The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  There was, however, more to the union than sheer physical attraction or even a desire for companionship. There was, in fact, more than Ed, who hated to speak about his private life even with his brothers, would let on. Ed and Helen shared a secret—a family scandal—that few if any outsiders knew about. It may well have been this history of familial betrayal that, as much as anything else, drew these two young New Yorkers together.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning on May 14, 1851, a train with twelve passenger cars had pulled out of New York City. Aboard were President Millard Fillmore, along with much of his cabinet and many other dignitaries. The train made slow progress as it snaked toward western New York with enthusiastic crowds gathering at every stop to hear a legendary orator, Secretary of State Daniel Webster, address them from the observation car. They were there to commemorate the opening of the Erie Railroad, at 445 miles the longest in the world and the first to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.

  The next day, the train reached the railroad’s terminus in Dunkirk, New York, a small but prosperous port on Lake Erie settled in the early nineteenth century and named after the French town that would become famous as the embarkation point for the British Army in 1940. “On the arrival of the excursion party at Dunkirk,” a local historian later wrote, “it was welcomed by every exhibition of joy that could be manifested by the people assembled. Salutes, processions, barbecues, banquets and fireworks; a great bonfire illuminated the night, the harbor was filled with shipping, flags and bunting were everywhere displayed.”

  When Helen Frances Batcheller was born in Dunkirk fifty years later, the terminus of the railroad had long since moved to Buffalo. After the railroad decided in 1869 to close its repair and manufacturing shops in Dunkirk, the enterprising engineer Horatio Brooks, who had brought the first locomotive to Dunkirk in 1851, decided to lease the property. Thus was born the mighty Brooks Locomotive Works, which would manufacture hundreds of steam engines annually and employ thousands of workers. The first general superintendent was David Russell, Helen’s great-grandfather, who made a fortune that was still extant when Helen was born. His granddaughter, Nellie, married young and was deserted by her husband, Willard Oscar Batcheller, son of a salesman of undertaker supplies from Worcester, Massachusetts, shortly after they had brought Helen Frances (known in her youth as Fanny) and her brother, Russell, into the world. Nellie herself died soon thereafter, in 1909, of tuberculosis.

  Having lost their mother and never knowing their father, Fanny and her brother were raised by their grandparents, David Russell’s daughter, Mary Jane Russell Herrick, and her husband, Lee Herrick, who had been foreman in the carpenter shop at the Brooks Works before his retirement. They owned a large house filled with crystal, china, and silver, and their needs were attended to by servants. Mary Jane died in 1927, at age seventy-five. Helen was then twenty-six, and she no doubt expected that she would become a wealthy heiress living a life of ease in her hometown. Yet according to family lore, the attorney handling the estate made off with her inheritance. Helen was now left to fend for herself. In search of work, she moved to New York City, where she met a handsome younger man recently arrived from Los Angeles with dreams of writing for a living.39

  ED LANSDALE was reeling at the time from his own family drama—one that he kept a secret from all of the previous writers who have chronicled his life, for he came of age at a time when extramarital affairs were far more scandalous and divorce much less common than they have since become. Ed’s father, Harry Lansdale, had moved to Detroit in 1930 to take a position with NAPA Auto Parts. For the first six months, he lived alone in the Statler Hotel, while his wife, Sarah, remained behind in Los Angeles with fourteen-year-old David, the only one of their children still at home. Opportunity led to temptation, and the forty-seven-year-old executive started an affair with Ethel Dow, a forty-one-year-old cashier in the hotel coffee shop who was ten years younger than his wife.40

  David, the only one of the Lansdale boys to leave a written account of his reaction to the news, remembers that it was “a terrible shock.” He received the news during the 1932–33 school year, when he was a high school senior in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Ed was dating Helen in New York. David remembers his mother telling him one day, “Your dad is in love with another woman.” “Not knowing what to do after [my mother] told me,” wrote David, who was on the high school swim team, “I went down to the pool and swam and swam and cried and cried in the water.” Given the strict family code of privacy and self-reliance, shared by most Americans of the time, David “couldn’t talk about it” with his mother or his brothers—“we never discussed family problems with each other or anyone else.”41 Ed was older than David—in 1933 he was twenty-five—but there is little doubt that the news came as a terrible blow to him as well. It likely made him all the more eager to marry Helen to restore a measure of stability in his life, to create a new family to replace the one he had lost.

  Setting an example that eventually would be followed by his son Ed, the wayward father waited until after Sarah died, in 1954, to marry his girlfriend, Ethel. (Harry himself would die five years later, leaving Ethel a well-off widow.) But Sarah and Harry Lansdale never lived together again after 1930. While Harry settled down in Detroit with his new paramour, Sarah spent much of the rest of her life flitting between her sons’ houses, never quite settling down anywhere again. We can only guess at the toll the separation took on her; she seems never to have spoken of it to her children. But a hint of her feelings was evident in the fact that she made a point of avoiding the use of “Ethyl gas” in her car.42 Sarah’s Christian Science faith must have helped her to get through this crisis. This is not really happening, she must have told herself; it’s only an untrue and therefore unreal figment of the mortal Mind.43

  Having lost most of his own religious faith, Edward Lansdale did not have the solace of Christian Science teaching to comfort him in dealing with upheaval. All he could do was focus on his work and his bride as he built a new life for himself a continent apart from his parents. The problem was that his work was not very satisfying. He was not planning to go into the railroad business. He needed a new occupation—­and he needed to find it while the Great Depression was still ravaging the economy.

  WITH NO sign of significant relief on the economic horizon, Edward Lansdale’s aspirations of becoming a writer, playwright, or cartoonist would be interred without even a marker in the mass grave that collectively buried the dreams of a generation of young Americans. Conceding defeat, he was determined to leave New York—and his mind-numbing job compiling railroad timetables—as soon as he could. He finally resigned in 1935 from the Official Classification Commission, and, after four years in New York, moved with his bride back to Los Angeles to accept a position in the advertising office of Silverwoods department store. In becoming an adman, he was entering a profession that was already influential and well established, even if it had not yet scaled the heights of influence and glamour that it would reach with the advent of television commercials in the 1950s.

  Advertising, the business in which Lansdale would learn many of the skills that he would later employ as a CIA operative, had grown along with mass-circulation newspapers and magazines since its nineteenth-century origins in the marketing of patent medicines. The outbreak of World War I led the Woodrow Wilson administration to harness advertising for its own purposes. The Committee on Public Information, led by the journalist George Creel, launched a propaganda blitz to whip up support for crushing the “barbaric Huns.” Its role in the war effort gave advertising a patriotic patina and enhanced its social standing, laying the groundwork for the even more ambitious employment of psychological warfare in World War II. In 1919, an article in the New Republic glorified “the advertising man” as the “genius of America,” the “enfant terrible of the time,” “the cornerstone of the most respectable American institutions; the newspapers and magazines depend on him; Literature and Journalism are his hand maidens. He is the Fifth
Estate.”44

  That Edward Lansdale got an opportunity to enter the Fifth Estate after the failure of his grander literary aspirations was due to nepotism in its purest form: the advertising manager of Silverwoods department store was none other than Phil Lansdale. Ed’s older brother had worked in advertising at a variety of clothing stores in Southern California after flunking out of the University of Arizona in 1929. Phil wanted an assistant, and he knew that his brother was a good writer, so he enticed him to return to Los Angeles to work for him and learn the business.

  However valuable the experience he gained, Lansdale had no desire to stay at Silverwoods for long. The salary was small and the headaches of working for his demanding older brother, who became notorious for going through copywriters, were large. It did not help that Helen Lansdale resented Phil for not giving her new husband the money or recognition she thought he deserved.

  DURING THE summer of 1937, at a time when the nation was riveted by Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in the midst of an around-the-world flight, Lansdale drove north to the Bay Area looking for work. San Francisco had long since been overtaken by the parvenu to the south, at least in population. But in the late 1930s denizens of San Francisco still regarded their metropolis as the first city of the West Coast, and with considerable justification. A New Deal guidebook written by local writers boasted, “When the other cities of the Coast were still hamlets in forest clearings or desert cow-towns, San Francisco was ‘The City.’ It is ‘The City’ still.” The crowning glories of San Francisco—the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and the Bay Bridge to the East Bay—had just been completed when Lansdale arrived.45

  San Francisco saw itself as the capital not just of the West Coast but of the entire Pacific basin, where Lansdale would spend much of his career. That ambition was symbolized by the Golden Gate International Exposition, a world’s fair that Lansdale undoubtedly visited in 1939 or 1940 along with millions of others. Held on Treasure Island, a man-made island in San Francisco Bay, its theme was “A Pageant of the Pacific.” A Court of the Pacific included pavilions devoted to Australia (featuring a collection of kangaroos, wallabies, and wombats), French Indo-China (with many items “from the ancient city of Angkor,” which could be viewed to the accompaniment of “Annamite and Cambodian music”), and other Pacific destinations.46 Condescending though the exhibits may seem to modern eyes, they were emblematic of the fascination with East Asia that Lansdale shared with many other Californians of his era. While another part of the exposition celebrated “The Peacemakers,” the American role in the Pacific was not destined to be a peaceful one. It is entirely fitting that, after the exhibition closed, Treasure Island became a Navy and Marine base—part of the constellation of military installations around the Bay Area that would enable the United States to wage not only World War II in the Pacific but also subsequent wars in Korea and Vietnam.

  While Lansdale had spent almost his entire life in big cities, none would entrance him the way San Francisco did. He was far from alone in concluding that, with its cosmopolitan mix of people, it was the most attractive of American cities. Standing at noon on Market Street, he marveled at the crowds spilling out of office buildings into the thoroughfares. “It’s the first time I ever saw such a happy working crew,” he recalled. “I was amazed looking at those faces and listening to their voices that these were happy people, living and working in San Francisco, so I decided I wanted to work here and bring my wife up to live in this place, far more so than in Los Angeles.”47

  THE OPPORTUNITY for Lansdale to live and work in San Francisco would be provided by Theodore H. Segall, a Jewish immigrant from Romania and a high school dropout who in 1925 had started one of the city’s first advertising agencies, serving predominantly Jewish retail clients such as Fred Benioff Furs, Milens jewelers, and Schwartz & Grodin men’s clothing store. Segall had seen Lansdale’s work for Silverwoods, and he thought Lansdale would be a good fit. Indeed, he was. Before long, Lansdale was working on the accounts of, as he later wrote, “6 men’s stores, a restaurant chain, a candy manufacturer, a food processor and wholesaler, a county chamber of commerce, and various political campaigns . . . all at the same time.”48 Among his accomplishments was to help develop a popular “Hero of the Week” program sponsored by Segall clients on a local radio station, which presented tales of local do-gooders such as a crossing guard who saved two children from being run over by an oncoming automobile.49

  In July 1941, Lansdale moved to a larger agency with a tonier list of clients, increasing his salary from $3,600 to $4,800 a year at a time when the median income for a man in the United States was less than $1,000 a year.50 His new boss was another Jewish high school dropout, Leon Livingston, the son of a German immigrant who had launched his own agency in 1923. More successful than Segall, he lived in a mansion atop Pacific Heights and operated from a penthouse office in one of San Francisco’s first skyscrapers.51

  Lansdale was now working for such prestigious clients as Wells Fargo bank, Italian Swiss Colony wines, and Levi Strauss jeans. But he was hardly cowed by his new boss. He recalled Livingston walking into his office: “I’d be sitting at my desk with my feet crossed and leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed and he’d say, ‘You aren’t paid for sleeping here.’ And I’d just open an eye and I’d say, ‘Leon, you’re disturbing my thought. I’m thinking, see? Get out of my room.’ ”52

  On another occasion, Lansdale openly disagreed with his boss at a meeting with a client. Levi Strauss was trying to expand to the East Coast for the first time. Livingston suggested the company spend its money on billboards, for which his agency would get healthy commissions. Lansdale jumped in to say that was a bad idea. He argued that Levi Strauss should put its money into hiring extra salesmen to push their jeans into the major eastern clothing stores before doing any advertising. Afterward Livingston was so furious with Lansdale for throwing away thousands of dollars in commissions that he refused to walk on the same side of the street with him, telling Lansdale he was being a fool, to which the account executive replied, “No, that’s honest advice. I believe what I told them.” All worked out well in the end: later that day, a Levi Strauss executive called to say they were adopting Lansdale’s suggestion to hire more salesmen for an East Coast rollout, but they were also going to increase their advertising spending, so the agency would not lose any commissions.53

  Both honesty and insolence would become Lansdale trademarks—he would seldom hesitate to tell the truth as he saw it, even if it offended a superior.

  THE LANSDALE family grew concomitantly with Ed’s advertising career. He and Helen had their first child, Edward Russell Lansdale (who would become known as Ted and later Ed), on June 2, 1939. A second and final son, Peter Carroll Lansdale (Pete), arrived on November 7, 1941. The family was living in a narrow, three-bedroom bungalow, with thick stucco walls and low ceilings, located at 880 Thirty-Fourth Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond district, an “urban suburb” close to Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean.54

  Precisely a month after Pete’s birth, on December 7, 1941, a cool, seasonal Sunday with limpid skies and temperatures in the low sixties,55 the entire family was in the modest backyard of their house getting some sun and fresh air, with the newborn in a baby carriage. The carefree weekend was interrupted by the unexpected appearance of one of Lansdale’s former colleagues, who had been drafted into the army (conscription had begun in October 1940). With considerable agitation, he told them to turn on the radio. Thus they learned that Japanese warplanes had just bombed Pearl Harbor and other military installations on Oahu.

  “The news seemed to be completely alien to my place and time there,” Lansdale recalled. “It came as a surprise to me to find myself a bit later that day bearing a growing feeling that it was a time when all Americans had to get into the fight for our country . . . and that included me. The more I thought about it, the more it took shape as an iron-clad duty, not to be questioned.”56 But Lansdale had resigned his
reserve army commission in 1937 to concentrate on his advertising career, and he had not succeeded in winning back his commission in 1939 after Germany’s invasion of Poland. Now thirty-three years old, he would have to fight simply to “get into the fight.”57

  3

  An Institution Run by Its Inmates

  They kept using me to go out, getting new information and meeting new people all the time, which seemed to be my forte.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THE coming of total war transformed untold millions of American lives, creating a lasting caesura that would unalterably separate the first half of the twentieth century from the years that followed. Housewives became factory workers. Executives became bureaucrats. Mechanics became Marines. Students became soldiers. In many cases, the experiences of war, whether traumatic or mundane or some of both, made it impossible for these men and women to go back to the lives they had lived in peacetime. Yet even by the standards of wartime, Edward Lansdale’s journey from adman to CIA officer, from a career in advertising to a career in nation building, counterinsurgency, and psychological warfare, was particularly unusual.

  Although Lansdale wanted to volunteer after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he found it hard to do so. The army refused to take back this overage volunteer because he had been diagnosed with an enlargement of his thyroid gland—in medical terminology a “simple colloid goiter moderate.”1 He was also unemployed, since Leon Livingston, an ardent liberal who was described by his daughter as “patriotic” but “anti-military,”2 had fired Lansdale on the spot in a fit of pique after he announced his intention to enlist. Chagrined to be losing his star employee, Livingston told him, “If you’re looking to fight, go join the Russian army. At least they have better looking uniforms than ours.”3 “So,” Lansdale recalled, “Christmas 1941 found us—the country at war, and me jobless, with a family to house and feed.”4 No other advertising agency would hire him because he told prospective employers that he would quit the minute he was accepted into the army.