June 22, 2016 • 41 mins
In the early 1960s the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure the effect of relentless U.S. bombing on their morale. Yet despite a wealth of great data, even the leaders of the study couldn’t agree on what it meant.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I had an apartment of my own. You know, life
couldn't have been better, I thought.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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,
(01:25):
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
(01:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Dave knew somebody McVie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Dave is Ma's husband, an American academic. McVie stands for
a military Assistants Command of Vietnam Headquarters for the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I got drafted. Well, I was semi volunteered, but I
got drafted. The Chief of Air Force Intelligence asked me
to go.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
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
(03:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Later, Leongerrey got into trouble, or at least into an argument,
and Rand brought in a third person to fix things,
Conrad Kellen.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
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.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
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.
(05:47):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:31):
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
(06:55):
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.
(07:18):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Via con.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
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
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
on paper, but.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
Nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military might.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
And alive horse of more than eight thousand men.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
central coast.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:08):
off from Lenin during the Bloshebic Revolution.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
They were in Russia during the revolution.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This is Leon Garrey's son, Daniel. He's a national security
and policy expert with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
Speaker 6 (10:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
They were living in Moscow.
Speaker 6 (10:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born, the
Garrays are kicked out of the country.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
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,
(11:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah, which of the bolsheviksty He must have known some
of the in person.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
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?
Speaker 6 (11:49):
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
(12:09):
truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
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
(12:49):
as a person I liked him.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Gray spoke, German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
of the European intellectual.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
That's the question I remembered very clearly.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Again, this is from the interview Garray did with the
Rand Archives a decade ago at the end of his life.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
My father was appointed to Haifhog. He became mayor of Haiphong.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
(14:48):
So that was really the best time of my life.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Then the French get defeated in the north by the communists.
Vietnam is divided in two.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
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
(15:48):
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.
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
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
(17:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
The other side.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
Well, we've had an interesting report from a man named
Goray who works for the Rand Corporation, and wemired.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
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
(19:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
When did I come to rand Oh? Well, I lived
in New York at sixty four. I think it was.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
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,
(20:09):
that would be Kellen.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
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
(20:33):
they should stop fighting the war.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
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
(21:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
In Germany.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
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
(22:04):
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
(22:26):
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
(22:48):
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,
(23:10):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:52):
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,
(24:16):
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
(24:37):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:20):
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.
(25:43):
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
(26:04):
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.
(26:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
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
(27:09):
out of ships airplanes cannot win over Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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
(27:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Elliott is talking about an early interview she did that
had a huge impact on her that she never forgot.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
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
(28:41):
to happen because I had grown up believing that the
Communists were blood thirsty.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
They started to talk, and gradually he relaxed and she relaxed.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
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
(29:13):
seemed to have a lot of integrity.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
And what effect did listening to him have on you?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
It's a literal translation of.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
That cho mingu the head of a buffalo and the
body of a horse. So somebody who's not quite human
a thug.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
What the captured Via Kong officer said was straightforward, The
intelligence was straightforward. But my Elliot's reaction was anything but straightforward.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
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
(30:31):
hot and Saigon. The Vietcong is not some abstract force.
They were a personal threat to her family.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
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
(32:07):
way it was to defend interest of the United States,
it was sufficient reason to pursue this thing.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
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
(33:43):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
enough for me. I don't what I have to was.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
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.
(34:32):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:47):
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,
(35:11):
a casualty is not a dead person. A casualty is
something theoretical for these people.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
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
(35:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Clearly Rand asked me to stop going there.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
To stop going to Vietnam, to return to Santa Monica.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
How'd you feel about that?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Were you disappointed?
Speaker 4 (36:13):
Of course?
Speaker 3 (36:15):
I like grand he was hung out to dry. His son,
Daniel is a lot more blunt.
Speaker 6 (36:20):
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,
(36:42):
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And how can you describe your father in those years?
Speaker 6 (36:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
determined the war was wrong and unwinnable.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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,
(38:09):
because you're talking about survival of your family realities.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Out the most unscientific people you can imagine. I'm not
sure it's any different today, is it.
Speaker 5 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
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,
(39:48):
and he would dream that the Nazis were coming up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
To take him away.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
It helps.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
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
(40:49):
engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka. Penalty management
team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm
gladwell
Speaker 2 (41:10):
S.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I had an apartment of my own. You know, life
couldn't have been better, I thought.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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,
(01:25):
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
(01:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Dave knew somebody McVie who was an officer, a graduate student.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Dave is Ma's husband, an American academic. McVie stands for
a military Assistants Command of Vietnam Headquarters for the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I got drafted. Well, I was semi volunteered, but I
got drafted. The Chief of Air Force Intelligence asked me
to go.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
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
(03:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Later, Leongerrey got into trouble, or at least into an argument,
and Rand brought in a third person to fix things,
Conrad Kellen.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
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.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
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.
(05:47):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:31):
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
(06:55):
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.
(07:18):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Via con.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
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
(08:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
on paper, but.
Speaker 6 (08:51):
Nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military might.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
And alive horse of more than eight thousand men.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
central coast.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:08):
off from Lenin during the Bloshebic Revolution.
Speaker 6 (10:10):
They were in Russia during the revolution.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This is Leon Garrey's son, Daniel. He's a national security
and policy expert with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
Speaker 6 (10:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
They were living in Moscow.
Speaker 6 (10:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born, the
Garrays are kicked out of the country.
Speaker 6 (10:45):
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,
(11:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah, which of the bolsheviksty He must have known some
of the in person.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
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?
Speaker 6 (11:49):
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
(12:09):
truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
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
(12:49):
as a person I liked him.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Gray spoke, German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
of the European intellectual.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
That's the question I remembered very clearly.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Again, this is from the interview Garray did with the
Rand Archives a decade ago at the end of his life.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
My father was appointed to Haifhog. He became mayor of Haiphong.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
(14:48):
So that was really the best time of my life.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Then the French get defeated in the north by the communists.
Vietnam is divided in two.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
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
(15:48):
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.
(16:10):
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
(16:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
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
(17:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
The other side.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
Well, we've had an interesting report from a man named
Goray who works for the Rand Corporation, and wemired.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
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
(19:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
When did I come to rand Oh? Well, I lived
in New York at sixty four. I think it was.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
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,
(20:09):
that would be Kellen.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
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
(20:33):
they should stop fighting the war.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
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.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
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
(21:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
In Germany.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
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
(22:04):
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
(22:26):
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
(22:48):
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,
(23:10):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:52):
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,
(24:16):
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
(24:37):
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
(24:58):
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
(25:20):
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.
(25:43):
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
(26:04):
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.
(26:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:44):
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
(27:09):
out of ships airplanes cannot win over Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
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
(27:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
Elliott is talking about an early interview she did that
had a huge impact on her that she never forgot.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
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
(28:41):
to happen because I had grown up believing that the
Communists were blood thirsty.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
They started to talk, and gradually he relaxed and she relaxed.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
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
(29:13):
seemed to have a lot of integrity.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
And what effect did listening to him have on you?
Speaker 2 (29:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
It's a literal translation of.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
That cho mingu the head of a buffalo and the
body of a horse. So somebody who's not quite human
a thug.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
What the captured Via Kong officer said was straightforward, The
intelligence was straightforward. But my Elliot's reaction was anything but straightforward.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
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
(30:31):
hot and Saigon. The Vietcong is not some abstract force.
They were a personal threat to her family.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
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
(32:07):
way it was to defend interest of the United States,
it was sufficient reason to pursue this thing.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
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
(33:43):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
enough for me. I don't what I have to was.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
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.
(34:32):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:47):
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,
(35:11):
a casualty is not a dead person. A casualty is
something theoretical for these people.
Speaker 3 (35:16):
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
(35:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (35:54):
Clearly Rand asked me to stop going there.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
To stop going to Vietnam, to return to Santa Monica.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:11):
How'd you feel about that?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Were you disappointed?
Speaker 4 (36:13):
Of course?
Speaker 3 (36:15):
I like grand he was hung out to dry. His son,
Daniel is a lot more blunt.
Speaker 6 (36:20):
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,
(36:42):
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
And how can you describe your father in those years?
Speaker 6 (36:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
determined the war was wrong and unwinnable.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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,
(38:09):
because you're talking about survival of your family realities.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Out the most unscientific people you can imagine. I'm not
sure it's any different today, is it.
Speaker 5 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
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,
(39:48):
and he would dream that the Nazis were coming up
the hill.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
To take him away.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
You've been listening to Revisionist History. If you like what
you've heard, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
It helps.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
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
(40:49):
engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka. Penalty management
team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm
gladwell
Speaker 2 (41:10):
S.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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