Konrad Kellen, a longtime resident of Pacific Palisades who lived a colorful and influential life, died April 8 in Los Angeles. He was 93. Kellen was a policy analyst at The Rand Corporation in Santa Monica and a major contributor to the organization’s pioneering studies dealing with the war in Vietnam and the motivation of terrorists. He joined Rand in 1966 to become part of a research team undertaking a major project exploring the motivation and morale of combatants in North Vietnam. He was among the first to argue that the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam would not deter the resolve of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. ‘Kellen was a leading scholar of psychological operations who made major contributions during the Cold War and in helping to develop our understanding of terrorist motivations,’ Rand president and CEO James A. Thomson said. ‘His scholarly contributions were influenced by the depth of his unique personal experiences.’ Born in Germany in 1913, Kellen fled with his family to escape the persecution of Jews by the Nazis and eventually made his way to New York, where he worked on Wall Street. During the late 1930s, he moved to the Palisades and served as a valued research assistant to Nobel prize-winning author Thomas Mann, who had also fled the Nazis. Kellen, who worked for Mann from 1939 until he was drafted into the Army in 1943, described one of his responsibilities in an interview with the Palisadian-Post. ‘Mr. Mann wrote the fourth volume of his stories of Joseph during my employment. He wrote in longhand on plain sheets of paper, no lines, and I transcribed it on the typewriter every day. I was the first reader and I enjoyed it greatly. He would write every day, no matter where he was, about two or three pages a day’never more, never less’and he wrote in an extremely economical style. When he read my transcripts, he would only change a word here, a word there. If he cut a sentence, generally it would show up 10 pages away. He knew English very well, but his German was unequaled in its beauty, its richness and its wonderful nuances.’ During World War II, Kellen served as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army in Europe and was awarded the Legion of Merit. After the war, he served as a political intelligence officer with the occupation forces. Upon returning to the United States, Kellen served in senior posts at Radio Free Europe. During the early 1960s he worked at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, the renowned military strategist who had earlier worked at Rand. Konrad was also a friend of Albert Einstein, who was a distant relative. Kellen authored or contributed to dozens of reports during his Rand career, which continued through 1996. He also wrote a biography of former Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev titled ‘Khrushchev: A Political Portrait,’ and ‘The Coming Age of Women Power,’ which predicted that women would reject men’s traditional view of their role in society. Kellen is survived by his wife, Patricia Kellen; his son David Kellen of Pacific Palisades; his daughters Jennifer and Elizabeth Kellen of Pacific Palisades; and his sister Estella Mysels. Services will be private.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
