Colin Blaydon oral history interview

Professor Colin C. Blaydon oral history interview for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. Blaydon describes his early life and education, experience serving in army intelligence in the Vietnam War, and post-war career as a professor at Harvard Business School and later Dean of the Tuck School of Business. Blaydon grew up in Newport News, Virginia as the son of a Naval architect and engineer. He attended West Point before transferring to the University of Virginia as a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and was commissioned in the Army Corps of Engineers upon graduating in 1962. He went on to study applied mathematics at Harvard University, earning a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1967. Blaydon began working in military intelligence in 1966, first on Robert McNamara’s staff at the Pentagon, studying drone warfare, and then at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Blaydon left active duty in 1968 and became an assistant professor at Harvard Business School teaching quantitative analysis and finance. He went on to teach and serve as Dean at the Tuck School of Business, where he and Tuck colleagues assisted Vietnamese scholars in establishing a business school at Vietnam National University in Hanoi.