The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  The congressman told Lansdale that “he wanted to go back and talk to the president of the Philippines” about a program of action to combat the Huks. So that night Lansdale took the congressman back to his quarters at Fort Myer, sat down with a manual typewriter, and asked him exactly what he wanted to do. When the congressman told him, Lansdale put the thoughts into his own language. “His ideas,” Lansdale later wrote, “were infused with a practicality about the use of troops against guerrillas and a compassion for the people on the land, which stemmed from his own experiences as a successful leader of guerrillas in World War II, in areas where Huks now were operating.” The end product was virtually identical to a program of action that Lansdale had just crafted and presented to his superiors at the OPC.

  In any counterinsurgency or, for that matter, any military operation, success is seldom possible without inspired leadership. Right there and then, Lansdale decided that this burly congressman “should be the guy to handle [the campaign] out in the Philippines, because of his feelings towards the people and towards the enemy; he understood the problem, which very few Filipinos ever understood and very few Americans either.”16

  HIS NAME was Ramon Magsaysay (pronounced mahg-sigh-sigh). Born on August 31, 1907, just six months before Lansdale, he grew up in an environment vastly different from the early twentieth-century America of Lansdale’s boyhood. Part of Magsaysay’s legend was that he was one of the common people. He even lived as a boy in the Philippine version of a log cabin—a shanty made of bamboo and cogon grass, which had been built by his father. But though the Magsaysays were poor by American standards, they were better off than most of their neighbors in Zambales Province in central Luzon, home of the giant Subic Bay U.S. naval base and the volcanic Mount Pinatubo.

  Ramon, known as Monching, was the second-oldest of eight children born to the carpenter Exequiel Magsaysay and his wife, Perfecta, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. As a teenager, Exequiel had been a member of the Katipunan secret society, which fought for Philippine independence first against the Spanish and then the Americans, but after the end of the war of independence in 1902 he had made his peace with the Yanquis. He even went to work as a teacher at an American-run trade school. He was fired from this post in 1913, however, after he gave a failing grade to the son of the school superintendent. His oldest son would inherit his father’s strict code of honesty.

  After losing his teaching job, Exequiel relocated with his family to the village of Castillejos, about ninety miles from Manila, where he and the rest of the clan ran a sari-sari store along with a carpentry and blacksmith shop. To supplement his income, Exequiel worked as the foreman of a public works gang. Like Teddy Lansdale, Monching was expected to earn his own money and in his case contribute to the family’s livelihood, so he would get up at five in the morning to toil on road construction alongside his father’s workers. This was the origin of a burly physique that, along with his height—five feet ten inches, the same as Lansdale, but tall for a Filipino of his day—would make Magsaysay an imposing presence.

  Eventually the Magsaysay family would prosper, building a rice mill and acquiring thousands of acres of agricultural land, along with the first tractor in the entire province. But Monching never lost his down-to-earth attitude. His favorite reading material was Popular Mechanics; he became a self-taught mechanic of considerable skill. Like Lansdale, he was an indifferent student who never received a college degree in spite of spending five years, on and off, at two different colleges. As an adult, he would feel defensive about his lack of education; this would make him lean heavily on trusted advisers.

  In 1933, the same year that Ed and Helen Lansdale wed, the twenty-six-year-old Monching married Luz Banzon, an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl from a wealthy family. (Her father was a prominent landowner and former mayor of Balanga, capital of Bataan Province.) By 1939, when World War II broke out, Magsaysay was comfortably settled with his growing family as the branch manager for the Try Tan bus line in his native Zambales Province. With the onset of war, Magsaysay joined the army as a captain running a motor pool, and he did not stop fighting after the army was defeated and the country occupied, taking to the hills to join a group of guerrillas operating under American officers. By the fall of 1944, he had risen to command more than ten thousand guerrillas in Zambales. His men had already cleared the province of Japanese by the time U.S. troops arrived in January 1945. Yet, unlike many other guerrilla officers, the modest Magsaysay refused to give himself a field promotion. He remained a captain until after the liberation, when his American superiors promoted him to major and awarded him the Bronze Star.

  Fresh from these triumphs, Magsaysay was installed as military governor of Zambales by the U.S. forces. He held the job for only five weeks in early 1945, but that was enough to catapult him into a position of prominence. He further solidified the loyalty of his guerrillas by lobbying the U.S. and Philippine authorities to provide them back pay and other compensation for their wartime efforts. When his men took up a collection to show their gratitude, Magsaysay characteristically insisted that the money, all thirty thousand pesos, be returned to those who had donated it. But he did accede to his men’s urging that he run for Congress in the first postwar election in 1946. Campaigning in uniform, he defeated five other contenders, most of them men with far more impressive résumés.

  Magysaysay stood out in this era of extravagant corruption, similar to the Gilded Age in America, as one of the few honest men in Philippine politics. He was, to be sure, not totally free of the stench of sordid politics; he was a close ally of the speaker of the House, Eugenio Perez, who had accumulated a fortune in office. But Magsaysay lived in the same simple house that he and his family had occupied before the war, and he wore the same unstylish clothes—khaki pants and casual white shirts—that he had sported as a student. In 1948, he was selected as chairman of the National Defense Committee and the next year won reelection handily.

  Yet many in Manila still disdained Magsaysay as a country bumpkin who had risen on a good war record and a ready smile but “had nothing in his head.” Even his friends had to concede “he was not an intellectual, in fact he was anti-intellectual. . . . He hated to read anything more than half a page double-spaced.” Later, after Magsaysay became president, a story spread around Manila that, when his secretary of finance told him that one of his plans for economic uplift was blocked by the law of supply and demand, Magsaysay replied, “Let’s repeal the damned law!” Even if this story is apocryphal or if Magsaysay was speaking in jest, he was plainly in need of wise guidance if he was to advance any further within the sharp-elbows corridors of Philippine politics. Aware of Magsaysay’s talents and deficits, Edward Lansdale believed he could provide him the help he needed to become defense minister, in the process turning the tide against the Huks.17

  BEFORE HE could guide Magsaysay to power, however, Lansdale first had to convince others in Washington of the Filipino’s utility. In March 1950, two days after he had first met the unvarnished Filipino soldier-turned-politician, Lansdale convened a lunch at the Hotel Washington where he introduced the visiting congressman to his superiors—Frank Wisner and Colonel Richard G. Stilwell, head of the OPC’s Far East Division (and a future four-star general)—along with Livingston T. Merchant, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, and General Nathan Twining, vice chief of staff of the Air Force. They were as impressed as Lansdale had been by Magsaysay after the Filipino, who spoke English fluently, gave a speech, carefully crafted by Lansdale, in which he laid out his ideas. At Lansdale’s urging, the OPC decided to throw its support behind Magsaysay. “I went broke taking them all to lunch,” Lansdale said, but it was worth it.18

  The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, however, delayed action in the Philippines. It was not until August that Colonel George Chester and Livingston Merchant flew to Manila as emissaries of the OPC to tell President Quirino to fire the incumbent minister of defense, Ruperto Kangleon, another former guerrilla and a
close friend of the president’s, and replace him with Magsaysay.19 Given the extent to which Quirino was dependent on U.S. support—if he did not get more money from Washington, the Philippine government would not be able to pay its bills—he had to hew closely to the Americans’ demands. But it was not just the Americans who were pushing for Magsaysay; so was Eugenio Perez, the powerful speaker of the House and Magsaysay’s political patron. Quirino was not opposed to the idea: he had already offered, back in March, to make him defense minister. Magsaysay had declined, because he doubted that he could be effective in this new role, given the pervasive corruption and other problems plaguing the government.20

  It would be an exaggeration, then, to give the impression, as have so many previous accounts, that Lansdale single-handedly engineered Magsaysay’s selection. His voice was but one among many. His greatest influence may have been in convincing the hesitant congressman that he should take the position and that he could be effective with American support. As usual with major historical events, Magsaysay’s selection as secretary of national defense—announced on his forty-third birthday, August 31, 1950—was the product of multiple factors. It was not solely the work of one midlevel intelligence officer in Washington. That officer, however, would play a much larger role in helping Magsaysay to carry out his new duties.

  THE OPC agreed to send Edward Lansdale to Manila to work as Magsaysay’s personal adviser while operating separately from the CIA station. His “cover” would be working at JUSMAG as an intelligence adviser to Quirino. Some of his colleagues told Lansdale, “That’s the lousiest cover we have ever heard of, to go out as an intelligence chief.” He replied, “Why not? I’m not going to be doing intelligence work. I can do that on the side and it will all be germane.”21 For a man who lived a covert life both professionally (as an intelligence officer) and privately (as Pat’s lover), Lansdale was remarkably indifferent to the demands of subterfuge. The most open and public of spooks, he became used to hiding in plain sight.

  When his superiors balked at giving him what he felt he needed in terms of support, Lansdale was irate, threatening—in one telling of the story—to come “back with my pocket full of grenades and . . . to throw grenades at you.”22 In another rendition of this tale, Lansdale did not mention any hand grenades; he simply said that “he slammed and locked the door and said he would not let them leave until they gave him” what he needed.23 Whatever Lansdale’s exact words, there is little doubt that he was vehement and insubordinate. His OPC superiors understandably concluded that Lansdale was a “wild man.” But the OPC, like the OSS before it, was used to outsize characters and tolerated their foibles and excesses far better than the more regimented military did. Rather than cashier him on the spot for his impertinence, his superiors gave him what he wanted.24

  His entourage was to be a modest one, and not without its comical characters. Eventually swelling to a grand total of six operatives, the Lansdale team consisted at first only of Army Captain Charles T. R. Bohannan and a communications specialist, Lieutenant A. C. “Ace” Ellis, both on the OPC payroll. They would be joined in the Philippines by Lansdale’s cigar-chomping secretary, Helen Jones, who had worked for him previously at G-2. She had come out to the Philippines in the 1930s and won a Medal of Freedom for working with Philippine guerrillas during the war to smuggle food, clothing, and medicine into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.25 While Jones took care of administrative tasks, the “even-tempered” Ellis allowed Lansdale to communicate directly with Washington without having to let the regular CIA station at the embassy know what he was up to.26

  Bohannan, known as Bo or Boh, was the most important member of the team initially, aside from Lansdale himself. He was a thirty-five-year-old anthropology PhD and a specialist in Navajo folklore who in the 1930s had worked for the Smithsonian Institution. He first arrived in the Philippines as an infantryman in 1944, leading a scouting force behind Japanese lines just ahead of the main U.S. invasion. He developed a reputation as a “tough” and “fearless” leader while gaining the kind of combat experience that Lansdale lacked. He was evacuated home after being wounded in an attack on a cave full of Japanese troops. He returned to the Philippines in 1946 as an army counterintelligence officer and stayed until 1949. Like Lansdale, he fell “in love with the people and the islands.”27

  Bo was highly intelligent—“one of the smartest guys I ever met in my life,” recalled Army Major General Victor J. Hugo Jr., who as a young second lieutenant worked with Bohannan in the 1950s. He also happened to be one of the few military or intelligence officers who was even more unconventional than Lansdale himself. A character whose eccentricities might have come straight out of Catch-22 or M*A*S*H, he became notorious for attending important meetings barefoot and squatting in the corner rather than sitting on a chair. He never wore socks; he went everywhere, even in uniform, in woven leather huarache sandals. He also favored a bush jacket with used brass shotgun shells for buttons. Initially he lived in normal military quarters in Manila, but eventually he trucked a couple of semicircular, corrugated steel Quonset huts to a vacant lot and combined them into a makeshift house for himself and his wife, Dorothy, a schoolteacher who joined him in Manila in 1952.28 “People would think he was crazy or something—that he wasn’t right in the head,” Lansdale recalled.29 But as someone who could be eccentric himself, Lansdale got along just fine with Bohannan.

  BY THE time Lansdale was ready to leave for the Philippines in September 1950, he was trying to reconcile with Helen even though he was still telling Pat Kelly that he was “terrifically, terribly and awfully lonely” without her.30

  Just a few months earlier, Ed had bought a decrepit, two-story house in northwest Washington, D.C., for nine thousand dollars. The address was 4503 MacArthur Boulevard, an appropriate location given the impact that Douglas MacArthur had had on his career.31 Although the Lansdale home was located next to Georgetown, it was in the far less exclusive Palisades, a narrow neighborhood running along the Potomac River far removed from this more genteel preserve of power. At the time, it was a working-class to middle-class area full of narrow, wooden, single-family houses built, like Lansdale’s house, around the turn of the century, and a few brick, two-story apartment buildings erected more recently. Five doors down from the new Lansdale house was an eyesore—a gasoline station.32 Behind the backyard, however, was a large public field where the Lansdale boys could play, and around the corner was an elementary school they could attend.

  Helen had sold their place in Larkspur and was relocating to Washington just as Ed’s orders for the Philippines finally came through—and shortly after he had started to remodel the house himself. Helen “was appalled,” Lansdale later wrote, “at the sight of our new home in Washington, in which I had only progressed as far as chopping down walls to make larger rooms and ripping out the plumbing for modernizing. Standing in the shambles, I broke the news that I was leaving within hours for the war in the Philippines. It wasn’t the most pleasant moment of my life.”33 When he set out this scene in his deliberately opaque 1972 memoir, Lansdale naturally omitted the most unpleasant fact of all from his wife’s perspective: the knowledge that her husband was about to return to the place where her rival lived. Lansdale left filled with guilt, which he ascribed to “the condition in which I had left that house.”34 No doubt his guilt was also due to his knowledge that his reconciliation with his wife was stillborn as he rushed back to the homeland of his mistress. Helen would have been livid if she had known that Ed was writing to Pat Kelly that his desire to be with her was “the real reason behind all my plans to get out there,”35 thus underscoring—even allowing for romantic exaggeration—the crucial influence of this extramarital relationship on his career trajectory.

  THIS TIME, Lansdale’s journey to the Philippines did not necessitate spending weeks aboard an uncomfortable troop transport. “I rode to the scene of conflict,” Lansdale wrote, “sunk down in a pillowed lounge chair aboard a Pan-American Clipper, a Boeing B-377 Stratocruise
r that cruised between fifteen and twenty-five thousand feet above the water.” In those days there was only one class of service aboard the Pan Am Clipper: “strictly first.”36 A 1950 Pan Am promotional film showed happy passengers in suits smoking and playing bridge in the lounge aboard the Stratocruiser while enjoying amenities such as a seven-course dinner prepared by a white-jacketed steward in the “largest and most efficient flying kitchen in the world.”37

  Just as Lansdale dissembled in his memoir about the true source of tension with his wife upon his departure, so too he concealed how his sudden upgrade in travel had come about. “Some unknown benefactor in the travel section in Washington had decided to hurry me to my destination,” Lansdale artfully wrote, “bypassing the delays of military traffic, which at the time was concentrating on getting troops to Korea, and sending me to the Philippines by U.S. commercial carrier.”38 In truth, he knew perfectly well the name of his benefactor. Frank Wisner, the energetic OPC chief, was impatient to get his operative to Manila to turn the tide of yet another war that the “Free World” appeared to be losing. And the OPC, unlike the armed forces, had the freedom and the funds—all that “candy”—to travel first-class.

  8

  “All-Out Force or All-Out Friendship”

  I learned to stick a toothbrush and razor in my pocket, since often days would pass before we returned to Manila again.