by Max Boot
2
Enfant Terrible
Not knowing what to do after [my mother] told me, I went down to the pool and swam and swam and cried and cried in the water.
—DAVID LANSDALE
LATER in life, Edward Lansdale would emerge as one of the foremost American authorities on Vietnam and the Philippines. He would also become a virtuoso politico-military adviser, a crack propagandist, and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, a field that has been described as the “graduate level” of warfare—“far more intellectual than a bayonet charge,” in the words of T. E. Lawrence.1 Those were not skills he learned, by and large, in the classroom. Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, to whom he has been compared, Lansdale was not drawn to the region where he would make his name by any academic inquiry, which helps to explain why he did not make his first acquaintance of Asia until he was in his mid-thirties. By contrast, Lawrence first visited the Middle East in 1909 as an Oxford undergraduate to work on his senior thesis on Crusader castles, and returned after graduation to work as an archaeologist on an excavation sponsored by the British Museum. Lansdale would be, at best, an undistinguished student who did not display the intellectual brilliance—or the psychological fragility—of T. E. Lawrence, who admitted that “madness was very near” for him.2 But Lansdale’s school years did teach him lessons in character and leadership, striving and hustling that would help make possible his later exploits.
After graduating from Berendo Junior High School in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, Edward Lansdale entered the tenth grade at Los Angeles High School in 1923, the same year that Time magazine published its first issue, Adolf Hitler staged his unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch, and Calvin Coolidge assumed the presidency. L.A. High was the oldest high school in Southern California, dating to 1873. For thirty years, from 1895 to 1925, its direction had been determined by the legendary principal William Harvey Housh, like many Californians an immigrant from the Midwest. By the time that Housh retired, wrote the Los Angeles Times, “an enormous percentage of the leading men of this city were Los Angeles High School students and came under the benign influence of Mr. Housh.”3 Lansdale was one of the last students touched directly by the taskmaster principal, with his moralistic approach to education.
The school’s motto, “Home of the Mighty Romans,” seemed particularly appropriate for a student like Lansdale who, in the manner of a Roman proconsul, would one day set out to defend his country’s interests abroad. So, too, the high school’s focus on civics seemed apt for someone like Lansdale who was already becoming a devoted believer in the principles of the American Revolution. As one of Housh’s successors put it in a handbook for students, “The backbone of the course of study is cultural rather than technical. Efficient and loyal citizenship has been the key note of the many generations that have graduated from the old pioneer school.”4 Lansdale imbibed the lessons in citizenship the school had to offer. He joined the junior ROTC program and he became an Eagle Scout, “winning,” his brother Ben recalled, “row upon row of merit badges across his chest.”5
Ed did better in high school than he would do in college, earning mostly B’s and a few A’s. His worst grade was an F in Latin, demonstrating for neither the first nor the last time his inability to learn foreign languages. His greatest achievement was to complete enough extra coursework to graduate a semester early, in December 1926.6
GOING FROM an old institution of learning to a new one, Lansdale entered the University of California at Los Angeles, better known as UCLA, early in 1927—a year that would see Charles Lindbergh’s celebrated solo flight across the Atlantic and the release of the first full-length motion picture with sound. The university was but eight years old and the campus was still located, as it had been since its inception in 1919, on a 25-acre plot on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. It would not move to its present location in Westwood—the name bestowed by the real estate developers Harold and Edwin Janss on an empty 383-acre tract near the Pacific Ocean—until Lansdale was a junior. When the new campus opened for 5,500 students on September 20, 1929, only the iconic Royce Hall, modeled on a basilica in Milan, and three other buildings had been completed. The grounds still had not been landscaped and were devoid of trees and shrubs. Construction materials were piled everywhere, and when it rained the dust turned into mud.
The newness of UCLA when Lansdale went there is significant: his achievements in college in some ways would prefigure his accomplishments in the newly independent nations of South Vietnam and the Philippines. Both in college and afterward, he was an institution builder. At UCLA, he built up a magazine, a fraternity, and an ROTC unit. “We were very proud of the fact that we were starting a new tradition,” Lansdale’s best friend and fraternity brother, Hubert “Pooley” Roberts, recalled.7
Lansdale and Roberts decided to work on a new humor magazine, The Claw (a name inspired by UCLA’s mascot, the Bruin), which was being started in the fall of 1928 by a third student, Rehbock “Reh” Lewis. An English major, Lansdale fancied himself a humorist and, despite his lack of experience, somehow persuaded Lewis to hire him as the new magazine’s editor, with Pooley Roberts working under him as associate editor. Roberts was later to comment that Lansdale was a “pretty good politician” with “the facility for almost naively getting what he wants from other people.”8
The university administration at first forbade the magazine’s publication on campus and suspended Lewis for a year for producing such risqué material, even though The Claw’s humor was pretty tame, at least by later, Harvard Lampoon standards. Typical jests, most of them in the Borscht Belt (or possibly Chinese fortune cookie) style, included such one-liners as “ ‘I hate to go to class—I haven’t touched my German for two days.’ ‘What’s her name?’ ”9 Eventually Reh Lewis was reinstated as a student, and The Claw was approved for sale in the student bookstore. Lansdale and Lewis ran the modest operation from an office above Crawford’s drugstore in Westwood Village, and Lansdale was involved in every aspect of the work, from typesetting to selling advertisements and copies (twenty-five cents an issue).10
Cartooning was a particular passion of Ed’s. He developed “a distinctive style of his own,”11 recalled Pooley Roberts. To supplement his meager income, he would use a black wax crayon to draw cartoons depicting campus events on big sheets of butcher paper. He would put up his cartoons in a local restaurant in exchange for a free meal, in a barbershop in exchange for a haircut, and in a clothing store in exchange for clothes.
In 1930, Lansdale got tired of running The Claw and turned over his editorship to Roberts. He set his sights on running for president of their fraternity. He worked quietly to develop a group of supporters among the 150 “brothers,” and he wound up besting a rival for the post. Once again Roberts noticed that Ed had an “ingenious charm” that gave him “the ability to integrate with other people without their realizing that they were being used by him for some purpose or other.” The secret of Lansdale’s appeal even at this early age, Roberts discerned, was “that he showed an interest in you. We egotists mostly like to talk about ourselves, and he would draw people out, let them talk about themselves.”12 Not only did Lansdale succeed in winning the presidency of his fraternity, but he managed to affiliate the UCLA chapter with the prestigious national fraternity Phi Gamma Delta, whose members were known as “Fijis.”13
By his senior year, Lansdale had also risen to cadet colonel of the ROTC regiment as well as president of the UCLA chapter of the Scabbard and Blade, a national military honor society. He was an energetic cadet who received his reserve commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1929, followed by a promotion to first lieutenant in 1932. He had shown interest in the military from a young age; as a high school student, he had participated in summertime Citizens’ Military Training Camps. His brother Ben, however, recalled that Ed “was less than an ideal soldier,” for he was “rather rebellious of the army traditions that seemed to be the mainstay of the training.”14 Lansdale would contin
ue to question the military way of doing things even as he rose to become a general.
Lansdale could not afford to devote all his time to The Claw, Phi Gamma Delta, and the ROTC. He had to make money to stay in school. UCLA may have been tuition-free for state residents, but students did need enough money to live on. That was not easy to come by, given that Ed was attending college at a time when his father’s shock-absorber business was failing and before he prospered with NAPA Auto Parts. Times were so tough after 1929 that some students supposedly banded together to split the cost of a hamburger, each pitching in a nickel for a bite.15
Lansdale tried to stay in college by working as a waiter at an upscale Hungarian restaurant in Westwood Village. To show up on time, he had to wear his tuxedo to class and sprint across the campus after a 5 p.m. lab. Along with some of his fraternity brothers, Lansdale also worked as an extra on Hollywood pictures. They especially liked musicals. “We’d get to dress up, sing songs, dance with nice looking girls, get a meal and something to drink and get paid for it,” Lansdale recalled.
With all of his extracurricular activities, classes became almost an afterthought. His grades were terrible—mostly C’s with a few B’s and D’s. He earned only one A during his entire undergraduate career—for English 1B in the fall of 1927. As if to make up for it, in the spring semester of 1928 he got a D in that same course.16 By the end of the 1930–31 school year, his fourth on campus, Lansdale was still short of the credits required for graduation. Rather than try to scrape by for another semester, he decided to leave school and seek his fortune as a writer or illustrator in New York.
LANSDALE ARRIVED in New York in September 1931 at a time of existential crisis. The bill for the excesses of the Roaring Twenties began coming due in October 1929 when the New York Stock Exchange crashed. By 1932, one in three New Yorkers was unemployed.17 Some of the newly homeless took to living in makeshift shantytowns that sprang up across the city; they were called, here as elsewhere, Hoovervilles in sardonic tribute to the incumbent president. The literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in December 1931 that people “seemed gaunt, gray, unsure of themselves and gloomy” and that “the life, the excitement had partly gone out of the city—the heart had been taken out of it.”18 Many intellectuals flocked to the Communist Party for salvation, while other Americans were drawn to demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. In 1932, the future New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia wondered, “Are we going to admit that Mussolini is right, that Republics and parliamentary forms of government are failures?”19
That this did not happen was due in no small part to the recovery, more psychological than physical, wrought by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he moved from the New York governor’s mansion to the White House in 1933. Roosevelt’s legislation creating the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Social Security Administration, and much else besides was “more than a New Deal,” commented Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. It was “a new world.”20 Although its economic impact was mixed (GDP reached its pre-Depression level in the mid-1930s, but employment did not recover until the mid-1940s),21 the New Deal had a profound impact in altering the views of Americans such as Edward Lansdale of what their government was capable of doing. All but a small minority of Roosevelt haters—and Lansdale was not that—came out of the 1930s convinced that government had a bigger obligation to shape the economy than had been commonly accepted in the more laissez-faire 1920s. The very landscape of New York was reshaped by the New Deal: federal money funded the creation of the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, the Bronx–Whitestone Bridge, the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, La Guardia Airport, McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, the Central Park Zoo, and other projects.22
The mobilization for World War II only a few years later would reinforce what was generally perceived to be the lesson of the New Deal, causing confidence in big government to soar to heights never reached before or since. Edward Lansdale’s personal experience of the Great Depression and its long recovery while he was living in New York and later in California helped midwife his faith in the power of the American government to rebuild and reshape devastated societies.
WHEN HE first moved to New York, Lansdale hoped to find work on a newspaper, but one of his prospective employers folded just before he arrived, while another was laying off staff. With barely fifty cents in his pocket (or so he remembered, no doubt with a bit of poetic license), he was rescued from penury by the family friend Harry Greenly, a fellow Christian Scientist who had known the Lansdales when they lived in Bronxville. Greenly was now chairman of the Official Classification Committee, which set freight rates for railroads across the country, and he gave Lansdale a job as one of his clerks. It was boring, “lousy” work, Lansdale discovered, but he was good enough at it to become chief clerk within a year.23 In his spare time, he drew New Yorker–style cartoons that were never published and wrote plays that were never staged.
Initially Lansdale lived in a modest apartment at 288 West Fourth Street, in the West Village. One day he ran into a fellow “Fiji”—a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity—who was broke and in need of a place to stay. Lansdale put him up, and thus wound up visiting his new roommate’s sister in an apartment where she lived with other young women in Greenwich Village, a legendary haunt of college students, bohemians, mafiosi, junkies, gays and lesbians, and artists and writers.
One of the women sharing this Grenwich Village walk-up was Helen F. Batcheller, a small-town girl from western New York with “brilliant blue” eyes who was working as a secretary for a hardware company.24 Ed and Helen soon struck up a romance. They later claimed that she was only a year older than he was—a claim repeated by his previous biographer.25 In fact, she was seven years older: she had been born on March 5, 1901.26 But it did not seem to make much difference at the time. In 1932, when they met, he was twenty-four, she was thirty-one, and they soon made a handsome couple. A picture from the early 1930s shows them looking like movie stars of the period, with even a hint of Myrna Loy and William Powell: Lansdale, just under five feet ten inches tall and less than 160 pounds, is slim and handsome. He is not yet sporting the mustache he would soon grow to appear older, and he is looking at the camera with a cool, even gaze, wearing a three-piece suit and a fedora tilted back at a rakish angle, holding a railing with one hand while the other encircles Helen’s waist. Helen, just five feet three inches tall and 115 pounds,27 has short, curly hair and is wearing a simple, nondescript dress. That Helen is leaning on his right arm masks the fact that his right shoulder is lower than his left—his only obvious physical imperfection. Helen was pretty, but she already had a few strands of white hair and within a few years would go prematurely gray even as Ed remained handsome and youthful-looking.
Those, however, were considerations for the future. In the present—in the impoverished but bustling New York of the early 1930s—Ed and Helen were, so far as can be discerned from the vantage point of nearly a century on, enormously happy in the way that only the newly infatuated can be. Ed had dated in high school and college but had never had a terribly serious relationship before. Pooley Roberts recalled that “he was a very attractive appearing man, and many girls would have been very happy to be his steady,”28 while another college friend said, “He got around socially with the young ladies, in an innocent sort of way.”29 His relationship with Helen was something more serious.
For middle-class young people of the period, the inevitable next step was matrimony. The ceremony was performed at the Episcopalian Church of the Ascension, near Helen’s apartment, on September 3, 1933, almost exactly two years after Lansdale’s arrival in New York.30 Christian Scientists have a tradition of not staging weddings or funerals in their churches, so the choice of venue was not necessarily significant, and yet in this case it did signal that Lansdale was starting to leave the religion of his yo
uth. Although he would remain a nominal Christian Scientist, he would later describe himself as “not a religious person.”31 Helen, who had been raised a Presbyterian, would be converted to Christian Science by her mother-in-law, Sadie Lansdale.
From the beginning there were warning signs that the marriage’s course would be less than smooth. Lansdale’s exuberant and adventurous personality made a marked contrast to his wife’s more reserved and cautious nature. While Ed later traveled by himself across insurgent-infested areas of the Philippines and Vietnam, Helen never even learned to drive a car (in spite of Ed’s constant pleading, “You’d better learn to drive”),32 and she was too afraid to fly to attend a son’s wedding because as a girl she had been traumatized by a scary ride in an open-cockpit biplane at a county fair.33 “Helen was not a very warm-natured person, not a fun-loving gal at all,” said Ed’s brother David.34 “Helen was a very quiet, home-type young woman,” recalled Pooley Roberts,35 while Phil Lansdale commented, “She didn’t have much curiosity. She felt sorry for herself much of the time. She was a very small person, prematurely gray, and I didn’t find her very stimulating or very interesting.”36 In fairness, others had a more favorable impression of Helen. One of her friends told the author that, although she was “quiet,” she was a “wonderful,” “lovely,” and “beautiful” woman.37
How did two such different people wind up together? David Lansdale asked his brother that very question half a century later. Ed replied that “we were both in New York together and we were both lonely” and got married “just for companionship.”38 That statement, uttered in 1984 by an old man long after Helen’s death, sounds more dismissive than the explanation that probably would have been offered by his younger self while still in the throes of passion. Yet it contains an element of truth, especially if one reads into it an oblique reference to the physical attraction the two felt and the enjoyment they no doubt derived from the steady availability of sex for the first time in their lives—a far more intense experience than the furtive gropings of youth.
