Porter Broyles's Reviews > The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

30 years ago or so I took a college course on the Vietnam War.

I was finishing a major in History with a concentration on Asia.

To be honest with you, it was a somewhat foregettable course.

The biggest principle I learned was that "modern" history can not be trusted.

My professor stressed that everything that we were learning in his class was probably wrong! He said that enough time had not passed between the actual events and the story being told to really know what happened.

He taugh that modern history (anything within the past 50 years) was still clouded by emotions and secrecy.

This is a principle I believe to this day.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tregedy in Vietnam is an absolute example of this lesson.

I still own the books that served as the foundation of the course I took in college.

After finishing this book---wherein Edward Lansdale is the key figure---I decided to look in the indexes of the books used in my college course. In one book, I found 8 whole pages that mentioned Edward Lansdale. In another, there are four consecutive pages dedicated to him.

Those were books published before 1990.

Fast forward to 2018--- roughly 50 years after the events give or take a few years---768 pages about the Vietnam War with Edward Lansdale being the key figure. While this book is not a biography of Lansdale, it might as well have been.

Lansdale, an Air Force General, was a pioneer with the CIA and "counter insurgency."

In the 1950s Lansdale was a pivotal force in the Phillipines. If you've followed my reviews, you know that I just read the book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War which discussed Arthur MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur's history there. While Douglas MacArthur was a pivotal figure in the 40s and into the Korean War, Lansdale played a significant role in preventing the Phillipines from becoming Communist in the 1950s.

His perception of the Phillipines was swayed by his friendships and long term affair with a Phillipina woman Pat Kelly. Pat helped him to understand the Phillipines and Asian mentality, which served him well in helping to prevent the Phillipines from becoming Communist. Boot points out that the Phillipines was the only place wherein democratic ideals won the day against Communistic ideals without the expenditure of lives or money.

Lansdale then was assigned to Vietnam.

Boot makes a convincing, if not debatable, argument that Lansdale was both over his head AND right in his approach to Vietnam. Lansdale initially misunderstood Vietnam. He blundered. Yet, because of his connections to his mistress Pat and the Phillipines he came to understand Vietnam better than most.

Had Lansdale been listened to in the 1960s, America's experience in the war might have taken a different path.

Reading this book, I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that 30 years ago, Lansdale was merely a footnote in the books we read.

Today, I could not imagine studying the subject and not knowing who Lansdale was.

Personally, this book epitomized why "modern" history cannot be trusted... it takes at least 50 years to begin to understand history.