by Max Boot
While Lansdale returned to Manila, Iron Mike O’Daniel swaggered to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like many future American generals in Vietnam, he came away from his trip absurdly over-optimistic. “The French,” he wrote, “are in no danger of suffering a major military reverse. On the contrary, they are gaining strength and confidence in their ability to fight the war to a successful military conclusion.”36 At his urging, the administration naïvely embraced the Navarre plan and approved $385 million in extra funding to underwrite French operations.
Desperate to land a decisive blow for the shellacked French army, General Navarre decided to create an “aero-terrestrial” outpost near the border with Laos. He hoped that this fortress, supplied by air, would block the Vietminh from invading Laos and draw them into open battle, where they could be slaughtered by superior French firepower. The place where he chose to situate this base was a valley with a prosaic name that translated as “Big Frontier Administrative Center.” Or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.37
12
A Fortress Falls
I sensed a sort of desperation that I move in fast.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
OPERATION CASTOR, as the plan to fortify Dien Bien Phu was known, began in earnest on November 20, 1953, while Edward Lansdale was back in the Philippines advising newly elected President Ramon Magsaysay on how to put together his government. Early that morning, some sixteen hundred French paratroopers were woken up, briefed, and then loaded with their gear aboard a fleet of sixty-five C-47 Dakota transport aircraft at two military airfields in Hanoi. By 9:30, all of the aircraft were airborne and heading west on their 185-mile journey. More than an hour later, as they began to approach the drop zone, the paras went through the by now familiar procedures: stand up, hook up to a cable, check the equipment of the man in front. Then doors opened with an “icy blast and deafening noise,” followed by the flashing of the green light and the screams of the jump masters: “Go! Go! Go!”1
By nightfall, after a six-hour battle against a battalion of Vietminh regulars, these elite troops had secured control of a valley eleven miles long and six miles wide. Within a few months, the French garrison numbered more than ten thousand men and they were spread across a series of eight strongpoints with feminine names—Dominique, Eliane, Beatrice, and so on—each one composed of blockhouses and dugouts protected by sandbags and barbed wire, land mines and interlocking fields of fire. Ever attuned to the niceties of war, the French even airlifted in two Mobile Field Brothels to keep the troops content in this jungle Verdun.2 Vo Nguyen Giap, for his part, would assemble fifty thousand carefully camouflaged troops on the forested slopes around Dien Bien Phu. Another fifty thousand or so porters and support troops—a long line of human ants—dragged heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns through the jungle. Incredibly enough, the Vietminh would have more than twice as many artillery tubes as the defenders.3
The French were blissfully unaware of the extent of Vietminh preparations. Their only concern was that the Vietminh might slink back into the jungle and refuse battle. A young French lieutenant stationed at Dien Bien Phu wrote to his sister on December 26, 1953, in racist prose typical of his comrades, “If they attack, there’ll be plenty of yellow meat in the barbed wire.”4
WHILE THE defenders of Dien Bien Phu in the isolated northwestern corner of Vietnam were still awaiting an enemy assault, Edward Lansdale left the Philippines on January 20, 1954, to return to the United States and seek his next assignment. No doubt he was sorry to be leaving his paramour and confidante once again, but the letter he wrote to her aboard the airplane did not reflect the giddy infatuation that he had exhibited while in limerence almost six years earlier aboard a troopship. In lieu of the ardent expressions of love he had once sent to his “darling Patching,” he now addressed his letter “Hi, Pat” and ended with a perfunctory “Love & kisses, Ed”—not so different from the way he wrote to his wife.5
Returning home, Ed had to reacquaint himself with his family after nearly three and a half years away. His older son, Ted, was now fourteen years old; Pete was twelve. Both were enrolled at Gordon Junior High School, a public school in northwest Washington, D.C. That fall, Ted would enter Western High School, followed two years later by Pete. “My kids missed having a father during the days when they’d be going to Boy Scouts, and I missed having them,” Ed later said.6
Helen, by now fully gray-haired and almost fifty-three years old, had the sole responsibility of raising these “renegade sons,” or “hooligans,” as Ted referred tongue-in-cheek to himself and his brother many years later.7 The task was all the harder because she did not know how to drive. Every Sunday, the three of them took a streetcar to attend Christian Science services and Sunday school. “And if worst came to worst,” Ted recalled, “Mom would just call a taxi, saying, ‘Your father will pay for all of this.’ ”8
Both Pete and Ted, being active teenage boys, rebelled against their mother’s attempts to introduce a bit of “refinement” into their lives by taking them to the Army-Navy Junior Cotillion at a posh townhouse in Georgetown, a formal setting where proper boys were expected to dress in suits and dance with girls in dresses and white gloves. “My brother and I hated it,” Ted Lansdale recalled. “Absolutely hated it.” Bored, the boys wandered over to the window. Looking outside, they spotted a convertible parked downstairs. Close to them stood a punch bowl with a big chunk of ice floating in it. “I wonder what’ll happen if that ice chunk hits the ragtop of the convertible?” one of the boys asked. The other answered, “There’s only one way to find out!” As it turned out, the ice only caused the ragtop to sag, not to break. Helen was beside herself, lecturing them, in the time-honored tradition of exasperated parents, “You don’t appreciate what I do for you!”9
No doubt Helen was frustrated, as any mother would be, by the challenges of dealing with these rambunctious boys by herself. She must have felt lonely, too, and resentful that while she was raising the children, Ed was, to her mind, luxuriating in the Philippines with his mistress. “In some ways she had a rough life,” Ted reflected. But, to her considerable credit, she never expressed any resentment toward their absent father, nor did she ever mention to them the existence of his mistress, even if, in the manner of most children, they eventually intuited the truth. The impression their mother conveyed, the boys later said, was that their father was a “larger than life” figure, a “great guy” who was away doing very important work for the country, even though he would have preferred to be with them.10
In turn, one of Lansdale’s closest friends was to state, he never heard Ed say an unkind word about his wife, “even by implication.” In spite of his love for Pat Kelly, “Ed was an honorable man with a tremendous sense of duty. After the initial request for a divorce, I think Ed saw it as his duty not to desert Helen and his boys.”11
On those intermittent occasions when he was with his children—usually a short home leave—Ed would try to make up for lost time by taking them on some fun activity. “Sometimes it was like, ‘damn it, we are going to have fun whether you like it or not,’ ” Pete recalled with a laugh.12 Their father introduced an earthy, fun-loving element largely absent from their lives with their straitlaced mother, even if she did gamely don a baseball glove to play catch with them and even take them to Redskins football games.13 One time, for example, Ed taught the boys how to melt snow by peeing on it.14 Then he was gone again, and it was left to their mother to impose discipline. “She kept us pretty much grounded in what was right and wrong,” Ted later said, “and by and large I think we followed that.”15
Trying to get used to being with his family again—and they with him—while missing Pat Kelly must have made Lansdale’s latest homecoming awkward and bittersweet. But his focus lay elsewhere: like many other fathers in the age of those best sellers The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, he was consumed by his work. His reputation was growing along with demands for his service. Just before leaving the Philippines,
Ed wrote to Helen, “The French, British, Catholic Church, Nationalist Chinese, Vietnamese, and even South Koreans have all made it known that they want some help from me—apparently since I’m one of the few real optimists left in this gloomy part of the world.”16 But for all the calls on Lansdale, there was little doubt he would wind up focusing on the country that had so enchanted him during his three-week visit the previous summer—a country that increasingly was a source of frustration and concern for American policymakers.
THE DOMESTIC political context played an important role in President Eisenhower’s calculations about Vietnam, as it would for all of his next four successors. While Ike liked to play the part of an amiable, apolitical, and dim duffer, he was, in reality, intensely intelligent and keenly attuned to the demands of politics. During his long army career, he had learned the benefits of appearing relaxed and nonchalant: his demeanor inspired confidence. But he could not possibly have accomplished as much as he did—he had rocketed from the rank of colonel in 1941 to become a five-star general in command of the Allied armies that liberated North Africa and Western Europe—if he had actually been the simpleton his detractors imagined. “To those who knew him,” writes his biographer Jean Edward Smith, “Ike was a tireless taskmaster who worked with incredible subtlety to move events in the direction he wished them to go.”17
In his decision-making about Vietnam, Eisenhower was acutely aware of the influence still exerted as the year began by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the first half of 1954, “Tailgunner Joe” was losing public popularity and credibility, but he remained a force to reckon with in the Senate and the Republican Party. Eisenhower did not want to give him any further ammunition to snipe that the administration was soft on Communism—which McCarthy certainly would have done if Indochina had fallen to Ho Chi Minh. Eisenhower, moreover, had won office with a campaign blasting Truman for having “lost” China, so, even if McCarthy did not exist, he could hardly afford to be seen as “losing” Indochina. But Ike had also won office by promising to extricate the United States from the unpopular war in Korea. He thus could hardly afford to send American troops into another war in Asia either. “This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!” the president warned, prophetically.18
The obvious alternative to sending ground troops was to send more matériel and more advisers to help the French. A decision was reached early in 1954 that Lieutenant General Iron Mike O’Daniel would be sent back to Vietnam in the spring to take over the Military Assistance Advisory Group even if it meant he would have to voluntarily give up a star to do so. (MAAG was a two-star, not a three-star, command.) But Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson noted at an NSC meeting on February 4, 1954, that “some skepticism existed at the Pentagon as to General O’Daniel’s qualifications in the political and psychological field.” Vice President Nixon, who had visited Vietnam a few months earlier, added that he was concerned the United States did not have “our first team in the field,” and that it was imperative “to have the very best men in the information and propaganda fields” in Vietnam.19
The process of sending one of “the very best men” began in the Pentagon on the afternoon of Friday, January 29, 1954. The setting was the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger M. Kyes, a General Motors executive who had been brought to Washington by “Engine Charlie” Wilson, the former CEO of General Motors. Gathered here were Admiral Arthur W. Radford, a strong-willed aviator who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the short-fused under secretary of state, Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith; and the genially deceptive CIA director, Allen Dulles. After a long discussion of what could be done to help the French, the minutes show, “Mr. Allen Dulles inquired if an unconventional warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale, could not be added to the group of five liaison officers to which General Navarre had agreed.” This suggestion won an immediate endorsement from Admiral Radford, although he added that Lansdale’s departure should be delayed for a few months until O’Daniel arrived in Saigon. “This was agreeable to Mr. Allen Dulles,” the minutes indicate. The reaction of Colonel Lansdale himself was not recorded, but he, too, was very much present at this meeting.20
Lansdale was to insist repeatedly in later years that it was John Foster Dulles, not Allen Dulles, who had sent him to Vietnam—an assertion that has been repeated by numerous writers.21 In the most complete version of the story, told to two interviewers from the Congressional Research Service in 1982, Lansdale claimed that in January 1954 he attended a meeting about Vietnam at the Pentagon at which John Foster Dulles said, “We’re going to send you over there, Ed. . . . We want you to go over there and help the Vietnamese the way you helped the Filipinos.”22 Lansdale appears to have deliberately twisted the memory of the actual meeting at which John Foster Dulles was not present, because he was not yet ready to admit that he had worked for the CIA. Yet even after he admitted in 1984 his CIA association, he still claimed that the secretary of state had sent him to Vietnam;23 by that point, the fiction may have been too firmly implanted in his memory to be dislodged. Which is not to say that the entire recollection was fictitious: it is likely that Allen Dulles did say to him on January 29 something along the lines of, “Do what you did in the Philippines,” even though that comment was not included in the minutes.
Even with top-level support for his mission, however, Lansdale found it hard to get to Saigon. One night, his father, Harry, who was visiting asked him, “Who’s that fellow who keeps calling every night?” “Oh,” Ed replied, “some guy out in the Philippines.”24 That guy was actually the Guy: Ramon Magsaysay. The president of the Philippines was beseeching Lansdale to return to Manila to help him resolve his difficulties with the Philippine Congress.
Given his success in the Philippines and his affection for its people and for his mistress, Lansdale was torn. He wanted to help Monching, but he also felt he had achieved as much as he could in the Philippines and that he was more urgently needed in Indochina. He tried to get out of another long-term assignment in Manila by recommending to Allen Dulles that “Ambassador Spruance should be loaned the best public relations man possible to carry on.”25 But Magsaysay would brook no substitutes. In late March or early April 1954, Lansdale was informed by his governmental superiors that none other than Magsaysay had just phoned Eisenhower to insist, president to president, on Lansdale’s services, and Eisenhower had agreed.26 There was no escaping an order from the commander in chief.
Before Lansdale could depart for Manila, he received word that his mother, Sarah, had died in Los Angeles on April 6, 1954. She was seventy-two years old. In his memoir, he was to write, “We were a close, affectionate family and the news hit me hard.” The latter part of the statement is undoubtedly true. But he was stretching a point to claim that the family was close, given that his father was now living in Detroit with his girlfriend, soon to be his wife, and that Ed had been gone from the country so much that he could go years without seeing his brothers or parents. In Sarah’s last years, she had actually been closer to Helen than to Ed, because she had lived with Helen and the boys in California in the 1940s while Ed was away in the Philippines. But Helen’s morbid fear of flying meant there was no chance of her going from Washington to California for the Christian Science funeral service. Ed had been planning to stop over in Los Angeles anyway en route to Manila in order to see his mother. Now he would see her buried before proceeding on to Asia “in a deeply somber mood.”27
His latest stay at home had lasted less than three months.
LANSDALE ARRIVED back in humid, hectic Manila on April 20, 1954, and immediately began spending most of his time at the Malacañang Palace. In the late afternoon, after Magsaysay woke up from a nap after having worked between 5 a.m. and 2 p.m., Lansdale would come to his bedroom for a chat. With Magsaysay in his pajamas, he and the first lady, Luz, would sit down at a table with Lansdale “and talk at length on various and sundry problems.”28 There was continuing good news about the nearly extinct Huk Rebellion—Luis Taru
c, the Huk supremo, surrendered on May 17—but Magsaysay was struggling with the challenge of overhauling the government. Pulled once again into the role of “a behind-scenes executive,” Lansdale found himself working “long, long hours” on various “national and international problems, including a lot of economics that I had to really study up on.”29
Lansdale’s presence in Manila became widely known and controversial among critics who charged that once again Magsaysay was being manipulated by his American Rasputin. “It became quite a game,” Lansdale wrote, “to get things done without notice—just speculative attacks in the scandal sheets and almost completely wrong.”30 Despite the controversy, Magsaysay was eager to have his American friend stay for as long as possible. Lansdale wrote that he was plied with “all sorts of things”—“rooms at Malacañan, house in the garden, aircraft, cars, boats to take me any place I wanted to go—etc., etc.,” but he turned it all down.31
One of his newfound, self-assigned duties was trying to explain the situation in Indochina to Filipinos wondering whether a nearby state was about to fall to Communism. On April 21, 1954, Lansdale was the featured guest at a Meet the Press radio broadcast at the Manila Overseas Press Club. He said presciently that the fall of Dien Bien Phu “would not necessarily be fatal from the military point of view” but that it would have a large psychological impact by aiding “the reds in their drive for power.”32 Lansdale learned more about the latest developments in Vietnam during a lightning visit to Saigon three days later to meet with the recently arrived Iron Mike O’Daniel. In Ed’s words, it was “eleven hours of flying just to have a couple of hours talk with O’Daniel.” The general, along with “almost all of the top Americans there,” tried to persuade him to stay. “I sensed a sort of desperation that I move in fast,” Ed wrote to Helen. “I stalled them off, but am worried about the atmosphere in Indochina, and my conscience hurts since they feel I can start changing the situation.”33
