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

This is what might be called a situational biography of Edward Lansdale, an influential actor in American foreign policy -- primarily in the Philippines and Vietnam -- in the 1950's and the 1960's. "The road not taken" refers to Lansdale's favored policy path, which he referred to as "civic action," and which involved supporting efforts by native politicians to shore up democratic practices and infrastructure as the best hedges against insurrection and communism. The road taken was of course the ultimately disastrous one of seeing a small foreign country in turmoil only as a battlefield to be won by force of arms.

I say "actor" because Lansdale is difficult to pigeonhole in a meaningful way. Technically -- ultimately -- an Air Force major general, he was no pilot; the assignment to the Air Force appears to have been almost an act of Pentagon whimsy. Mustered into the World War II effort, he had experience as an advertising man that qualified him for the "psy-ops" of the OSS and for its successor, the CIA. But he was not a stereotypical spook either, even though the pages of the book are littered with cloak-and-dagger bombardier colleagues who were. Lansdale neither believed in nor practiced the standard practice of paying or blackmailing foreigners to spy on their own countries. He believed in forming bonds based on mutual trust and "the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish." Nor was he a typical foreign service officer of the bureaucratic type, yet a more effective diplomat may never have existed in the annals of American foreign policy. His personal approach accomplished real successes in stabilizing Filipino democracy in the early 50's, but in the face of bureaucratic opposition among fellow Americans met with only limited, temporary success in Vietnam.

Author Boot (a military historian with other books on guerrilla warfare and the technology of war) presents an even-handed account of Lansdale, who was something of a celebrity in his day as an advisor to Presidents, an influential author of think-pieces in such policy pubs as Foreign Affairs, and perhaps most characteristically as the model, at least in part, of the fictionally enshrined "ugly American" and "quiet American." There is plenty of contemporary criticism of Lansdale, mostly from the military and foreign service establishment, who saw his cultural-friendly activities and methods (Lansdale compiled a study of Vietnamese folk songs) as both bizarre and naive. Boot himself -- who excels at providing essential context for the book's large cast of characters that includes JFK, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Daniel Ellsberg, not to mention numerous Filipino and Vietnamese leaders central to the story -- occasionally evaluates Lansdale's notions and does not pull punches, e.g. calling Lansdale "delusional" at one point.

But Lansdale emerges as a hugely sympathetic character. One aspect of Lansdale's positive image is his practical belief in democracy, which formed the foundation for his signature "civic action" policy. This is tellingly contrasted with the shocking cynicism among Americans at the highest reaches of political power and influence. Working to engineer honest, clean elections at the national level for Vietnam (and, against the odds, largely succeeding), Lansdale triggered a "lengthy diatribe" by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge -- a Republican who had been Nixon's running mate in the 1960 presidential election, yet who had been appointed ambassador by Democrat JFK -- "about how he and Lyndon Johnson had spent most of their lives rigging elections." According to Lodge's aides, he wanted only the "appearance of a democracy," Lansdale wanted the real thing.

Mostly though the positive image of Lansdale that emerges from this book has to do with his advocacy of "humanity" as the basis for policy and personal behavior. He sympathized with and related well to the peasants in the countryside of the Philippines and Vietnam. His lack of language skills was no barrier; body and sign language were apparently enough to convey a bond knotted in common humanity (although the invaluable assistance of linguists is also part of the story). His core principles, as outlined by Boot, were "learn, like, and listen;" the book is a chronicle of his indefatigable efforts to acquire the best kind of "intelligence" and of his application of loyal friendship to every level of personal contact. His advice, late in his career in Vietnam, to incoming US war leader Creighton Abrams about how best to work with the Vietnamese leaders is an example: "Be a human being. … It's about time we got this thing on the basis of humans talking to each other."

The wisdom of Lansdale's approach is sharply contrasted with the fleshless, numbers-driven approach that ruled the American military-diplomatic roost in Vietnam, best represented by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Called into McNamara's office in 1962 and presented with a list of "factors" that could help "computerize" (Lansdale's word) the war, Lansdale told McNamara he had left out the most important one: the "X" factor, which was "what the people out on the battlefield really feel." McNamara didn't get it; after Lansdale persisted in suggesting ways to gather that information, he told Lansdale not to bother him anymore.

[I was re-acquainted with a favorite anecdote of mine about McNamara: trying to speak in support of a short-lived Vietnamese president suspected of being a US puppet, McNamara used Vietnamese words meaning "Vietnam 10,000 years," but his garbled pronunciation rendered it, "Ruptured duck wants to lie down."]

The final, positive judgment of Lansdale is that his ideals made him in some sense a prophet. (The word "Cassandra" had already sprung to my mind by the time Boot uses it.) In 1957 he knew that the US military was too dependent on "mechanical means of warfare," even when it was engaged in unconventional war. His advice at the time was for military personnel to "make friends among the people." While his advice had some effect in the development of training for special forces, it was more generally ignored. In 1958 he said, "We don't want to be like the French," who had millions of dollars worth of modern weaponry, ample bravery, and numbers, but who were "licked by a local army wearing tennis shoes and pajamas." He argued against building up a huge American military presence and against bombing North Vietnam. He argued in favor of rules of engagement by the South Vietnamese military -- who would be doing the fighting rather than Americans -- that would protect non-combatants. Boot comments ruefully, "The US military would not recognize the utility of such restrictive rules of engagement, designed to avoid alienating the populace, until decades later in Afghanistan and Iraq." And one suspects that drone warfare has enabled them to forget it once again. Lansdale's 1964 article in Foreign Affairs warned in no uncertain terms that ignoring such basic rules only helps "defeat the cause of freedom."

Unfortunately for the US and for Vietnam, Lansdale was pissing into the wind. "How long do you guys want to see the shit kicked out of the US to serve the career ambitions of a handful of Americans?" he asked one visiting diplomat. "You don't seem to understand that, if the US bureaucracies had done their work, we wouldn't have over 2,000 American kids killed in combat so far." That was in 1966; most of the deaths were yet to come. In his frustration at being ignored, he spent one July 4th party at Lodge's embassy in Saigon "trying to teach 'some four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, ending in 'Cabot,' to the ambassador's red-feathered parrots."

When Nixon and Kissinger sought later to wind down the war and exit with honor, according to Boot "in their haste to disengage, they would set in place the conditions for the very bloodbath -- and the mass exodus of refugees -- that Lansdale had predicted. But just as Lansdale had been ignored when he warned about the consequences of toppling Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, so a decade later he was ignored when he warned about the consequences of a peace treaty that would render meaningless the sacrifice of fifty-eight thousand American lives."

Boot's final analysis: "Lansdale had a good point in arguing that the American authorities, from Eisenhower to NIxon, had erred in disregarding his advice to strengthen the accountability and reduce the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime. He may have been overly idealistic in imagining that democracy could blossom in the tropical soil of South Vietnam even as a war raged all around, but his critics were overly cynical in imagining that the unpopularity and the corruption of the regime did not matter or that there was absolutely nothing the United States could do to constructively influence a regime so dependent on American aid. Unfortunately, Lansdale's attempts to use his patented methods of friendly persuasion were effectively stillborn after 1956 in large part because he was persistently undercut by bureaucratic rivals -- and after 1965, all other considerations were subordinated to the military imperatives of the American war machine." Of course Lansdale's approach was not guaranteed to succeed either -- "North Vietnam would have been a tough and determined adversary under any circumstances, with more will to win than the United States had. … But his approach, successful or not, would have been more humane and less costly."