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

A sympathetic but objective examination of the life and times of Edward Lansdale, the "T.E. Lawrence of Asia". Boot believes that Lansdale has been unfairly dismissed by journalists and historians as either naive or crazy in his approach to combating Communist insurgencies in the "third world" countries founded in the aftermath of World War II and the demise of European colonial empires. Boot makes the argument that Lansdale was one of the few who believed these conflicts were as much political as they were military, if not more so. Despite Lansdale's success in applying his ideas in both the Philippines and initially in South Vietnam, his inability to work smoothly with his superiors and other bureaucrats made him a pariah to many in powerful government positions and helped to ensure that he was eventually ignored. Whether Lansdale's "hearts and minds" approach could have prevented the eventual Communist victory in Vietnam is certainly debatable, but Boot argues that had the U.S. followed Lansdale's ideas, the destruction, loss of life, and national trauma might have been far less. A thoughtful treatment of this still controversial subject.