by Max Boot
The battle for the palace raged all night beneath a full moon. The flash of guns and the pop of magnesium flares nearly turned darkness into daylight as rebels and loyalists clashed at point-blank range amid narrow alleys and streets. The close-quarters combat seesawed first one way, then the other. Finally, in the early morning hours, after 33 people had been killed and 236 wounded, the defenders waved a white flag. The rebels went inside, expecting to take the president and his brother into custody, only to find that they had disappeared. They had slipped out of the palace the previous night through an unguarded gate, then driven, in a commonplace Citroën 2CV instead of the presidential limousine, to a supporter’s house in Cholon, Saigon’s sprawling Chinatown. Nhu reportedly had suggested that they split up because the president would have a better chance of escaping without his widely loathed brother, who was seen as the regime’s Svengali. But Diem feared that Nhu, if caught by himself, would be executed on the spot. They had ruled together, Diem decided, and now they would flee together.
Around 6:45 a.m., Diem called Lodge to see whether the Americans might be able to do something to help him. Lodge held out the possibility of asylum abroad but refused to do anything to help Diem get there. Lodge’s aide, Major General John Michael Dunn, offered to go to Cholon himself to bring the Ngo brothers out. Lodge refused. “We can’t,” the ambassador said. “We just can’t get that involved.”29
Having nowhere else to turn, Diem called the general staff headquarters to tell the generals that he and his brother were at the caramel-colored Cha Tam Church in Cholon and that they were ready to surrender. At first, Diem demanded full military honors but then settled for a promise of safe passage to exile. Big Minh sent a convoy with American-made jeeps and an M-113 armored personnel carrier to bring the brothers back to headquarters. When the convoy returned at 11 a.m., it brought back both men—but they were no longer breathing.
Minh told Lou Conein that they had committed suicide. As a Catholic, Conein didn’t believe it.30 He immediately understood that they had been killed, and photographs of their corpses confirmed it. Both had been shot in the head with a pistol, and Nhu had also been stabbed multiple times with a bayonet. The tart-tongued Madame Nhu was lucky to escape a similar fate; she was traveling in Beverly Hills, California, with one of her daughters when her husband and brother-in-law were murdered.
The brothers’ killer was Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, a bodyguard to Big Minh and a “professional assassin who liked to keep a record of the people he killed by scratching a mark on his pistol for each victim.”31 Before the convoy left for the church, Minh had given a hand signal to Nhung, who had carried out his orders with ruthless efficiency. Neither the president nor his brother had any chance to defend himself; their hands were tied behind their backs when they were murdered. Big Minh had wanted to be sure that Diem would not stage a comeback. He got his wish—and the entire world would have to live with the consequences.
The Diem regime ended, along with the life of its leader and his brother, on the morning of November 2, 1963—All Souls’ Day. Or, as it is known in some Catholic cultures, the Day of the Dead.
WHEN WORD of Diem’s death reached Washington, President Kennedy was meeting with his senior advisers in the Cabinet Room. The Kennedys over time have acquired a reputation for cultivating a tough-guy persona, but there was nothing hard about the president’s reaction to this unexpected news. General Maxwell Taylor wrote, “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.”32 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confirmed, “When President Kennedy received the news, he literally blanched. I had never seen him so moved.”33 Rather naïvely, Kennedy had not expected that a plot which he had sanctioned would lead to the death of a fellow Catholic president.
Two days later, Kennedy dictated for the record a short memo, not declassified until decades later, in which he confessed, “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu.” Kennedy recalled meeting Diem years before in Washington and finding him to be an “extraordinary character.” Kennedy privately paid tribute to Diem for the way in which “he held his country together to maintain its independence under very adverse conditions.” Kennedy concluded that the “way he was killed” was “particularly abhorrent” and held himself responsible for the coup: “I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup.”34
Tragically, JFK was not to live long enough to see for himself the problems caused by Diem’s demise. He himself would be felled by an assassin’s bullet within three weeks. The new South Vietnamese government, run by a military junta chaired by Big Minh, lasted all of three months. On January 30, 1964, power was seized by another general, Nguyen Khanh, who had played only a minor role in the anti-Diem coup. He, in turn, was forced out the following year. Each time the top man changed, so too did many lower-level officials, including the important provincial and district governors. Prime ministers changed more often than the seasons. By the time that Henry Cabot Lodge returned to Vietnam in 1965 for his second tour as ambassador, he wrote, “I found the Saigon government in a state of grave instability and turmoil.”35 A small measure of calm was restored shortly thereafter with the ascension of yet another general, Nguyen Van Thieu, who had been part of the anti-Diem coup. At first ruling jointly with Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and then by himself, he would remain in power until 1975, shortly before the destruction of the Republic of Vietnam.
Long before then, South Vietnam’s political credibility and governmental effectiveness, already weakening in Diem’s final year, had suffered a blow from which it never recovered. The generals who succeeded Diem were just as authoritarian, unpopular, and aloof—and considerably more illegitimate, ineffective, and corrupt. None had much success in dealing with threats ranging from the Buddhists to the Communists. Within four months of Diem’s death, more Buddhists had self-immolated than during his entire nine-year reign, but with Diem gone these voluntary autos-da-fé were no longer headline news.36 The Communists also stepped up their offensive, with the number of attacks in the Mekong Delta soon reaching a new high. A leader of the National Liberation Front, the Communist front organization, called Diem’s death a “gift from Heaven for us.”37
With Communist infiltrations increasing, Diem’s emphasis on protecting the rural populace in “strategic hamlets”—a tried-and-true pacification tactic that had worked for the British from the time of the Boer War at the turn of the century to the Malayan “Emergency” in the early 1950s—was set aside in favor of conventional, big-unit operations. The burden of stopping the Communists shifted from the presidential palace in Saigon to the nearby U.S. embassy and the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam. As the authors of the Pentagon Papers later wrote, “Our complicity in [Diem’s] overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment in an essentially leaderless Vietnam.”38 With Communist forces on the offensive, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, reluctantly decided in 1965 he had no choice but to send American soldiers into combat. Within four years, half a million American troops were trapped in a quagmire. William Colby, a former CIA director and station chief in Saigon, was later to call Diem’s overthrow “the worst mistake of the Vietnam War,” a judgment shared by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,39 if resisted by other analysts who maintain that the tragedy of America’s defeat was inevitable whether Diem remained in power or not.
The course that the United States was now embarked on was not just a mistake; it was a catastrophe that would profoundly alter American foreign policy for decades to come, and it might conceivably have been avoided if only Washington policymakers had listened to the advice of a renowned counterinsurgency strategist who had been present at the creation of the state of South Vietnam. His guidance had been disregarded not only about the wisdom of the Diem coup itself but also, crucially, in the years immediately preceding and following that pivotal event. He had argued,
in vain, the need to scale back the amount of firepower expended against the insurgents and to make Saigon’s government more accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to rule. Victory may have been out of America’s grasp in any case; North Vietnam was a formidable foe and South Vietnam a weak ally. But it is no exaggeration to suggest that the whole conflict, the worst military defeat in American history, might have taken a very different course—one that was less costly and potentially more successful—if the counsel of this CIA operative and Air Force officer had been followed.
Who was this singular visionary, this unhonored strategist, this sidelined adviser who wanted to follow, as Robert Frost put it, the road not taken?
His name was Edward Geary Lansdale.
INTRODUCTION
The Misunderstood Man
There are few individuals in my knowledge more damned and at the same time applauded. . . . History’s going to have to portray Lansdale’s real part.
—LIEUTENANT GENERAL VICTOR H. “BRUTE” KRULAK, U.S. MARINE CORPS1
THE legendary Edward Lansdale, a covert operative so influential that he was said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and for one of the main characters in The Ugly American, remains, even more than four decades after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, one of the most fascinating and mysterious, yet misunderstood, figures in post-1945 American foreign policy.
He was portrayed by David Halberstam in his 1969 classic, The Best and the Brightest, as a “particularly futile and failed figure”: a “classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for,” who “allegedly knew and loved Asians” but “talked vague platitudes one step away from the chamber of commerce.” In Halberstam’s telling, he was an expert on “how to fight guerrilla wars the right way” who became “part of a huge American mission which used bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.”2 Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 Vietnam: A History, drew Lansdale in equally unflattering hues as “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former advertising executive,” an ineffectual “romantic” who “overlooked the deeper dynamics of revolutionary upheavals” and who “seemed to be oblivious to the social and cultural complexities of Asia.”3 Tim Weiner, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, was more scathing still, deriding Lansdale as a “Madison Avenue . . . con man” who dreamed up impractical schemes to overthrow Fidel Castro.4 By contrast, Neil Sheehan, in another Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), lauded Lansdale as a Machiavellian genius, a “legendary clandestine operative” who ruthlessly and effectively bulldozed opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to consolidate the nascent state of South Vietnam. Sheehan wrote with what some might consider flattering exaggeration: “South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale.”5
Taking up the theme of Lansdale as a “dirty tricks” specialist, the late L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who had once worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon, went so far as to suggest that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy that was responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.6 These sinister animadversions were picked up by the director Oliver Stone in his conspiratorially themed 1991 film, JFK, which features a shadowy Lansdale stand-in referred to only as General Y running the assassination on behalf of the “military-industrial complex.”
This is symptomatic of the long concatenation of misunderstanding and misinformation that still clouds Lansdale and his legacy. His was an epochal, if ultimately tragic, story—one that sheds considerable light not only on the course of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose bitter legacy still haunts American foreign policy, but also on such vital issues as how the United States can effectively fight insurgencies abroad, how it can deal with autocratic allies, and how it can most effectively dispense military and political advice to foreign partners of dubious reliability. But Lansdale’s struggles and achievements, while important to postwar history and relevant to contemporary debates, remain but dimly understood.
Halberstam, Karnow, Sheehan, and Weiner were—and, in the case of the latter two, still are—superb journalists and historians, but none has captured the totality of Ed Lansdale, and, by extension, of this particular part of the Vietnam War itself. The accounts of the first three were circumscribed because the authors knew Lansdale only in the 1960s, a frustrating decade for him, not at the peak of his effectiveness in the 1950s. The time is right, then, for a deeper look at Lansdale, one that is intended to do for him what Sheehan so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie or what Barbara Tuchman so effectively did for General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell in Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
Like those earlier works, The Road Not Taken is meant to be not only a biography of a pivotal, yet strangely unknown, figure; it is also a work of history with often surprising diplomatic, political, and military implications that seeks to recast our understanding of recent American history—and, indeed, of contemporary American policy debates. As the subtitle suggests, this book is concerned both with Lansdale and with the “American tragedy in Vietnam,” but in order to understand his impact on Vietnam, one must first appreciate what he did elsewhere, not only in the Philippines, where he served prior to arriving in Saigon in 1954, but also in “the Washington jungle,” where he struggled to make a mark in the eight years, 1957 to 1965, between his two Vietnam tours.
THE STARTING point for this examination must be to clear away the mythology that surrounds Lansdale and obscures his real legacy. He was, for a start, almost certainly not the model for the young American intelligence operative Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (1955); Greene wrote a draft of his novel before Lansdale had even arrived in Saigon. Yet the identification of Lansdale as “the Quiet American” adheres like indelible ink, because the views that Greene ascribes to Alden Pyle are an identifiable caricature of the views held by Lansdale. He was the model for Colonel Edwin B. Hillandale, practically the only admirable character in Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s scathing indictment of U.S. foreign policy, The Ugly American (1958), but unlike the fictional Hillandale, the real-life Lansdale did not speak Tagalog or any other foreign language. More importantly, Lansdale was not, as he has so often been depicted, an inveterate practitioner of, or advocate for, assassinations and “dirty tricks.” In fact, although he had a weakness for fanciful propaganda coups, such as hiring an astrologer to predict a bleak future for North Vietnam, he was deeply suspicious of most covert action, seeing it as a shortcut designed to deal with deep-rooted problems that demanded a political, not a military, solution. And, as this book will show, he had no connection with the assassination of President Kennedy, a charge that is nothing short of historical blasphemy, for the thirty-fifth president was a man he worked for, admired, and respected.
The very fact that Lansdale is even mentioned in connection with a supposed right-wing plot to kill the president, credible evidence of which has never come to light, is symptomatic of how little he is understood still. What motive would the military and CIA have had to kill Kennedy? Conspiracy-mongers most often claim it was either revenge because Kennedy didn’t do enough to support the Bay of Pigs invasion or an act of preemptive warmongering because Kennedy wanted to pull American troops out of Vietnam. What Kennedy would have done had he lived is unknowable, and there is still much debate among historians about whether he was serious about downsizing the U.S. military commitment to South Vietnam. But of one thing there can be no doubt: Lansdale was not an advocate for a larger U.S. military presence in Indochina. He argued that the American emphasis should be on building up legitimate, democratic, and accountable South Vietnamese institutions that could command the loyalty of the people, and he thought that sending large formations of American ground troops was a distraction from, indeed a hindrance to, achieving that all-important objective. As for the Bay of Pigs, Lansdale had never been a fan of the operation in the first place. He wanted to ou
st Castro not with a D-Day-style invasion staged by exiles but rather by fomenting a popular internal uprising, a strategy that was very much in keeping with his philosophy.
Contrary to the journalistic clichés, Lansdale was neither a “dirty tricks” artist nor an unworldly dreamer, neither Machiavellian mastermind nor arch-bumbler. He was an idealist and realist both—a canny strategist who recognized the need both for tough military action against insurgents and for political and social action designed to address the roots of an uprising. The doctrine of “Lansdalism,” as his teachings were labeled by some journalists, was founded on the bedrock of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. He believed that the “basic political ideas” set out in those documents would have far more appeal in Asia than either colonialism or communism—and could help cement alliances between the United States and Third World peoples struggling for self-rule. His ideas were ridiculed at the time by self-styled sophisticates such as Graham Greene, but they look more credible when seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, when democracy has spread across Asia to such disparate lands as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and Nepal.
The larger implications are obvious—and they make The Road Not Taken more than just one man’s story. Lansdale’s yin-yang approach, of hunting down guerrillas and terrorists while trying to attract the support of the uncommitted, is the basis of modern “population-centric” counterinsurgency doctrine as applied by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Britain in Northern Ireland, by Colombia against the FARC, by Israel in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, and by many other countries with varying degrees of success. The most commonly cited influences on counterinsurgency thinking include David Galula of France, Robert Thompson and Gerald Templer of Great Britain, and David Petraeus of the United States. But Lansdale was fighting insurgents as early as any of them—first in the 1950s in the Philippines, where he helped to put down the Huk Rebellion, and then in South Vietnam, where, even if he did not create the state, he helped to consolidate its authority in its uncertain early days.
