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Harvard psychology professor who created the OSS assessment system for selecting clandestine operatives, which became a landmark in personality evaluation and prefigured the CIA's behavioral profiling programs. | 1893-05-13 | 1988-06-23 | Cambridge, Massachusetts | 2026-06-03 | 2026-10-14 |
Henry "Harry" Murray was a Harvard University psychology professor who, in 1938, wrote Explorations of Personality, a notable book laying out a battery of tests for evaluating individuals. General William Donovan recruited Murray to create an assessment system for the Office of Strategic Services to sort through the masses of recruits being rushed through training. The program's prime objective, according to Murray, was keeping out the "loonies," as well as "sloths, irritants, bad actors, and free talkers." "Spying is attractive to loonies," Murray stated. "Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field."1
Building the Assessment System
Donovan gave Murray and a distinguished group of colleagues only 15 days before the first candidates arrived to be assessed. In the interim, they took over a spacious estate outside Washington, D.C. as their headquarters. In a series of hurried meetings, they assembled a system combining German and British methods with Murray's earlier research. It tested a recruit's ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person's character by the nature of his clothing. The system was designed as a screening tool to weed out unsuitable candidates before they could cause damage in the field.1
Wartime Results
More than 30 years after the war, Murray remained modest in his claims for the assessment system, saying that it was only an aid in weeding out the "horrors" among OSS candidates. Nevertheless, the secret agency's leaders believed in its results, and Murray's system became a fixture in the OSS, testing Americans and foreign agents alike. Some of Murray's young behavioral scientists went on to become prominent in public affairs, including John Gardner, a psychologist teaching at Mount Holyoke College who helped Murray set up the original program, went on to open the West Coast OSS assessment site at a converted beach club in San Juan Capistrano, and would later become Secretary of HEW in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and founder of Common Cause.1
Postwar Influence
The OSS assessment program was recognized as a milestone in American psychology, the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual's personality in order to predict future behavior. After the war, personality assessment became a new field in itself. Some of Murray's assistants established OSS-like systems at large corporations, starting with AT&T, and set up study programs at universities, beginning with the University of California, Berkeley. As would happen repeatedly with the CIA's Mind Control research, the OSS was years ahead of public developments in behavioral theory and application.1
Successors
In the postwar years, Murray would be superseded by a young Oklahoma psychologist, John Gittinger, who would rise in the CIA on the strength of his ideas about how to make a hard science out of personality assessment and how to use it to manipulate people. Gittinger would build an office within the Agency that refined both Murray's assessment function and Walter Langer's indirect analysis of foreign leaders. Murray was not enthusiastic about the spinoffs from his work: "Some of the things done with it turn your stomach," he declared.1
The Hitler Analysis, 1943
In October 1943 Murray completed a confidential memorandum for the OSS, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, with predictions of Adolf Hitler's future behavior and suggestions for dealing with him now and after Germany's surrender.2 Murray wrote that Hitler's neurotic spells would increase in frequency and duration, and that there was some evidence his mental powers had been deteriorating since November 1942. He considered it possible that the military command or a revolutionary faction might seize Hitler and immure him in a prison fortress, an outcome that would end the myth of the invincible hero.3 On suicide, Murray wrote that Hitler had often vowed to kill himself if his plans miscarried, but that if he chose that course he would do it at the last moment and in the most dramatic possible manner.4 In the closing sections Murray named insanity to some extent, dramatic suicide and death at the front as the outcomes that seemed most probable, on the assumption that Hitler's chief concern was the immortality of his legend.5
Footnotes
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John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 1. ↩︎
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Murray, Henry A. Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, with Predictions of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and after Germany's Surrender. Harvard Psychological Clinic, October 1943. https://archive.org/details/AnalysisOfThePersonalityOfAdolphHitler. Same text in CIA Reading Room document 02617886. ↩︎
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Murray, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, pp. 29-30. https://archive.org/details/AnalysisOfThePersonalityOfAdolphHitler ↩︎
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Murray, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, pp. 31-32. https://archive.org/details/AnalysisOfThePersonalityOfAdolphHitler ↩︎
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Murray, Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, p. 33. https://archive.org/details/AnalysisOfThePersonalityOfAdolphHitler ↩︎