Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and this one is a remarkable saga, sometimes comical, sometimes ominous ... Simulmatics...is almost completely forgotten. Yet Lepore finds in it a plausible untold origin story for our current panopticon: a world of constant surveillance, if not by the state then by megacorporations that make vast fortunes by predicting and manipulating our behavior—including, most insidiously, our behavior as voters ... Deeply researched, written with elegance and passion, If Then gives a vivid picture of [Simulatics' executives'] lives, including their often miserable wives, suffering 'the bad bargains of the middle-class marriages of the 1950s.'

What Lepore’s rich account unearths is the impetus behind the project, a set of attitudes that continue to drive psychographic microtargeting efforts today ... Lepore’s exceptional skill as storyteller and her sharp eye for seemingly quotidian details and small coincidences lend the Simulmatics world an intimate—and at times deliciously gossipy—feeling, which serves to underscore how tightly knit this particular echelon was.

... fascinating but flawed ... [Lepore's] attempt to use Simulmatics as a parable for and precursor to “the data-mad and near-totalitarian 21st century” is hamstrung by the fact that it failed at almost everything it tried to do — oftentimes spectacularly so ... Despite Lepore’s repeated references to the Simulmatics team as “the best and the brightest,” the group that Greenfield assembled was, well, not that ... Lepore undermines her attempt to elide over the differences between Simulmatics’ ambitions and its accomplishments by quoting or summarizing post-mortems from the company’s clients ... Over the last decade, Lepore, a Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer, has repeatedly shown herself to be an uncommonly astute and insightful interpreter of American history, and one of her many strengths is the moral clarity that infuses her writing. Lately, however, it feels almost as if she’s trying to stanch the flow of hatred, misinformation, racism and venality that threatens to overwhelm the country by the sheer volume of her work ... This prolificness likely explains why her latest effort feels as if it was rushed out the door before it was ready. When she’s at her best, Lepore’s writing has a nimble fluency that can be exhilarating. Here, however, events are described out of order, crucial context is missing and stylistic tics become intrusive ... But the fact that Simulmatics can’t support Lepore’s narrative shouldn’t detract from the importance of the story she’s trying to tell. Lepore’s frustrations should be our frustrations as well ... That Lepore overstates Simulmatics’ role in this tale does not make her ultimate conclusions any less true, or any less terrifying.

Lepore weaves her narrative across continents and through time with engaging, conversational prose. Her characters' personalities, families, affairs, fights and constant gossiping come alive, thanks to extensive troves of family papers and interviews with those closest to them. At the same time, she braids in the larger context ... But at the heart of the book is a dissonance that Lepore never really resolves. How much did Simulmatics matter? Was it 'effective but sinister,' as portrayed in a bestselling thriller by Eugene Burdick, a political scientist who had worked with Greenfield? Or, as the Kennedy campaign contended, was it 'ineffective and duplicitous'?

If Then continues Ms. Lepore’s streak of obscure yet vivid stories...that reveal some aspect of American history. But it also has the moral purpose of These Truths ... After reading a catalog of Simulmatics’s disappointments, [Lepore's] indictment feels hyperbolic. And Ms. Lepore’s description of Simulmatics as 'Cold War America’s Cambridge Analytica' is...gaudy hucksterism. The prediction machines that Ms. Lepore disdains also have their uses, such as finding a commercial audience for Harvard historians. They allow individuals to assemble into communities, where they can support each other and do good rather than simply yell across the barricades. The history of data science may not be pretty, but it isn’t entirely predictive either.

Lepore devotes the first third of her book to introducing a cast of fascinating characters central to the Simulmatics ... Unfortunately, too much of the book is focused on introducing the cast, like a heist movie where the portion of the film devoted to assembling the team to pull off the job gets more screen time than the crime itself. The book is also weighed down by Lepore’s efforts to use Simulmatics to tell the entire history of the 1960s—from Kennedy’s Camelot era through the anti-war movement. Simulmatics was largely a bit player in most of these events, and the general history often reads like filler. Lepore, to put it mildly, doesn’t buy into data analytics’ hype. As a historian, she is understandably dismissive of Big Tech’s obsession with predicting the future at the expense of the past.

Lepore, a Harvard professor and New Yorker writer, unearths decades of archival evidence to support the book’s bold claim that Simulmatics is 'a missing link in the history of technology' ... But Lepore is less convincing when she claims that Simulmatics 'incubated' modern-day Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Palantir and Google ... If Then may be most instructive as a parable for well-intentioned technocrats: the 'What-If Men' who ask questions about how the world could be improved but bristle when those same questions are asked about their own impact on the world.

It’s debatable if the individuals and their families who lived through the rise and fall of this company enhance the book’s narrative, but they are also stand-ins for families torn apart by a decade of protests, riots and political unrest ... What makes If Then/em> so powerful is the implicit analogy between the ’60s and today --- not just because of social upheavals, but because ordinary citizens are being manipulated now, as they were then, by the technology that affords its overseers the power of 'perfect persuasion.'