18 Feb 2021

A Dangerous Idea

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“There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” –Victor Hugo

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one we have.” –Émile-Auguste Chartier

Quotation anthologies abound with quotes about the power of ideas. Fewer are those warning against their dangers. Ideas do have power, but their power can be harnessed for ill as well as good, for evil as well as virtue. Lebensraum was an idea. So was Aryan superiority. (Or, for that matter, Aryan.) Ideas have consequences. That we can agree upon, even when our judgment of those consequences differ.

Nineteenth century Russian Jews became enthralled by an idea. Its origins can be traced back at least to the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881when Jews were scapegoated and the so-called May Laws of the following year “decreed that the Jews be forbidden to settle anew outside of towns and boroughs, exceptions being admitted only in the case of existing Jewish agricultural colonies.” That adverb “anew” hints at an earlier time, when Jews could farm the land. The reference to “existing Jewish agricultural colonies” suggests some resettlement had taken place in recent years. In fact, Alexander II had been easing anti-Jewish laws for much of his reign. Two decades of liberalization made the pain of restriction that much more acute. Russian Jews’ desire for what they could not have grew concomitantly all the more intense.

Begun as an emotional longing, the idea was codified and proclaimed by a man of letters and a non-religious, Jewish nationalist. Peretz Smolenskin published the essay, “Am Olam“ (“Eternal People”), in 1881, in which he proposed the creation of Jewish agricultural colonies in the United States and Palestine. He wrote of the “productivization” and “normalization” of the Jewish people through agricultural labor. [Weinstein 28] It was an idea whose time had come, as Hugo said, and it spread.

But ideas blow free on the wind, out of the control of their propounders. They morph, change shape, end up in unlikely places, espoused, sometimes, by the unlikeliest of supporters. That is to say, the emigrants who established agricultural colonies in the United States were by no means all socialists. Their goals, religious and secular, varied. Yet they all seem to have been impelled by the idea that there was dignity to be found in working the land.

That was the idea. The reality was often quite the contrary: humiliating dependency, degrading poverty.

The first group of Russian Jews to respond to the call of Am Olam found nothing ennobling about the swampland they settled forty miles north of Natchez. Their longevity fell far short of “eternal” when a devastating Mississippi flood drove them from Louisiana in their very first spring. Colonies in Kansas, the Dakotas, Colorado, and Oregon fared little better. Accounts include a litany of reasons for their premature demise: drought, scarce water, thunderstorms, flooding, poor land quality, crop failure, excessive mortgage interest rates, communal strife. Yet, the overarching cause of these failures is a lack of agricultural experience and know-how. The idea of going back to the land to live in communal harmony was an alluring one, but its actual achievement elusive.

In 1891, sixteen Jewish families founded the hopefully-named Palestine near the tip in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten. The name of the nearest town might have been more fitting: Bad Axe. Sixteen Russian Jewish families soon found themselves outmatched by the demands of Mother Nature. Infusions of cash from the Baron de Hirsch Fund and the Beth El Hebrew Society of Detroit may have only prolonged the misery. The population dwindled to less than half by the end of the decade and but one family in 1906. The truth is, most of the thirty-one colonies founded in these years, 1880 to 1900, were supported by Jewish philanthropy, a combination of wealthy individuals and philanthropic organizations. The latter were supported by Jewish congregations, also infected by an idea or ideas descended from Am Olam. Combined with emotion, too: they were moved by the plight of their persecuted brethren from the Pale. Both millionaires and the middle class threw good money after bad.

Alliance, New Jersey, was the first successful Jewish agricultural colony in the United States and the longest lasting. Supported financially by both the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society,  the colony was founded in 1882 by forty-three Russian families, primarily from Kiev, Odessa, and Elizabetgrad. Alliance Colony descendant Ruth Weinstein reports that the original colonists “spoke no English” and “possessed no knowledge of farming.” They were a mix of intellectuals, artisans, and pious Jews. Tilling the soil in the southern New Jersey Pine Barrens–after first felling the trees–these immigrants were hardly better off than they had been in the Pale of Settlement. None was used to “the long hours of back-breaking work in the fields.” They would not have survived without the philanthropic support of AIU and HEAS or the hired tutorial support of a German agriculturist (farmer) named Fred Schmitt.

Members of the Alliance colony (young women, mostly)  engaged in homespun industry–cigar-rolling (briefly) and clothes-sewing–to earn cash. Alliance, which accreted to include contiguous Norma and Brotmanville communities, built a synagogue by the end of their first decade. But forces of acculturation are ineluctable. Greater Alliance had a baseball field by the middle of its third decade. One second generation colonist recalled the significance of his Norma baseball team: “That, more than anything else, gripped our youthful imagination, which showed more than anything else that we were really Americans.” The power of an idea, indeed.

The story of Jewish agricultural colonies in America is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. At least thirty different colonies in a dozen states were established (attempted) in the years between 1880 and 1900. Why aren’t they better known? That their median longevity was less than two years goes a long way in answering the question. Only a handful survived longer than five years, most of them in the East. The accounts I read document failure, but not so much death and tragedy. (There must have been some.) The idea of back-to-the-land redemption led to actions whose consequences were not catastrophic or irreversible. The colonists moved on to other locales, other opportunities, other ways of life.

Besides, a fairly direct line can be drawn from Am Olam to Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl’s watershed Zionist tract. For Palestine was as much a destination for back-to-the-land Jews as the United States. Palestine saw as many starry-eyed farmer wannabes who depended on philanthropy for their survival. As many failed colonial attempts. Yet, on the whole, we know they survived. The idea of Am Olam contributed to the creation of kibbutzim. The Zionism created a Jewish state. Ideas become reality.

But the reality continues to be fought over; the ideas that sustain them, likewise.

Sources:

31 Jan 2021

Hero and Goat

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Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King

“One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King,” remarked the normally unflappable Dwight Eisenhower. “He’s the antithesis of cooperation…, he’s a mental bully.” What’s more, said Ike, the Chief of Naval Operations was “biased entirely in favor of the Pacific” and paid only lip-service to the Europe-First Strategy the Joint Chiefs and their commander, Franklin Roosevelt, had adopted. Eisenhower was no ETO partisan. He had spent four years in the Philippines assisting General Douglas MacArthur in his role as Field Marshall of the Philippine army. He understood the strategic importance of the southwest Pacific. What he didn’t understand, or appreciate, was CNO King’s bullheadedness, his parochial focus on his Navy.

King’s narrow focus and pugnacity had its benefits. He supported an offensive mindset that led to the Halsey Raids of February, 1942, which kept the Japanese off balance and, more important, gave American seamen battle experience and a boost in morale. These leadership qualities did not serve him as well in the spring when defensive concerns rose to prominence. Where would the Japanese make their big offensive? When would they strike? What were their strategic intentions? Joe Rochefort biographer Elliot Carlson described a jittery CNO in May of that year: “King visualized the possibility of ‘string raids, against, Midway, Oahu, New Hebrides, northeast Australia, possibly the [US] west coast and Canada. To say that King was scattered in his thinking would be an understatement.” King resisted Rochefort’s intelligence analysis, before ultimately assenting to defend Midway. This was not King’s his finest hour.

King was saved from himself and went on, quite possibly, to save the Allied cause in the Pacific. While southern Pacific commander Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley (COMSOPAC) and southwest Pacific commander MacArthur (COMSWPA) pleaded for more time, King insisted on a stepped-up timeline. Hit the Japanese before they could consolidate their gains, was his strategy. His only concession to caution was to move back Operation WATCHTOWER by one week to August 7. As it happened, the Japanese were caught sleeping. The 1st Marines put ashore on Guadalcanal unopposed. (Japanese forces on the smaller islands of Tulagi and Gavutu put up stiff but otherwise suicidal resistance.) Though it took another four to six months of brutal combat and nail-biting struggle for survival, the 1st Marines secured Guadalcanal and the Allies marked a critical victory. Barring King’s forcefulness, it would not have happened. The history of the war would have been entirely different. It’s a good thing neither Eisenhower nor anyone else was so hasty as to shoot him.

 

Chief of Staff of the United States Army General George C. Marshall

Several months before pleading caution to King, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area General Douglas MacArthur had begun a relentless P.R. campaign that had the effect of elevating his stature as America’s paladin in the Pacific. Issuing daily communiques to the American press, often at odds with Allied objectives and/or Joint Chiefs’ directives, Mac was a loose cannon. Yet Roosevelt understood his value in galvanizing morale at home–as well as the political cost of firing him. It fell to Army chief Brigadier General George C. Marshall to “manage MacArthur as best he could,” according to MacArthur biographer Walter Borneman. He went so far, at one point, to send a hero from the last war, a man as strong-willed and outspoken as MacArthur himself, to talk him down off the ledge. It didn’t work, so it was up to Marshall to manage his commander’s ego and talent for the remainder of the war.

Marshall’s diplomatic astuteness had in evidence, too, in the critical months before the attack at Pearl Harbor. In early November, he advised his commander against issuing an ultimatum and in favor of making “certain minor concessions which the Japanese could use in saving face.” In the event, American concessions, such as they were, were too little, too late. The Japanese put Admiral Yamamoto‘s audacious plan into effect.

And during that day of infamy, Marshall appears to have been at his worst. On December 6, after the decryption of a particularly troubling intercept, military brass in Washington debated sending a warning to Pearl. Intelligence chief Colonel Rufus Bratton pressed for sounding the alarm. Marshall demurred. An alert had been already been issued in November, he argued. A second one would only sow confusion. He left the office for the weekend, pointedly requesting that he not be disturbed over the weekend. They tried to bother him, anyway, but on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, General George C. Marshall was incommunicado. As the naval base on Oahu was ravaged and military command in Washington thrown into confusion, the Army chief was on an extended horseback ride through the countryside.

In post hoc investigations, Stark and Kimmel were made scapegoats. Marshall’s actions, both the prudent and the questionable, escaped scrutiny.

 

Secretary of War Henry Stimson

Captain Ellis Zacharias of naval intelligence felt nothing but confidence in Secretary of War Stimson. Of his actions during the crisis of 1941-42, Zacharias said they would “remain forever impressed upon [his] memory with a feeling of admiration and gratitude.” Yet the historical record shows that Stimson’s actions were not all beyond reproach.

As the downward momentum picked up in late October, 1941, Stimson fairly gushed about the new “opportunity” opening up in the southwest Pacific: “Our whole strategic possibilities of the past twenty years has [sic] been revolutionized. From being impotent to influence events in the area, we suddenly find ourselves vested with the possibility of great effective power. Indeed we hardly yet realize our power in this respect.” “Realize” is the misleading word, for the United States had not in fact realized the potential of its power. Subsequent history revealed how the United States’ influence in the area was more “impotent” than “effective.”

At least Stimson backed up his words with a willingness to act. The secretary was much more hawkish on Japan than either Marshall or then then-CNO Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark. The two chiefs–whose subordinates, after all would prosecute the war–knew their forces needed more time to prepare. Politically, too, they understood that America must not be seen to fire the first shot. We’ll never know how history might have been different, for better and worse, had Stimson’s bellicose view prevailed.

 

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Roosevelt was too political an animal to have been swayed by Stimson, in any case. The president, as the secretary of state noted in late November, faced the “difficult proposition” of how to “maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger for ourselves.” That “proposition” made Roosevelt vulnerable to charges that he anticipated the attack and did nothing to stop it. The rumors cropped up quickly and persisted for decades (even today there are revisionists who give them credence) that Roosevelt was willing to sacrifice the lives servicemen in order to preempt the America First-ers and to garner support for a war he had already more or less committed to. William Friedman, who led the team that broke Purple, famously lamented on the infamous day, “But they knew, they knew.” Indeed, the nation’s chief cryptanalyst was in a position to know. Daily Purple intercepts allowed American military planners to read Japanese diplomatic communications as readily as Japanese embassy officials.

What Friedman and his superiors (including Roosevelt) knew was that the Japanese were on the move, that a strike was imminent. What they did not know–indeed, could not even imagine–was that Pearl Harbor would be the target. Commander in  Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC) Admiral Chester Nimitz‘s chief intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton laid out the case most cogently: “All the new evidence that has been gathered for this account shows beyond any reasonable doubt that our leaders in Washington knew by the evening of 6 December that Japan would launch into war in a matter of hours rather than days. Not a shred of evidence has been uncovered from all the classified intelligence files to suggest that anyone suspected that Pearl Harbor would be the target.” The president and his so-called War Cabinet–Stark, Marshall, Stimson–lacked imagination rather than scruples.

Yet Roosevelt’s hard line toward Japan had made Pearl Harbor a possibility before it became an inevitability. The thirty-second U.S. president may have harbored anti-Japanese prejudice. At the least, his loyalties were conspicuously pro-Chinese–as were his secretary of state’s. Egged on by the not-so-diplomatic Stimson, Roosevelt had been imposing economic sanctions on Japan for two years.   Instead of “bring[ing] Japan to its senses,” Roosevelt’s hard line had pushed a strengthening-but-sensitive world power into a corner. Sensitive to humiliation, it was bound to strike out.

The crisis, only partly of his own making, put Roosevelt in an increasingly tight bind. Increasingly, it posed a no-win political dilemma–or perhaps better: tri-lemma. If he attacked Japan preemptively, he would be denounced by the isolationists. If he made a deal and Japan later attacked, he would be labeled an appeaser. If he did nothing, he would be guilty of negligence. So Roosevelt chose to wait for Japan fire the first shot, in the meantime readying his forces and hoping the initial damage would not be too great. It was. The destruction of men and materiel was shockingly, insupportably large.

Roosevelt’s leadership style was not without critics. The straight-laced, gentlemanly Henry Stimson called his a “topsy-turvy, upside-down system of administration.” Indeed, Roosevelt could be frustratingly hard to pin down, putting off some decisions, making others with a casual swiftness that could leave advisers breathless. Yet the maddening method might have been just what was required of this wartime president. His actions–and even his inaction–came from a position of strength, from a man unafraid of the awesome responsibility history had foisted upon his shoulders.

All of these men–King, Marshall, Stimson, Roosevelt–have been seen as paragons of strength, whose decisiveness helped bring the Second World war to ultimate victory. Yet none of these four escapes scrutiny unscathed. Nor indeed can any of us. Look for a paragon to take your flag, to champion your cause. You won’t find him. You won’t find her. She will find her under attack for one thing or another. You will have to come to her defense. Or, concede she let you down, too. But you will weigh the accounts and show your challenger that the scales in favor weigh down those against.

It is the best anyone can do.

Sources:

7 Jan 2021

Hero or Goat?

by | posted in: Codebreakers, WWII: Pacific Theater | 0

He might have been the hero of Midway, one of many, perhaps, but potentially the first among them, the one who made all the others possible. Commander Joseph Rochefort led the Station Hypo team of cryptanalysts,  linguists, communications experts, and IBM-machine card punchers who partly discovered, partly intuited Japanese naval intentions in June 1942, turning the tide on Japanese advancement and putting Allied forces on equal footing with their enemy in the Pacific. Rochefort gave full credit to his staff, whom he called the greatest cryptanalytic team in history, but his staff gave the greatest credit to him.

Captain Thomas Dyer went as far as to say Rochefort was “almost solely responsible for producing the intelligence, which resulted in the Battle of Midway.” He located his commander’s strength in seeing the big picture, in weaving fragmented intelligence into a coherent operational narrative. Rochefort combined uncanny intuition with extraordinary powers of analysis and memory of details. It was his  according to Lieutenant Commander Jasper Holmes named his “qualities of leadership” as the key to their unit’s success at Midway.

Following the action, Rear Admiral David Bagley, Commandant of the 14th Naval District at Pearl Harbor, recommended Rochefort for the Distinguished Service Medal. Privately, Rochefort demurred. “I advised against doing anything like this, because it’s going to make trouble.” A cryptanalyst at heart, he shunned the exposure of daylight, let alone of the spotlight. Even within the shadowy world of the intelligence community, Rochefort knew the attention would be unwelcome. He was aware that he had stepped on toes, specifically those of Rear Admirals John Redman and Joseph Wenger.

Rear Admiral Joseph N. Wenger played a leading role in the development of both the Naval Security Group Command and the National Security Agency, and was one of the most influential figures in American cryptologic history. He was a pioneer in the development of machines for use in cryptanalysis, and was among the first to recognize the need for centralization within the naval Communications Intelligence (COMINT) establishment. More than anyone else, he was responsible for establishing a Navy-wide cryptologic organization. [NSA/CSS Hall of Honor]

So reads the opening paragraph of Wenger’s NSA Hall of Honor inductee page, and an impressive summation of a career it is. Adding weight to the praise is the fact of his close affiliation with William Friedman, America’s greatest cryptanalyst and “the man who broke Purple.” The two met in the 1920s and became fast friends.

But what is one to make of Wenger’s association with John Redman? According to Rochefort biographer Elliot Carlson, he brought radio expertise to his position as Director of Naval Communication but almost no intelligence experience.  Redman, according to Carlson, was “a gifted self-promoter, blending likeability and competitiveness with an aptitude for winning the support of influential officers….” [Carlson 217] As it turned out, he was a real snake-in-the-grass for the likes of Joe Rochefort. So why did Wenger align himself with Redman in an effort to bring down Rochefort.

The answer is evident in the Hall of Honor accolades printed above. It says Wenger was “among the first to recognize the need for centralization within the naval Communications Intelligence (COMINT) establishment.” Rochefort was an obvious impediment to advancing that goal. As Dyer put it, Rochefort “shot himself in the foot” by giving the message to Washington “to send us more men and leave us alone.” Wenger himself used similar words: “The attitude [at Pearl] was ‘give us what we need and let us alone, CINCPAC is running the war. You are too far away to control.'” Oddly, perhaps, it’s easy to see that both could have been right. Under Wenger and Redman in Washington, OP-20-G seemed to do everything in its power to undercut Rochefort and his team as they worked to defend the Pacific fleet against the Japanese offensive at Midway. Redman even objected to their “unapproved” water evaporator deception which had clinched Hypo’s Midway hypothesis. Redman appears to have been more concerned with being right than with defeating an enemy in a global, existential struggle. Rochefort was right to defend his office from collateral damage in a petty turf war.

Yet Wenger was probably not incorrect about the need to centralize, rationalize, streamline COMINT operations. Nor that Hypo Station in Pearl Harbor could not see the big picture of a two-front/two-ocean war. Only a centralized authority in Washington could “comprehend more clearly the global nature of the conflict,” he wrote in retrospect. Wenger’s fingerprints are all over the structure and organization of post-war intelligence in the United States, whereas Rochefort left nothing enduring behind. As intelligence historian Robert Hanyok wrote, “You don’t see his imprint” anywhere.

Except, of course, that in allowing victory at Midway, he enabled ultimate victory in the war and a Pax Americana that lasted almost fifty years. Rochefort didn’t get his Distinguished Service Medal during the war or even during  his lifetime. But Ronald Reagan did bestow it on him, posthumously, in 1986. He was inducted into the NSA Hall of Honor in 2000, five years before his nemesis, Joseph Wenger. Wenger may not have been the villain that he is in the context of the Joe Rochefort story. On the other hand, one imagines a more adept leader would be able to further his centralizing agenda while also taking full advantage of one of his strongest, if independent-minded officers, Joe Rochefort.

Sources:

Carlson, Elliot. Joe Rocheforte’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway, Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2011.

Clark, Ronald. The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman, Who Deciphered the Japanese Code in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.

Layton, Rear  Admiral Edwin T. Layton (with Pineau and Costello), And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway–Breaking the Secrets. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985.

22 Dec 2020

“But It Helps”?

by | posted in: Codebreakers, William Friedman | 0

Early in his career as the United States government’s go-to man on all things cryptologic, William Friedman was asked if insanity was a prerequisite of the codebreaker. Friedman didn’t hesitate in his response. It was “not necessary,” he said, “but it helps.” [208]

A flippant response to reinforce the cryptanalyst’s mystique? A glib remark to get a laugh? Perhaps. But the task of worrying a garble of letters for days or weeks at a time, holding to a faith that the effort will yield results, took a certain kind of, if not insanity, then extreme doggedness not found in ordinary men. But which is the cause and which the effect? In Friedman’s case, at least, the witticism hid a painful truth. America’s greatest cryptologist was predisposed to anxiety/self-doubt/depression which his profession’s relentless demands only exacerbated.

It was not just the stress of work on whose success the security and survival of the nation relied. It was the doubt he harbored–doubt that only grew stronger with the years–about his profession’s moral legitimacy, at least in practice. Coming out of the Second World War, the intelligence organization Friedman had helped build only expanded its operations in peacetime. The Cold War brought new levels of, what Friedman saw as, paranoia and security obsessiveness. Genetics, the field he might have entered thirty-five years before, was just then coming into bloom. Its promise posed a stark contrast with the increasingly tainted world of intelligence-gathering (and -withholding). To Henry Stimson’s biographer on the question of gentlemen reading each others’ mail, he wrote, “You may be interested to know that my own feelings on the ethical point at issue are quite ambivalent–and have been for a long time. I have often wondered whether a good portion of my psychic difficulties over the years are not attributable, in part at least, to that ambivalence.” [116] To another historian he wrote about “the frustration generated by my having chosen as a profession one so enmeshed with measures requiring great secrecy–some quite necessary, some quite absurd or futile….” [261]

It didn’t help that he had become the object of the NSA’s paranoia. His papers, many of them going back as far as the First World War, were reclassified as “confidential” by the newly-organized National Security Agency. This was a slap in the face to a man who had given so much in his country’s service. Having foregone more lucrative opportunities in his prime working years, he had hoped to garner some income in retirement from the sale of his works. Not if the NSA had anything to say about it, which it did.

More slaps: Forty-eight volumes from his personal library, fastidiously organized in his Capitol Hill home, were confiscated as security risks by two NSA agents–a raid on the United States’ most accomplished cryptologist. “The NSA considers me their greatest security risk,” said an exasperated, and perhaps self-pitying, Friedman. [253]

Writing to longtime friend Boris Hagelin, Friedman was less caustic, more self-aware. Besides a genius for cryptography, both men shared a birthplace in the former Russian empire; both were, using Hagelin’s locution, “neurotics.” [208] In a phraseology more in line with our own time, the men gave each other therapy through their correspondence.

That’s the way it sounds to me in a letter Friedman biographer Ronald Clark quotes at length: “My nervousness, depression, at times despondency–frightening to be alone a/c suicidal thoughts–realization of how wrong that would be in all respects. Flight, fight, or neurosis. For fifty years have struggled with this off and on.” Friedman is surprisingly honest about his concern for his “reputation” and his “feeling of being a ‘has-been.'” His reference to a “‘floating anxiety’ which attaches itself to anything and everything” evinces the all-encompassing nature of his mental illness. [258-259]

Another side of his “neurosis” caught my attention in an amusing and withal not insignificant anecdote. After submitting a manuscript on the inscrutable Voynich codex, Friedman had post-eleventh-hour second-thoughts, as explained in this letter to his editor:

I went to play a round of golf, alone as usual, during the week. This is often bad for me because I have not only time to play but also to think. I get ideas for improving (and often ruining instead) this and that, which is bad for one who should be content to leave well enough alone. The idea I have (you’ve no doubt divined that I’m about to spring it on you) is this: I’d like to delete the last two sentences of footnote 28 and substitute the following…: [216-217]

Golf is one game, played alone or not, that can distract the average man from life’s cares and focus him instead on balls and holes and keeping his head down. Not one as cerebral as William Friedman. No, this is “bad” for him, and “bad” again. He can’t keep “ideas for improving (and often ruining instead)” from storming his mental fortress. This is impressive self-awareness, revealing an understanding that over-thinking can be as hazardous as thinking too little. Evident, too, is a recognition that such an awareness is not sufficient safeguard against the demons that haunt you.

A note of recognition registered as I read these words. I have “ruined” more than my share of lesson plans by over-thinking them, though I’m not sure this is literally true. I’m not sure Friedman believed it about his case, either. What is ruined in this particular neurosis is one’s mental equanimity, something indispensable in a teacher of children–and pretty important in a cryptographer helping to save the free world, too. Like Friedman when he made the comments above, I am fully aware of both the hazards and, yes, benefits, of my obsessiveness. As a result, its grip on me is less debilitating. Like him, this self-awareness does not preclude persistent, periodic self-doubt (and, in my case, self-loathing). Unlike the great cryptologist, I have never been hospitalized for my psychiatric imbalances. I doubt I ever will be.

Source: Clark, Ronald. The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman, Who Deciphered the Japanese Code in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.