What would a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir see in a socialist politician like Zohran Mamdani?

Or, for their part, rank-and-file employees at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bae Systems, and Northrop Grumman? On one side, you have products like Maven, Palantir’s technology that optimizes targeting decisions (what they call the “kill chain”), or Hellfire missiles and GBU-38 JDAM guidance kits manufactured by Raytheon. And on the other side, the promise of fast, free buses, free childcare, a rent freeze, alongside the unequivocal view that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza. These worlds seem entirely disconnected from one another. Turns out, they’re not.

Last Fall, my class was reviewing campaign finance data for the New York City mayoral race. File this under stuff journalism students do. Even in the age of AI, it’s important that reporters know where to find data and what to do with it. What data means is a separate question. And as we found more than 70 donations to Zohran Mamdani from employees at Palantir and a handful of other defense contractors, this question seemed one worth exploring.

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Nobody really wants to talk about this, though. No Palantir employees who donated to Mamdani responded to a request for an interview. The same was true for Raytheon, General Dynamics, and most other contractors. And the Mayor Mamdani’s press shop didn’t respond to a request for comment. Yet, one employee did respond. And the interview below shows that while the statistical signal may be insignificant — these donations accounted for less than $5,000 of the more than $4 million Mamdani pulled in during the 2025 campaign — the moral predicament this captures is not.

The behavior isn’t entirely an outlier. Scratching the surface of Congressional campaign finance data, junior Palantir employees — software engineers, recruiters, sales reps—sent money to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Cori Bush, and PACs like Swing Left, Progressive Turnout Project, and Vote Save America. Their boss, Alex Karp, showed what one may call pragmatism (others may see it as the absence of conviction): he donated $360,000 to Kamala Harris in October and November 2023 (before she announced), then $1,000,000 to MAGA, Inc. in December 2024.

The dissonance here may be more of a reflection of our campaign finance system than anything else, but it signals something at the heart of this: individual choice. And what it means to exercise it within the current political and economic realities. I was grateful to find someone willing to talk about this. I’ll call him Defense Engineer. (I’ve concealed personal identifiers to not jeopardize his job with a company that builds, among other things, weapons systems currently being used in Iran, Israel, and Lebanon.)

This conversation has been edited and condensed for readability.

Defense Engineer: Hey, Johnny, this is [Defense Engineer].

Johnny: Hey, [Defense Engineer], how are you?

DE: Doing well, how about you?

Johnny: To kick off, tell me a little bit about your interest in Mamdani and how your donations came about.

DE: Yeah, I think early in his campaign, I took a little bit of interest. I’m a member of DSA, actually. I’m not a super active member, but in my social circles and stuff, Mamdani was someone who was coming up as someone to be excited for. And then summer of last year, I happened to be in New York City [and] saw some of the flyers and started kind of getting more interested, started following the social media campaign and saw “man, this guy is doing it all right.” His messaging was on point as far as what I wanted to hear from a more left-wing side of the aisle and as well as with DSA messaging. My participation with DSA has been a lot of frustrations with National DSA and their weird mix of coalitions in DSA. I was seeing what NYC DSA was doing, as “these guys have it together” in terms of making something real, right? I mean, why are you part of a DSA if you don’t believe at least somewhat in electoral politics? And so I was really excited.

Johnny: Tell me a little bit about your journey to DSA, and I guess, you know, your basic political journey.

DE: Yeah, I feel my journey is probably somewhat common in that high-school-wise I definitely had a bit of an internet edgelord streak, too much time on 4chan. I had a libertarian streak, but I didn’t have very coherent politics. And then in college, that started to melt away, especially 2016. I did not like Trump; I didn’t care for Hillary. I think I, oh God, it’s really one of the most shameful things I ever did is I voted for Gary Johnson.

Johnny: Okay.

DE: I mean, how fucking embarrassing is that?

Johnny: I don’t even remember what his affiliation was.

DE: He was Libertarian Party.

Johnny: Okay.

DE: After 2016, [I] started to be a little bit more apolitical, though I would say I started leaning more towards standard liberalism, laissez-faire liberalism. I started understanding a lot more about what a lot of my female peers in engineering or just you know women in general were dealing with all the time. [I] got more exposed to the adult and working world [and] a lot of other miscellaneous experiences of racism, where I started to be just generally more amenable to liberalism. I would say my hard shift more to farther to the left was 2020. When the interest rates were low, my wife and I were able to buy a house. Part of that was privilege and part of that was luck because my wife didn’t have student loans, but I did. And you know when that market blew up I felt a great deal of guilt and I don’t know if maybe guilt is the I just I was really astonished by how unfair it was that I was able to buy a house where I can now pay a mortgage that’s less than most people’s rent. Most other people of my age were not so lucky or were not so fortunate. That was a real change in a sense of economic inequality and again as well as luck, right? It was this narrow window of time in which we could make that purchase. And then January 6th, there was a real point of “holy shit.” I’d say the thing that’s probably most consistent is I’ve always had a very strong sense of democratic principles. And so that whole— the whole everything leading up to that, the event itself was really earth-shaking for me of , you know, what is— what is going on here? You know, why is the Democratic Party so unable to really handle this? And I mean by this point, I was much more turned towards social democracy, I think I was much more of Bernie, Elizabeth Warren kind of a voter. I had a friend who was already a member of DSA. He had persuaded me over some time where, you know, learning more about Marxism or various leftist philosophy. I think it was ‘23 I joined DSA. I haven’t been super active in this local chapter. I would say kind of where I am politically is democratic socialist. I have to just be very careful about how open I am in the industry I’m in, and also being in [REDACTED], you know, you can’t tell too many people you’re a socialist without it getting you some weird looks. So usually if I talk to anyone about politics I’m never using any labels that would, you know, give me away.

Johnny: Tell me about your arc—or maybe it’s just a straight line—as an engineer. How did your education and career develop?

DE: My interest in becoming an aerospace engineer is around grade school, all the way from grade school. I think it’s kind of—it’s also embarrassing— there’s this general childish love of airplanes and Top Gun, which is unquestionably a propaganda movie, was very influential in my interest in aerospace. I think most people would agree that planes are cool and interesting and military planes and their technology are cool and interesting. If you force yourself to actually confront the politics of it, it becomes kind of a problem. I didn’t really have that confrontation until after my undergrad. After I graduated, I worked for this UAV company called [REDACTED]. It just fucking sickens me now. I think one thing I can say is literally nothing I’ve worked on should have killed anybody. At least as of now, which is good.

I love airplanes. I love aviation and I thought it was really awesome working on these airplanes. That’s what I focused on and less about the mission or why the government was contracting us to do these things. Though I was always more interested in some of the more benevolent reasons. I came out to [REDACTED], started working at [REDACTED] I’d say the majority of what I work on then and still now was commercial or human spaceflight. You know, there’s no getting away that there’s some of these other defense programs where it’s part of the work that the company has. And I’ll say definitely since October 7th it became really hard to tell people that even though I know I don’t work on anything that is deployed there, to even say that I work at [REDACTED]. Like I don’t— it’s—I’m not proud of it.

And so but at that point, we were—we had education assistance to repay, and then we had—there were some places as far as it would have been difficult to transition career-wise. Before Trump took office, what I really wanted to do was go into wind energy or to go and work for the NTSB, or the FAA... I was really thinking or NASA, I was really thinking about a public sector job. But now: fuck no, I’m not at all going to do that. You know, I have friends in the public sector or, you know, they do research stuff and how can I expect any sort of stability out of that or it’s going to be a horrible time.

At least right now I’ve got an offer from [REDACTED] and I’m interested with it’s a unionized engineering workforce. I’ve been thinking a lot about being involved in that. It was—I had explored amongst various coworkers how interested anyone— in a not very direct way—interested in unionizing. And [REDACTED] is not a good name to be associated with either, but I would to work in general aviation. If that doesn’t work out, it might just be commercial spaceflight, you know. My hatred for Elon Musk is so fiery, SpaceX is completely off the table for me.

Johnny: To this broader idea of the ethics of engineering—so much innovation comes out of the defense space, what are your choices if you’re an engineer and you’re socially conscious?

DE: Yeah, so definitely I’ve thought about this a lot. In aerospace it’s very hard to be in the industry and completely escape defense in some way. America’s only kind of really onshore American industry is all of these defense jobs programs. You’re in this very hard spot where you have to keep funding them because if you don’t, there’re next to no skilled industrial jobs for these people to go to. And the ways in which that industry is subject to politics and this commingling of defense is really agonizingly painful where I don’t know—I don’t have a set idea of really what to do about it. Like I don’t—if I were to say be president how would I reallocate this capital towards non-defense purposes? It would be very difficult because so much of the capital is so bespoke towards this pipeline of weaponry.

And of course tons of people buy into these very bullshit ideas about defense. What freaks me out is spending money on interceptor systems because those are escalatory, counterintuitively. You know this Iron Dome stuff. Even before that, there’s another major interceptor system being developed. Before October 7th and the genocide in Gaza, I was able to carry under the illusion that the US won’t get into another evil Iraq War kind of situation. And now I can’t. I can’t ever believe that. I think so much of this is wasteful spending that we’re in a very captive situation.

And I don’t know, it’s a very hard problem where I don’t really know how to roll it back, I just don’t know how radical I can be removing myself from it completely [without] putting myself in a bad position for raising a family. It’s hard. I would have to leave and go to probably Europe to pick up a decent engineering job. Or China I guess, I guess. It’s been a hard thing where the state of the world is not ideal for the life and morals I want to hold to.

Johnny: I think there is—there’s some version of this in every industry, maybe—maybe the line’s a little more direct in defense. In terms of comportment with your colleagues do politics come up? Does any of this stuff come up?

DE: A lot of my close friends in the industry, they’re of surprisingly very similar mindsets. There’s quite a lot of us who are fairly left-wing. Where I work right now, since so much of the work is [REDACTED] or commercial spaceflight, there’s a degree to which you can separate yourself from working too much on a weapons. I’ve got some friends who exclusively work SLS [Space Launch System]. A lot of them, they’ve been trying to leave the industry to avoid defense as much as possible. There’s other folks who I’d say are just come from a different background where from my perspective, they really kind of drank the Kool-Aid of what they work on a lot more. And I don’t—I don’t forcefully argue with them, but I oftentimes will push back, especially, say, for example, the interceptor systems. I pretty often very strongly convey my opposition to them as even a good idea in concept. I spent a lot of time just reading the literature and if you go to kind of the ‘80s, all the literature is from—is written by Americans dealing with the Star Wars program under Reagan. And basically all of it is pretty negative on it because all of them concede this—if you put out a system that can defeat your enemies, that has the innate consequence of then your adversary has to escalate, build more weapons to counteract your interceptor system. Or that right now you make it easier for you to say your enemy’s arsenal, they can’t use it against you, but you can now inflict force against them. I would say actually a very recent case here would be Iran and Israel. Where Iran can launch a lot of rockets at Israel and basically none of them will hit Israel, but that gives Israel a huge amount of ability to strike Iran expecting to be able to get no real significant retaliation. So that’s a kind of a good case of where an interceptor system actually makes things escalatory.

Johnny: Turning back to New York City, Mamdani, DSA—one thing the Left has been criticized for, perhaps more than the right, is, policing of the the politics of candidates and of people within a party. Do you think that there’s room within DSA or within Mamdani’s coalition for people who work within the defense industry?

DE: There’s a couple of things there. For example, the makeup of the engineering force in SPEEA (Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace union) is 50 percent Republican. So many of these engineers don’t like the Democrats very much, but they vote in these ways where they’re very deleterious to [their] union, right? These Republican administrations hurt the unions quite a lot. But the Republicans will probably give you a lot of red meat in just direct funding or defense contracts. There’s lots of people in the defense industry myself, my friends, who don’t want to be put in this morally bad position. And we really want to be working towards something good. If you want to build a mass movement, you have to in some ways engage just the breath of people who live and work in this country. So I think any sort of purity testing... maybe for candidates you have to do a little bit of purity testing, but for the voters themselves, you know, engage everyone as much as you can.

I think—and you know if a lot of leftists want to criticize me for lacking moral fortitude or courage…I recently read One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and it made me think a lot about. Should I have just resigned on principle, seeing the genocide in Gaza? And you know does that make me, you know, complicit and a coward and, you know, you... it’s hard to not answer and maybe that answer is yes.

And but you know there’s it—we live in a society where there’s... well, I think it’s sometimes a cop-out to say, you know, there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism or have that sort of argument, but we live in a society that doesn’t give us a lot of good options. And those options have been restricted so much more. All of us have to make choices where we frequently are just always forced to operate under systems and in societies that we don’t want to. And you have to do the good that you can.

Johnny: I think that could also be said of being mayor of New York City, particularly in a moment when the federal government’s very hostile to funding things that the city needs funded. What—I mean, how do you think Mamdani should navigate this same sort of fraught moral, ethical, political landscape that you have?

DE: Uh, that’s a good question. His platform of affordability, I think, as long as he can stay as committed to that as possible. I think there’s no getting away that you probably have to do a little bit of concessions to just get something that works that starts to help people and keep building political momentum and grow the base and gain support. It’s really important that he doesn’t fail on delivering his promises of making cheaper and better services for New Yorkers and that doesn’t—that—and that payment for that doesn’t come from, you know, the people who are already struggling. You know, that has to come from the people who have more than enough to contribute to the city to fund that.

I think there’d have to be some a Fetterman-esque turn to the dark side to really see a loss of support. It’s going to be a hard—it’s a hard fight to kind of claw left-wing power away from the pervasive liberal hegemony and the more really entrenched right-wing all over the country. So any little gains towards building power, I’m for it. And I won’t take any of it for granted.

Johnny: Yeah. Well, thank you, thank you so much.

I can write with absolute certainty that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was not fired for failure to respond to the 52 FOIA requests and appeals I’ve submitted to DHS since last summer.

It has nothing to do with my efforts to obtain information about inappropriate relationships, fraud, drug abuse, bribery, theft, sexual assault, misuse of funds, and excessive force within the department.

To be fair, DHS did respond.

Specifically, Customs and Border Protection. (God love ‘em.) While their counterparts at ICE have all but ghosted me on these identical subjects, CBP has released dribs and drabs of material on bribery, drug and alcohol use, relationships with subordinates, and fraud.

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The requests were narrow to Noem’s tenure: records from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)—the component charged with investigating these types of accusations. CBP has sent nothing back regarding theft, sexual assault, misuse of funds, or excessive force. But I did receive OPR records on the other categories of allegations. They’re heavily redacted (in many cases, completely redacted), but nonetheless provide a window into CBP—and the cases that the office was working during Noem’s term.

Documents don’t make a story…yet. What we have here is a signal from inside Noem’s DHS about some of the misconduct CBP was investigating. Does their leadership take this seriously? Hard to tell. After requesting a list of detailed questions from me more than a month ago, their press shop stopped responding.

To Representative Swallwell’s point, there are open questions about accountability within DHS. And I’ll continue to seek answers.

Why am I publishing these today? Honestly, I thought I had more time…perhaps, Secretary Noem did too.

(Read the OPR files for yourself: bribery, drug and alcohol use, relationships with subordinates, and fraud (100% redacted).

Customs and Border Protection, Office of Professional Responsibility - Incidents filed between January 20, 2025 - July 29, 2025 by Category

A summary of the contents (with some help from NotebookLM):

Inappropriate Subordinate Relationships

• April 29, 2025: A management inquiry investigated an allegation that a Supervisory Border Patrol Agent (SBPA) had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate Supervisory Border Patrol Agent (SBPA).

• May 9, 2025: A related inquiry was filed regarding an inappropriate subordinate relationship, directing readers to “please see attached source document for additional information”.

Redactions:

• Exemptions (b)(2), (b)(7)(E): Used to redact the Event IDs and the RIG source tracking number.

• Exemptions (b)(6), (b)(7)(C): Used to redact the name of the subordinate Supervisory Border Patrol Agent (SBPA) involved.

• Exemption (b)(7)(A): Large blocks spanning the remainder of the subject area are completely redacted.

Bribery

• February 28, 2025: A Chinese national attempted to bribe a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO) with $900 to gain entry into the U.S.. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) declined the case due to the circumstances and amount. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) arrested the individual, but the Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) declined prosecution. The subject was processed for Expedited Removal from the U.S. that same day.

• March 26, 2025: A Supervisory Customs and Border Protection Officer (SCBPO) self-reported a bribery incident involving a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO).

• May 5, 2025: An investigation was opened into an unknown Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employee receiving kickbacks for every CBP vehicle towed.

• May 13, 2025: An anonymous tip alleged a traveler gave a monetary bribe to an unknown Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO) at an airport. A search of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) systems by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) found no employee matching the provided name and no derogatory information regarding the traveler.

Redactions:

• Exemptions (b)(2), (b)(7)(E): Used to redact Event IDs, RIG (Report of Investigation/Incident Gathering) numbers, and Office of Inspector General/Department of Homeland Security (OIG/DHS) Blackbook numbers.

• Exemptions (b)(6), (b)(7)(C): Used to obscure personally identifiable information (PII) including Special Agent (SA) names, employee names, the Chinese national’s name and Date of Birth (DOB), specific airport locations, and the flight/boarding information for the subject’s removal.

• Exemption (b)(7)(A): Used to heavily redact entire sections at the end of the bribery logs, likely indicating ongoing law enforcement proceedings.

Alcohol and Drug Use

• January 29, 2025: A Supervisory Border Patrol Agent (SBPA) reported the arrest of a Contractor (CTR) for Driving Under the Influence / Driving While Intoxicated (DUI/DWI).

• February 27, 2025: A Border Patrol Agent (BPA) was found drunk in public by the police department and was taken to a volunteer-run recovery shelter to sober up.

• March 6, 2025: A Contractor was referred to a secondary inspection at a Port of Entry, where a Customs and Border Protection Officer (CBPO) discovered 1.0 gram of cocaine in their wallet. The contractor was issued a $500 penalty.

• March 12, 2025: An inquiry was closed regarding a positive drug test for cocaine.

• April 3, 2025: A mechanic supervisor returned a positive drug test.

• April 7, 2025: A Border Patrol Processing Coordinator (BPPC) returned a positive drug test for marijuana. Records indicated the employee was no longer active with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

• May 8, 2025: An Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) Field Office Duty Agent (Special Agent / SA) was contacted regarding a Supervisory employee who tested positive for Codeine during a random drug test.

Redactions:

• Exemptions (b)(2), (b)(7)(E): Used to redact Event IDs across all entries.

• Exemptions (b)(6), (b)(7)(C): Extensively used to protect identities and specific details, including the names of arrested contractors, the drunk-in-public Border Patrol Agent (BPA), the specific Port of Entry, the identities of officers conducting searches, and local police report numbers.

• Exemption (b)(7)(A): Massive blocks of information are completely withheld under this exemption, interrupting event narratives and hiding subsequent incident details.

Fraud / Financial Allegations

Summary of Incidents:

• The entire list of financial-related allegations has been withheld from the released record.

Instances of Redaction:

• Exemption (b)(7)(A): Every single entry under the “Financial Type” header—including the Event Date, Event ID, Allegation, and Incident Summary—is completely redacted under (b)(7)(A).
  
  

  Share ATTENTION EDIFICE | By Johnny Dwyer

Get ready for an anecdote. And, if you know me, a particularly well-trod one. But at the end of it is an app I just built. (I know, I’m as surprised as anyone else.)

Some years back, I was in Liberia spending my time with former child soldiers from Charles Taylor’s faction, the NPFL. One thread that ran through reporting on the civil war surrounded the supernatural beliefs of the fighters, many of whom believed that going into battle wearing fetishes—jewelry, wedding dresses, etc.—or nothing at all, stark naked—conjured magic that protected them from bullets. Lurid details easy to exoticize, but less easy to understand. Too many reporters stepped into this trap—I wanted to avoid it, so I asked a fighter what he thought of this. Did they really believe this? He didn’t outright dismiss it. It just wasn’t for him—as if he was talking about Steely Dan. I asked him to elaborate. He was a Christian, he reminded me, and that sort of magic wasn’t for those who believed in God. You needed a more animistic view of the world. But, then he shrugged and said, “if you believe in it, it works for you.”

I could’ve been in Ojai.

A lot of talk about artificial intelligence sounds like this. The sort of self-reinforcing mysticism that clearly isn’t indigenous to Silicon Valley. But, it’s getting a pretty intense workout in discussions of the promise of AI. Which, let’s be frank, isn’t intelligence — it’s something, though.

And as if that question has been settled, we’re on to agentic AI: the intelligence that is somehow smart enough to do your job, but not smart enough to get out of the business of working for a living.

Jokes aside, I was curious: could I build an agent to do a task for me?

The answer: if you believe in it, it works for you. Kind of.

So, here’s Threde.ai. A completely free—no doubt, imperfect—agent that reads the newsletters stacking up in your Gmail, prioritizes the stories you should read, and creates a digest that you can read each morning. And then jump off to the real, original reporting.

None of this can touch the experience of reading the physical newspaper. But, as I tinker with it, I’m going to work to recreate a version of it. That mixture of editorial wisdom and topical kismet you’ll only find with ink on your fingertips.

Have at it. Tell me how it breaks.

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Another week, another war.

It’s understandable—but mistaken—to think of the events of the past few days as normal. Venezuala, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq. War may be policy by another means. But for this administration policy is war. Whether it comes to trade, domestic policy, or foreign policy. But the shifting rationales that we’ve heard this week regarding Iran are hardly an innovation in U.S. politics. One may fear it’s business as usual.

A few weeks back, I returned to Hearts and Minds, the Oscar-winning 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War—an artifact from a shattered America still struggling to confront its tragic and deadly mistake. Seems like most of us can open our front doors and watch that play out in realtime right now. But, it’s hard to imagine a better film to make sense of this moment.

The film is stark in its portrayal of the lies that made the war in Vietnam possible. Not just those told by the Pentagon and White House, but the lies Americans tell ourselves. The director, Peter Davis, 89, a longtime filmmaker and journalist for CBS, The Nation, and others, lives between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Maine these days. I was curious to hear how he felt about this moment and—even though we caught up before the war with Iran kicked off—found his perspective as sharp as his masterpiece film.

…oh, and yes, Attention Edifice is new. If you like this sort of thing, please subscribe.

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An interview with Peter Davis

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Johnny Dwyer

It’s been 51 years since Hearts and Minds was released. [Watching it recently] I was really struck by the moral clarity of the film. And I’d obviously grown up seeing a lot of different documentaries about Vietnam, but this was different because it was made during the war, and you didn’t have the full benefit of hindsight. Tell me a little bit about how you arrived at your perspective on Vietnam for the film?

Peter Davis

I made a film for CBS News called “The Selling of the Pentagon.” And that film is absolutely what led to Hearts and Minds. “The Selling of the Pentagon” was [about] how the Pentagon sells war, really.

As a result of that, an old friend of mine, the filmmaker Bob Rafelson, put me together with his partner, Bert Schneider. This is while I was working for CBS News. And I went out to California and had a meeting with him. At first, I was still at this time hoping not to go to Vietnam. In my little crew of four, I was the only one who was married, the only one who had children. The others [did not] including Dick Pearce, Tom Cohen, and Brennon Jones—great people.

I was thinking possibly that the trial of Dan Ellsberg and his partner, who helped him, would be a kind of armature around which I could wind the war. I mean, this was stupid, but that’s what I thought. That I would interview the witnesses for the prosecution and for the defense who came to California to testify. Well, neither the defense nor the prosecution would let any of their witnesses talk to me. So this bad luck turned out to be good luck. I realized that I was going to have to go.

I flew to Vietnam, and Brennon Jones, who I worked with at CBS News, oddly enough, drove me out to a little village outside Saigon. And, Jesus, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I saw a place where a bomb had struck and put a huge hole in the ground. It was maybe twenty feet across. The first thing I saw was a kid’s bicycle wrapped around a little tree. Then I saw a piece of crockery and a bowl that had been used for cooking, and it was splattered. Only then did I see an arm, a leg, a head, a torso, another arm, and another leg—of a child’s doll. That’s all it was, a child’s doll. And I knew how this would be treated at the network, any network. The camera person would pull back slowly and show each of these things. It’s what the networks call dead air. And they hate dead air. Then you come to the correspondent. I was terrified and angry at the same time.

I didn’t want to do filming of the war. I wanted to show the effects of the war. I decided that each part of the film—and the film wasn’t even shot yet—much less. Each part of the film would address itself to three questions. Why did we go to Vietnam? What was it that we did there? And what did the doing in turn do to us? Now, those three questions are not answered. But I wanted each part of the film to kind of address them. Now, I didn’t come to that conclusion that first day in Vietnam. The only thing I came to that first day in Vietnam was this film was going to be dead air — what the networks called dead air.

JD

Early in the film, there is a moment where you’re interviewing two sisters and they’re recounting a bombing that killed their third sister. It’s marked by a substantial amount of dead air—a notable pause.

Davis

That [was] in line with this thinking that, you know, this is not what we do in network television. But I’m going to do it here because it’s here as a distinct narrative purpose.

JD

This film was made coming out of like the late 1960s and the 1970s where there was a lot of upheaval. A lot of violence. There was a rejection of the status quo, whether it was a civil rights movement or the anti-war movement. Do you see any parallels today?

Davis

I do because Trump is a foe of the civil rights movement. I mean, look: anyone who can portray a former president and his wife as an ape is not somebody who’s in favor of the civil rights movement, right? I mean that portrayal of President Obama and Michelle Obama. Of all the horrible things this scoundrel has said and done. This is just got to be about the lowest.

When [Johnson] was president, I didn’t like him because of the way he escalated the Vietnam War, which I thought Kennedy probably wouldn’t have done—but I have no idea what Kennedy would have done. I do know that when Kennedy was assassinated, there were only 16,000 American troops in Vietnam, and by the time it hit its peak, there were 500,000. Johnson also did something very courageous. Johnson knew that because of the Civil Rights Act he was turning the South over to the Republicans. And it was a courageous thing that Johnson did and I admire him for that.

JD

Another thing that really struck me [in the film] was your ability to show Americans professing these firmly held beliefs, whether it’s about democracy, freedom from tyranny, or notions of justice. But then, air that, with evidence of American actions that are in direct opposition to those ideas.

Davis

Not one single person interviewed in the film had not been, at one time, in favor of the Vietnam War—including Ellsberg. Clark Clifford is a very good example. [In the film] I identify Clifford in different ways. I think the first time we show Clifford, it’s as an adviser to Harry Truman. At the end, it was as the Secretary of Defense, and he said he had no hesitation saying that he had a 180-degree reversal of his earlier position on the Vietnam War.

Well, that was something that was very impactful. In that, the government had undergone a change of heart— important parts of the government—as to the mistake of Vietnam.

JD

Looking at today, do you think that there is the capacity for any part of the government to have a similar change of heart?

Davis

It’s interesting. I don’t know whether Trump criticized the Vietnam War. But he definitely criticized the war in Iraq. I mean, here we are with a guy who wants the Nobel Prize for peace, yet he’s already made war in Iran one time, and he seems to be getting ready to do it again. It’s terrible. [He’s] kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and is killing people [in the Caribbean], who he has no idea whether they are transporting drugs or not. Trump has killed those people without due process.

JD

It’s likely an illegal policy. Yet, it has the initiative. It has the momentum, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone with the power or the will to stop it politically.

Davis

I also want to tell you something about my interview with [General] Westmoreland. Late in the interview, I had really asked all the questions. I was going to ask. I didn’t have any more, so I said to the crew, “Do any of you have any anything you want to ask General Westmoreland?” And the sound man, who’s also the associate producer, Tom Cohen. He says, “Look, general, you’ve served all over in World War II and [Vietnam] is there anything that makes you differentiate between people?” And he said, “well, the Oriental, doesn’t really care that much about human life.” At that point, we ran out of film. And I knew that he was going change his mind when we reloaded it. And he said it again. A second time. And at that point, Tom Cohen, the sound man, he ran out of sound. So he had to reload. I don’t know, this kind of thing couldn’t happen now, but it did happen. So, for the third time. He said the same thing, “the Oriental doesn’t put much value on human life.” I couldn’t believe that he said it three times.

JD

It drives home an important lesson of the film that I think is really lost to history is that racism against the Vietnamese was really central to what was going on.

Davis

And he complained afterwards that it was, it was a remark that was taken out of context. I wondered afterwards what context would he like to have been in?

JD

An effect of watching [Hearts and Minds] right now, a lot of what is said, particularly by the Vietnamese, comes across as almost prophetic. There’s a Buddhist monk in the film who says something like, “ultimately Americans will see the light. If not, they will defeat themselves.” Did you have a sense of the impact of those sorts of words?

Davis

No. I’m not quite sure how to answer it accurately. I felt that he was making a correct point.

JD

I was looking at the historic [Oscar] winners of this category of the best documentary. Last year’s winner, which was a film about the West Bank.

Davis

Oh, I love that. No Other Land. I loved that film. Of course, I voted for it. That’s such a scandal—it’s a murderous scandal, the way they were behaving on the West Bank.

JD

Do you feel like feature documentaries have lost some of their cultural power?

Davis

It’s the opposite. Just the opposite. I think when Hearts and Minds came out. Documentaries and Hearts and Minds did very poorly in theaters. It didn’t make back anything. But it seems to have stayed.

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