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Saigon, 1965 · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: After we got married, we got an apartment on Hibachung,
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: near the Tending Market. It's not the best part of town,
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: but not the worst either. Very lively, bustling, noisy area.
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: That's my Elliot. She lives outside of Los Angeles now,
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: a graceful, elegant, middle aged woman. She's talking about her
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: life in Saigon in the early nineteen sixties, the first
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: days of the Vietnam War.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: I had an apartment of my own. You know, life
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: couldn't have been better, I thought.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: My name is Malcolm Glaubla. Welcome to Revisionist History, where
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: every week we go back and look at something misunderstood
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: or overlooked. This week's episode is about a secret Pentagon
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: study that a Vietnamese woman named May Elliott and two
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: others became tangled up in and what happened when it ended,
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: because there's a lot we can learn from them today.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: The project was run by the Rand Corporation, a think
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: tank based in Santa Monica, California, home to an extraordinary
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: collection of intellectuals and thinkers and policy wonks. RAND is
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: the kind of place where everyone speaks in complete paragraphs,
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: and if you close your eyes as you listen. You
• 1:55
  Speaker 3: can almost see the footnotes at the end of each
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: one of those perfect paragraphs. The Defense Department were alatting
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: them heavily in those years. Still does tell me about
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: how you come to work for RAND.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Dave knew somebody McVie who was an officer, a graduate student.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: Dave is Ma's husband, an American academic. McVie stands for
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: a military Assistants Command of Vietnam Headquarters for the Vietnam War.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: So anyway, Dave knew this guy who was also a
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: graduate student doing his military stint, and his wife, an American,
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: was working at RAND.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: My Elliott is Vietnamese and she ends up working at
• 2:36
  Speaker 3: Randon Saigon for a man named Leon Garray, one of
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: Rand's most brilliant academics. He ran the Secret Study and
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: he's a big part of this story. Here's an interview
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Rand recorded with Garray just before he died in two
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: thousand and seven.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: And how did you end up getting into Vietnam?
• 2:54
  Speaker 4: I got drafted. Well, I was semi volunteered, but I
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: got drafted. The Chief of Air Force Intelligence asked me
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: to go.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Garray set up shop in an old French style villain
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: near the Presidential Palace in downtown Saigon, one seventy six
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: Rue Pasteur. The house is still there, flame trees and
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: tamarin line, the street quiet, discreet. This was in nineteen
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: sixty four, just when Saigon was beginning to fall apart. Still,
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: if you were a Westerner, you might go to the
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: exclusive Cerx sportif on the humid afternoons, to sit by
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: the pool or by tennis, or have a cocktail in
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: the veranda of the Continental Hotel. Maybe you'd hear a
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: bomb or two oft in the distance. Later, of course,
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: things would get far worse.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: The house we lived in in Saigon was directly under
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: the trajectory of the rockets that they yet congo firing
• 3:47
  Speaker 4: at the palace, so we had a greative experience of
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: ducking under the dining room table.
• 3:54
  Speaker 3: Gray had been working in the Santa Monica office of
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: RAND when he was summoned to Vietnam. It was a
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: job no one really wanted. Who would leave southern California
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: for Saigon. The Pentagon wanted him to run a project
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: interviewing Vietcong prisoners and defectors. Jumped at the chance.
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: I had to organize my own team of Vietnamese we
• 4:13
  Speaker 4: were producing interview reports or interrogation reports for the US,
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: for Rand and for the Chief of the Intelligence of
• 4:23
  Speaker 4: the Vietnamese ARA Forces. They all got copies.
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: Later, Leongerrey got into trouble, or at least into an argument,
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: and Rand brought in a third person to fix things,
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen.
• 4:36
  Speaker 5: I was supposed to be in Doctor Nathan by Leon Golray.
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: He was supposed to tell me about Vietnam. But I
• 4:42
  Speaker 5: got very quickly the feeling that he was extremely partisan,
• 4:47
  Speaker 5: you know, for the for the South, which of course
• 4:49
  Speaker 5: was part of the show.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: That woman's voice, you hear, that's my Elliott again. She
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: interviewed Kellen in Santa Monica after he retired from RAND
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: for a history she wrote called Rand in Southeast Asia,
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: a History of the Vietnam War, A brilliant book.
• 5:04
  Speaker 5: By the way, he was sort of mister Vietnam at Rand,
• 5:08
  Speaker 5: you know, and missed the saus Vietnam, and I sort
• 5:12
  Speaker 5: of became his sort of successor in a way.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: The story that follows is about these three people, May
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: Elliott leungar Ray Conrad Kellen, and how their lives intersected
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: over a minor and forgotten episode in the Vietnam War
• 5:36
  Speaker 3: called the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Project. I say minor
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: because what happened in that French villa on one seven
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: six Rue Pastor didn't swing the war one way or another.
• 5:47
  Speaker 3: Nobody who was part of the study ever fired a
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: gun or dropped a bomb. But the story of the
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: Morale Project says a lot about something that has obsessed
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: us ever since intelligence failure. Why is it so hard
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: to tell what your enemy is thinking? That question came
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: up after nine to eleven during the Two Gulf Wars,
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: It came up again in Afghanistan in It comes up
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: today with ISIS. And every time we get it wrong,
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: every time our enemies take us by surprise, we always say,
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: if only we knew more about them, If only we
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: had more information about our adversaries, more spies in the ground,
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: more satellite images, more intercepted communications, more of everything. Do
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: you know how many federal government organizations there are just
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: devoted to counterterrorism? Twelve hundred and seventy one and another
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: nineteen hundred and thirty one private companies. Do you know
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: how many Americans hold top secret security clearances? Eight hundred
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: and fifty four thousand. Those numbers all come from an
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: extraordinary washed and post investigation from six years ago. And
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: here's the most incredible statistic of all. Just since nine
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: to eleven, just to Howe's top secret intelligence work, and
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: just in the Washington, DC area, seventeen million square feet
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: of new office space has been built to house intelligence operations.
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: Seventeen million. We want to know everything about our enemies.
• 7:18
  Speaker 3: But what the viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project tells
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: us is this, you can know everything there is to
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: know about your enemy, everything, and that still won't solve
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: your problem. Vietnam was a French colony from eighteen eighty
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: seven until nineteen fifty four. Then the French lost control
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: of the country. It was split in half. Communists took
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: over the north, an American backed regime came into power
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: in the south. Over the next decade, conditions inside South
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: Vietnam slowly deteriorated. The government was unpopular, they were protests
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: in the streets, a military coup, and the North Vietnamese
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: started setting guerrillas known as the Viet Coong over the
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: border to try and recruit South Vietnamese to their cause.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: That's why the Vietnam War at least the US and
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: there starts in the nearly nineteen sixties because the United
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: States feels compelled to help the South turn back the.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: Via con.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: Wars are usually about territory. A country X invades country
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: Y country why fights back? But this is a weird
• 8:24
  Speaker 3: kind of war. The US and the South Vietnamese have
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: no intention of invading the North. They decide instead that
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: they'll just bomb the North Vietnamese until they give up,
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: until they realize that exporting gorillas over the border isn't
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: worth it. The Vietnam War is a war of persuasion,
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: a crude kind of persuasion. The goal is to break
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: the other side's will.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: The new theory is that revolutionary development may look good
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: on paper, but.
• 8:51
  Speaker 6: Nothing pacifies quite like old fashioned military might.
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: And alive horse of more than eight thousand men.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Today Titans hold on a Batangan peninsula on South Vietnam
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: central coast.
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: But if your goal is to break someone's will, how
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: do you know if his strategy is working? In the
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: earth early nineteen sixties, when the US first starts sending
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: troops to fight the Viatkong, there was a problem. No
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: one knew anything about the Viat Coong. Almost known of
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: the Pentagon or the State Department even spoke Vietnamese. The
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: special advisor to the American General in South Vietnam at
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: the time was an Australian called Colonel Sarong. And you
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: know what he said. I'll quote him directly. These people
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: are simply what we call in many countries juvenile delinquents.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: That's the best he could offer in terms of intelligence
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: about the Viet Kong. So what do you do if
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: you're bombing someone you know nothing about and you want
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: to know how this unknown person feels. You call in
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: the Rand Corporation. So Rand rents Sevilla on Ruepasteur and
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: brings in Leon Garray to run the show. Gray was
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: Russian by birth. His family history was remarkable. His parents
• 10:04
  Speaker 3: were Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were the socialist moderates who split
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: off from Lenin during the Bloshebic Revolution.
• 10:10
  Speaker 6: They were in Russia during the revolution.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: This is Leon Garrey's son, Daniel. He's a national security
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: and policy expert with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
• 10:20
  Speaker 6: They participated in the revolution. In fact, my grandparents met
• 10:22
  Speaker 6: in prison. My grandmother used to smoke unfiltered cigarettes and
• 10:27
  Speaker 6: a little holder and cut them in half.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: They were living in Moscow.
• 10:30
  Speaker 6: Are at Moscow, Yeah, are at Moscow, and they were,
• 10:33
  Speaker 6: you know, fighting the system. He my grandfather ran an
• 10:37
  Speaker 6: I legal printing press and the whole thing.
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty two, just after Leon is born, the
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: Garrays are kicked out of the country.
• 10:45
  Speaker 6: They ended up next in Berlin, and in nineteen thirty
• 10:49
  Speaker 6: three they shut the doors, locked the building up and left,
• 10:54
  Speaker 6: just walked away and went to Paris. And then they
• 10:58
  Speaker 6: got out of Paris on the same train that Humphrey
• 11:02
  Speaker 6: Bogart did in Castle Blanca, heading south and meandered south,
• 11:07
  Speaker 6: went through Spain to Portugal and then got to the
• 11:10
  Speaker 6: US after that. So they stayed on one step ahead
• 11:14
  Speaker 6: of the tide of evil for about almost twenty years. Wow.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, which of the bolsheviksty He must have known some
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: of the in person.
• 11:23
  Speaker 6: Oh, he knew Albin person if they knew Trotsky, they
• 11:25
  Speaker 6: knew Lenin, they knew Stalin, they knew the whole, the
• 11:29
  Speaker 6: whole crowd. Man, Your left is royalty, Yeah right.
• 11:33
  Speaker 3: The Grays end up in New York City, ninety sixth
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: and Broadway, deep in the world of Eastern European emigreys.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Leon serves in the army, fights in the Battle of
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: the Bulge, and ends up in counterintelligence. How do you
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: think the refugee experience shaped your father?
• 11:49
  Speaker 6: Number of ways. I think the overriding one was we've
• 11:55
  Speaker 6: retreated this far and no farther. So it was it
• 11:59
  Speaker 6: was a view of sort of America, not just as
• 12:02
  Speaker 6: city on the hill, not just but you know, there's
• 12:05
  Speaker 6: nowhere left to retreat to. The country needs to be
• 12:09
  Speaker 6: truly defended. He got a home, he got a country,
• 12:13
  Speaker 6: he got acceptance. All that was terribly, terribly important.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: So this is who Ran puts in charge of the
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: Vietnam operation. Leon Garay a patriot in the way that
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: only an immigrant can be a patriot.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: He was suave, he was very charming. He had a
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: great sense of humor, very articulate, energetic, enthusiastic. So personally
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: I liked him. The only thing I didn't like about
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: him was the fact that he was a great ladies man,
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: and there were a lot of rumors about that. But
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: as a person I liked him.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: Gray spoke, German, Russian, French, all fluently, big thick head
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: of black hair, that amazing accent. He was the embodiment
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: of the European intellectual.
• 13:01
  Speaker 6: He had an amazing kind of research all of his life,
• 13:04
  Speaker 6: where there would be stacks of documents in Russian innings
• 13:08
  Speaker 6: on his desk and he literally re talking to you
• 13:10
  Speaker 6: and it would sort of be, well, you know, there
• 13:12
  Speaker 6: was this recent thing, and it's an idetic memory. But
• 13:15
  Speaker 6: he was certainly kind of librarian encyclopedic in that kind
• 13:17
  Speaker 6: of set.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: Gray meets Robert McNamara, President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: tells him what he thinks needs to be done. That
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: is to really answer the question of how the bombing
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: is affecting the Viet Cong.
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: That's the question I remembered very clearly.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: Again, this is from the interview Garray did with the
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: Rand Archives a decade ago at the end of his life.
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: And he said, what is your funding? I told him
• 13:39
  Speaker 4: he had one hundred thousand dollars. He said, what would
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: you do with a million? That was his question. I said,
• 13:46
  Speaker 4: that's a new moral of this stuff, and I have
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: more people doing the interviewing, says, you have it.
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: A million dollars in Saigon in the mid sixties was
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: a king's ransom. So Gray hires a team of locals
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: to fan out across the South Vietnamese countryside to interview
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: defectors from North Vietnam and captured via Cong guerrillas. That's
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: where my elliot comes. She was one of Garay's interviewers,
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: and her story is every bit as fascinating as Leon Garays.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: My father was appointed to Haifhog. He became mayor of Haiphong.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: She grew up in the north before the country was divided.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: Her father was part of the French colonial administration, and.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: As mayor he had a lot of authority. He was
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: almost like the king of that little town. And we
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: live in an enormous house with an enormous garden front
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: and back, with a staff of servants and even a
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: platoono guards, you know, who stood guard outside our gate.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: So that was really the best time of my life.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: Then the French get defeated in the north by the communists.
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: Vietnam is divided in two.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: It happened, so suddenly we just packed up and left
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: everything and we lost everything. So when it happened, we
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: were in a panic, didn't know what to do. My
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: father had, of course collaborated with the French. I didn't know,
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: you know, I didn't understand a thing, but my father
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: was a fait that the communists would come in and
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: kill him.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: My Elliott didn't come to the RAND project as a
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: blank slate. She came with a history. She had to
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: flee for her life from the communists in the north.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: Now she's been hired by RAND to figure out the communists,
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: the same people who chased her family away. The interviewers
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: would go out in teams of three or four. Sometimes
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: the groups would stay in Saigon and go to the
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: prison where captured Via Kong were held. Other times they
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: would head out into the countryside, hitching a ride on
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: military planes to the Mekong Delta. The interviews were taped,
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: did offer their subjects cigarettes. Sometimes they'd sit outside under
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: the trees. It was friendly, not confrontational. The interviewers made
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: it clear that they were only doing a research project.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: If the subject was uninteresting or reluctant, the sessions would
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: be short. Other times they might last for days. Then
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: it was back to the villa on Route Pasteur, where
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: the interviews would be transcribed, translated, and edited. That's my
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: Elliott in the Central Mekong Delta into being a former
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: company commander for the two hundred and sixty first Battalion
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: of the North Vietnamese Army.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: There was a lot of questions about bombing, What weapons
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: do you feel the most, what had the most effect
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: on your unit and your operations? And with the North
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: Vietnamese who infiltrated into the South, tell us about conditions
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: you march from the North to the South with the
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: bombings you know along the way. Things like that.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: The Morale Project would eventually put sixty two thousand pages
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: of transcripts interviews with captured via Kong and others sixty
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: two thousand pages. This isn't some focus group conducted by
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: a PR firm where a few dozen people are interviewed
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: for an hour. This is one of the most extraordinary
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: encyclopedic detailed portraits of an enemy ever created. Remember, no
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: one in Washington really knew anything about Vietnam in the
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: early nineteen sixties. Now there was a million dollar operation
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: on the Rue pasteur painting a living, breathing portrait of.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: The other side.
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: The stuff was gold. Gray takes the results and makes
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: the rounds. His favorite statistic was this. When Rand started
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: as study, sixty five percent of defectors and prisoners believed
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: the Via Kong could win. After a year of heavy
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: US bombing, that number was down to twenty percent. The
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: enemy was on the ropes. He's the Air Force Army
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: US Embassy, then off to Honolulu, to the headquarters of
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: the Army of the Pacific RAND in Santa Monica, Washington,
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: d C. To the Pentagon, and to the White House.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: Helicopters would pick him up in Saigon and whisk him
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: to aircraft carriers at the Villa and Rupasteur. He holds
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: cocktail parties for everyone who is anyone in South Vietnam,
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: Henry Kissinger, Walter Mondale, the US Senator later to become
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: Jimmy Carter's Vice president. Gray meets with visiting journalists, CIA officers.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: His stuff goes right to the top.
• 18:42
  Speaker 4: Well, we've had an interesting report from a man named
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: Goray who works for the Rand Corporation, and wemired.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: That's Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary. From tapes made of
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: White House conversations in nineteen sixty five and sixty six,
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: President Lyndon Johnson decides to pull the United States deeper
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: and deeper into Vietnam, and the story was that LBJ
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: used to walk around with a summary of Grey's fine
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: in his back pocket. Wars require public justification. If you're
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: going to put thousands of lives at risk, you need
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: to explain to your citizens just what you're doing. And
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: that's what Leon Garret offered in the crucial early years
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: of the Vietnam War. He offered justification. Enter Conrad Kellen,
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: the third person in our story.
• 19:38
  Speaker 5: When did I come to rand Oh? Well, I lived
• 19:41
  Speaker 5: in New York at sixty four. I think it was.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: Kellen was a battered veteran of World War Two and
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: a little bit of a legend. I once spent two
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: weeks in Los Angeles just going from one person's house
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: to the next, asking for their memories of Kellen. Everybody
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: remembers Conrad Keillen. If you took the absolute best of
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: nineteenth century Central Europe and put it in a time
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: machine that opened its doors in nineteen sixties southern California,
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: that would be Kellen.
• 20:11
  Speaker 5: I read the paper said some people in Washington, some
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: smart boys, had showered the North with millions of leaflets
• 20:21
  Speaker 5: in which they had told the Vietnamese they should lay
• 20:24
  Speaker 5: down their arms because we were good people and their
• 20:30
  Speaker 5: leaders were bad people. You know the ordinary nonsense, and
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: they should stop fighting the war.
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: Kellen served in US Army intelligence in the Second World War,
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: specializing in psychological warfare. So later when he reads how
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: the US was using leaflets in Vietnam, he gets angry,
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: We're doing it all wrong.
• 20:49
  Speaker 5: And so I wrote a letter to the New York
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: Times and said it was obvious nonsense to shower large
• 20:57
  Speaker 5: numbers of soldiers with a leaflet saying stop that war.
• 21:00
  Speaker 5: Soldiers don't stop wars, so this would begin wars. And
• 21:03
  Speaker 5: soldiers don't stop wars. So if you want to stop
• 21:07
  Speaker 5: a war, you have to do it differently. So I
• 21:09
  Speaker 5: got a call from them here, from the RAM people,
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: and they wanted me to come and be part of
• 21:16
  Speaker 5: the system, and that I said, okay, So came to
• 21:19
  Speaker 5: Los Angeles.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: Kellen grew up in Berlin, wealthy cultured. His father owned
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: a big brewery. His full name was Katzen ellen Bogan,
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: and the Cats and ellen Boguns were one of the
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: great Jewish families of Europe. But when Hitler came to power,
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: Kellen packed his bags. He said later that he knew
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: on some instinctive level that things would not end well
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: for the Jews.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: In Germany.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: He goes to Paris becomes friends with the French writer
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: Jean Cocteau. His life is full of moments like this.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: He gets on a boat to America and meets the
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: mobster Dutch Schultz, who offers him a job. He arrives
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: in New York and works for the legendary investor Benjamin Graham,
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: who was the mentor of Warren Buffett. He goes to
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: California and is the private secretary of the Nobel Prize
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: winning novelist Thomas Mann. Kellen was impossibly handsome, dashing over
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: six feet tall. He was an expert in golf, handwriting analysis,
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: and ferraris. Both his sisters earned PhDs from Berkeley, one
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: in chemistry, the other in biology. His brother escapes from
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: Nazi Germany lands in New York, and if you go
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: online and look up the assets of his personal foundation,
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: it's six hundred and sixty five million dollars. His stepmother
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: was painted by Renoirs, a family friend. He was cousins
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: with Einstein. I mean, after a bit, it gets ridiculous.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: The craziest story about Kellen is when he was in
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: Paris in nineteen forty five. The war has just ended,
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: and he's sitting in the Cafe Select near the chan
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: Zilise when a young woman approaches him. She says, are
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: you an American gi He says yes. She says you
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: going back to the States. He says yes. She says,
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: you have to do me a favor. My father's an artist.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: I have to get his work safely to America, because,
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: of course Europe was in chaos. And Kellen says, by
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: all means. But then she goes away and comes back
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: with this massive stack of canvasses and he says, there's
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: no way I can take that, and she says, you
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: have to. Whereupon Callen embarks on this epic month long
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: struggle to get these paintings safely across the ocean, which
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: includes being trapped in the back of an open truck
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: during a rain storm and throwing his coat over the
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: pile of paintings to keep them from being ruined, and
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: staying up all night, night after night because he's terrified
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: someone will steal them. Who's the painter, Mark Chagal, I
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: should say Mark Chagal, of course, because only Conrad Kellen
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: would end up transporting the collected works of one of
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: the most famous artists of the twentieth century to America
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: in a rainstorm on the back of a truck. The
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: deal Chagall's daughter made with him was that he could
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: take one picture and keep it for himself. So he
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: takes one, a famous one. Then he tells it in
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties for what seemed like a lot of
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: money at the time, But of course it's a Chagall,
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: a famous Chagall. And every now and again over the
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: years he'd spot his old painting in an auction catalog
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: worth more and more and more, and it'd bury his
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: head in his hands and say oh. By late nineteen
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: sixty six, when Conrad Kellen gets to Rand, the place
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: is in turmoil. The Vietnam War has split its ranks
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: down the middle. This is the think tank that the
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: Pentagon has been relying on to make sense of the war.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: But there's a group inside RAND that believes the war
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: is a terrible mistake. I don't know if you remember
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: the story of the Pentagon Papers. This was the secret
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: forty seven volume study of US political and military involvement
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: in the Vietnam War. It was commissioned by the Pentagon.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: The Pentagon Papers showed that the White House had been
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: misleading Congress and the American people for years about how
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: well the war was going. A copy of the Pentagon
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: Papers was famously leaked to the New York Times in
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: nineteen seventy one by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg's leak was really
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: the beginning of the end of public support for the war.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: And who was Elsburg? An employee of Rand? And where
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: did he get his copy of the Pentagon Papers? He
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: took it from the safe at Rand and guests who
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: was one of Ellsburg's best friends and confidants at Rand,
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen, of course, as always in the thick of things.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: But the moment we're talking about is well before the
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: Pentagon Paper's controversy. It's at the beginning of the divisions
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: within Rand nineteen sixty five sixty six. Rand is a
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: place that prides itself on objectivity and rigor. Everything is
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: checked and double checked and fact checked and reviewed in
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: house before it's released. But the Rand brass is beginning
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: to worry that when Leon Garray gets whisked by helicopter
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: to aircraft carriers or huddles with generals at his cocktail
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: parties at the Villa and Rupestur he's bypassing all that.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: They worry that he's gone rogue, so they bring in
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: Conrad Kellen to be a second set of eyes. Kellen
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: comes in and reads a thousand of the Via Kong interviews.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: Remember many of these interviews ran to fifteen or twenty
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: single space type pages. It's a huge amount of work.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: And Kellen decides Gray has it all wrong. The Via
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: Kong are not crumbling. On the contrary, here's Kellen again
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: from his interview with my Elliott.
• 26:44
  Speaker 5: I could see from the interviews that we were not
• 26:49
  Speaker 5: going to win this role. That was Michael Koos. I
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: was one of the very few people that ran who
• 26:55
  Speaker 5: had that idea, and most of from Bergang Ho they
• 26:59
  Speaker 5: were going and they couldn't understand. To this day, they
• 27:02
  Speaker 5: don't understand how a nation was two million million soldiers
• 27:09
  Speaker 5: out of ships airplanes cannot win over Vietnam.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: So here we have two men, two sophisticated European intellectuals
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: with access to the richest trove of intelligence in the
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: entire war. Grey goes first and says we're winning. Kellen
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: comes along, looks at exactly the same evidence and says
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: we're never going to win. Then there's my Elliot. If
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: Gray is at the villa on Rue Pasteur and Kellen
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: is back in Santa Monica, Elliott is actually in the field,
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: in the jungles and villages, talking to actual defectors and
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: via cong guerrillas. And what does she think will happen?
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: She doesn't know. She's confused.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: I walked into this sale and I didn't know what
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: to expect. And then in walked this man, middle aged,
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: very briskly and he looked, you know, like a man,
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: and he stopped dead in his tracks.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: Elliott is talking about an early interview she did that
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: had a huge impact on her that she never forgot.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: You have to remember what I looked like at the time.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: I was young. I was dressed in western clothes and
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: I didn't look like the military interrogators he had seen.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: So he was surprised to see me, and he was
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: kind of guarded, suspicious. He didn't know what to expect,
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: and I was afraid. I didn't know what was going
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: to happen because I had grown up believing that the
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Communists were blood thirsty.
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: They started to talk, and gradually he relaxed and she relaxed.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: You know, I had never met a Communist before face
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: to face. So I just my curiosity just took over,
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: and I just asked him a lot of questions about
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: him and his family and his background and his beliefs.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: And he had devoted his whole life to fighting the
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: French and now he was fighting the Americans, and he
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: seemed to have a lot of integrity.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: And what effect did listening to him have on you?
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Well, it really confused me because I had believed that
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: the Communists were sort of like tugs. We call them
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: cho mutu, meaning tugs, and.
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: It's a literal translation of.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: That cho mingu the head of a buffalo and the
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: body of a horse. So somebody who's not quite human
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: a thug.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: What the captured Via Kong officer said was straightforward, The
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: intelligence was straightforward. But my Elliot's reaction was anything but straightforward.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: And so I left with more questions and answers, and
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: I began to see that the picture was not black
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: and white like I had believed at the beginning.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: But then Elliott says something crucial. She says, it didn't
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: change her mind. She saw the evidence with her own eyes.
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: She did the interview with the general, but it wasn't enough,
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: remember her circumstances. She comes from a family of privilege,
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: and the rise of the Communists in the north takes
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: all that away. They end up living in a little
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: hot and Saigon. The Vietcong is not some abstract force.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: They were a personal threat to her family.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: I think for people whose the blacks were against the
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: wall and who thought that the survival depended on the
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Communists not winning, then seeing the evidence doesn't mean that
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: you change your mind.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: Seeing the evidence doesn't mean that you change your mind.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: Seeing the evidence just increases your fear. Because you fear
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: that you know that the Communists would win and it
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: would be the end of you and your family, and
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: you don't want to face it. You know, you don't
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: want to think about it.
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: Leon Garay might well have read the transcript of that
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: same interview that my Elliott did with the Via Kong officer,
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: and his interpretation would be that guy's going to give up.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: If we just bomb people like him some more, we'll
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: destroy their will in retrospect, completely wrong. But think about
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: this from Gray's perspective.
• 31:47
  Speaker 4: Well, look, if you want to understand that I am
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: a professional refugee, I win a refugee from Russia to Germany,
• 31:56
  Speaker 4: from Germany to France, and from France to the United States.
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: So three times. So as far as I was concerned,
• 32:04
  Speaker 4: this was going to be my country, and what the
• 32:07
  Speaker 4: way it was to defend interest of the United States,
• 32:10
  Speaker 4: it was sufficient reason to pursue this thing.
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: By this thing, he means fighting communism, the enemy that
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: forced Gray out of his home in Russia, and in
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties, this thing, Communism is still out there.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: It spread to Vietnam. Think how much Gray had to
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: believe that America was winning the war. Leon Garray felt
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: there was nowhere left to retreat to.
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: You don't pick and choose your wars. Your countries are
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: wars at war period. You don't pick and choose whether
• 32:45
  Speaker 4: you approval of it or not. That's nonsense, that's chaos.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: There's a moment in my Elliott's interview with Conrad Kellen
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: where he talks about Gray about what it means to
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: be a refugee.
• 33:03
  Speaker 5: I think, like many, it eventually became great opportunists. What
• 33:09
  Speaker 5: else could they do. I mean, if you were an opportunitists,
• 33:13
  Speaker 5: at least you had the American establishment on your side.
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: You know, the refugee is an opportunist because he is
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: at the mercy of whatever country will take him. And
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: I can't help but think that Kellen is also talking
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: about himself here. He's acknowledging the biases that he brought
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: to the interviews because he's a refugee too. He escaped
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: from the Nazis. He witnessed the destruction of everything he
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: once knew, his home, his community, his family, his privilege.
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: How can that not scar you? At one point, Kellen
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: explains to Elliott why he never actually traveled to Vietnam,
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: even though he was working on a project about Vietnam.
• 34:02
  Speaker 5: I was not going to Vietnam because one war was
• 34:05
  Speaker 5: enough for me. I don't what I have to was.
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: Was enough for me? I imagine Kellen read that same interview
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: Elliott did, the one with the Vietcong officer. Kellen sees
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: the man's determination, and when he thinks about that resolve
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: through the prism of his own experience, he realizes, I
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: can't match that, not anymore. One war was enough for me.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: Over and again in his interview with my Elliott, Kellen
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: comes back to this war wasn't some conceptual abstraction for him.
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: It wasn't an intellectual question like it was for so many.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: At Rand it was real, he lived through it.
• 34:47
  Speaker 5: There were an awful lot of civilians around in this
• 34:51
  Speaker 5: whole thing, in this whole Vietnam thing, who talked about casualties, characters.
• 34:59
  Speaker 5: They didn't give a damn about anything. If somebody came
• 35:03
  Speaker 5: back and said, you know, we took and took such
• 35:05
  Speaker 5: and such a place which I don't know sixty well,
• 35:11
  Speaker 5: a casualty is not a dead person. A casualty is
• 35:14
  Speaker 5: something theoretical for these people.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: One interview with the Vietcong officer, one fantastic bit of intelligence,
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: an insight into the enemy's mind, and yet everyone was
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: in disagreement on what it meant because everyone was looking
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: at it through a different set of eyes. That's why
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: intelligence failures happened. It's not because someone screws up or
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: is stupid or lazy. It's because the people who make
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: sense of intelligence are human beings with their own histories
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: and biases. So what happens to the three people in
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: our story? Gray gets recalled from Vietnam in April of
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: nineteen sixty seven.
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: Clearly Rand asked me to stop going there.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: To stop going to Vietnam, to return to Santa Monica.
• 36:01
  Speaker 4: I went back, and then I was told that my
• 36:03
  Speaker 4: presence was an embarrassment. I don't know why you suggest.
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: You was very clear that there should love for something else.
• 36:11
  Speaker 6: How'd you feel about that?
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: Were you disappointed?
• 36:13
  Speaker 4: Of course?
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: I like grand he was hung out to dry. His son,
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: Daniel is a lot more blunt.
• 36:20
  Speaker 6: My sense of it was they wanted, you know, to
• 36:24
  Speaker 6: cut loose from anything having to do with Vietnam, and
• 36:29
  Speaker 6: the way to cut loose from this project and from
• 36:33
  Speaker 6: him was to try and discredit the analysis and sort
• 36:36
  Speaker 6: of then you know, Okay, you're now no longer a
• 36:39
  Speaker 6: legitimate analyst, Well you really do need to go, yeah,
• 36:42
  Speaker 6: kind of thing.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: And how can you describe your father in those years?
• 36:46
  Speaker 6: So I think he was feeling quite beaten down. Frankly,
• 36:50
  Speaker 6: I suspect there was a degree of just physical exhaustion.
• 36:53
  Speaker 6: It may have been not that different than you know,
• 36:56
  Speaker 6: when he and his family kept getting driven out of
• 37:00
  Speaker 6: you know, cities in Europe and had to restart the
• 37:03
  Speaker 6: whole process and restart the fight. I think there was
• 37:05
  Speaker 6: a certain degree of that.
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: Gray eventually moves to Florida take opposed to the University
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: of Miami, fights the Cold War from Coral Gables. As
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: for my Elliott, she eventually moves to America, lives in Ithaca,
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: and it's only then, from the safety of upstate New York,
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: that she finally accepts what the Vie Kong officer was
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: telling her.
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: I wish it would had been easier for me to
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: come to that conclusion earlier, because it was just the
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: use of agonizing and being ambiguous.
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: She finally admits it to herself. The North Vietnamese were
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: determined the war was wrong and unwinnable.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: I think that it's easier to be objective when you
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: will not you don't have a personal stake in a situation,
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: and you can see the evidence and say, oh, yeah,
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: the war's not working less ended. But when you have
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: a very deep, strong personal stake, it's a lot harder,
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: because you're talking about survival of your family realities.
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: Mi Elliott finally faced the difficult truth. As for Kellen,
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: Kellen sounds the alarm almost in the beginning of his
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: time at RAND. He says, the intelligence tells us the
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: war cannot be won. But of course, if you know
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: even the slightest bit about the Vietnam War, you know
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: that no one listened to him, at least until it
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: was too late. He suffered, like all of them did.
• 38:38
  Speaker 5: I can only say that the people that I knew
• 38:40
  Speaker 5: talked a lot about scientific scientific Listen that we're the
• 38:45
  Speaker 5: most unscientific people you can imagine. They just picked somebody,
• 38:50
  Speaker 5: and then if they agreed with him, or he agreed
• 38:52
  Speaker 5: with them, then he was an expert, and if he
• 38:54
  Speaker 5: didn't agree with him, he was not an expert. And
• 38:56
  Speaker 5: then they wrote it.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: Out the most unscientific people you can imagine. I'm not
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: sure it's any different today, is it.
• 39:04
  Speaker 5: And everybody reports for everybody else, and it was almost
• 39:11
  Speaker 5: like a comedy. You know, he was so stupid. I
• 39:14
  Speaker 5: got very angry about that.
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: Kellen died in two thousand and seven, and not long
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: ago I went to see his wife in that same
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: house up in the hills. His daughters were there as well.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: They talked about how the Second War War never left him.
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: He had terrible memories, and at the very end of
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: his life, all those memories came back with a vengeance.
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: Kellen would lie in his bed in sunny, beautiful Santa Monica,
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: and he would dream that the Nazis were coming up
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: the hill.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: To take him away.
• 40:19
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• 40:23
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• 40:26
  Speaker 1: It helps.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: You can get more information about this and other episodes
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: at revisionististory dot com or on your favorite podcast app.
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: Our show is produced by mea LaBelle, Roxanne Scott and
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: by Luis Kira and Taka Yasuzawa. Flon Williams is our
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: engineer and our fact checker is Michelle Sarraka. Penalty management
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: team Laura Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: gladwell
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: S.