For our latest counterfactual David talks to historian Thant Myint-U about his grandfather U Thant, UN Secretary General for most of the 1960s and the man who might have ended the Vietnam War before it really got started. How close did U Thant get to bringing LBJ and the Vietcong to the negotiating table in 1964? What ultimately scuppered his chances? And how differently might the Cold War have turned out if he had succeeded?Sign up now to PPF+ to get ad-free listening and all our bonus episodes: available now a new bonus on Michel Houellebecq’s explosive political fiction Submission www.ppfideas.com Coming soon: More What Ifs… on WWI, the Russian Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.Up next: Fifteen Fiction for Summer from Coriolanus to Hamilton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.