Speaker 1: Pushkin. After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibaichung,
Speaker 1: near the Attending Market. It's not the best part of town,
Speaker 1: but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.
Speaker 1: That's My Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now,
Speaker 1: a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her
Speaker 1: life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first
Speaker 1: days of the Vietnam War. I had an apartment of
Speaker 1: my own. You know, life couldn't have been better, I thought.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Glauber. Welcome to Revisionist History, where
Speaker 1: every week we go back and look at something and
Speaker 1: misunderstood or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret
Speaker 1: Pentagon study that a Vietnamese woman named my Elliott and
Speaker 1: two others became tangled up in and what happened when
Speaker 1: it ended, because there's a lot we can learn from
Speaker 1: them today. The project was run by the Rand Corporation,
Speaker 1: a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to
Speaker 1: an extraordinary collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks.
Speaker 1: RAND is the kind of place where everyone speaks in
Speaker 1: complete paragraphs, and if you close your eyes as you listen.
Speaker 1: You can almost see the footnotes at the end of
Speaker 1: each one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department willot
Speaker 1: on them heavily in those years. Still does tell me
Speaker 1: about how you come to work for RAND. Dave new
Speaker 1: somebody at macvie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Speaker 1: Dave is my husband, an American academic. Macwee stands for
Speaker 1: a Military Assistance Command of Vietnam headquarters for the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a
Speaker 1: graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American,
Speaker 1: was working at RAND. My Elliott is Vietnamese, and she
Speaker 1: ends up working at Randon Saigon for a man named
Speaker 1: Leon Garay, one of Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran
Speaker 1: the Secret Study and he's a big part of this story.
Speaker 1: Here's an interview Rand recorded with Garay just before he
Speaker 1: died in two thousand and seven. And how did you
Speaker 1: end up getting into Vietnam? I got drafted. Well, I
Speaker 1: assume I volunteered, but I got drafted. The Chief of
Speaker 1: Air Force Intelligence asked me to go. Garay sat up
Speaker 1: shop in an old bench style villain at the Presidential
Speaker 1: Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six Rue Pasteur. The
Speaker 1: house is still there, flame trees and tamarin line, the
Speaker 1: street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen sixty four, just
Speaker 1: when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still, if you
Speaker 1: were a Westerner, you might go to the exclusive sex
Speaker 1: portif on the humid afternoons, to sit by the pool
Speaker 1: of by Tennis, or have a cocktail in the veranda
Speaker 1: of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a bomb or
Speaker 1: two off in the distance. Later, of course, things would
Speaker 1: get far worse. The house we lived in in Saigon
Speaker 1: was directly under the trajectory of the rockets that the
Speaker 1: Vietong were firing at the Palace, so we had a
Speaker 1: greative experience of ducking onto the dining room table. Gray
Speaker 1: had been working in the Santa Monica office of RAND
Speaker 1: when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a job
Speaker 1: no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California for Saigon.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon wanted him to run a project interviewing Vietcong
Speaker 1: prisoners and defectors. Great jumped at the chance. I had
Speaker 1: to organize my own team of Vietnamese. We were producing
Speaker 1: interview reports or interrogation reports for the US for Rand,
Speaker 1: and for the chief of the Intelligence of the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: are reforces. You all got copies. Later, Leon Grey got
Speaker 1: into trouble, or at least into an argument, and Rand
Speaker 1: brought in a third person to fix things, Conrad Kellen.
Speaker 1: I was supposed to be indoctor NATed by Leon Go Ray.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam, but I
Speaker 1: got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan
Speaker 1: for the South, which of course was partims. Show that
Speaker 1: woman's voice. You here, that's my Elliott again. She interviewed
Speaker 1: Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND for
Speaker 1: a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia, a
Speaker 1: History of the Vietnam War. A brilliant book. By the way,
Speaker 1: he was sort of missed Vietnam at Rand, you know,
Speaker 1: mister sauciet man, and I sort of became his sort
Speaker 1: of successor in a way. The story that follows is
Speaker 1: about these three people, my Eliot leungare Conrad Kellen, and
Speaker 1: how their lives intersected over a minor and forgotten episode
Speaker 1: in the Vietnam War called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project.
Speaker 1: I say minor because what happened in that French villa
Speaker 1: on one seven six route Pasteur didn't swing the war
Speaker 1: one way or another. Nobody who was part of the
Speaker 1: study ever fired a gun or dropped a bomb. But
Speaker 1: the story of the Morale Project says a lot about
Speaker 1: something that has obsessed us ever since intelligence failure. Why
Speaker 1: is it so hard to tell what your enemy is thinking?
Speaker 1: That question came up after nine to eleven during the
Speaker 1: Two Gulf Wars, It came up again in afghanist It
Speaker 1: comes up today with ISIS. And every time we get
Speaker 1: it wrong, every time our enemies take us by surprise,
Speaker 1: we always say, if only we knew more about them,
Speaker 1: If only we had more information about our adversaries, more
Speaker 1: spies in the ground, more satellite images, more intercepted communications,
Speaker 1: more of everything. Do you know how many federal government
Speaker 1: organizations there are just devoted to counter terrorism? Twelve hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy one and another nineteen hundred and thirty one
Speaker 1: private companies. Do you know how many Americans hold top
Speaker 1: secret security clearances? Eight hundred and fifty four thousand. Those
Speaker 1: numbers all come from an extraordinary Washington Post investigation from
Speaker 1: six years ago. And here's the most incredible statistic of all.
Speaker 1: Just since nine to eleven, just to Howe's top secret
Speaker 1: intelligence work, and just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen
Speaker 1: million square feet of new office space has been built
Speaker 1: to house intelligence operations. Seventeen million. We want to know
Speaker 1: everything about our enemies. But what the Vietcong Motivation and
Speaker 1: Morale Project tells us is this, you can know everything
Speaker 1: there is to know about your enemy, everything, and that
Speaker 1: still won't solve your problem. Vietnam was a French colony
Speaker 1: from eighteen eighty seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the
Speaker 1: French loss controlled the country. It was split in half.
Speaker 1: Communists took over the north, an American backed regime came
Speaker 1: into power in the south. Over the next decade, conditions
Speaker 1: inside South Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they
Speaker 1: were protests in the streets, a military coup, and the
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese started setting guerrillas known as the Vietcong over
Speaker 1: the border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause.
Speaker 1: That's why the Vietnam War, at least US involvement there
Speaker 1: starts in nearly nineteen sixties. Because the United States feels
Speaker 1: compelled to help the South turn back the Vietcong. Wars
Speaker 1: are usually about territory. Country X invades country, why country
Speaker 1: WI fights back? But this is a weird kind of war.
Speaker 1: The US and the South Vietnamese have no intention of
Speaker 1: invading the North. They decide instead that they'll just bomb
Speaker 1: the North Vietnamese until they give up, until they realize
Speaker 1: that exporting guerrillas over the border isn't worth it. The
Speaker 1: Vietnam War is a war of persuasion, a crude kind
Speaker 1: of persuasion. The goal is to break the other side's will.
Speaker 1: The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
Speaker 1: on paper, but nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military
Speaker 1: might and a live horse of more than eight thousand men.
Speaker 1: Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
Speaker 1: Central coast. But if your goal is to break someone's will,
Speaker 1: how do you know if his strategy is working. In
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending
Speaker 1: troops to fight the Vietcong, there was a problem. No
Speaker 1: one knew anything about the Vietcong. Almost no one of
Speaker 1: the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The
Speaker 1: Special adviser to the American General in South Vietnam at
Speaker 1: the time was an Australian called Colonel Srong. And you
Speaker 1: know what he said, all quote him directly. These people
Speaker 1: are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents.
Speaker 1: That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence
Speaker 1: about the Vietcong. So what do you do if you're
Speaker 1: bombing someone you know nothing about and you want to
Speaker 1: know how this unknown person feels. You call on the
Speaker 1: Rand Corporation. So Rand rents the villa on Rue Pasteur
Speaker 1: and brings in Leon Garay to run the show. Garay
Speaker 1: was Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His
Speaker 1: parents were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who
Speaker 1: split off from Lenin during the Alshebek Revolution. They were
Speaker 1: in Russia during the revolution. This is Leon Gary's son, Daniel.
Speaker 1: He's a national security and policy expert with the Lexington
Speaker 1: Institute in Arlington, Virginia. They participated in the revolution. Effect
Speaker 1: My grandparents met in prison. My grandmother used to smoke
Speaker 1: unfiltered cigarettes and a little holder and she cut him
Speaker 1: in half. They were living in Moscow. They were in Moscow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were in Moscow and they were fighting the system.
Speaker 1: He my grandfather ran an illegal printing press and the
Speaker 1: whole thing. In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born,
Speaker 1: the Garrays are kicked out of the country. They ended
Speaker 1: up next in Berlin in nineteen thirty three. They shut
Speaker 1: the doors, locked the building up and left, just walked
Speaker 1: away and went to Paris. And then they got out
Speaker 1: of Paris on the same train that Humphrey Bogart did
Speaker 1: in Castleblanca, heading south, and he andered south, went through
Speaker 1: Spain to Portugal and then got to the US after that.
Speaker 1: So they stayed one step ahead of the tide of
Speaker 1: evil for about almost twenty years. Wow. Yeah, which of
Speaker 1: the Bolsheviks? He must have known some of them person
Speaker 1: or knew album personal if they knew Trotsky, they knew Lenin,
Speaker 1: they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the whole crowd. Man,
Speaker 1: you're leftist royalty. Yeah, well right. The Grays end up
Speaker 1: in New York City ninety six and Broadway deep in
Speaker 1: the world of Eastern European emigreys. Leon serves in the army,
Speaker 1: fights in the Battle of the Bulge, and ends up
Speaker 1: in counterintelligence. How do you think the refugee experience shaped
Speaker 1: your father number of ways. I think the overriding one
Speaker 1: was we've retreated this far and no farther. So it
Speaker 1: was it was a view of sort of America, not
Speaker 1: just a city on the hill, not but you know,
Speaker 1: there's nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to
Speaker 1: be truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
Speaker 1: he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important. So
Speaker 1: this is who Ran puts in charge of the Vietnam operation.
Speaker 1: Leon Garay a patriot in the way that only an
Speaker 1: immigrant can be a patriot. He was suaved. He was
Speaker 1: very charming, He had a great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic.
Speaker 1: So personally I liked him. The only thing I didn't
Speaker 1: like about him was the fact that he was a
Speaker 1: great ladies man, you know, and there were a lot
Speaker 1: of rumors about that. But as a person I liked him.
Speaker 1: Gray spoke German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
Speaker 1: of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
Speaker 1: of the European intellectual. He had an amazing kind of
Speaker 1: research all of his life. Where there will be stacks
Speaker 1: of documents in Russian innings were on his dad, and
Speaker 1: he literally be talking to you and it would sort
Speaker 1: of be, well, you know, there's this recent thing, and
Speaker 1: he's sort of it's an idetic memory, but he was
Speaker 1: certainly kind of librarian cyclopedic in that kind of set.
Speaker 1: Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and
Speaker 1: tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That
Speaker 1: is to really answer the question of how the bombing
Speaker 1: is affecting the Vietcong. That's the question I remembered very clearly. Again,
Speaker 1: this is from the interview Gray did with the Rand
Speaker 1: Archives a decade ago at the end of his life,
Speaker 1: and he said, what is your funding? I told him
Speaker 1: we had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would
Speaker 1: you do with a million? That was this question. I said,
Speaker 1: that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have
Speaker 1: more people doing the interviewing. Says, you have it. A
Speaker 1: million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was a
Speaker 1: king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals to
Speaker 1: fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview defectoris
Speaker 1: from North Vietnam. And captured Vietcong guerrillas. That's where my
Speaker 1: elliot come in. She was one of Grey's interviewers, and
Speaker 1: her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Grey's.
Speaker 1: My father was appointed to Haifang. He became mayor of Haifang.
Speaker 1: She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Speaker 1: Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and
Speaker 1: as mayor he had a lot of authority. He was
Speaker 1: almost like the king of that little town. And we
Speaker 1: live in an enormous house with an enormous garden in
Speaker 1: front and back, with a staff of servants and even
Speaker 1: a platoon of guards, you know, who stood guard outside
Speaker 1: our gate. So that was really the best time of
Speaker 1: my life. Then the French get defeated in the north
Speaker 1: by the Communists. Vietnam is divided in two. It happened.
Speaker 1: So suddenly we just packed up and left everything, and
Speaker 1: we lost everything. So when it happened, we were in
Speaker 1: a panic. I didn't know what to do. My father had,
Speaker 1: of course, collaborated with the French. I didn't know, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't stand a thing. But my father was a
Speaker 1: faith that the Communists would come in and kill him.
Speaker 1: My Eleigot didn't come to the RAND project as a
Speaker 1: blank slate. She came with a history. She had to
Speaker 1: flee for her life from the communists in the North.
Speaker 1: Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists,
Speaker 1: the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers
Speaker 1: would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the
Speaker 1: prison where captured Viacong were held. Other times they would
Speaker 1: head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on military
Speaker 1: planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped, did
Speaker 1: offer their subject cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under the trees.
Speaker 1: It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made it clear
Speaker 1: that they were only doing a research project. If the
Speaker 1: subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would be short.
Speaker 1: Other times they might last for days. Then it was
Speaker 1: back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where the interviews
Speaker 1: would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my Elliott in
Speaker 1: the Central Mekong Delta into being a former company commander
Speaker 1: for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion of the
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese Army, there was a lot of questions about bombing,
Speaker 1: what weapons do you feel the most, what had the
Speaker 1: most effect on your unit and your operations? And with
Speaker 1: the North Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us
Speaker 1: about conditions. Are you march from the North to the
Speaker 1: South with their bombings you know along the way? Thanks
Speaker 1: like that. The Morale Project would eventually deduce sixty two
Speaker 1: thousand pages of transcripts interviews with captured Vietcong and others.
Speaker 1: Sixty two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted
Speaker 1: by a PR firm where a few dozen people are
Speaker 1: interviewed for an hour. This is one of the most
Speaker 1: extraordinary encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember,
Speaker 1: no one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in
Speaker 1: nearly nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation
Speaker 1: on the route pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of
Speaker 1: the other side. The stuff was gold. Gray takes the
Speaker 1: results and makes the rounds. His favorite statistic was this.
Speaker 1: When RAND started its study, sixty five percent of defectors
Speaker 1: and prisoners believed the Vietcong could win. After a year
Speaker 1: of heavy US bombing, that number was down to twenty
Speaker 1: percent the enemy was on the ropes. Gray used the
Speaker 1: Air Force Army US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to
Speaker 1: the headquarters of the Army of the Pacific RAND in
Speaker 1: Santa Monica, Washington, d C. To the Pentagon, and to
Speaker 1: the White House. Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon
Speaker 1: and whisk him to aircraft carriers at the Villa en
Speaker 1: Rue Pasteur. He holds cocktail parties for everyone who is
Speaker 1: anyone in South Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US
Speaker 1: Senator later to become Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets
Speaker 1: with visiting journalists, CIA officers. His stuff goes right to
Speaker 1: the top. Well, we've had an interesting report from a
Speaker 1: man named Gorey who works for the Rand Corporation. That's
Speaker 1: Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of White
Speaker 1: House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six, President
Speaker 1: Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper and
Speaker 1: deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ used
Speaker 1: to walk around with a summary of Gray's dings in
Speaker 1: his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're going
Speaker 1: to put thousands of lives at risk. You need to
Speaker 1: explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And that's
Speaker 1: what Leon Garrey offered. In the crucial early years of
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen, the
Speaker 1: third person in our story. When did I come to round? Oh? Well,
Speaker 1: I lived in New York at sixty four, I think
Speaker 1: it was. Kellen was a battered veteran of World War
Speaker 1: Two and a little bit of a legend. I once
Speaker 1: spent two weeks in Los Angeles just going from one
Speaker 1: person's house to the next asking for their memories of Kellen.
Speaker 1: Everybody remembers Conrad Kellen. If you took the absolute best
Speaker 1: of nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a
Speaker 1: time machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixty southern California,
Speaker 1: that would be Kellen. I read the paper said some
Speaker 1: people in Washing, some smart bowers, had showered the North
Speaker 1: with millions of leaflets in which they had told the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese they should lay down their arms because we were
Speaker 1: good people, and they were leaders were bad people, you know,
Speaker 1: the ordinary nonsense, and they should stop fighting the war.
Speaker 1: Kellen served in US Army Intelligence in the second World War,
Speaker 1: specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how
Speaker 1: the US we're using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry,
Speaker 1: We're doing it all wrong. And so I wrote a
Speaker 1: letter to the New York Times and said it was
Speaker 1: obvious nonsense to shower large numbers of soldiers with a
Speaker 1: leaflet saying stopped that war. Soldiers some stopballs. So there's
Speaker 1: some begin wars and soldiers stopballs. So if you want
Speaker 1: to stop a war, you have to do it differently.
Speaker 1: So I got a call from them here, from the
Speaker 1: RAM people, and they wanted me to come and be
Speaker 1: part of the system, and I said okay, So it
Speaker 1: came came to Los Angeles. Kellen grew up in Berlin,
Speaker 1: wealthy cultured. His father owned a big brewery. His full
Speaker 1: name was kats and ellen Bogen, and the kats and
Speaker 1: ellen Bogans were one of the great Jewish families of Europe.
Speaker 1: But when Hitler came to power, Kellen packed his bags.
Speaker 1: He said later that he knew on some instinctive level
Speaker 1: that things would not end well for the Jews in Germany.
Speaker 1: He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer
Speaker 1: Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this.
Speaker 1: He gets on a boat to America and meets the
Speaker 1: mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives
Speaker 1: in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham,
Speaker 1: who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to
Speaker 1: California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over
Speaker 1: six feet tall. He was an expert in Gulf handwriting
Speaker 1: analysis and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley,
Speaker 1: one in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes
Speaker 1: from Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you
Speaker 1: go online and look up the assets of his personal foundation,
Speaker 1: it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother
Speaker 1: was painted by Renoir, a family friend. He was cousins
Speaker 1: with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous.
Speaker 1: The craziest story about Callen is when he was in
Speaker 1: Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended
Speaker 1: and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the Cham's
Speaker 1: Elise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are
Speaker 1: you an American gi He says yes. She says, you
Speaker 1: going back to the States. He says yes. She says,
Speaker 1: you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist.
Speaker 1: I have to get his work safely to America, because,
Speaker 1: of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by
Speaker 1: all means. But then she goes away and comes back
Speaker 1: with this massive stack of canvases, and he says, there's
Speaker 1: no way I can take that, and she says, you
Speaker 1: have to. Whereupon Kellen embarks on this epic month long
Speaker 1: struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which
Speaker 1: includes being trapped in the back of an open truck
Speaker 1: during a rainstorm and throwing his coat over the pile
Speaker 1: of paintings to keep them for being ruined, and staying
Speaker 1: up all night, night after night because he's terrified someone
Speaker 1: will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I should
Speaker 1: say Mark Schagal, of course, because only Conrad Keellen would
Speaker 1: end up transporting the collected works of one of the
Speaker 1: most famous artists of the twentieth century to America in
Speaker 1: a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The deal
Speaker 1: Chagal's daughter made with him was that he could take
Speaker 1: one picture and keep it for himself. So he takes one,
Speaker 1: a famous one. Then he sells it in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: But what seemed like a lot of money at the time,
Speaker 1: But of course it's a Chagal, a famous Chagal. And
Speaker 1: every now and again over the years he'd spot his
Speaker 1: old painting in an auction catalog worth more and more
Speaker 1: and more, and he buried his head in his hands
Speaker 1: and say oh. By late nineteen sixty six, when Conrad
Speaker 1: Kellen gets to RAND, the place is in turmoil. The
Speaker 1: Vietnam War has split its ranks down the middle. This
Speaker 1: is the think tank that the Pentagon has been relying
Speaker 1: on to make sense of the war. But there's a
Speaker 1: group inside RAND that believes the war is a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you remember the story of the
Speaker 1: Pentagon Papers. This was the secret forty seven volume study
Speaker 1: of US political and military involvement in the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: It was commissioned by the Pentagon. The Pentagon Papers showed
Speaker 1: that the White House had been misleading Congress and the
Speaker 1: American people for years about how well the war was going.
Speaker 1: A copy of the Pentagon Papers was famously leaked to
Speaker 1: the New York Times in nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg.
Speaker 1: Ellsberg's league was really the beginning of the end of
Speaker 1: public support for the war. And who was Ellsberg? An
Speaker 1: employee of Rand? And where did he get his copy
Speaker 1: of the Pentagon papers? He took it from the safe
Speaker 1: at Rand. And guests who was one of Ellsberg's best
Speaker 1: friends and confidants at Rand, Conrad Kellen, of course, as
Speaker 1: always in the thick of things. But the moment we're
Speaker 1: talking about is well before the Pentagon Papers controversy. It's
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the divisions within Rand nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: five sixty six. Rand is a place that prides itself
Speaker 1: on objectivity and rigor. Everything is checked and double checked
Speaker 1: and fact checked and reviewed in house before its released.
Speaker 1: But the Rand brass is beginning to worry that when
Speaker 1: Leon Garay gets whisked by helicopter to aircraft carriers or
Speaker 1: huddles with generals at his cocktail parties at the Villa
Speaker 1: on Rue Pasteur, he's bypassing all that. They worry that
Speaker 1: he's gone rogue, so they bring in Conrad Kellen to
Speaker 1: be a second set of eyes. Kellen comes in and
Speaker 1: reads a thousand of the Vietcong interviews. Remember many of
Speaker 1: these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty single space type pages.
Speaker 1: It's a huge amount of work. And Kellen decides Garray
Speaker 1: has it all wrong. The Vietcong are not crumbling. On
Speaker 1: the contrary, here's Kellen again from his interview with my Elliott.
Speaker 1: I could see from the interviews that we were not
Speaker 1: going to win this war. That was Michael Duz. I
Speaker 1: was one of the very few people that Rand who
Speaker 1: had that idea. Most of from Buegang, who they were,
Speaker 1: they couldn't understand. To this day, they don't understand how
Speaker 1: a nation was two million million soldiers out of ships
Speaker 1: airplanes cannot win over Vietnam. So here we have two men,
Speaker 1: two sophisticated European intellectuals with access to the richest trove
Speaker 1: of intelligence in the entire war. Grey goes first and
Speaker 1: says we're winning. Callen comes along, looks at exactly the
Speaker 1: same evidence and says we're never going to win. Then
Speaker 1: there's my Elliot. If Gray is at the Villa en
Speaker 1: rue Pasteur and Callen is back in Santa Monica Elliott
Speaker 1: is actually in the field, in the jungles and villages,
Speaker 1: talking to actual defectors and Viet Cong guerrillas. And what
Speaker 1: does she think will happen? She doesn't know. She's confused.
Speaker 1: I walked into this sale and I didn't know what
Speaker 1: to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged,
Speaker 1: very briskly, and he looked, you know, like a man
Speaker 1: like although I he stopped dead in his tracks. Elliott
Speaker 1: is talking about an early interview she did that had
Speaker 1: a huge impact on her, but she never forgot. You
Speaker 1: have to remember what I looked like at the time.
Speaker 1: I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and
Speaker 1: I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen.
Speaker 1: So he was surprised to see me, and he was
Speaker 1: kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect,
Speaker 1: and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going
Speaker 1: to happen because I had grown up believing that the
Speaker 1: Communists were bloodthirsty. They started to talk, and gradually he
Speaker 1: relaxed and she relaxed. You know, I had never met
Speaker 1: a Communists before face to face, so I just my
Speaker 1: curiosity just took over and I just asked him a
Speaker 1: lot of questions about him and his family and his
Speaker 1: background and his beliefs. And he had devoted his whole
Speaker 1: life to fighting the French, and now he was fighting
Speaker 1: the Americans. And he seemed to have a lot of integrity.
Speaker 1: And what effect did listening to him have on you? Well,
Speaker 1: it really confused me because I had believed that the
Speaker 1: Communists were sort of like pugs we call we call
Speaker 1: them tho choema, meaning pugs, and it's a literal translation
Speaker 1: of that. No choe minga the head of a buffalo
Speaker 1: and the body of a horse. So somebody who's not,
Speaker 1: you know, quite human, a thug. What the captured Vietcong
Speaker 1: officers said was straightforward, The intelligence was straightforward. But my
Speaker 1: Elliott's reaction was anything but straightforward. And so I left
Speaker 1: with more questions and answers, and I began to see
Speaker 1: that the picture was not black and white like I
Speaker 1: had believed at the beginning. But then Elliott says something crucial.
Speaker 1: She says, it didn't change her mind. She saw the
Speaker 1: evidence with her own eyes. She did the interview with
Speaker 1: the general, but it wasn't enough. Remember her circumstances. She
Speaker 1: comes from a family of privilege, and the rise of
Speaker 1: the Communists in the north takes all that away. They
Speaker 1: end up living in a little hot and Saigon. The
Speaker 1: Vietcong is not some abstract force. They were a personal
Speaker 1: threat to her family. I think for people whose backs
Speaker 1: were against the wall, who thought that their survival depended
Speaker 1: on the commonness not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you change your mind. Seeing the evidence just
Speaker 1: increases your fear, because you fear that you know that
Speaker 1: the Communess would win and it would be the end
Speaker 1: of you and your family, and you don't want to
Speaker 1: face it. You know, you don't want to think about it.
Speaker 1: Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that
Speaker 1: same interview that my Elliott did with the Vietcong officer,
Speaker 1: and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up.
Speaker 1: If we just bomb people like him some more, will
Speaker 1: destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about
Speaker 1: this from Garay's perspective. Well, look, if you want to
Speaker 1: understand that I am a professional refugee, I win a
Speaker 1: refugee from Russia to Germany, from Germany to France, and
Speaker 1: from France to the United States, so three times. So
Speaker 1: as far as I was concerned, this was going to
Speaker 1: be my country and whatever way, what's the defense that
Speaker 1: no interest of the United States, it was sufficient reason
Speaker 1: to pursue this thing. By this thing, he means fighting Communism,
Speaker 1: the enemy that forced Gray out of his home in Russia.
Speaker 1: And in the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still
Speaker 1: out there. It's spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray
Speaker 1: had to believe that America was winning the war. Leon
Speaker 1: Garay felt there was nowhere left to retreat to. You
Speaker 1: don't pick and choose your wars. Your country's at war.
Speaker 1: It's at war period. You don't pick and choose whether
Speaker 1: you approval it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos. There's
Speaker 1: a moment in my Eliot's interview with Conrad Kellen where
Speaker 1: he talks about Gray about what it means to be
Speaker 1: a refugee. I think, like many eventually became great opportunists.
Speaker 1: What else could they do? I mean, if you were
Speaker 1: an opportunist, at least said the American establishment on your side.
Speaker 1: You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is
Speaker 1: at the mercy of whatever country will take him, and
Speaker 1: I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking
Speaker 1: about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought
Speaker 1: to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped
Speaker 1: from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he
Speaker 1: once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege.
Speaker 1: How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen
Speaker 1: explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam,
Speaker 1: even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.
Speaker 1: I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
Speaker 1: enough for me. One war was enough for me. I
Speaker 1: imagine Kellen read that same interview Elliot did, the one
Speaker 1: with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees the man's determination, and
Speaker 1: when he thinks about that resolve through the prism of
Speaker 1: his own experience, he realizes, I can't match that, not anymore.
Speaker 1: One war was enough for me. Over and again in
Speaker 1: his interview with my Elliott, Kellen comes back to this
Speaker 1: war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him. It wasn't an
Speaker 1: intellectual question like it was for so many at RAND.
Speaker 1: It was real. He lived through it. There were an
Speaker 1: awful lot of civilians around in this whole thing and
Speaker 1: this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties character They
Speaker 1: didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came back
Speaker 1: and said, you know, we took and took such and
Speaker 1: such a place which I don't know sixty category, well,
Speaker 1: a casualty is not that that person. A casualty is
Speaker 1: something theoretical for these people. One interview with the Vietcong officer,
Speaker 1: one fantastic bit of intelligence, an insight into the enemy's mind,
Speaker 1: and yet everyone was in disagreement on what it meant
Speaker 1: because everyone was looking at it through a different set
Speaker 1: of eyes. That's why intelligence failures happen. It's not because
Speaker 1: someone screws up or is stupid or lazy. It's because
Speaker 1: the people who make sense of intelligence are human beings
Speaker 1: with their own histories and biases. So what happens to
Speaker 1: the three people in our story? Gray gets recalled from
Speaker 1: Vietnam in April of nineteen sixty seven. Clearly, Rand asked
Speaker 1: me to stop going there, to stop going to Vietnam,
Speaker 1: to return to Santa Monica. I went back, and then
Speaker 1: Ibas told that my presence was an embarrassment. I don't
Speaker 1: know why you suggest, she was very clear that they
Speaker 1: should for something else. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 1: Were you disappointed? Of course, I like grand he was
Speaker 1: hung out to dry. His son, Daniel is a lot
Speaker 1: more blunt. My sense of it was they wanted, you know,
Speaker 1: to cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and the way to cut loose from this project and
Speaker 1: from him was to try and discredit the analysis and
Speaker 1: sort of then again, okay, you're now no longer a
Speaker 1: legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go kind
Speaker 1: of thing. And how can you describe your father in
Speaker 1: those years? So? I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly,
Speaker 1: I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion.
Speaker 1: It may have been not that different than you know,
Speaker 1: when he and his family kept getting driven out of
Speaker 1: cities in Europe and had to restart the whole process
Speaker 1: and restart the fight. I think there was a certain
Speaker 1: degree of that. Gray eventually moved to Florida take supposed
Speaker 1: to the University of Miami, fights the Cold War from
Speaker 1: Coral Gables. As from my Elliott, she eventually moves to America,
Speaker 1: lives in Ithaca, and it's only then from the safety
Speaker 1: of upstate New York that she finally accepts what the
Speaker 1: Vietcong officer was telling her. I wish it would have
Speaker 1: been easier for me to come to the conclusion earlier,
Speaker 1: because it was just use of agonizing and being ambiguous.
Speaker 1: She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
Speaker 1: determined the war was wrong and unwinnable. I think that
Speaker 1: it's easier to be objective when you will not you
Speaker 1: don't have a personal steak in a situation, and you
Speaker 1: can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah, the war
Speaker 1: is not working less ended. But when you have a
Speaker 1: very deep, strong personal steak, it's a lot harder because
Speaker 1: you're talking about survival of your family, your relatives. Myke
Speaker 1: Elliot finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen, Kellen
Speaker 1: sounds the alarm almost from the beginning of his time
Speaker 1: at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the war
Speaker 1: cannot be won. But of course, if you know even
Speaker 1: the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know that
Speaker 1: no one listened to him, at least until it was
Speaker 1: too late. He suffered, like all of them did. I
Speaker 1: can only say that the people that I knew were
Speaker 1: talked a lot about scientific talk. Scientific listened that we're
Speaker 1: the most unscientific people. You can imagine. They just picked
Speaker 1: somebody and then if they agreed with him, or he
Speaker 1: agreed with them, then he was an expert, and if
Speaker 1: he didn't agree with him, he was not an expert,
Speaker 1: and then they would it out the most unscientific people
Speaker 1: you can imagine. I'm not sure it's any different today,
Speaker 1: is it. And everybody reports for everybody else, and it
Speaker 1: was It wasn't almost like a comedy, you know, it
Speaker 1: was so stupid. I got very angry about that. Kellen
Speaker 1: died in two thousand and seven, and not long ago
Speaker 1: I went to see his wife in that same house
Speaker 1: up in the hills. His daughters were there as well.
Speaker 1: They talked about how the Second World War never left him.
Speaker 1: He had terrible memories, and at the very end of
Speaker 1: his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance.
Speaker 1: Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa
Speaker 1: Monica and he would dream that the Nazis were coming
Speaker 1: up the hill to take him away. You've been listening
Speaker 1: to revisionist history. If you like what you've heard, do
Speaker 1: us a favor and rate us on iTunes It helps.
Speaker 1: You can get more information about this in other episodes
Speaker 1: at revisionist history dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
Speaker 1: Our show is produced by mel La Belle, Roxanne Scott
Speaker 1: and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is
Speaker 1: composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yasuzawa. Flan Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Saraca. Peneply
Speaker 1: management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell.