A chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for sixty years. Born in the wake of World War II as an idea factory to advise the Air Force on how to wage and win wars, RAND quickly became the creator of America's anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex." In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts' theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam, and drove our invasion of Iraq 45 years later. But RAND's greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system, but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied--religion, patriotism, tribalism.--From publisher description.
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