African-Americans had long voted Republican, but in the nineteen-thirties F.D.R. On May 21st, Kennedy visited Stevenson at his house in Libertyville. Her latest book isThis America: The Case for the Nation (2019). And when Congress voted to censure McCarthy, 67–22, Kennedy, in the hospital, chose not to cast a vote. He was young, only forty-two. Two degrees of separation from the people and events of the book. Lepore traces the birth of one strain of predictive technology through the rise and fall of the mysterious Simulmatics Corporation, an advertising and … Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. “I suggest you come out for Kennedy, be identified with his nomination, and unite the party.”. Ad Choices, For Mountain Bikers, Crashing Has Its Own Allure. “Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party,” he pleaded. At the same time that Simulmatics’ scientists got to work, Kennedy began wooing the liberals who had long supported Stevenson. In another fast-paced narrative, Jill Lepore brilliantly uncovers the history of the Simulmatics Corporation, which launched the volatile mix of computing, politics, and personal behavior that now divides our nation, feeds on private information, and weakens the strength of our democratic institutions. Beginning in 1965, Simulmatics conducted psychological research in Vietnam as part of a larger project of waging a war by way of computer-run data analysis and modelling. ... Google, and Cambridge Analytica. McCarthy asked them to set themselves free from whatever pledge they’d made, no matter the caucuses and the primaries. Jill Lepore, in her thrilling new book, If Then, explores the nature and range of The People Machine-- and its goal to predict behavior, whether commercial or political, and … In a year when two hundred and sixty-nine of a possible five hundred and thirty-seven Electoral College delegates were needed to win the Presidency, eight states with high African-American voter turnout—New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, and Missouri—would together account for two hundred and ten. • If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore is published by John Murray Press (£20). Meeting on Sunday, July 10th, it endorsed a platform called “The Rights of Man.” Its boldest plank staked out the most liberal position on civil rights ever taken by either party. About Jill Lepore. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and This America. “He wants it!”. Not many know of this enterprise today. “I do believe in science and don’t like to be a party to choking off new ideas.” Project Macroscope went ahead. “What do you suggest?”, “I suggest you not go out of here a defeated guy trying to get nominated a third time,” Minow said. “The scientists are from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins,” the New York Times reported. Instead of deflecting anti-Catholic opposition, the campaign drew attention to it, seeking opportunities for the candidate to respond by decrying religious prejudice. Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday, July 9th. Sound familiar? L ong before Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook, a company called Simulmatics Corporation sought to predict and control human behaviour through the analysis of big data. Illinois is caucusing in fifteen minutes and it’s almost one hundred percent for Kennedy.”, “Really?” Stevenson asked. Pool decided to write his own book about the making of the President, the story of how a “starry-eyed notion on the frontiers of science became a reality.” Meanwhile, Morgan pitched an article to Harper’s. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! Immediately after the Convention, Kennedy, who, according to White, was the Democratic candidate least appealing to African-Americans, set up a civil-rights “division” headed by Harris Wofford, the friend of Ed Greenfield’s who had drafted the civil-rights plank of the Party’s platform. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of History at Harvard University and is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Schlesinger thought it just might work. I want you fellows to make it clear to your delegations that the Kennedy forces are unequivocally in favor of this plank.” Schlesinger found it one of the most impressive speeches of the Convention. Jill Lepore is Professor of American History at Harvard University. That is Lepore’s final message: history is not inevitable.". politics would be an exact science in which our purposes and destiny could be left to great impersonal computers.” White was close to the Kennedy campaign, and the Kennedy campaign had decided to deny, publicly, that it had used Simulmatics. “One morning in mid-July 1959, as I was sitting in the sun at Wellfleet, Kennedy called from Hyannis Port to invite me to dinner that night,” Schlesinger recalled.