Saigon, 1965

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibachung, near the Tending Market. It's not the best part of town, but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.

00:00:31
Speaker 3: That's my Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now, a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first days of the Vietnam War.

00:00:42
Speaker 2: I had an apartment of my own. You know, life couldn't have been better, I thought.

00:01:00
Speaker 3: My name is Malcolm Glaubla. Welcome to Revisionist History, where every week we go back and look at something misunderstood or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret Pentagon study that a Vietnamese woman named May Elliott and two others became tangled up in and what happened when it ended, because there's a lot we can learn from them today. The project was run by the Rand Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to an extraordinary collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks. RAND is the kind of place where everyone speaks in complete paragraphs, and if you close your eyes as you listen. You can almost see the footnotes at the end of each one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department were alatting them heavily in those years. Still does tell me about how you come to work for RAND.

00:02:06
Speaker 2: Dave knew somebody McVie who was an officer, a graduate student.

00:02:14
Speaker 3: Dave is Ma's husband, an American academic. McVie stands for a military Assistants Command of Vietnam Headquarters for the Vietnam War.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American, was working at RAND.

00:02:33
Speaker 3: My Elliott is Vietnamese and she ends up working at Randon Saigon for a man named Leon Garray, one of Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran the Secret Study and he's a big part of this story. Here's an interview Rand recorded with Garray just before he died in two thousand and seven.

00:02:50
Speaker 2: And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?

00:02:54
Speaker 4: I got drafted. Well, I was semi volunteered, but I got drafted. The Chief of Air Force Intelligence asked me to go.

00:03:05
Speaker 3: Garray set up shop in an old French style villain near the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six Rue Pasteur. The house is still there, flame trees and tamarin line, the street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen sixty four, just when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still, if you were a Westerner, you might go to the exclusive Cerx sportif on the humid afternoons, to sit by the pool or by tennis, or have a cocktail in the veranda of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a bomb or two oft in the distance. Later, of course, things would get far worse.

00:03:40
Speaker 4: The house we lived in in Saigon was directly under the trajectory of the rockets that they yet congo firing at the palace, so we had a greative experience of ducking under the dining room table.

00:03:54
Speaker 3: Gray had been working in the Santa Monica office of RAND when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a job no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California for Saigon. The Pentagon wanted him to run a project interviewing Vietcong prisoners and defectors. Jumped at the chance.

00:04:10
Speaker 4: I had to organize my own team of Vietnamese we were producing interview reports or interrogation reports for the US, for Rand and for the Chief of the Intelligence of the Vietnamese ARA Forces. They all got copies.

00:04:27
Speaker 3: Later, Leongerrey got into trouble, or at least into an argument, and Rand brought in a third person to fix things, Conrad Kellen.

00:04:36
Speaker 5: I was supposed to be in Doctor Nathan by Leon Golray. He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam. But I got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan, you know, for the for the South, which of course was part of the show.

00:04:52
Speaker 3: That woman's voice, you hear, that's my Elliott again. She interviewed Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND for a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia, a History of the Vietnam War, A brilliant book.

00:05:04
Speaker 5: By the way, he was sort of mister Vietnam at Rand, you know, and missed the saus Vietnam, and I sort of became his sort of successor in a way.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: The story that follows is about these three people, May Elliott leungar Ray Conrad Kellen, and how their lives intersected over a minor and forgotten episode in the Vietnam War called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project. I say minor because what happened in that French villa on one seven six Rue Pastor didn't swing the war one way or another. Nobody who was part of the study ever fired a gun or dropped a bomb. But the story of the Morale Project says a lot about something that has obsessed us ever since intelligence failure. Why is it so hard to tell what your enemy is thinking? That question came up after nine to eleven during the Two Gulf Wars, It came up again in Afghanistan in It comes up today with ISIS. And every time we get it wrong, every time our enemies take us by surprise, we always say, if only we knew more about them, If only we had more information about our adversaries, more spies in the ground, more satellite images, more intercepted communications, more of everything. Do you know how many federal government organizations there are just devoted to counterterrorism? Twelve hundred and seventy one and another nineteen hundred and thirty one private companies. Do you know how many Americans hold top secret security clearances? Eight hundred and fifty four thousand. Those numbers all come from an extraordinary washed and post investigation from six years ago. And here's the most incredible statistic of all. Just since nine to eleven, just to Howe's top secret intelligence work, and just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen million square feet of new office space has been built to house intelligence operations. Seventeen million. We want to know everything about our enemies. But what the viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project tells us is this, you can know everything there is to know about your enemy, everything, and that still won't solve your problem. Vietnam was a French colony from eighteen eighty seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the French lost control of the country. It was split in half. Communists took over the north, an American backed regime came into power in the south. Over the next decade, conditions inside South Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they were protests in the streets, a military coup, and the North Vietnamese started setting guerrillas known as the Viet Coong over the border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause. That's why the Vietnam War at least the US and there starts in the nearly nineteen sixties because the United States feels compelled to help the South turn back the.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: Via con.

00:08:17
Speaker 3: Wars are usually about territory. A country X invades country Y country why fights back? But this is a weird kind of war. The US and the South Vietnamese have no intention of invading the North. They decide instead that they'll just bomb the North Vietnamese until they give up, until they realize that exporting gorillas over the border isn't worth it. The Vietnam War is a war of persuasion, a crude kind of persuasion. The goal is to break the other side's will.

00:08:46
Speaker 2: The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good on paper, but.

00:08:51
Speaker 6: Nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military might.

00:08:55
Speaker 4: And alive horse of more than eight thousand men.

00:08:57
Speaker 2: Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam central coast.

00:09:03
Speaker 3: But if your goal is to break someone's will, how do you know if his strategy is working? In the earth early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending troops to fight the Viatkong, there was a problem. No one knew anything about the Viat Coong. Almost known of the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The special advisor to the American General in South Vietnam at the time was an Australian called Colonel Sarong. And you know what he said. I'll quote him directly. These people are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents. That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence about the Viet Kong. So what do you do if you're bombing someone you know nothing about and you want to know how this unknown person feels. You call in the Rand Corporation. So Rand rents Sevilla on Ruepasteur and brings in Leon Garray to run the show. Gray was Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His parents were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who split off from Lenin during the Bloshebic Revolution.

00:10:10
Speaker 6: They were in Russia during the revolution.

00:10:12
Speaker 3: This is Leon Garrey's son, Daniel. He's a national security and policy expert with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

00:10:20
Speaker 6: They participated in the revolution. In fact, my grandparents met in prison. My grandmother used to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and a little holder and cut them in half.

00:10:29
Speaker 3: They were living in Moscow.

00:10:30
Speaker 6: Are at Moscow, Yeah, are at Moscow, and they were, you know, fighting the system. He my grandfather ran an I legal printing press and the whole thing.

00:10:40
Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born, the Garrays are kicked out of the country.

00:10:45
Speaker 6: They ended up next in Berlin, and in nineteen thirty three they shut the doors, locked the building up and left, just walked away and went to Paris. And then they got out of Paris on the same train that Humphrey Bogart did in Castle Blanca, heading south and meandered south, went through Spain to Portugal and then got to the US after that. So they stayed on one step ahead of the tide of evil for about almost twenty years. Wow.

00:11:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, which of the bolsheviksty He must have known some of the in person.

00:11:23
Speaker 6: Oh, he knew Albin person if they knew Trotsky, they knew Lenin, they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the whole crowd. Man, Your left is royalty, Yeah right.

00:11:33
Speaker 3: The Grays end up in New York City, ninety sixth and Broadway, deep in the world of Eastern European emigreys. Leon serves in the army, fights in the Battle of the Bulge, and ends up in counterintelligence. How do you think the refugee experience shaped your father?

00:11:49
Speaker 6: Number of ways. I think the overriding one was we've retreated this far and no farther. So it was it was a view of sort of America, not just as city on the hill, not just but you know, there's nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to be truly defended. He got a home, he got a country, he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important.

00:12:18
Speaker 3: So this is who Ran puts in charge of the Vietnam operation. Leon Garay a patriot in the way that only an immigrant can be a patriot.

00:12:27
Speaker 2: He was suave, he was very charming. He had a great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic. So personally I liked him. The only thing I didn't like about him was the fact that he was a great ladies man, and there were a lot of rumors about that. But as a person I liked him.

00:12:52
Speaker 3: Gray spoke, German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment of the European intellectual.

00:13:01
Speaker 6: He had an amazing kind of research all of his life, where there would be stacks of documents in Russian innings on his desk and he literally re talking to you and it would sort of be, well, you know, there was this recent thing, and it's an idetic memory. But he was certainly kind of librarian encyclopedic in that kind of set.

00:13:19
Speaker 3: Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That is to really answer the question of how the bombing is affecting the Viet Cong.

00:13:30
Speaker 4: That's the question I remembered very clearly.

00:13:32
Speaker 3: Again, this is from the interview Garray did with the Rand Archives a decade ago at the end of his life.

00:13:37
Speaker 4: And he said, what is your funding? I told him he had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would you do with a million? That was his question. I said, that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have more people doing the interviewing, says, you have it.

00:13:54
Speaker 3: A million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was a king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals to fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview defectors from North Vietnam and captured via Cong guerrillas. That's where my elliot comes. She was one of Garay's interviewers, and her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Garays.

00:14:15
Speaker 2: My father was appointed to Haifhog. He became mayor of Haiphong.

00:14:21
Speaker 3: She grew up in the north before the country was divided. Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and.

00:14:28
Speaker 2: As mayor he had a lot of authority. He was almost like the king of that little town. And we live in an enormous house with an enormous garden front and back, with a staff of servants and even a platoono guards, you know, who stood guard outside our gate. So that was really the best time of my life.

00:14:53
Speaker 3: Then the French get defeated in the north by the communists. Vietnam is divided in two.

00:14:59
Speaker 2: It happened, so suddenly we just packed up and left everything and we lost everything. So when it happened, we were in a panic, didn't know what to do. My father had, of course collaborated with the French. I didn't know, you know, I didn't understand a thing, but my father was a fait that the communists would come in and kill him.

00:15:26
Speaker 3: My Elliott didn't come to the RAND project as a blank slate. She came with a history. She had to flee for her life from the communists in the north. Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists, the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the prison where captured Via Kong were held. Other times they would head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on military planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped, did offer their subjects cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under the trees. It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made it clear that they were only doing a research project. If the subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would be short. Other times they might last for days. Then it was back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where the interviews would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my Elliott in the Central Mekong Delta into being a former company commander for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion of the North Vietnamese Army.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: There was a lot of questions about bombing, What weapons do you feel the most, what had the most effect on your unit and your operations? And with the North Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us about conditions you march from the North to the South with the bombings you know along the way. Things like that.

00:17:07
Speaker 3: The Morale Project would eventually put sixty two thousand pages of transcripts interviews with captured via Kong and others sixty two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted by a PR firm where a few dozen people are interviewed for an hour. This is one of the most extraordinary encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember, no one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in the early nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation on the Rue pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of.

00:17:43
Speaker 1: The other side.

00:17:44
Speaker 3: The stuff was gold. Gray takes the results and makes the rounds. His favorite statistic was this. When Rand started as study, sixty five percent of defectors and prisoners believed the Via Kong could win. After a year of heavy US bombing, that number was down to twenty percent. The enemy was on the ropes. He's the Air Force Army US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to the headquarters of the Army of the Pacific RAND in Santa Monica, Washington, d C. To the Pentagon, and to the White House. Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon and whisk him to aircraft carriers at the Villa and Rupasteur. He holds cocktail parties for everyone who is anyone in South Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US Senator later to become Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets with visiting journalists, CIA officers. His stuff goes right to the top.

00:18:42
Speaker 4: Well, we've had an interesting report from a man named Goray who works for the Rand Corporation, and wemired.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: That's Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of White House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six, President Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper and deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ used to walk around with a summary of Grey's fine in his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're going to put thousands of lives at risk, you need to explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And that's what Leon Garret offered in the crucial early years of the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen, the third person in our story.

00:19:38
Speaker 5: When did I come to rand Oh? Well, I lived in New York at sixty four. I think it was.

00:19:46
Speaker 3: Kellen was a battered veteran of World War Two and a little bit of a legend. I once spent two weeks in Los Angeles just going from one person's house to the next, asking for their memories of Kellen. Everybody remembers Conrad Keillen. If you took the absolute best of nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a time machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixties southern California, that would be Kellen.

00:20:11
Speaker 5: I read the paper said some people in Washington, some smart boys, had showered the North with millions of leaflets in which they had told the Vietnamese they should lay down their arms because we were good people and their leaders were bad people. You know the ordinary nonsense, and they should stop fighting the war.

00:20:37
Speaker 3: Kellen served in US Army intelligence in the Second World War, specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how the US was using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry, We're doing it all wrong.

00:20:49
Speaker 5: And so I wrote a letter to the New York Times and said it was obvious nonsense to shower large numbers of soldiers with a leaflet saying stop that war. Soldiers don't stop wars, so this would begin wars. And soldiers don't stop wars. So if you want to stop a war, you have to do it differently. So I got a call from them here, from the RAM people, and they wanted me to come and be part of the system, and that I said, okay, So came to Los Angeles.

00:21:22
Speaker 3: Kellen grew up in Berlin, wealthy cultured. His father owned a big brewery. His full name was Katzen ellen Bogan, and the Cats and ellen Boguns were one of the great Jewish families of Europe. But when Hitler came to power, Kellen packed his bags. He said later that he knew on some instinctive level that things would not end well for the Jews.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: In Germany.

00:21:43
Speaker 3: He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this. He gets on a boat to America and meets the mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham, who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over six feet tall. He was an expert in golf, handwriting analysis, and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley, one in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes from Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you go online and look up the assets of his personal foundation, it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother was painted by Renoirs, a family friend. He was cousins with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous. The craziest story about Kellen is when he was in Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended, and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the chan Zilise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are you an American gi He says yes. She says you going back to the States. He says yes. She says, you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist. I have to get his work safely to America, because, of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by all means. But then she goes away and comes back with this massive stack of canvasses and he says, there's no way I can take that, and she says, you have to. Whereupon Callen embarks on this epic month long struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which includes being trapped in the back of an open truck during a rain storm and throwing his coat over the pile of paintings to keep them from being ruined, and staying up all night, night after night because he's terrified someone will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I should say Mark Chagal, of course, because only Conrad Kellen would end up transporting the collected works of one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century to America in a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The deal Chagall's daughter made with him was that he could take one picture and keep it for himself. So he takes one, a famous one. Then he tells it in the nineteen fifties for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, But of course it's a Chagall, a famous Chagall. And every now and again over the years he'd spot his old painting in an auction catalog worth more and more and more, and it'd bury his head in his hands and say oh. By late nineteen sixty six, when Conrad Kellen gets to Rand, the place is in turmoil. The Vietnam War has split its ranks down the middle. This is the think tank that the Pentagon has been relying on to make sense of the war. But there's a group inside RAND that believes the war is a terrible mistake. I don't know if you remember the story of the Pentagon Papers. This was the secret forty seven volume study of US political and military involvement in the Vietnam War. It was commissioned by the Pentagon. The Pentagon Papers showed that the White House had been misleading Congress and the American people for years about how well the war was going. A copy of the Pentagon Papers was famously leaked to the New York Times in nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg's leak was really the beginning of the end of public support for the war. And who was Elsburg? An employee of Rand? And where did he get his copy of the Pentagon Papers? He took it from the safe at Rand and guests who was one of Ellsburg's best friends and confidants at Rand, Conrad Kellen, of course, as always in the thick of things. But the moment we're talking about is well before the Pentagon Paper's controversy. It's at the beginning of the divisions within Rand nineteen sixty five sixty six. Rand is a place that prides itself on objectivity and rigor. Everything is checked and double checked and fact checked and reviewed in house before it's released. But the Rand brass is beginning to worry that when Leon Garray gets whisked by helicopter to aircraft carriers or huddles with generals at his cocktail parties at the Villa and Rupestur he's bypassing all that. They worry that he's gone rogue, so they bring in Conrad Kellen to be a second set of eyes. Kellen comes in and reads a thousand of the Via Kong interviews. Remember many of these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty single space type pages. It's a huge amount of work. And Kellen decides Gray has it all wrong. The Via Kong are not crumbling. On the contrary, here's Kellen again from his interview with my Elliott.

00:26:44
Speaker 5: I could see from the interviews that we were not going to win this role. That was Michael Koos. I was one of the very few people that ran who had that idea, and most of from Bergang Ho they were going and they couldn't understand. To this day, they don't understand how a nation was two million million soldiers out of ships airplanes cannot win over Vietnam.

00:27:13
Speaker 3: So here we have two men, two sophisticated European intellectuals with access to the richest trove of intelligence in the entire war. Grey goes first and says we're winning. Kellen comes along, looks at exactly the same evidence and says we're never going to win. Then there's my Elliot. If Gray is at the villa on Rue Pasteur and Kellen is back in Santa Monica, Elliott is actually in the field, in the jungles and villages, talking to actual defectors and via cong guerrillas. And what does she think will happen? She doesn't know. She's confused.

00:27:52
Speaker 2: I walked into this sale and I didn't know what to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged, very briskly and he looked, you know, like a man, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: Elliott is talking about an early interview she did that had a huge impact on her that she never forgot.

00:28:20
Speaker 2: You have to remember what I looked like at the time. I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen. So he was surprised to see me, and he was kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect, and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going to happen because I had grown up believing that the Communists were blood thirsty.

00:28:47
Speaker 3: They started to talk, and gradually he relaxed and she relaxed.

00:28:52
Speaker 2: You know, I had never met a Communist before face to face. So I just my curiosity just took over, and I just asked him a lot of questions about him and his family and his background and his beliefs. And he had devoted his whole life to fighting the French and now he was fighting the Americans, and he seemed to have a lot of integrity.

00:29:16
Speaker 3: And what effect did listening to him have on you?

00:29:19
Speaker 2: Well, it really confused me because I had believed that the Communists were sort of like tugs. We call them cho mutu, meaning tugs, and.

00:29:33
Speaker 3: It's a literal translation of.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: That cho mingu the head of a buffalo and the body of a horse. So somebody who's not quite human a thug.

00:29:49
Speaker 3: What the captured Via Kong officer said was straightforward, The intelligence was straightforward. But my Elliot's reaction was anything but straightforward.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: And so I left with more questions and answers, and I began to see that the picture was not black and white like I had believed at the beginning.

00:30:10
Speaker 3: But then Elliott says something crucial. She says, it didn't change her mind. She saw the evidence with her own eyes. She did the interview with the general, but it wasn't enough, remember her circumstances. She comes from a family of privilege, and the rise of the Communists in the north takes all that away. They end up living in a little hot and Saigon. The Vietcong is not some abstract force. They were a personal threat to her family.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: I think for people whose the blacks were against the wall and who thought that the survival depended on the Communists not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.

00:30:56
Speaker 3: Seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.

00:31:00
Speaker 2: Seeing the evidence just increases your fear. Because you fear that you know that the Communists would win and it would be the end of you and your family, and you don't want to face it. You know, you don't want to think about it.

00:31:27
Speaker 3: Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that same interview that my Elliott did with the Via Kong officer, and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up. If we just bomb people like him some more, we'll destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about this from Gray's perspective.

00:31:47
Speaker 4: Well, look, if you want to understand that I am a professional refugee, I win a refugee from Russia to Germany, from Germany to France, and from France to the United States. So three times. So as far as I was concerned, this was going to be my country, and what the way it was to defend interest of the United States, it was sufficient reason to pursue this thing.

00:32:15
Speaker 3: By this thing, he means fighting communism, the enemy that forced Gray out of his home in Russia, and in the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still out there. It spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray had to believe that America was winning the war. Leon Garray felt there was nowhere left to retreat to.

00:32:37
Speaker 4: You don't pick and choose your wars. Your countries are wars at war period. You don't pick and choose whether you approval of it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos.

00:32:55
Speaker 3: There's a moment in my Elliott's interview with Conrad Kellen where he talks about Gray about what it means to be a refugee.

00:33:03
Speaker 5: I think, like many, it eventually became great opportunists. What else could they do. I mean, if you were an opportunitists, at least you had the American establishment on your side.

00:33:17
Speaker 3: You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is at the mercy of whatever country will take him. And I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege. How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam, even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.

00:34:02
Speaker 5: I was not going to Vietnam because one war was enough for me. I don't what I have to was.

00:34:09
Speaker 3: Was enough for me? I imagine Kellen read that same interview Elliott did, the one with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees the man's determination, and when he thinks about that resolve through the prism of his own experience, he realizes, I can't match that, not anymore. One war was enough for me. Over and again in his interview with my Elliott, Kellen comes back to this war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him. It wasn't an intellectual question like it was for so many. At Rand it was real, he lived through it.

00:34:47
Speaker 5: There were an awful lot of civilians around in this whole thing, in this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties, characters. They didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came back and said, you know, we took and took such and such a place which I don't know sixty well, a casualty is not a dead person. A casualty is something theoretical for these people.

00:35:16
Speaker 3: One interview with the Vietcong officer, one fantastic bit of intelligence, an insight into the enemy's mind, and yet everyone was in disagreement on what it meant because everyone was looking at it through a different set of eyes. That's why intelligence failures happened. It's not because someone screws up or is stupid or lazy. It's because the people who make sense of intelligence are human beings with their own histories and biases. So what happens to the three people in our story? Gray gets recalled from Vietnam in April of nineteen sixty seven.

00:35:54
Speaker 4: Clearly Rand asked me to stop going there.

00:35:57
Speaker 3: To stop going to Vietnam, to return to Santa Monica.

00:36:01
Speaker 4: I went back, and then I was told that my presence was an embarrassment. I don't know why you suggest. You was very clear that there should love for something else.

00:36:11
Speaker 6: How'd you feel about that?

00:36:12
Speaker 2: Were you disappointed?

00:36:13
Speaker 4: Of course?

00:36:15
Speaker 3: I like grand he was hung out to dry. His son, Daniel is a lot more blunt.

00:36:20
Speaker 6: My sense of it was they wanted, you know, to cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam, and the way to cut loose from this project and from him was to try and discredit the analysis and sort of then you know, Okay, you're now no longer a legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go, yeah, kind of thing.

00:36:42
Speaker 3: And how can you describe your father in those years?

00:36:46
Speaker 6: So I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly, I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion. It may have been not that different than you know, when he and his family kept getting driven out of you know, cities in Europe and had to restart the whole process and restart the fight. I think there was a certain degree of that.

00:37:06
Speaker 3: Gray eventually moves to Florida take opposed to the University of Miami, fights the Cold War from Coral Gables. As for my Elliott, she eventually moves to America, lives in Ithaca, and it's only then, from the safety of upstate New York, that she finally accepts what the Vie Kong officer was telling her.

00:37:25
Speaker 2: I wish it would had been easier for me to come to that conclusion earlier, because it was just the use of agonizing and being ambiguous.

00:37:37
Speaker 3: She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were determined the war was wrong and unwinnable.

00:37:44
Speaker 2: I think that it's easier to be objective when you will not you don't have a personal stake in a situation, and you can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah, the war's not working less ended. But when you have a very deep, strong personal stake, it's a lot harder, because you're talking about survival of your family realities.

00:38:15
Speaker 3: Mi Elliott finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen, Kellen sounds the alarm almost in the beginning of his time at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the war cannot be won. But of course, if you know even the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know that no one listened to him, at least until it was too late. He suffered, like all of them did.

00:38:38
Speaker 5: I can only say that the people that I knew talked a lot about scientific scientific Listen that we're the most unscientific people you can imagine. They just picked somebody, and then if they agreed with him, or he agreed with them, then he was an expert, and if he didn't agree with him, he was not an expert. And then they wrote it.

00:38:57
Speaker 3: Out the most unscientific people you can imagine. I'm not sure it's any different today, is it.

00:39:04
Speaker 5: And everybody reports for everybody else, and it was almost like a comedy. You know, he was so stupid. I got very angry about that.

00:39:24
Speaker 3: Kellen died in two thousand and seven, and not long ago I went to see his wife in that same house up in the hills. His daughters were there as well. They talked about how the Second War War never left him. He had terrible memories, and at the very end of his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance. Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa Monica, and he would dream that the Nazis were coming up the hill.

00:39:50
Speaker 1: To take him away.

00:40:19
Speaker 3: You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.

00:40:26
Speaker 1: It helps.

00:40:28
Speaker 3: You can get more information about this and other episodes at revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by mea LaBelle, Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis Kira and Taka Yasuzawa. Flon Williams is our engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka. Penalty management team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm gladwell

00:41:10
Speaker 2: S.