The Incredibly Stupid One

https://www.lowellmilkencenter.org/programs/projects/view/douglas-hegdahl-the-incredibly-stupid-one/hero

230 74 4 years ago

gwbas1c• 4 years ago

For TLDR:

Rather than give up information to his captors, Douglas pretended to be an illiterate fool.
Using the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” as a mnemonic device, he memorized over 250 prisoners’ names.
His global impact came when he confronted the Vietnamese at the Paris Peace Talks in 1970. The information Douglas provided, including the locations and horrible conditions of the prison camps, as well as the torture practices used by the Vietnamese

registeredcorn• 4 years ago

It would be worth including the final line

Exposing the Vietnamese this way led them to keep POWs alive until the war was over, saving hundreds of prisoners.

DisjointedHunt• 4 years ago

A brave soldier, doing right by his country, which was led into fighting villagers half way around the world in incredibly tough scenarios by asshole politicians.

beachy3• 4 years ago

The Vietnam war (or the American war as I was corrected in a bar in Hanoi) was the epitome of unintended escalation. One of the early escalators was JFK, who was simultaneously extremely wary of escalation, and is not someone who most people think of as an asshole politician. Your point has some heft but it's a simplistic take.

adamrezich• 4 years ago

isn't it also a bit of a simplistic take to think that American Presidents truly have the "Commander-in-Chief" power w.r.t. war decisions that they have on paper?

chasil• 4 years ago

I have often wondered if, had the Watergate break-in not been discovered or reported, South Vietnam might yet exist, and if they would rival South Korea in their technological accomplishments.

refurb4• 4 years ago

As a history nerd I’ve read a ton of books on the Vietnam war and pretty much this.

There is a great book on LBJ’s decision to escalate - I can’t remember the title, but it’s 300 pages long and only covers a few months in ‘65 when the decision to escalate was made.

People like to think the decision was made in a vacuum but it was influenced by everything going on at the time and geopolitical risk going forward.

LBJ made a decision (there were members of the inner circle who wanted to pull out) based on what he knew at the time. It turned out to be the wrong one.

andrewclunn• 4 years ago

What a bay-of-pigheaded comment.

tasty_freeze2• 4 years ago

The Errol Morris documentary "The Fog Of War" about Robert McNamara is amazing. Even though McNamara was in his 80s when it was filmed, his mind was still razor sharp. McNamara was highly self-reflective and was not someone to whitewash history, even his own.

The documentary covers various phases of McNamara's career, including his contribution to the Tokyo firebombing raids in WWII, and a short bit about his work at Ford Motor Company between the wars, but the Vietnam war part was the biggest section.

D_Alex• 4 years ago

the epitome of unintended escalation

And right about now we are witnessing another. Against an opponent with nukes.

pdonis• 4 years ago

You should also include high ranking military officers, many with political ambitions, who put their own aggrandizement or telling their civilian superiors what they wanted to hear ahead of their military duties. I recommend H. R. McMaster's book Dereliction of Duty, which goes into this in great detail.

smegsicle• 4 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220715174007/https://www.lowel...

franzsmith• 4 years ago

How would the Vietnamese' face be at Paris Peace Conference? After knowing he gave all the information.

refurb4• 4 years ago

Not sure it mattered much in terms of the big picture.

The North had plenty of highly placed spies in the South. Both sides were running espionage operations throughout the war.

And the North had a “fighting while talking” strategy which meant if they made advances on the battlefield they exploited them during negotiations and when they took loses they just delayed until better opportunities arose.

tedheath1232• 4 years ago

Irrelevant to the content of the article, but worth pointing out that this project is funded by the proceeds of crimes committed at Drexel Burnham in the 80s. Michael Milken and his brother Lowell undoubtedly do good through their philanthrophy, but the cynic in me suspects that it is primarily an attempt to rehabilate their image and is treated as a business expense. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.

myko• 4 years ago

Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.

There was an interesting discussion around this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 (TikTok'er doing random acts of kindness for clout upset someone he used for his videos)

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

Intent is everything.

HoraceSchemer• 4 years ago

I'm not religious, but a particular legend has stuck with me:

A philanthropist once came to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to complain that he felt he was giving charity without sincerity. “Without sincerity? Nonsense!” replied the Rebbe. “There is plenty of sincerity. Perhaps you are not sincere in giving charity, but the poor are very sincere in receiving your charity. Even if you don't mean it, they do!”

[source](https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1885183/jewis...)

dvt3• 4 years ago

I live in Santa Monica and often walk past the Lowell Milken Family Foundation (which is close to the posh downtown). I always kind of smile and think about the story of how the Milken Family completely reinvented itself. Michael Milken, for context, was paid the highest yearly salary in the history of the world (~250M in one of his highest years if I remember correctly). He served 2 years in prison, his fine was 600M and the guy is still a billionaire (he also got pardoned by Trump in 2020). He's a self-admitted crook and liar[1].

How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds? Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research? Forbes and CNN certainly think so[2] (even in 2004, for that matter). William K. Black put it well: "the best way to rob a bank is to own one."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220428215122/https://www.nytim...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004...

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

At some point punishment has to end and you move forward in life. The justice system would be a lot more fair if this was applied equally.

vba6162• 4 years ago

How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?

I'm not familiar with the context of what Michael Milken did (although he's famous enough I know the name), but your (rhetorical?) question sounds very strange to me.

An omniscient and omnipotent being that knew the right amount of junk bonds to issue could probably answer how many lives were destroyed or harmed by creating the wrong amount.

But when a question like that is asked, you're asking human beings, not God, and it sounds rhetorical, which means that the answer is supposed to be obvious, I think.

If you were asking about milk with melamine in it, then I would understand what you meant. But junk bonds aren't inherently useless or defective.

phonon• 4 years ago

How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?

Zero? What evidence do you have otherwise? None of his crimes were related to the issuance of high yield bonds. It's not like penny stocks being pushed from a boiler room...he helped create a market for higher risk, higher yield bonds. Historically, they have done pretty well in a portfolio.

derefr• 4 years ago

Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research?

If someone was an asshole, but has decided to stop being an asshole and try out "being a nice person" instead — then your choice, as an onlooker, is between either encouraging them in their new take on life; or pushing back due to their past actions. Through your actions, you can choose to live in a society where "turning over a new leaf" like that is either incentivized, such that more assholes become not-assholes... or disincentivized, such that the assholes' takeaway will be "damned if you do, damned if you don't", and they'll likely not bother, and keep being assholes.

Clearly, one of those options is better for the public good than the other.

mherdeg• 4 years ago

Gosh this makes me want to re-listen to some Capitol Steps parodies, like their 1992 classic "Mike Milken".

Growing up in the late 90s there were a few ways that I absorbed the pop-culture view of what had come recently. Old books collecting Erma Bombeck and Art Buchwald columns, plus old Doonesbury comics, plus a few Capitol Steps CDs, helped fill in some of the gaps for me in ways that I don't think newspapers or other sources really provided.

skippyboxedhero• 4 years ago

How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?

I think most people would struggle to name anyone. Milken is probably the most important person in modern finance, he was the JP Morgan of our era, no-one really comes close. And the impact for both companies and lenders was hugely positive, he organised financing for companies that would have gone bankrupt otherwise, he swept away the monopolistic finance that was emerging from the 70s (ofc, in the early 80s there was a very active attempt to stop Milken by the big banks, anti-semitism being a component of this). Private equity exists because of Milken, direct lending, offshoots of infra/real estate, he changed securities law, he increased management accountability (which was crippling economic growth), he increased the efficiency of corporate capital structures (also crippling growth), on and on. There are definitely innovations that were as important (securitization being one) but in terms of individual impact...no-one comes close (and he stopped working three decades ago...he is still that important, three decades later).

Milken certainly broke securities laws...improper disclosure of 13D/Gs, inaccurate commission disclosure, trades made for non-economic reasons, and (what he wasn't convicted for) improper separation between his personal deals and customer deals. A lot of the other stuff though was a combination of wrong and what almost everyone else was doing (and it took changes in regulation, a lot of these problems continued into the 90s because rules didn't change, Milken going to jail changed nothing).

Btw, all of the things he was actually charged for were supposedly harms against customers...but how many customers were unhappy with the business they did?

It is also worth saying that I don't think anyone who is actually familiar with Milken can think he did it for the money either. The guy basically didn't leave his desk, didn't take holidays, and lived in the same house that he lived in when he wasn't a billionaire.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

Seems morally consistent. We were the bad guys in Vietnam and this is an article about a soldier who went above and beyond in extreme situations to further our rampage.

Of course Milken was just a selfish criminal with powerful friends, and Hegdahl was fighting for a principle (even if that principle was to create a firebreak out of Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian corpses to protect the world from Communism.)

camillomiller2• 4 years ago

Nice to see that someone gets it

p1necone• 4 years ago

it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though

My take on this is that no, it doesn't. Philanthropy is useful regardless of the source.

But it also absolves you of no guilt, and the shitty things you did in the past are still shitty, and you shouldn't expect people to like you any more just because you're donating to charity. (Although maybe people who know you personally can judge better whether you've improved.)

stocknoob• 4 years ago

I don’t think you can just draw a line in the timeline and say “the philanthropy after the crime is useful and therefore justified”.

You have to look at the chain of causation.

camillomiller2• 4 years ago

Not sure if spewing badly written propaganda about the bloodiest war of invasion America ever waged could be considered doing good

retcon• 4 years ago

Drexel was shut down by order of one certain ambitious NY Assistant AG by the name of Rudy Giuliani. The indictment? Criminal prosecution for statutory civil offences of two counts of failure to file stock transfer forms that by the letter of the law impose a fin e. Sentence: 12 years in federal. Appealed and won. Key witnesses for the prosecution included the convicted fraudster Ivan Boesky. RICO was the act abused to overnight shutter the single most critical liquidity provider to the savings and loans industry. American Thrifts to almost the last were bankrupted instantly. Cost to the taxpayer for the bailout? Cheap at four trillion.

Edited extraneous adjectives and sp

Oh and Lowell Milken, Mike's brother, was charged before anyone else by Giuliani in a overt and well documented hostage manipulation. Lowell never held operational executive office sufficient to have any involvement with the affair and his indictment was dropped. I should probably also note that Mike infamously never spent money on lifestyle and had to be brute forced into upgrading dress and toupee. Anyone on the street as successful as Mike and not spending money will have accumulated substantial wealth even if you don't count the Rodeo drive era. Much of which wealth went into settling civil suits.

Edit2: Giuliani's correct job title at the time

tedheath1232• 4 years ago

Regarding Giuliani and his handling of the case, you make a good point. The politicization of law enforcement is something we should all be concerned about.

You're quite right that the charges were dropped against Lowell in return for a guilty plea from his brother. However, if Stewart's account in Den of Thieves is to be believed, then Lowell was intimately involved in the affair.

silentsea902• 4 years ago

This is movie script material right here.

lqet• 4 years ago

It would be a completely plausible additional plot line in Forrest Gump.

silentsea902• 4 years ago

Ha! This fits so well there that people would refuse to believe it actually happened

hackitup72• 4 years ago

Part of this story was adapted as part of the Vietnam war documentary Tropic Thunder, although they took some artistic license

Stratoscope2• 4 years ago

This reminds me of Jeremiah Denton, a POW in that same war who was interviewed on TV to explain that the prisoners were being treated humanely. As he gave the verbal answers his captors expected, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code:

  –  –––  •–•  –  ••–  •–•  •
  T   O    R   T   U    R   E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code

Epilog: A few years ago, someone gave me a Fourth of July T-shirt. Made in Vietnam.

It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.

RC_ITR• 4 years ago

It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.

Well, counterpoint: it really shows how China’s ascent has made for strange bedfellows.

gedy3• 4 years ago

It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.

I don't know about that, I do think it shows that the lives lost to fight 'American Imperialism' were mostly a waste, as Vietnam today is largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued. There's no US bases there I suppose, but USSR did have bases after the war. They also lost hundreds of thousands afterwards as boat people.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

We probably should count Viet Namese soldiers and civilians killed, on both sides, and Cambodians and Laotians, and probably even victims of Khner Rouge.

Then, all the forests wiped out with Agent Orange, and the long-lasting dioxin contamination. I have not seen any accounting of species driven to extinction by this treatment. Probably many were not even catalogued first.

einpoklum4• 4 years ago

largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued

Oh, it's not even remotely similar.

einpoklum4• 4 years ago

It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars.

Don't make a false equivalence. The Vietnamese were occupied by foreigners and did indeed - on the whole - want to struggle and fight for liberation from the US. As for people in the US - they were sent off to fight for geopolitical advantages of the ruling elite, for rubber supply security etc.

Stratoscope2• 4 years ago

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I certainly didn't mean to make a false equivalence, only to mention that most people in either land didn't want this war.

Of course as you point out, once forced into it, the Vietnamese people really had little choice but to defend their home.

It reminds me a bit of another war going on right now.

polishdude20• 4 years ago

Simple Jack!

hackitup72• 4 years ago

I'm a lead farmer!

einpoklum4• 4 years ago

Well, Hegdahl was somewhat stupid in at least one way: He fought on the side of the evil, genocidal, occupiers of Vietnam. Less stupid people dodged the draft or outright refused.

The Incredibly Stupid One

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