Okay. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Virtual Playhouse from the Bedford Playhouse. My name is Dan. I'm the Director of Development and Programming. I'm coming to you actually from the Playhouse tonight. We have a really great program, the latest installment of our author series with a great conversation on a book, Horse Crazy by Sarah Maslin Neer. Before I introduce our moderator and guest for tonight, just a couple of quick things for those of you who may be still not quite used to zoom in the age of COVID. There is a Q&A button, which you can find at the bottom of your screen if you are on a PC or laptop. I believe it's at the top of your screen if you are on a iPad or your phone. Please feel free at any point during the conversation to post a question in the Q&A forum. There will be some time at the end when Sarah will take your questions and feel free to make comments, post thoughts, anything you'd like to engage with. Please use that feature. Refrain if you don't mind from using the chat feature that tends to get things a little confusing. So the Q&A will be where we'll be focusing to take your questions. I want to just mention very briefly that the Bedford Playhouse is currently open in restricted capacity and observing all of the proper protocols for safety and cleanliness. If you are so inclined, please visit our website. We have some great programs, both virtual and live coming up over the next several months. We're still in something of a delicate period with regards to our operations. So if you enjoy tonight's program and you'd like to see us continue to do more things like it. Please consider before you shut down your devices, making a contribution to the Playhouse, which you can do via our website, which is bedfordplayhouse.org. And any amount is appreciated. We're offering memberships. We're doing some culinary events, a whole slew of different things, trying to sort of diversify for our audience a little bit. So that being said, I want to introduce tonight's moderator. I'm going to forgive me for reading this because it's very impressive and I want to make sure that I give it its due for her accomplishments. Diane Lloyd Roth, her first word was horse, and she started riding at the age of six. She graduated from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with a double major in economics and political science. The best opportunity for her first employment out of college was retail. She learned the retail business in a boutique in New York, Pennsylvania, and then was hired away to open a boutique in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she fine tuned her skills. She was hired by Jager of London to open stores for them, which culminated in the opening of their flagship store on 57th Street in New York City. In 1985, she opened her own high-end boutique, La Moire in New Canaan, Connecticut. She introduced Donna Karen, Richard Tyler, Giorgio Armani, and many other quality retail designers to Fairfield County. In 1990, she expanded into the estate jewelry business. She continues to consult with personal clients in state jewelry, personnel styling after closing her retail store last year. She's dressed clients for the Oscars, the Tonys, the Emmys, the White House, and Buckingham Palace. She's also been quoted in the New York Times, New York Post, various other magazines, newspapers, and online on dressing for special occasions, as well as how to invest in a state jewelry. Please welcome to the program, Diane Lloyd Roth. Hi, Diane. Hi, Dan. How are you? Great. The floor is yours. I want to thank you and the Bedford Playhouse for asking me to do this. My lifelong love of horses made the book a great read and it's such a great opportunity to have a conversation with Sarah and to talk about this extraordinary book that is not just about horses. I think that's the people, if you're allergic to horses, afraid of horses, never been on a horse. This is a great book to read. It's such an amazing compilation of her life and growing up, and every, I said she should have named it after her father's favorite opera, but she turned victorious instead of horse crazy because she certainly has on many levels in this. So, you know, I'd like to introduce Sarah so we can have a conversation with an extraordinary woman. I was waiting in the wings of the opera. I feel very glamorous. It's me. Thank you so much for the lovely introduction. Well, you so deserve it. The book is a fantastic read. And I think the thing I want everyone listening to understand is not just about horses. It's about an extraordinary life. And you say in the book how you failed and then you succeeded that every failure of yours led to success. And I think that's an important lesson for all of us.  And you've certainly overcome, you know, some incredible physical with horse mishaps and bad ones, which all of us who ride have certain sympathy for, as well as, you know, being attacked in New York and covering, having old tea parents who were extraordinarily famous and growing up in that shadow, but making a way for yourself. I mean, the book is impressive. And it's a very good read. So I want I who read constantly it's a great reads everyone run out and buy it to all my friends to buy it. I should make a run for it. I want to tell everyone I'm wearing first of all my horse crazy neck gator, a couple different brands partnered with the book but I'm outside on the street believe it or not in Los Angeles, where I'm about to head and this is for the real diehard horse and the people in the crowd to Monty Roberts his own ranch the man who listens to horses, the 85 original 85 year old original horse whisperer, we're actually going to be collaborating on a super secret special project. So I've just landed. And I'm out here in LA, squeezing this important talk in before I had to meet the legend. I'm really so jealous.  But the book is I like the way you set it out with horses your chapters are named for horses. And I think for women, you know women have an unusual and close relationship with horses. You know, are close to our fathers and I often wonder and maybe you can talk on this if sometimes we seek the horses because they're big and they're protective and they're warm and, you know, if we have a father figure. When we're growing up it's a big kind of looming person. So, maybe that was some of the connection. And I think that a little bit in the book as you rightly point out you know I grew up in New York City. It's a very unusual background for being so horse obsessed. And yet I endlessly sought them out. I ended up as a teenager becoming a mounted parks enforcement officer in Central Park patrolling on horseback. I taught riding lessons at a actually a stable on an island in the middle of the Harlem River. And I really try to unpack in the book as you say it's about so much more than horses. It was I so inexorably, ineluctably drawn to them. And I realized in unpacking that it has a lot to do with my father. I'm not exactly in the way you mentioned, but but related so I'm the daughter of immigrants. My father was a Holocaust survivor. He was born in 1930 he was a little old man by the time I was born. And I always wanted to sort of have the protection. And I realized of being part of this upper crust this class this Ralph Lauren created world, and I wanted to subsume myself in it, much like my father had tried to hide as an Aryan during the Holocaust, I wanted to really fit into this elite world. And I pursued male figures who were the American father I never had my father spectator sport was opera, you know, and I really, you know, kind of cruel manly man trainers that almost as a compulsion to fill up that void exactly what you're speaking of to try to insert myself both in American identity and in that quintessential American family that I didn't have. But what I loved about your father is how he felt when he got you that first horse. He had one he took his recreation money and said, we must buy something he didn't buy the horseman but we must get something luxurious. Yeah, not that wonderful rug that to say you know to the Germans, I won I defeated 80 million Germans, and under his breath I have this carpet I can walk on with to fully flesh out the anecdote you're speaking of. My father ended up applying for reparations from the German government. And when they got the measly some, you know, my father said the blood money from them. My mother said, well, let's use it to fix our car. Let's, you know, put it towards something we need and my father couldn't stand the idea that he had needed help from the Germans for anything. He wanted to express that he had persevered without them. So he said the only thing that we could get was something luxurious something we don't need and they bought this oriental carpet as you mentioned, and his favorite part was that he could step on the Germans all the time. But in a way that relates to writing because it was such a luxury luxury to have it's such a luxurious sport, and my father, the best, not revenge, but the statement that he was not an erasable person as he had people had tried to erase my people from this planet was in living well, and in pursuing these trappings of the elite, not because it was posh, but because it meant I am here, and I'm part of this. Living well is the best revenge.   I had competed in this very prestigious horse show. I was sure I didn't belong there I was a nobody so I left after I competed put my horse away, but my dad who knew nothing about horses stood by that ring the entire day, making in the sun. And as you say when they called in the winner circle, all the horses trotted in and my little old dad trotted in, and he took that second place ribbon from the judge, and he put it on his chest and he turned to the judge and he said, I defeated Hitler. Yeah. And that moment for him was that, as you say his favorite opera was Aida and the net the favorite aria from that is return of venture tour return of the victor, and for him success was returning victorious. But my father, and I had a tense relationship around this passion of mine, because for my family, who was all about achievement in very specific zones riding was unimportant to them. This year I had this passion that wasn't newspaper bylines that wasn't Ivy League degrees, and was really to them insignificant. So there was a lot of tension between my passion for this and what they wanted for me. And ultimately I realized that passions can align and actually dad I'll tell you something. I only came out as a horse girl, about two years ago. I kept totally secret because of this statement from my family that it wasn't valuable. It wasn't a value. And then I was speaking to a friend about what I wanted to write about. I wanted to tell my colleagues because I would be seen as maybe not tough, not hard minded enough to tackle these very difficult subjects that I tackle as a news reporter. If I reveal that I love pony so much. And my friend said to me, Sarah, he said, passion translates. That's all that matters. If you want to write about this subject. People will get that it's a passion and that is what writing is about and that's what literature is about and making people feel. It's an accolade that the whole world cares about if it's something you care about people will get it.  Yeah, wonderful horse and you said it was finally a connection that she understood at last your passion may not have under stills thought horses halters were collars. I finally had that connection to you, which I thought was great. Thank you in the book I didn't quite realize it was going to be such a personal book. I had originally pitched it to Simon and Schuster as an almanac of the horses that I've met around the world when I'm investigating stuff and reporting for the times my secret is that when I'm done I put down my notebook and I go find the horses, and I hadn't picked this almanac of horse crazy horse crazy people just like me. My editor said, you know, horses are personal.  But when you look at a horse, you feel something kind of like looking at a mountain range or the sea rolling in. The story to me speaks to the emotional personal feelings that horses and gender, and I realized that the horses. The story of horses was my personal story. And what you're alluding to with my family. I end up speaking about how I come from a very fractured family. I have three brothers who are much older than me I'm the last in a new marriage. And they don't love me, and they don't have any relationships with me.  And, again, that's what drew me to these animals, because horses would always need me, always be there for me, I could sit in their stall for hours and tell them the stories that I longed for my family to listen to. And among them, I could belong to a herd in the way I didn't really belong to my family. And that's that great story when you're on the plane when you go as a horse groom, and then you're coming in for the landing and the three horses, hang their heads out and press into you because they're frying as one of them and they're joining with you and saying, you know, are we going to make it and horses are herd animals and people aren't around them don't recognize they're also a flight animal. They run away they don't stand and fight except for occasional stallion. But I think it's you convey that a lot that you know you can become part of their tribe or herd, which is great.   And in that mutually reinforcing relationship, I found my tribe. And in the book, what you're referring to is I decided I would pull all the threads of horses in my life to their logical place. So I have this Dutch warm blood called trendsetter. He's, I realized he's Dutch. How the hell do I have a Dutch creature in New York City. So I pulled that thread and I went on a horse importing Odyssey and actually flew in the belly of a 747 with three horses. And turns out the only thing you need to fly with horses is snacks. As long as they have a million snacks, they're happy with whatever it is. The prey creature the herd before it's designed to be constantly eating and if it's constantly eating it's in a safe place. But the one thing Diane that they, where it breaks down is you can't tell them what's happening to their body when you're starting to land. So they're perfectly happy flying and all of a sudden they're like what is it why are my ears popping. What are these butterflies in my stomach and you can't say oh no no don't work. So in that moment when the landing gear came out these three horses pressed under me in the way that they do with a dam into her utter when they're falls. And I realized at that moment they didn't see me as human as in control they saw me as part of their world. And it was one of the most profound moments I ever had standing in this horse box in a cargo hold plummeting through the sky. And the horses spoke to me in horse language and I it sounds fluffy, but they have a very specific system of gestures that they use one another and here they use it with me, and it was probably the, the moment of feeling I belong most in this world. I thought it was great. The other down the chapter I thought was the funniest was on the briar horses.  No, I had, you know, I never had briars I'm older than yet, but I had a shorts. Oh yeah, whole horse that I love they had little wheels and that was as close as I got. So the nominati it's here briar is a plastic model horse, and I used to collect them when I was younger my family couldn't afford horses but briars were the horses that were accessible. And so I, I got them every Hanukkah every birthday. And there used to be these things called photo shows where you could send in a picture of your briar, you know, posed in the yard like it was in a field. And it turns out it has become a worldwide phenomenon, but people do live shows with these bite sized plastic horses. So this I had to see for myself. So I pulled my obsession with those plastic horses with logical thread and just logical conclusion. And I went to one of those model conventions, and to my shock Diane, it wasn't children playing with them. But you know, I really got my comeuppance in that chapter because I came into that convention center. And by the way, they groom them, they put them in stables, it's, it's the real thing. And the real thing. And I came in really in violation of the tenets of being a good journalist, I came in full of judgment job is to stay loose with my conceptions of what's right and wrong and what reality is my job is to absorb process and then present. I didn't do that. I came in thinking, these aren't real horses. How could this give you joy? In what way are you winning anything? Also, mind you, they're competing identical manufactured plastic horses against identical ones. It's not like they paint them and make designs. They're competing out of the box. But I really, I really got my comeuppance because as I spent the day with them, I realized that here were people doing something I so rarely am able to do, which is not care with other people. They totally don't care. They just embrace their joy and so much of my relationship to riding and why I was compelled to be part of the sport was about presenting a certain type of American, a certain type of being in the world. And these people did what I could not, which was be free and joyful with those horses that became so real to them. And so I, I loved it. I bought a plastic one when I on my way home. Yeah, I said, when you go out, you said you picked one out of the bin. I thought it was great, but I also loved when you talk about being on the park patrol and when you go for the triumph.   Well, the horse didn't go backwards. Well, you touched on that in the beginning with your intro that a lot of my road to achievement has been through failure. And I'm a journalist, a professional writer who can't spell. And I was always told in these elite circles that I grew up in and these posh private schools that it was because I was lazy and dumb. And I really thought to myself, I'm really sure I'm not lazy and I think I'm not done but like, I just can't spell maybe they're right. And so I really struggled, I failed throughout high school. I got a D in English, you know as a writer who's a scandal. And so when I took that test for the parks department, and they put me on this giant draft horse in the middle of a actually one of the wonders of the world I call it a stable on 89 street in Manhattan that the horses walked up stairs. And I lived on the fourth floor of that description. And I couldn't, as you said, make the horse go. And I got off that horse and returned the reins to the Ranger and actually got off right on the mounting block where it got on because he really hadn't moved for half an hour. And I thought, you failed again. And she said to me, actually this horse normally flies backwards with people, you prevented him from moving at all. Welcome to the mounted unit. And it was really a moment for me that failure isn't always the end failure. I still can't spell.  I did a big investigations into nail salons in New York City. That was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. And it got a tremendous amount of pushback from people who didn't want it to be true that these workers are being exploited. But because of my issues with spelling, I have been so scrupulous with every note I had translations in English and Chinese and Korean, and I had every iota marked down because of my anxiety about my failures that actually the story ended up robust and was impossible to impeach.  The other story like as you went to Vogue went through all the layers up. That's a great failure. That's my favorite. In illustrating that point I described getting a job interview at Vogue and I went through five layers of interviews ended up 32 girls and then end up me and one other girl. And I wrote, she only though she was happy instead of she only thought she was happy on the test. And when they asked me what the, what why did that I said well you know I'm not perfect. Well, Vogue is of my interview. And as I left I realized Diane I was sobbing, not with sadness that I missed that job, but with relief that my life had seemed laid out in one direction that you know, nobody turns down a job at Vogue. And I realized that it had opened up paths for me by that door being closed and so failure is a tremendous part of my life unfortunately or fortunately, but it's really a process to embrace and also Diane writing as you know because you're a passionate equestrian is mostly about failing.  That's what makes it so compelling that it's impossible to really master. It isn't I was talking to someone at the barn and we're training a young horse and I said, and she's saying oh you know I haven't been able to get him to this level. I said but writing is about evolving. Yes, never going to know it all but you're going to keep evolving closer. Like I do dressage now because when you're young you bounce when you're old you break so no more leaping over fences, but it's true we're always with horses evolving. And you have like you know the number of horses you've had each very distinct, very different personalities very different ways of trying to get them to do what you want them to do, which is achievable. But it's you know the book was great in capturing that I loved the horse that was afraid of plastic bags. Yeah, you know the fascinating thing and what makes so endlessly compelling about this sport is, I don't want to use the word partnership. I think that that is a little euphemistic because partnership implies to people to entities that are in it for the same reasons and the horses very much subject to our will. I wouldn't call it a partnership. I, in some ways it's an enslavement and I battle with that ethical dilemma in the book as well. But that imbalance in that relationship and those characters and personalities make it manifestly important that we have a respect for the animal and that we try to give it back what we take from it. And I'll be a little more specific. Horses can't exist without humans. The idea of a wild horse is a fiction. Horses died out on the American continent 10,000 years ago. The mass extinction that they don't know why it happened. There's no such thing as an indigenous horse except the prezwalski wild horse in Mongolia, and they were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. And when we have this idea of a horse wild and free, the truth is we've constructed them so they're big and we can sit on their backs but that means they have spindly little legs that aren't good for holding up for a lifetime of work. We've created ruminants who stay stalled all the time so they get a lot of stomach issues that can kill them. And I think that ethic of responsibility for the creature that we've created that has been the perfect complement to humankind is really important to keep forefront of mind. And I think it makes you a better person caring for something larger than yourself. Well, also that wonderful passage about Shinkantin Island, the two sisters who, you know, you're having a, and they had, you can buy the ponies and return them to the wild. Yeah, you're having a conversation thinking, well, how is that your pony you can't ride it you can't groom it you can't, and then you realize, well what they've done is give it the pony a level of freedom that they're still cared for. But it was an epiphany that, you know, yes I have horses I ride, but they actually gave a horse its freedom. And they have a horse in the truest sense of a horse, what we imagine about an animal I say that the horse is the American flag in equid form, right. And that ties to this fantasy we have about our identity, and those girls who bought their pony only to set it free on the preserve of Shinkantin Island. They maybe have what it really means to have a horse, which is that boundlessness. I do want to speak to you and about identity and horses, because as a Jew I always felt like I was an interloper in this equestrian world that was the Kennedys, not mine. And my dad would always say, I'd say, you know, this is Ralph Lauren's world he created this. And my dad would say, don't you mean Ralph elitists. And that's Ralph Lauren's real name, his original name is new from Queens like me. And that spoke to me that identity is what you create, and that can be crafted. And part of the exploration into identity. I talked about black cowboys in the book. Because I worked for a black cowboy in Harlem, and turns out Diane one in four cowboys in the American West were black. Yeah, I was surprised. But during the pioneer and they've been totally erased from literature and from the silver screen by racism, because as the great cowboy black cowboy historian William Lauren Katz incidentally also a Jew from New York told me. She said, if black people came into the American cowboy story, they came at the end of a whip and in chains. And that's not the America people wanted to remember about ourselves, because the cowboy supposed to represent the best of American identity. And so in the book I actually went to Texas riding with a postman, who's been resurrecting life savings the story of the black cowboy in the black cowboy museum. And that's a lot of commonality with people erased from the narrative. And the truth is we make our own narratives. Yeah. Well that's it. And you say that at the end of the book which I said you was my favorite passage when you're talking about recognizing when you're on the hunt. And that's when the energy comes up to you and, you know, recognizing what your father had meant, but you have a passage you said that epitomizes to you you wanted to read about, you know, in your book that is your favorite. I do, I do, and I love the past you chose it's the end of the book but I didn't want to do any spoilers so I And it would be great if people could queue up their questions because I think I'll read this part and then this will be our last bit of our schmooze and take some audience questions was that what we decided. Sounds perfect. So, Diana and I both are writers and we know what it feels like to be lent their power, because that's what riding a horse is, I say on my own. Two legs I'm Sarah lent for more I'm permittable. So I wanted to read this passage that really I hope expresses what it feels like when horses lend their power to us mere mortals. So this is about riding this type of horse if you can see its ears are curlicue on the cover. It's called a Marwari horse it's indigenous to India. There's a secret that can't be exported, but there's one woman on Martha's Vineyard who smuggled 12 of them in an unconventional way. She's a chapter in the book I won't. I won't give it away. Anyway, so I will read about my first time riding a Marwari in Rajasthan when I was on assignment. After the assignment I was not assigned to ride a horse with the Marwari galloped at an impossible speed, bunching and coiling underneath me, the brown and white stallion was a blur. I can see earth dropped beneath us and the undulating tail of the undulating trail whipped through the pulverized rock of the quarry and dipped and rose and rippled my horse's body billowed and constricted with every oscillation of the terrain. In front of us, the black horse's hopes flicked in and out of the dust flaring up behind that stallion and the cavalry officer mounted on him before us. He was loud with a rat attack clatter of hoax on unmind marble, then a rumbling of distant thunder when they hit soft packed dirt. The officer ahead of me darted back a glance over his shoulder as we careened down a slope, and I realized he was checking to see if I was still on by divine grace somehow I was. Then he went faster. He knocked out of me as my stallion whipped through the hot air. He was going too fast for me to inhale, blasting into the air so that it compressed and felt almost solid, too thick to gasp. Tears from the wind of our flight streamed from my eyes, the flesh of my cheeks flattened against the pressure as this stallion tore into the atmosphere. Then, he went faster. At the edge of a green marble ravine the officer pulled up, and my horse dropped from flight to an easy walk without a hint of a jolt. The man pulled a beat up flask of water from a saddlebag and reached across the space between his perspiring black horse and my sweating painted one to pass it to me. I spilled some out on the fur to cool my horse's shoulders before taking a deep glug. The officer grinned at me, and I saw in his face, the democratizing effect of a shared passion. We can speak the same language, and we were worlds apart, but in the saddle we were peers. I peered through that heart-shaped gap in the world above my stallion's mane, and we stood on the edge of the marble crater. We four were silent then. The officer and me, full of the ecstasy of a horse's pure power, loaned to us mere mortars for a moment we hope will never end. Holding his red beret to his head with one hand, the officer tipped back the canteen to his lifts. The water ran from both ends of his white mustache to rain on the exquisite horse beneath him. Neither minded at all. Well, the best part of that passage is in the beginning when you leave and the man in charge of the horse says, you know Gallop. The only word he spoke in English to his cavalry officer was no Gallop. When we got around a corner and I went Gallop. I love that. And let me try to see if I really could. It was the best. Oh, thank you. Oh my God. Do we have any questions? Yes, we do. Someone saying that she appreciated the fact you didn't shy away from some of the cruelty of the horse world, found it to be fully honest book about it. You know, thank you for saying that because I ended up after I outed myself as a horse curl. I ended up applying some of my question knowledge to my journalism, and I did two large exposés on really mythic figures in the sport Jimmy Williams who's deceased and George Morris who's living and he's sort of the living legend. He's, if you imagine Babe Ruth and Tom Brady together. That's George Morris stature in the horse world and Olympic coach and gold medalist and a pedophile. I ended up doing a large expose and he was banned from the sport for life because of my work a year and a half ago. And I received a tremendous amount of pushback there where I stand with George groups because people couldn't bear to see this legend this luminary in the horse world revealed for what he truly was and they didn't want to believe it. And people asked me you know you love this for why are you revealing this Sarah and I said because I love it. It demands if you love something we demand it be excellent. And I revealed it's dark side, because I know it can be so much more and so I really never shy away from those discussions even in things I love and cherish deeply so thank you for saying that that was a hard moment. I was shopping for a horse with my trainer and some people wouldn't do business with us because of what I had written. You're very balanced in the book about talking about the good and the bad of the sport, which is as it's grown it's gotten better but when you talk about the training methods of one of the trainers that you work for and you know really how horrifically cruel you are to the jumpers. Yeah and I participated in as a young girl. I was instructed to remove the water buckets from my horse's stall the night before a competition so they would be quiet. And I think about it now I am talking about it and I have goosebumps it fills me with heart that I wouldn't let my horse tried her heart out for me for August day slaker thirst for you know 24 30 hours. And at the time, I thought, these are people with illustrious equestrian pedigrees, who am I I miss interloper it felt wrong, but I didn't have the confidence in myself to step up, and I have reported my way into understanding horses, far better. And I think become a better person because of it. I think they do make us a better person. You know, if you're in caring of them and understand like you said how dependent, they are on us. You know, and we gain as much as they do maybe more from a relationship.  Come on, speak up list I asked all the questions I want some questions. If they haven't typed any to me so you know I've been doing something really interesting lately Diane I've been working with a therapeutic riding organization in New York City called Gallup NYC. And it has really helped me understand the compelling nature of horses, because they have these children, some of them are teenagers who've never even lifted a spoon to their own lips on with their own power. They're actually in a wheelchair, they're seated, always below everyone.   The horse gives its this gift of its power. And if that's so compelling for me, you know who is able bodied, what, what does it mean for somebody who has no power. And you said about young girls and horses, initially women and horses, I think they're so compelling to young girls in particular, because in no other arena in a little girl's life, is she in control of something so large and powerful right and what's less in control than a little girl, you know, and here 1200 pounds will listen and respect her. And that's compelling and powerful. It's also a sport where we are completely equal with men, you know, in riding. Yes, not only do male and female horses compete equally against each other, it's the only Olympic sport where men and women compete equally. And Christine just asked, Diane, I want to shout out Christine because she's the one who invited me here. And Christine was a source as a journalist who has become an admired friend. I really respect what Christine does in making the world a better place so love you Christine. Actually you speak about veterans and equine therapy. I'll talk a little bit about something that happened to me that I read about in the book. When I, in 2010 I was sleeping in my apartment in the West Village and a man came through the window and stabbed me. And he was trying to rob me and he ended up stealing some stuff thankfully that's all that happened to me because normally in those instances the police told me you die. And after that happened, I started to hear the world incredibly loudly. I couldn't shut off any ambient noise because I was hyper vigilant it's a type of post traumatic stress disorder. I was always listening for danger. And in speaking with Monty Roberts, he told me that that's the baseline of horses that horses are hyper vigilant in this world, because they are only pray. And I couldn't turn the world off and horses helped me learn to communicate with silence because they only speak to each other in a language of gestures. You know they're winning on TV right? But that's not, we both know that's not how they really communicate. And they helped me quiet down the world again. And ultimately I realized that a horse doesn't have a choice to be a prey creature, but I do. And so Christine's question about veterans, they're very valuable in with veterans and post traumatic stress disorder actually that's what the class I'm going to work with Monty this weekend is is Mustangs who've never been handled by people are going to be gentle by veterans, because by quieting down their minds and the animals minds, these fragile creatures both human and horse can heal each other. And so it's a very valuable therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. It's why I'm able to walk around in the world. It's amazing. Now we have another question. Do you think some people are just born horse crazy. This is from Katie. The story, like you the stories my mother tells me if my love for horses start when I was two or three, but how could someone so young know and why don't we outgrow it. So Katie, I sort of push back against the idea of essentialism with horses right that you that one person is a horse crazy and another person may found it late in life and isn't because when you read the book, you know, it's all about finding your place. So, I sort of, I reject that that there's such thing as a person who's horse crazy or person who's horsey. I think we come at it for so many different reasons. And in trying to understand that exact question Katie became this book. And I engage with lots of people about their, their reasons sometimes it's because they were broken and horses healed them. Sometimes it's because they were lonely, and didn't have a place and horses became a herd. Sometimes it's because they needed power. Other times because it's horses have big amber eyes and look at you with so much more behind them than just a reflection. The question are some people who are crazy.  Another one this is from Bonnie Masslin. Why do you think girls predominate the sport of riding but men end up dominating the sport in the highest levels in the competitive world of riding. The question mom. I've actually been talking about this with her she's a little bit of a ringer. It's it's unclear. I've actually been looking into the numbers a young man just won a very prestigious competition the McClay equitation finals which is judged subjectively, and I looked back since 1938 38% sorry 1933 38% of winners of McClay finals have been male. And then I looked at the numbers of how many young men there are in the sport under 18. 34% of the sport on males and 38% of the young males when so there's something up there. That's subjectively judged I think we have to look at the patriot patriarchy on ponies and type of decisions it makes just make I think we have to think about equitation, which is the discipline of conforming to ideal standard. It comes from the cavalry. So the ideals of the cavalry are male, flat back when you don't have breasts to hunt your shoulders or thighs, a long lean leg when you don't have a female phenotypic thighs. So I think we have to unpack this. So, the patriarchy is invasive everywhere. Why are there so few black writers, it's a soul searching the sport is doing right now. You know, some people say it's an economic thing, but there are plenty of rich black people who are not doing the sport to and what messages are coming across. So, investigating the sport again is what's going to make it better and I'm going to keep doing it. And here's another from Laura Tiramani. Where do you see your journey with horses going what's next. Laura. I could have never imagined the journey horses have taken me on so far from the belly of a 747 to a seaman smuggling rare Indian horse dealer to galloping with the black cowboys to swimming with the ponies of Shinketeague to sitting here in LA about to say, Monty Roberts the legend. I can't answer it horses are a journey and a gift and being in their presence is, is a journey and an adventure. And we never give them back that gift. I will say I'm working on a super special secret project with Monty so watch this space. Here's another one. Have you from MSA. Have you ever felt intimidated by a horse at the start of your relationship with horses. If so, how did you overcome that and find your voice. Yeah, I start the book. That's a great question. MSA. I start the book. And maybe we should take one more after this and wrap it up. Does that work for Diane. I start the book at two years old. I got on my first horse. It was probably to, I should have been writing a pony but my mom talked some people into letting me astride their full grown horse. And I fell off it almost immediately. I was a chanter because I was sure I was a cowgirl. And it's on a lunch line which is a long lead that goes sort of an around delay when you're learning to ride, and it kept cannery and I kept lying there. And I should have been squished, but instead it jumped over me. And rightly or wrongly, that lesson of watching the horse soar above my little head imprinted on me this idea that horses would always save me. I would always be my safe place. That's not been true. I've broken my vertebrae multiple times on horses.  I've been bitten. I haven't been kicked, interestingly. I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, it won't happen. I'm working with Mustangs this weekend. It's definitely not going to happen. But when you say how did you overcome that and find your voice with them. That misunderstands a little bit the relationship with horses, because it's not about having a voice with them. It's about listening. If you move your body in a way that listens to what the horse's body language is telling you, if you behave among them as a peer, you don't need to be intimidated because you're accepted. There's actually a person I know I couldn't bathe my horse when she was in the barn, because her energy is off and the horse became volatile.  They become your herdmate. And there's nothing to be intimidated from a member of your herd, just like your family. So the last one is. Not a question. Yeah, she's just saying she it's been a joy and thank you. I have a question for you, Diane. Yes. Why do you love horses? And then you can ask it back. The reason I love horses is that when you're on the back of a horse, your mind is totally clear of all the garbage, all the rumblings. Your focus is on what you're doing and the connection to the horse and I find it like you. I was always high energy and my parents were always like looking for something to get me into that would and horses calm me. It is probably the most calm in my day that I have is when I'm on the back of a horse. Very interestingly, there's a biographer of Donald Trump, who told my colleague Michael Barber out something in the interview and Michael called me after you know who does the daily and Michael called me was like you got to hear this.  And his postulate on why was because the rocking motion of the horse replicates the rocking of the womb. And it's the only time as an adult that were rocked like we were the first nine months of our lives. And that brings you back to a very primal state. And I thought that was fascinating and I put it in my book. But, but yes, the quieting of the mind, especially for high intensity people is, is very valuable in the book my answer to that question Diane is because horses. Because to me they seem like just an inevitability. I don't question my love for them any more than breathing in or breathing out, then I question that. But I think for all of us on this call. Anytime you have a passion. It deserves investigation and gets only richer by that. And so I invite people to ask themselves why do I love horses or why do I love anything I love. It's a great exploration and you might just get a book out of it. The book is wonderful. I can't emphasize enough that there are so many levels to read it on. And it is just a discovery and I think for all of us it when you read it you start thinking about parent relationships, animal relationships, family and then succeeding I think there are a lot of really good messages in it and I'm so grateful to have had this opportunity. Oh, thank you. And I just want to shout out the Bedford Playhouse and also book see which is a shop in Bedford that's carrying this shop local it's such a difficult time support places that throw events like this, you know, give your money to the Bedford Playhouse shop at Bedford Playhouse if you want to buy the book, because, you know, Amazon isn't hosting these lovely zoom meetings or we need community more than ever and so a credit to Bedford Playhouse for creating community, even virtually thank you so much. We need our herd. Yeah, we need our herd exactly. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you. Bye everybody.


What are you talking about? On the wishlist? I can't remember. I may have but I thought I put it not there. I know I was looking at them.


Good afternoon everybody. Hello and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and it's wonderful to have all of you here with us this afternoon for a very special event. We are particularly pleased to be hosting a book release of launch for Assistant Professor Joy Rodie. Well, today's event, as some of you may know, is part of the Ford School Centennial Activities. We are showcasing a number of our faculty and the impact that they have on various dimensions of public policy, but it's always really a pleasure to celebrate the publication of some of our faculty's research, and I'm delighted to have all of you here to join us for that because of that reason as well. And in particular, it's a special honor when it is a faculty member's first book, and so today we have the special benefit of learning about armed with expertise, the militarization of American social research during the Cold War. Joy Rodie joined the Ford School's faculty just this past fall, but actually it was a homecoming of sorts because she had previously spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, or STPP, and we're delighted to have her back. Specializing in U.S. national security policy and the history of science, she brings a historian's perspective on research and teaching, and that's particularly valuable for the kinds of issues that we grapple with at the Ford School. She's taught a number of courses, including science and technology as well as values and ethics, and she is frequently has appeared on the Ford School's teaching honor roll, and so I think that you will have a taste of her really engaging presentation style later this afternoon. She previously spent three years as an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, and in addition to her postdoc here at the STPP program, she has had research fellowships from the University of Virginia, Harvard, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her PhD in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. All around, a great addition to our faculty. So before I begin, or before we begin, I would like to thank the Department of History, Science, Technology, and Society program, and in particular, its director, Gabrielle Hett, who is with us and will be speaking just in a few moments with you. They are post sponsoring today's lecture, and we're delighted to partner with them. Just a quick note about the format today. So in a moment, Gabrielle Hett will be introducing Joy's work and really situating it for you in the broader literature and providing some context. And then the main event, and Joy will be sharing some of the insights and the main points and highlights and implications of her work. She'll then take questions from the audience, and for those of you who are watching online, we invite you to tweet in your questions using the hashtag policy talks. We'll have a reception right after the event, and I hope that you will join us. There will be a book signing, and you can have your own copy of Armed with Expertise available for purchase and signing. And so with no further ado, I will invite Gabrielle to the podium, and then we will have the pleasure of hearing from Joy. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome Joy Rody, Professor Joy Rody, to the University of Michigan and to our STS program. The STS program is administratively housed in history, but it is a program in science, technology, and society, and it's actually an interdisciplinary program that attracts students not just from the Ford School and LSA, various LSA departments, but also from SNRE, the School of Natural Resources and Environment, the School of Information, even the Architecture School, and we've even had a nuclear engineer as part of our community. So for those of you who aren't familiar with STS, the acronym, or what our activities might be, STS is actually a global, interdisciplinary field that has been active since approximately the 1960s, that draws and brings together approaches from history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, even on occasion literary studies and public policy, of course, to think about the ways in which science, technology, medicine, health are shaped by social factors and in turn shape our social world. So there are programs throughout the United States. Some of them are freestanding and grant their own degrees. Others, like ours, aim to be more multidisciplinary and appeal to kind of broad constituencies. There are also programs throughout Latin America and in Europe and now increasingly in Asia and even one now starting in South Africa. So it is really truly a global and growing field. And this is part of the field in which Joy situates her work. And so I thought I would take advantage of this moment to tell you a little bit about how Joy's wonderful book contributes not just to the discipline of history, which is, of course, a home discipline that she comes to, but also to the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. Now, first and foremost, and I think most strikingly for me, because I study nuclear things and so you'll see why this was most striking for me in a moment, Joy provides really a radically different view of the role of social science in the Cold War from the view that we are accustomed to having. Most work, there's been actually quite a lot of work on what social scientists have done in the Cold War and what their role in shaping the Cold War on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain War. But most of that work really focuses on issues like modernization theory or looks at institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, other kinds of development institutions. Now, of course, I'm not saying that's not important work. It is important work. But what Joy has done here is to show us how social scientists became entangled with the U.S. military as part of its all-front strategy in the Cold War. And I think, so, you know, it's such what they were, they were tasked with focusing on the human side of this battle for hearts and minds that the Cold War was. But in essence, what Joy's arguing here is that it was social scientists, at least as much as nuclear weapons and nuclear weaponiers, and perhaps even more than nuclear weaponiers who were tasked with keeping the Cold War cold. And this, for me, is a major finding and something that really gets us to rethink the whole Cold War dynamic in important ways. The second, for me, major contribution of this book is that Joy shows the contradictory and even sometimes counterintuitive process by which this militarized social science came to undermine democratic debate about the role of expertise in policymaking. She does this by showing really the complexity of scholars' motivations, reasoning, ethical dilemmas. And she does it by focusing on ordinary social scientists rather than the high-profile policy analysts and social scientists that we are accustomed to seeing in these stories. She argues that it is amongst this rank and file of social scientists that we can best understand the dilemmas that they faced about confronting the garrison state and what their role in the garrison state was. So it turns out the contemporary debates about the roles of experts in democratic decision making, of which there are many, and which I think is one place where STS of the field kind of overlaps really productively and has really productive things to say to public policy as a field. But these contemporary debates about the role of experts in democratic decision making have long roots in the anguished doubts and self-reflections of these social scientists. And what Joy shows, she shows this really profound irony, which is that those who felt that funding from the military, funding from the Pentagon, compromise their scholarly ethics, retreated into the ivory tower, they retreated into the university, and expelled, in essence, colleagues who continued to get funded by the military, social scientists who continued to get funded by the military. And this had the deeply unfortunate effect of isolating those militarized social scientists from public scrutiny, from peer scrutiny, from peer review, in many cases, and thereby ironically eroding democratic control over the public policy that emerged from this scholarship. And for me, that is also a really profound finding. I recently had the occasion to review another book manuscript by anthropologist Joe Masco, who's at the University of Chicago, which explores the links between nuclear fear, the nuclear fear that was generated during the Cold War and our current war on terror. And what Masco does in that book is to trace continuities in how the national security state cultivated a sense of permanent existential threat, which in turn served to legitimate and also create a demand for a state apparatus that operates in this kind of permanent state of, you know, alert, open end of the alert. What Joyce manuscript does is really kind of broadens this story in some really chilling and compelling ways. She shows how the civilian social scientists that accompanies the US Army to Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, have a much longer history than most of us anticipated. So that today's counterinsurgency came from yesterday's counter communism efforts. So to my mind, this is really engaged scholarship at its best, engaged history at its best that will reach peers, not just in history, not just in STS, but I think a very broad audience indeed. So really, it's a pleasure to welcome you back to campus and to hear more about your book. So much Susan and Gabrielle for those comments. I would like to just stand here and bask in them, but I am tasked with taking you through the book with a little bit more detail. I'm so delighted to be celebrating the book here because as Susan mentioned, I was here as a postdoc and I slaved over this manuscript in this building for two years. So it's really meaningful to be celebrating it here. There are times columnist Nicholas Christoff set up a little bit of a commotion in academia with a column entitled professors, we need you, exclamation point. In it, he argues that too many academics have walled themselves off in the ivory tower, churning out turgid prose or as he called it gobbledygook, while the world waited for answers to pressing political, economic, scientific and social questions. Now scholars of course, hit back. My personal favorite was as a blog post by political scientist, Corey Robin titled, Lacuna Christoff is saving now. There is ample evidence that many people share Christoff's concern that academia is too far removed from the needs of policy. So a recent evidence from political scientists, Michael Avey, Paul Avey and Michael Dash is quite interesting in this regard. They surveyed top foreign policymakers from both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration. And what they found this slide is really up here to make us historians feel better. Not surprisingly, policymakers when they assess the disciplinary usefulness of the various social sciences found economics useful, but they ranked areas studies and history as more useful to them than political science. More to the point of my talk today, they also found that policymakers found least useful the kinds of methodologies that have the most prestige in the social science disciplines. So high level theoretical analysis, quantitative analysis and formal modeling they report as less useful than contemporary and historical case studies. Now in a stark signal that Congress too is skeptical about the value of a lot of social science pending reauthorization legislation for the NSF legislation that's passed through committee would cut funding for the social sciences by 22% or $50 million next year. Now from a historical perspective, this concern about the relationship between policy and the university is really just the latest incarnation of an ongoing relationship between the social science and the state. The social sciences themselves, of course, arose in the late 19th and early 20th century in the context for a quest for empirical knowledge to solve the pressing problems of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The relationship between scholars in the state has never been an easy or straightforward one. So as Gabrielle says, my book examines a crucial moment that I'm going to argue today has had lasting consequences for that relationship between social science and the state. The book tells the story of military funded social science research that took place during the first three decades of the Cold War. It's rise in the 1950s, it's fall from grace in the context of the Vietnam War, and it's unexpected resurgence in the 1970s. And in the process, I examine how Americans have understood and debated the relationship between expert knowledge, the national security state, and democracy. So for the next 15 minutes, I'm going to take you briefly through the main points of the book, I'm just drawing out a few things. During the Cold War, the social sciences mobilized more extensively than ever before for the military. While Rand theorists, of course, were busy thinking the unthinkable, other social scientists worried that communist political and ideological expansion was as dangerous as nuclear war. And so comparative political scientists, area studies scholars, social psychologists, and anthropologists joined forces with the military to try to win hearts and minds. This mobilization seemed to them to require the creation of new institutional forms, a middle ground between purely academic social science, which didn't seem relevant enough, on the one hand, and in-house military research, which seemed too applied and couldn't attract the right experts. So this led to the establishment of a series of new research institutes in the early years of the Cold War. These were situated in what I call in the book the gray area. They're halfway between academia and the military. They seemed to, they were funded in part or wholly by the military, depending on the institution, and they seem to be able to tap into cutting edge social science and yet remain relevant. So of these institutions, Rand is the most famous, but it's also different in that it wasn't allied with the university. Most of these were located on university campuses, but Rand itself was thought of as having a university-like atmosphere. I've listed a few others here, the Army, which wasn't known as a real bastion of social science research, had three of its own social science research institutes that were placed on university campuses. So the operations research office founded in 1948 was at Johns Hopkins. The Human Resources Research Office was located at GW. The focus of my book is the Special Operations Research Office, which was located on the campus of American University. These are less well-known sites of Cold War social research, but it's at these sites where hundreds of social scientists who are the rank and file of an emerging military industrial academic complex worked. Just to give you a sense of the kind of work that they did at SORO, they sought to identify and test theories about the laws of social change. How did social change happen? With the goal of predicting Communist Revolution and circumventing it before it could happen. If you're familiar with Project Camelot, Camelot came out of SORO and was a project exactly along these lines. They also set the laws of communication, cross-cultural communication as fancy term for psychological operations campaigns, but how you communicated especially with non-literate populations in order to enhance U.S. outreach for hearts and minds. And finally, they wrote dozens of area studies handbooks that made their way into embassies and military bases around the world. Now, at the time, the people who did this research didn't think of themselves as hired guns or servants of power. They thought of themselves as people who combined scholarship and relevance. Their work embodied an immense confidence in the ability of experts to find technical solutions to the social and political problems of the Cold War. Historians like David Hollinger and Jessica Wong have argued that science and democracy seem to march in tandem. They seem to be in symbiosis during the Cold War. Social scientists believed that their research could provide universally valid, impersonal, non-ideological solutions to pressing political problems. So they thought that their work promised the reasoned application of knowledge to policy. They also conceived of these institutions not as growing some kind of military-industrial complex, but as serving as a bulwark against the growth of the national security state. Americans viewed the growth of the national security state in the Cold War with ambivalence. On the one hand, it seemed very necessary in order to protect the United States against the dangers of an expansionist enemy. But at the same time, they worried about the effects of militarization, which historians basically defined as the encroachment of military values, military institutions, into domestic politics and intellectual life. They worried about what Harold Lastwell famously turned to the garrison state, centralized, secretive, dictatorial bureaucracy that could grow in the quest for American national security and that could reach into intellectual life, political life, and even personal life. The gray area seemed to mitigate this problem because the gray area mobilized private scholars working outside of the national security state to work on military problems. Now, the idea that the gray area could neutralize the dangers of militarization or that it could produce neutral knowledge that protected and extended democracy was very short-lived. In the late 1960s, the gray area came under heavy attack in Congress, among student activists, and among public intellectuals. It was labeled an incubator of the Vietnam War. It came to be seen as exactly the opposite of what the people who built it thought it was. So, for example, in 1968 and 1969 Senator J. W. Fulbright held some very public hearings that rhetorically tied military-funded social science to American failures in Southeast Asia. Noam Chomsky and other intellectual critics labeled the men and women who worked in the gray area a technocratic intelligentsia and accused them of using their expertise not to protect democracy but to circumvent it and to empower a growing garrison state. These men and women argued that the military social scientists didn't protect or expand or embody democracy. They were direct threats to it. New Left student groups and anti-war faculty on campuses across the country where these kinds of institutions were situated, held sit-ins and rallies, attacking the presence of military-funded science and social science on university campuses. Critics had three interrelated goals. One, they wanted to demilitarize universities. Two, they sought to dismantle the gray area but above all they wanted to reign in the power of what they called the warfare state. They wanted to restore democracy. The outcome of their actions, as Gabrielle hinted, is not what they intended. These institutes were by and large kicked off of university campuses, not just at American University where Soro was exiled at GW, but this happened across the country. Stanford, University of Chicago, Princeton, Columbia, military sponsored science research and social science research was kicked off campus in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By and large there are some exceptions. However, these institutes simply reconstituted themselves as private either non-profit or for-profit research institutes and they continued the work that they did before. So for example, American University and the military severed their ties in the fall of 1969. But Soro's researchers continued going to work. The Army simply created a new contract with American Institutes for Research or AIR and so Soro's researchers, they called themselves Sorons, continued performing their research into counterinsurgency, nation building, and psychological operations just under the auspices of a private non-profit research outfit. Similar events happened elsewhere, the Human Resources Research Office, another Army product, became a non-profit standalone, it still exists today. The Operations Research Office was purchased by General Research Corporation, a for-profit research institute. So the final chapters of my book detail the consequences of these events for the relationship between social science and the state. I'm just going to talk about a couple of the consequences today because we want to get to the party. But the first of them, which is extremely important, is the loss of transparency. Once these research institutes left their university settings, their research products and their very existence became more opaque. Soro, for example, had been nominally attached to academic lives at American University. Researchers published their research in the peer-reviewed literature, they attended professional conferences, they trained students, but once they were ensconced at AIR, they lost that contact with academic life. They stopped publishing in open journals, instead they published in the gray literature, which is a very tightly controlled circulation, and they did this partly to avoid scholarly and public scrutiny. They had been burned by the events of the Vietnam War. And I think the result of this is problematic from a research standpoint. The work that came out of these institutes suffered in quality as a result. So one example is just modernization theory. Modernization theory, the darling of American social science in the 1950s and through most of the 1960s, was largely discredited by the very people who had come up with it by the early 1970s. But modernization theory maintained its salience within the gray literature well throughout the 1970s. A second consequence that's also troubling is that once these institutes privatized, they also reached out to domestic agencies for research contract funds. What that meant was that people who spent the 1960s honing expertise on counterinsurgency, understanding say Vietnamese communist self, applied that knowledge to American leftist movements. And so student movements and also racial unrest in these studies treated basically as if it were identical to Third World Revolution. And so counterinsurgency experts advised domestic agencies, police departments, the justice department about how to control leftist social movements in the 1970s. Now at the same time as the gray area faded to black, as I say in the book, academic social science also retreated from public engagement. This isn't entirely true. I'm drawing with broad strokes here there are exceptions. But by in large, there were a few events that led the university to turn inward. First of all, some by events of the Vietnam War, some scholars intentionally stopped producing knowledge that they thought could be used by the national security state. Here specifically, anthropologists who had specialized in Southeast Asian village politics, for example, turned towards studying spoke life and musicology in order to explicitly to avoid producing knowledge that could be used by the military. At the same time, many social scientists, wittingly or unwittingly, intentionally or unintentionally, retreated into internal disciplinary debates. So intellectual historians like Thomas Bender have described the 1970s as an era in which social scientists got engaged in their own specialized concerns and spoke less to each other and less to the world outside the university. Now, there were still scholars who called on each other to speak truth to power and to provide relevant knowledge. For example, a younger generation of South Asian area study scholars called on each other to create radical critiques of American-born policy. And they did that, but those efforts had salience mostly only within the discipline itself. In other words, radical intellectual movements tended by the late 1970s to matter within their disciplines, but not so much beyond them. So we can think of the 1970s as an era in which the social sciences themselves became more self-enclosed and faked less towards politics. Here's my book is one of unintended consequences and bitter ironies and what historian doesn't love a declensionist narrative. But it has some implications I think for the present moment and this concern about a divide between policy and academia. My story indicates there was no golden age that got the relationship between social science and the state right. The 1970s, much of academic social science retreated from policy engagement. There are exceptions to this in security studies. This is also of course the era of the rise of policy schools. So we have this proliferation of competing institutions and competing orientations. But at the same time as many social scientists withdrew the gray area faded to black. It was insulated from academic and public critique. So researchers working for the military and other agencies found themselves ensconced in private research institutes that produced knowledge that circulated only through tightly controlled channels. And in these institutes they were now insulated from external critique. And so they were less likely to wrestle with the possibility that their research might be technocratic or anti-democratic. They remained responsive to military and other agency needs and they still do today. The war on tariffs put a premium on secrecy in national security policy. People have talked about a concern that we have a hollowed out state, we have a contract state where contractors are providing services and research to the military. And it is true that it's private contract researchers more than universities that are providing the bulk of the intellectual work on which the military still relies. So we're confronted with the fact that the current national security apparatus I think continues to reinforce this policy, this boundary between policy and academic social science that I argue in the book emerged out of the events of the Vietnam War. So with that I will take your questions. Thank you. I suppose that you could argue that it was, but it was very short lived. Perhaps longer than a decade. I think another way of thinking about it is it's hard to say from our current point of view, one, how we could go back to that. And I think, two, the idea that this research was actually neutral and value free wouldn't get much traction today. And so I think in that sense it wasn't as golden as it may have seemed to the people who were involved in it. Josh. Yeah, it's a great question that I don't know the answer to. I have no idea. And Richard. Oh, yeah. Yes, right. Yes. Absolutely. So the same story happens in the sciences. And that's typically been the story that people have talked about historians who work on Cold War science. Absolutely. There was huge debate within the physics community. You know, there's this label of the War Physicists, the Jason's who had advised the Defense Department become the sort of incarnation of evil. And there are huge risks in the physics community that really remains through the rest of the 20th century over whether or not people worked on nuclear problems. With physics and with other kinds of weapons research in particular, this story that I told about university divestiture is a little bit different because that was such lucrative research that what so universities like MIT would take that physics research weapons research, move it off campus physically, but maintain those contractual and classified relationships with the institutes that produce the knowledge. Richard. I'm wondering if there's a phenomenon now, and I don't know how I spread, but do you see it like Trey is getting himself to be reacting in the room? Yeah. Is it the same kind of phenomenon or is it sort of different because they're only there temporarily and can't get to compromise? It's a great question. So the Defense Department, I mean, especially with this turn towards counterinsurgency operations and Petraeus have mobilized to try and get social scientists, particularly anthropologists and area studies experts to work with them. And so, you know, famously the counterinsurgency manual had PhD anthropologists contribute to it. Now, within the anthropology community, that's hotly contested. And the result of that has been that some of the experts that Petraeus is able to reach out to are not very well respected within the disciplines. So I think that there are a lot of questions about the quality of knowledge that's being provided to the Defense Department. I mean, another example is the human terrain system, which, right, which embedded anthropologists and area studies scholars in military brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they were not able to mobilize people who knew the language for the most part or had the kinds of expertise that were necessary. And I think that's partly, you know, fall out from the serious acrimony that remains in this post-Vietnam moment. You know, people who consider themselves experts in their fields won't do this kind of work. Now, as to whether or not this is a movement, this moment in the military is going to last, I don't know. I mean, Minerva has been defunded. So and as we draw down, perhaps people will lose interest in the cultural side. Yeah. So just to put neither side on the next one to change? Well, I wouldn't, I don't know that I would say that they don't want to change, but I would say that the, that there are now certain structural barriers that keep these groups isolated from each other, for sure. Susan. Yeah, he's focused on military kinds of research. What are 15 raw parallels with all the government funded in social science? So. So domestic agency research, for example? I don't know what it is. I think the National Security Council has some kind of sensual simulations of the State Department, CIA, Commissions Report periodically. So I've thought I don't have the university kind of details. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I think that this does, the State Department is an interesting case because it had so much less money for research and it was conceived of by the military as being, or it's conceived of by social scientists as being opposed to social science research in the time period that I'm talking about. And when it finally did get the money to be able to do this kind of research, the contract research institutes that existed that had the expertise were these same institutes. And so what you see is that they're drawing on that sort of already militarized set of experts, for sure. And as far as the intelligence community, so most famously the intelligence community supported the creation of MIT's Center for International Studies, which went through the same kind of experience in this time period. So I think it holds, as far as the domestic story, I think it's a little bit different and I think that a lot more work remains to be done to kind of figure out how those things play out. Yeah. So what is it where there are flow from soldiers into social science? It sounds like there's stories about people being sort of hired who are already social scientists. Is there a sort of long-out scenario? Yeah, there's a few different things. So one thing to say about these institutes is that they were also places where career military men would go after they retired, they would go get a PhD or a master's degree and they'd bring their expertise. So that was another way in which the sort of gray area was supposed to create this really relevant knowledge. These researchers would, especially in the context of Vietnam, try to do a lot of work to maintain the knowledge that people gained on the ground and preserve it. And they would comb intelligence files. But you see a lot less of that kind of fine-grained experiential knowledge and a lot more of the desire for formal modeling and the kinds of things that now, at least this one set of policymakers are saying they don't find very useful. Alex. Thanks for that question. Is it possible to talk about the personalities of people who are doing the gray area of research and if there was a monitoring of when you're reading some of their work, there's more that's particularly rigorous for that you found yourself wrong too? Because I'm kind of curious about the background. Yeah. So their backgrounds are a little bit hard to trace because these aren't for the most part people who say left personal papers because they really are this rank and file. Mostly what I've looked at is their different orientations towards the relationship between their work and ideas about democracy. And I would say that by and large most of them bought into the sort of general Cold War vision of democracy is something that's guided by elites that should have expert input. They were really, they were Cold War liberals. So politically, they're sort of centrist. But they really, I mean, they really believed in the march of democracy along with social science. So that's the most I can really say about their personalities. And some of them, they really believed in the products that they were producing. So one woman who did leave her records. Initially, she had worked for the Dutch in Indonesia until she realized they weren't going to decolonize after the war. And she said, forget this. And so she was really kind of devoted to decolonization and saw this work as a place where she could really do that kind of thing. Yeah. Carl. So more reminisce is not in 1970 in Berkeley. I was a co-organizer of a informal seminar that felt like why you wouldn't want to do military research or have anything, not military, but anything sponsored by any military connections. I had two pieces of that. I think the fellow who really started the year before was a guy named Ted Kozinski. I sort of figured you had some connection. I do need to notice that the other co-organizer, another fellow with strong, strong mission connected to that name, Steve Smale, a field fellow mathematician and chatting with him a few months ago, I noticed all this one day now comes from military. Yeah. Well, and especially, I mean. I can do a lot of things. Yeah. And there's been a move on the part of the military to try and reach out to more social scientists and to provide grants for research. And especially with NSF funding, being in this very precarious state, but you're going to have to tell me more about Ted Kozinski later. Howie. A couple of questions, George. There's been great stories about the Kosovo and him and kinds of questions. One thing I'm interested in, the first question is regarding the early period in which you say work is being presented in peer-reviewed terms. Also, on the basis of personal recollection, the campaign here in Michigan, as I remember it in the early 70s, was, again, classified military. And it was on the grounds, those grounds, that empty war act that was discussed, I think, of much wider support among faculty who are thinking on questions having to do with, norms of communication entailed in ideals of academic freedom. So I think there's a little bit more about the issue of classification. And the other question is earlier, if you argue, as you argue, that the attack, the political critique of military public research in the social sciences had the consequence of people deploying from that type of communication. How would you compare that to say the early 1950s in which, on the other side, as it were, McCarthyist attacks, particularly against people like Otto Latterhorn, might have had an effect on encouraging scholars not to get involved in politics and politics. Yeah, so to the second question first, I mean, you're absolutely right. So the McCarthy era attacks certainly had a chilling effect on the social sciences. And it's been, of course, widely written about. I think the attacks in the late 60s and early 70s, there I just see so much more irony. I mean, because the intention was certainly not to move people away, necessarily from producing relevant knowledge. But certainly, there was this retreat from the sense that the state could use this knowledge. Now, somewhat differently, many anthropologists argued that that would be the case for any kind of knowledge that you produced. And so there's also a sense in which the retreat, well, for some people, was crucially important. For others, they thought it was sort of senseless because what could you produce that wouldn't be used? So I think, I also think the reaction was much, it was a much smaller segment of the community. It was very specifically anthropologists. And what was your first question again? Just, oh, classification. Yeah. So it was much easier to keep research classified or to keep it contained from the institutes once they privatized. The research that got published in the open literature in the 1950s and early 1960s was always along the lines of these are the theoretical contributions that come out of this kind of research that we're doing for the military. So one example would be communications experts who take insights into how you communicate with people, which was done under the offices of creating psychological warfare programs for Thailand at SORO. But they publish in the peer-reviewed literature, here's our method for how you sample a nonliterate population and go door to door and actually figure out what are the meaningful symbols, et cetera, for these people so that they are extrapolating to a new kind of theory. And so I think it speaks partly to the classification issue. It speaks partly to this issue that they saw themselves as producing important theoretical knowledge. But the way that this got increasingly difficult in the context of the Vietnam War where the Defense Department, which would always look over what anyone wanted to publish, was increasingly unwilling to let people present their research because it could be so politically problematic. Another outcome of the scrutiny that happened in the late 1960s was the Defense Department sent out a memo to all of the armed services and the heads of these research institutes that said anything that uses the words insurgency, internal warfare, et cetera, will from now on be classified. So classification intensified immensely in the context of this scrutiny. I don't know if that speaks to what you wanted to know about classification, but that was what struck me most. Susan? Your really interesting story is focused on the implications for both research but also engagement. Of course, one of the other things that academics do is teach. I'd be interested in your thoughts in the different decades and as the story unfolded about the implications for some of the research training, academic programs, doctoral programs and whether you actually see that interface in terms of how they were structured what the focus of them was and how that might be a part of the story as an example. Yeah, that's a really good question. By and large, the people who worked in these institutes taught when they felt like, if they felt like it. So they weren't required to teach. They were contractors with the military but paid by universities. So the teaching that happened wasn't sustained, I would say. But one implication of this effort to remove all of this military-funded research from the university was that there was this sense that for people who had defense contracts they were training their Ph.D. students recreating themselves, creating people who would then go on to work within this warfare state. And so there was a real desire by getting rid of these contracts to not be training people who would follow in those footsteps. One place you do see these people doing a lot of education is doing education sessions for people in the State Department and people in USAID. So there are a lot more involved in institutes in Washington and also at the military academies going in, you know, Ithiel Poole and others would go and give lectures about modernization theory to cadets so that they could understand how to think about the Cold War. So they have more of a teaching role in that sense. I guess I have one other hand, one last question, and then... So I work at the Institute for Social Research and we're very much oriented on data, collecting data, being data, mapping data, analyzing data. And I recall growing up when I was a kid, you can read in the data you just paid for a statistical summary of how well it would be and how well it would feel right. So our technical summary of is like chill ratios and body counts and percent of that would be a territory to capture things like that. So what I'm wondering is to what extent this transition in his encouraging social science and over the last few decades it's been used to be like that. It's very data for you and I'm wondering to what extent that can be used as defined by the influence of the monetary balance. I think that's a really interesting question. I don't think that it is that it's that causally linked. I mean, I think it's also, I would argue, the result of a sort of set of elite practitioners in the social sciences who are very wedded to the idea that social science can in fact be scientific and make clear causal arguments and clear, you know, to get beyond correlation, to get beyond description. That is happening around this same time period. It's actually part of what my next book is about. So we can reconvene in like eight years and I'll have a better answer for you. But I think the military's only one piece of it. I mean, those kill ratios that McNamara offered were, of course, discredited and that was partly why Fulbright and others could tie social science to these failures in Vietnam. So there's some internal disciplinary dynamics that I think there's still a lot of work to uncover. Okay, Mel, and then really it's the last one. So I realize you're concentrating on the military scientists. I thought I would just offer a comment on the civilian side since I, you know, I'm talking about the 70s. I worked in certain Moscow. I worked on U.S. Soviet bilateral relations and state departments. I did a variety of things in certain courses. Deputy Director of the Voice of America did a lot of programs. So on the civilian side, I have to say, you know, their books have been published about bridging the gap. I mean, bridging the gap between academia and policy. And I haven't seen the civilian side. I thought we did a pretty good job of this. Well, for one thing, we had academics coming over to the policy side. Brzezinski, Kissinger, you didn't think what you wanted about the experience with them. But there was this kind of, I wouldn't say it was a revolving door so much, but there was a lot of exchange between the two. INR, Intelligence Research and State Department, had a relatively small amount of money, but they sponsored studies that were not classified, for the most part, unless they had access to intelligence, classified intelligence. Secretary Schultz, whom I worked for for a couple of years directly, used to bring scholars over before he joined Moscow. And they had these Saturday seminars where they would get the points of view that might be different than what he was hearing. Policy planning in the State Department had a number of academics that would come in and then go back to academic work. So I think on a civilian side, frankly, as I read 70s and early 80s, I don't remember anything about whatever was being done in the Defense Department, especially with social science research. Nothing really seeped over into the State Department. I don't think I'm missing something. And so it may have been used within that defense complex, but as far as the overall policy toward Soviet Union, let's say, China, I think it did not permeate that part of the policy. Obviously, there was a reason to do this when you talk about psychological ops and things like that. Sure. But I always thought that this kind of synergy and the exchange of academia and the State Department had and the people that were working on these issues was a pretty useful thing. And I don't think anybody was compromised one way or the other. There wasn't any attempt really to skew the research. Right, right. And I think what, so there's a few things going on there. I mean, one is that there were certainly individual scholars who were very influential. And if you, one of the interesting things that came out of the avian dash research is that many policymakers cited Kissinger as being an extremely important social academic social scientists did not list Kissinger as someone who is extremely important or influential. So what you have, I think you have social scientists saying, wait, we're producing this knowledge and no one's paying attention to us. You have individuals who are influential. Then I think you raise another interesting point, which is I don't want to say that the divide is sort of like always in existence. It's this, or that it's always on people's minds. It kind of ebbs and flows in it. So there's a period for the 70s through the mid 80s where no one is talking about this. And by the late 1980s, people start worrying again, you know, gattus is writing pieces about how historians and political scientists aren't informing policy enough. You know, why isn't anyone listening to us? So it kind of goes both ways. It's on both sides and it ebbs and flows. So that's what I would say. But thank you so much, all of you. We have food and books. And I am happy to answer more questions. Thank you.