It has long been acknowledged that the Second World War significantly transformed anthropology and gave rise to applied anthropology as a professional subdiscipline; but, there has been surprisingly little scholarly inquiry into the particulars of this process, during the war or as it gave way to the Cold War. The relative silence, among anthropologists, regarding the contributions of their colleagues to the interests of government during this crucial period, is itself worthy of study. Though it might simply be regarded as a subject whose time has not yet come, whose subject matter has little immediate relevance to the intellectual priorities of our own time, even a tentative excursion into the subject suggests that there are uncomfortable issues just below the surface, issues that reflect ethical and political contradictions that anthropologists must inevitably confront.