Even in his college years, Wohlstetter was flamboyant and eccentric, smooth and suave in an affected sort of manner, however genuine the flavor might have been. In 1934, his senior year, the City College newspaper selected him “Most Sophisticated” member of his class.
During the 1930s, Wohlstetter’s college years, City College and Columbia University were hotbeds of student radicalism, among the most intensely political campuses in the nation. Wohlstetter toyed a bit with socialism, but he never grew enthusiastic about it. He considered himself a logician, not an activist. His mind was more comfortable with methodology than ideology. When the Depression stimulated an interest in studying economics, he read Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and the free-marketeer Alfred Marshall, then systematically formulated their statements and propositions in the symbolic language of mathematical logic. He concluded from this exercise that Keynes was the least plausible of the three (too many tautologies), Marshall the most plausible, and Marx (too many logical contradictions) somewhere in between.
That was how Albert Wohlstetter learned new things and made political judgments amid the political dynamite of the thirties. For Wohlstetter, the criterion of acceptability for a book or thesis or statement was whether it was symbolically satisfying, whether it was mathematically logical, whether it fit into the highly abstract universe of Principia Mathematica.
In his first venture into the outside world, Wohlstetter could remain on theoretical territory. With a grant from the Social Science Research Council, he worked at the Department of Agriculture and then the National Board of Economic Research, working on such recondite matters as the impact of random variables on statistical analysis.
Then came the war. Like most pure mathematicians of the pre-computer age, Wohlstetter felt that it was stooping himself to work on projects that might have some relevance in solving problems of the real world. That was the sort of thing that applied mathematicians did. The logic could no longer remain pure, the models were less elegant. But this was war, and if Wohlstetter wanted to remain gainfully employed, he would have to learn to like it.
Living off another fellowship, this from the Carnegie Corporation, Wohlstetter became a consultant on the Planning Committee of the War Production Board, and soon one of its quality-control managers, supervising inspections of motors, generators, electronic circuitry and other war equipment. The task was much more up his alley than it might have seemed at first glance. Scientists at Bell Labs had developed a theory of quality control within the framework of probability analysis. The idea had grown out of the recognition that, for many items, it was impossible to test every unit that came off the production line. (A good example was the time that it took for a fuse to blow.) One had to select a sample of units and infer from that the quality of the entire line, and Bell had calculated how to do that scientifically. Wohlstetter, in fact, had analyzed these sorts of theories in his doctoral dissertation at Columbia. Working in the war, it seemed, would not require an entirely new angle on life after all.
However, the experience did give Wohlstetter a chance to apply the math that he had been studying in theory all these years, and it gave him a technical education. He frequently had to talk with engineers and machine-shop foremen about how machinery worked. He had to find out how and what sorts of things could go wrong, and how to improve them.
After the war, Wohlstetter spent a brief time in private business in New York, then moved back to Washington to work for the National Housing Agency. A housing shortage was in the makings and new ideas were welcome. One particularly innovative engineer at the agency, Paul Weidlinger, had worked during the war for a small aircraft company owned by Wohlstetter’s brother, Charles, designing such things as airplane hangars that could be assembled instantly. At the National Housing Agency, Wohlstetter helped Weidlinger apply a similar concept to housing—prefab modular units that could easily be transported and pieced together at low cost and minimal construction time.
Wohlstetter then got the idea to start a housing firm that combined the prefab ideas of his work in Washington with the architectural designs of the International Style or Bauhaus movement. In 1947, he and his wife, Roberta, moved to Los Angeles, found a modern split-level house in the hills of Laurel Canyon, and set up his company. Not long after, the firm folded—some of its ideas, such as assembling houses without nails, were too much at variance with the L.A. housing code—and Albert contemplated moving back east to teach.
But Roberta convinced him to take a look at the RAND Corporation. Shortly after they had moved to Los Angeles, they ran into some of Albert’s old friends—Abe Girschick, his old boss from the Agriculture Department; Olaf Helmer, a mathematical logician whom Wohlstetter had met in New York while Helmer was teaching at the New School for Social Research; and J. C. C. McKinsey, a friend from his math days at Columbia. All three were now working in Santa Monica for Project RAND. It was through their efforts that Roberta got a job in the social science division, and now, with Albert’s firm having folded, she convinced him to come talk with Charlie Hitch, head of the economics division. Wohlstetter went to look at the place and found he liked its atmosphere, the brilliant people, the diverse interests and especially the predilection that many of the top analysts had for mathematical models. Early in 1951, Albert Wohlstetter joined the RAND economics division as a consultant.
The study on the selection and use of overseas bases was Wohlstetter’s first major project at RAND. By the beginning of 1952, he had made his novel, if then still somewhat tentative, discovery that the entire Strategic Air Command might be dangerously vulnerable to a surprise Soviet attack.
At this point, Wohlstetter’s technical training during World War II started to show its usefulness. He stalked the RAND corridors, staking out every expert on radar, air defense, aircraft technology and logistics that he could find, asking them frankly naïve questions about how things worked, how they might work better, how things could go wrong.
While touring the RAND hallways, Wohlstetter ran across a young economist-engineer named Henry (or, as his friends called him, Harry) Rowen. Rowen was bored with his work—fairly tedious and mechanical numbers-crunching, involving no imagination or creativity. Wohlstetter began trying out some of his ideas on Rowen, who became increasingly intrigued with the project and who joined it full-time in December 1951.
Wohlstetter also received assistance from Robert J. Lutz, a former MIT aerospace engineer who had worked for Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego during the war and who joined the aircraft division at RAND in 1949. Like most of the rather sober crowd in the aircraft shop at RAND, Lutz thought that Wohlstetter was more than just a little eccentric: voluble, keeping as high a profile as possible, running around the corridors as if there were no tomorrow. He had an almost monomaniacal sense of urgency: some thing or another had to be done tomorrow or that night. Ideas kept popping out of his head. Lutz found it hard to believe that Wohlstetter could possibly have control over all this information he was gathering. But as Lutz became more involved in the project, he found to his amazement that he did.
Still, Lutz found problems. Wohlstetter was making the analysis too abstract. He was starting to do what Paxson and most other systems analysts did: come up with some amorphous, hypothetical bomber force that would do the “best” job. Lutz put the project on a more concrete basis, doing what a SAC planner might have done if ordered to change Air Force operations along Wohlstetter’s tentative recommendations, analyzing not some ideal bomber of the future, but the airplanes that the United States actually possessed at the time—mainly B-47 and B-36 bombers and KC-97 refueling tankers. He also got Wohlstetter to analyze not some imaginary set of targets, but the 100 industrial-complex targets that Ed Paxson had used in his bomber study.