What is genuinely new and interesting in the book are the sections that show the development of the OSS itself. What is particularly engaging are the individuals who were pivotal in getting the OSS established, in arguing for resources to develop its work, and for ensuring that its work would be considered as genuinely strategic by those directing the conduct of the war. It is here that we see the role played by the humanities (and the social sciences) in having trained a generation of scholars to assess and analyze large amounts of data, often patchy in its coverage, and to draw accurate inferences, even (and sometimes especially) in the gaps.
We also are shown the importance of the surrounding scholarly infrastructure of libraries, archives, and scholarly publishing, and the skills of the staff who are necessary to run those organizations. (To the historian this should not be a huge surprise: there are echoes of the links between knowledge gathering and analysis, espionage, and state strategy with figures like John Dee, who accumulated a great library of arcane but erudite knowledge which was put at the service of Elizabeth I through his connections to Sir Francis Walsingham.) Graham highlights, for example, the paucity of high-quality mapping of Japan and the islands of Pacific East Asia at the time of Pearl Harbor, and therefore the importance of the map collections of the New York Public Library and of the library at UCLA. Similarly the library of the Association of American Railroads provided information from its collections that was vital to the American invasion of North Africa. The organization still exists, but no information on its library can now be found on its website.
Graham introduces us to academics such as Wallace Notestein, the distinguished Yale scholar of early modern Britain who recruited some of the early figures in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the predecessor body to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, which was based initially in an annex of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Among Notestein’s recruits were Joseph Curtiss, another Yale scholar (whose expertise was on the 17th-century astrologer William Lilly), and Sherman Kent, a curator at the Yale University Library, who joined the Research and Analysis Branch to head up its North Africa section. Much of the work that Sherman Kent directed—analyzing maps, commercial directories, and a mass of other seemingly innocuous and boring information gathered from libraries and through the book trade—would be vital in supporting the American invasion of North Africa, which helped push the Wehrmacht out of North Africa.