Saigon, 1965 | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ❤

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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. 😢😢😢

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

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.

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

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.

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