Saigon, 1965 | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

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.
Saigon, 1965 is the story of three people who got caught up in that effort: a young Vietnamese woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a brilliant Russian émigré. All saw the same things. All reached different conclusions. The Pentagon effort, run by the Rand Corporation, was one of the most ambitious studies of enemy combatants ever conducted-and no one could agree on what it meant.
Season 1 (2016)
#podcast #revisionisthistory #malcolmgladwell
ABOUT REVISIONIST HISTORY
Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every podcast episode re-examines something from the past - an event, a person, an idea, even a song - and asks whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.
ABOUT MALCOLM GLADWELL
Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996. He is a trustee of the Surgo Foundation and currently serves on the board of the RAND Corporation.
ABOUT PUSHKIN INDUSTRIES
Pushkin Industries is an audio production company dedicated to creating premium content in a collaborative environment. Co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg in 2018, Pushkin has launched seven new shows into the top 10 on Apple Podcasts (Against the Rules, The Happiness Lab, Solvable, Cautionary Tales, Deep Cover, The Last Archive, and Lost Hills), in addition to producing the hugely successful Revisionist History. Pushkin’s growing audiobook catalogue includes includes the bestselling biography “Fauci,” by Michael Specter, “Hasta La Vista, America,” Kurt Andersen’s parody Trump farewell speech performed by Alec Baldwin, "Takeover" by Noah Feldman, and “Talking to Strangers,” from Pushkin co-founder Malcolm Gladwell. Pushkin is dedicated to producing audio in any format that challenges listeners and inspires curiosity and joy.
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[@patrickjeffs5094]

Malcolm (and team). I still can’t figure how more people are here. You all are some of the best story tellers. Real emotion and thought. Please keep going.

[@maxheadrom3088]

There was another guy working at RAND and dealing with Vietnam. He was a Game Theorist who wrote an important piece called "The Strategic Advantage of Perceived Madness". His name is Daniel Elsberg.

[@roc7880]

I know and love Vietnamese Americans. The erhnic immigrant group who made the biggest social leap forward in the history of mankind. Not because of IQ but hard work, discipline, resilience, and communitarian spirit.

[@jeffhidalgo8457]

Well said!

[@superpuppy7854]

I rember an interview with McNamara where he revealed that it was only a few weeks before the fall of Saigon that he finally realised that the South Vietnamese saw the US as a hostile invading force. This man had so much experience of conflict and yet remained so blinkered until after his career. I remember him sobbing in the same interview and revealing that he now realised he was a war criminal.

[@markolsen9183]

The fog of war documentary, worth watching.

[@mattheww9116]

Werner Herzog. The Fog of War. Profound.

[@johnschneidhorst3406]

Just bad leadership.. Westmoreland was the wrong person for the job..

[@willmpet]

McNamara tried to reconstitute himself by saying he always thought the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and blamed Johnson!

[@electrolytics]

If McNamara actually said this it's irrelevant anyways. The vast majority of the South didn't see the US as a hostile invading force. Just because McNamara may have said this doesn't mean it's true.

[@WillN2Go1]

What if at the beginning of the RAND project someone asked, "What if we learn that we cannot win? What would you do if that was our conclusion? Would you take it to the Defense Secretary, the President?" A question like this would never come up. In 2003 I remember watching the Evening News. The UN Weapons Inspectors were going all over Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. In early days they'd go to a military base and be held up at the gate, trucks would race out the back gate. But now they'd pull up to any location, the guard would throw open the gate and salute. They said, 'We can't find anything.' So the News report this night was that MI-6 British Intelligence gave them some locations to check. Nothing. So me in my kitchen preparing dinner for my family thought, 'Well they're probably holding back on the 'good locations' until the invasion so they can....' Wait a minute, the current debate was they got rid of the weapons, they don't want another war with the West. And it hit me: Maybe there are no more WMDs. So they want them found. See, these guys are armed ready to attack... So next I thought, 'Well now we'll (U.S.) will give them some places to look and if they don't find anything, maybe there are no more WMD....' but of course the Brits wouldn't have shared these locations without first coordinating with the Americans. Dinner wasn't even ready and I had three thoughts: 1. There are no more WMDs and 2. I'm a smart guy but I'm no intelligence analyst, and 3. But if I'm right, this whole war is a total lie and why aren't other people saying these things?? And then there were the Judith Miller articles in the New York Times. I didn't even turn the page before I thought, This stinks, this isn't right. How'd the New York Times run this? Coincidentally I had had a bad experience with a customer who had the same name, so my next thought was, 'Wow, I'm still so pissed off....' I read it again. Nope. Junk. So before the war started I expected this to be 'Another Vietnam' (I had a lot of respect for the first President Bush for saying, "No more Vietnams," and here it was his kid was about stick us in another one.) Okay, so how does this end? It'll be a mess, we'll a lot of what we did in Vietnam, spend a lot of money, get a lot of people killed, trash Iraq -- and then the Iranians will come in as the regional power and broker a peace raising their status while ours is again besmirched. The Iranians missed the opportunity. And Putin invades Ukraine? He wanted to have that Desert Storm Iraq Invasion blitzkrieg thrill. Had we not invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan he might not have done it. (And Afghanistan? Well they helped Osama bin Laden so we were right to attack them. We're really good at that. But then why did we think we could occupy them and change how they think and do things? Doesn't anyone think at the highest levels? How did Condelezza Rice study at Stanford and then go along with it??) So this story? It's another wonderful Malcolm Gladwell story, but these people who are related to so many amazing people, etc, etc... In it's way this is like an upstairs downstairs situation. This story is about when the people upstairs figured out what everyone below stairs had known all along.

[@behnamashjari3003]

I don't know about the rest of your team, but I know Malcolm's work and am a fan. He is one of a kind and one of the best journalist/writers today. Your team's podcast is great. ❤

[@almishti]

What is thst music st the very end? That's beautiful and nicely conceived.

[@alexlimion2624]

I appreciate all your works Malcolm as did my late father who introduced me to your writing.

[@bettydean4149]

I have listened to this about at least ten times if not more and every single time I find one more new thing that I've missed the previous times. It's amazing. This, is for sure my favorite revisionist history.❤ Great work by the whole team.

[@maxheadrom3088]

PBS has an excellent 12 hour long documentary about the Vietnam Conflict from the 1980s. It does not touch on this subject but it has the merit of having interviewed people from the State Dept. and OSS who were in French Indochina right after WWII. All of them, btw, had extreme respect and liked Ho Chi Min.

[@rynes.rai7er993]

Policy maker: "tell me what you think." Analyst: "I think a, b, and d, but not c." Policy maker: "you're fired!"

[@maxheadrom3088]

9:00 It took until 1986 for McNamara to learn that Vietnam had fought the Chinese for independence during 1,200 years! They had won, btw.

[@charleslewis6815]

Love the way you put together a story and love the great music also! So innovative!

[@dosesandmimoses]

Bravo.

[@flyfree78644]

Thoroughly enjoy your story telling. One of the best listens on the net.

[@Redmenace96]

Mr. Gladwell makes an excellent point, and you don't need the Viet Nam war to bring it up. Bias was part of being human, is part of being human, and always will be human. If someone says, "Shut up. Let me tell you how it really is." you should be suspicious.

[@BusinessofGood]

Someone needs to write a Konrad Kellen biography. Surely there’s a history phd student that needs a topic

[@pennpfautz2024]

I think the more interesting evaluative disconnect was the one w/r/t the famous Ia Drang battle in "We Were Soldiers Once." MacNamara et al concluded we could kill 10 enemy for every one American casualty so we'd win. Unbeknownst to US until decades later, the after action evaluation in Hanoi concluded they could kill one American for every 10 Vietnamese lost - and that would allow the communists to win. I'm disappointed to see some of the vituperative comments. I don't believe the US was wrong to try to help the Vietnamese -and there were many- who did not want a communist regime but once it became clear that the South could not come up with a government that could effectively organize an alternative, even with massive US aid, it was time to go. We did not learn that lesson and that was part of the problem with our involvement in Afghanistan.

[@canadiangemstones7636]

Luckily, after the Vietnam debacle, the US gov’t realized that Rand was rubbish, and ceased funding! Except no, of course they didn’t, a few hundred million a year is still pissed away on Rand. 😢😢😢

[@L33PL4Y]

The conclusion of this one seems incredibly obvious right from the start. People interpret things differently based on bias? Nooooo...who'da thunk it?

[@sirfrank6209]

L oive u som uch. I am a fan of yours.

[@tomballardnd]

You can call them intellectuals and academics but at core they were co-combatants in an illegal and immoral war. Until vets, RAND, employees, etc. are called out for their crime against the people of Vietnam, we'll continue to have misguided and ill-informed young people repeating these crimes. American soldiers were not war heroes, as often portrayed, but young people who believed the lies and killed on command. When they're willing to ask forgiveness, we can stop this type of insanity.

[@willmpet]

When I think of my classmates who died there (one of whom would have been a major league pitcher) I become angry.

[@willmcgrane6359]

Leon Gray? Goray? Grey? Gouray? Clarification, please. Thanks.

[@tjipjoustra4359]

Léon Gouré

[@willmcgrane6359]

@@tjipjoustra4359 Appreciated. Thank you.

[@amerigo88]

What about the enormous bias of the captured Viet Cong prisoners? If i refuse to cooperate, they're is no interview to read. If i tell you what i know you want to hear, i get more food and cigarettes. Word gets around as most groups in the Republic of Vietnam had some level of penetration by the VC. If I'm in VC leadership, I'm requiring my guys to tell the interviewers that the Communists can never win in case they are capturedand interrogated. ("only 20 percent think they can win") The Vietnam War Veterans i served under in the early 1990s said that if the Iraqis under Saddam were as hard as the VC had been, we would be there for decades. Those prisoners who were blabbing to RAND were either soft or trained. The guys who really knew the score would not have talked if waterboarded for years. That was the problem with expecting some academics to figure out the enemy's motivation.

[@rosesprog1722]

Vietnam was split in two in 1954, during the negotiations in Geneva after the French lost at Dien Bien Phu. Included in the peace plan a country wide election is planned two years later, in 1956. The CIA guys, present at the negotiations soon realized Hô Chi Minh would win easily, so they convinced Diem to cancel the election and told him lovely lullabies, claimed uncle Hô was a vicious commie, moved Kennedy out of the way, the thing escalated and the US had its war. The Vietnamese people were one, they wanted the invader out, French or Yank or Chinese or Japanese, they didn't care and no matter the cost, they would be free. South Vietnam was an American fiction that didn't exist before the Yank came in uninvited, and vanished as soon as he got kicked out.

[@MichelleBeahm]

She changed her name to hide her secret..

[@tigran56]

The Vietnam War predates 65. By two decades if not two centuries depending on who you talk to. Go revisionism! Yes, it is when America got involved (overtly) but the US is not the beginning of history, a mistake often made, by Americans. A pity, you are a smart man. You do fix it later, bravo, why say it at all?

[@WilliamBrown-yl8tt]

Russian sympathizer

[@TheChapen]

Anyone who refuses to be fed ready-made narratives is today called a Russian sympathizer. 🤔

[@MichelleBeahm]

“Home to an extraordinary collection of thinkers” you mean demons.. actual demons but ok .. go on with your story

[@robertpembroke8902]

Projection of Negative and Positive Space in the ABCD vis a vis .a baby city' Joke Did you know that if you get a drill bit door hole attachment for a drill and make holes in a fence paling that you have created a negative to positive space representation in modelling of a Diorama. n.b., watch out you don't Lilliputianlose your fingers if you ever do it with the hole driller, they're wild;) The 'w' upside down 'M' shape becomes the ocean waves and the positive space in the round wooden holes can become tables and a round performance stage per the little people as Conan Doyle once called them. I'm using it to make little bits of furniture decoration for my Paddle Steamer model. I'll put up an image later once it all dries. It will be ocean waves as a boat stand and the round holes will be a round stage and tables for the top deck. I might even make an ensemble of instruments for the stage:) The mantrap guard on the back of the paddle wheel was made by cutting a bottle lid from thickened cream in half. It's the blue semi-circle guard at the back on the paddle wheel. It prevents the Hans Joke:) Here's image. I still got a lot to do with the model- drive.google.com/file/d/1uN06r9VjL5yiNDzY8szbiSXyZBePlziz/view?usp=sharing