The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  At that initial meeting, Collins outlined his priorities, which included paring back the costly South Vietnamese armed forces that U.S. taxpayers were funding, from 170,000 troops to 88,000.22 Lansdale spoke up to say that the general had ignored the need for the army to take control of rural areas being vacated by the Vietminh and to integrate sect militaries. Cutting back army ranks would be antithetical to both goals. “You’re out of order!” Collins barked. He explained in staccato tones that he was the personal representative of the president of the United States, that he set the priorities, and that there was no need to discuss them.

  “Do you understand?” he asked icily.

  Lansdale pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. “Yes sir, I understand,” he said in his deceptively soft-spoken way. “I guess there’s nobody here as the personal representative of the people of the United States. The American people would want us to discuss these priorities. So, I hereby appoint myself as their representative—and we’re walking out on you.”

  And out he walked. Or so he later told the story.23

  Even Lansdale realized he might have gone too far. Years later he was to say, with a chuckle, “If I had been ambassador, I would have kicked me out of the country immediately.”24 But Lansdale was not as naïve or impetuous as he appeared. He had taken a risk in challenging the incoming ambassador, but even a four-star general would be reluctant, as his first act in office, to fire a man who was the personal representative not of the American people but of the CIA director—a director who happened to be the brother of his own boss, the secretary of state.

  Instead of exiling Lansdale, Collins summoned him to his office for a “more in sorrow than in anger” upbraiding. “Gee, you’re sure a hot-head aren’t you?” Collins began.25 Collins then lectured him in a fatherly tone, telling him that his behavior had been “sadly disappointing.” As a military man, surely Colonel Lansdale “understood that there could be only one commander giving the orders.” Lansdale agreed, but he pointed out that in this “highly complex” situation, Collins could not succeed if he were “to wear blinders and gags.” Collins relented enough to let Lansdale brief him while he was lying down for a post-lunch rest. Lansdale spent hours sharing his ideas with Collins before he noticed that the jet-lagged ambassador was falling asleep. He apologized for taking up so much time and beat a “hasty retreat.”26

  This was symptomatic of how out of sync Collins and Lansdale were, and would remain. Lansdale later felt as if they were living “in two wholly separate worlds.”27 Locked into a rigid, conventional-war mindset, Collins would remain largely impervious to Lansdale’s unconventional insights. In fairness, Lansdale’s sometimes abrupt manner would impede his efforts to win over his skeptics. Lansdale seldom extended the same patience and understanding to his own superiors that he routinely gave to foreign leaders such as Ramon Magsaysay and Ngo Dinh Diem.

  GIVEN THE pressure he was under, Edward Lansdale reported to Pat Kelly, “Everyone says I’m losing weight and look like Hell.”28 A few days later, he told her, “I’m punch-drunk from no sleep and too much work.”29 Lansdale’s spirits briefly lifted in early September 1954 when he was able to leave behind the small, cramped house on Rue Miche. He and Joe Redick moved into a more spacious, two-story house at 260 Rue Legrand de la Liraye. Not only did it have air-conditioned bedrooms and a large garage, but it also offered better protection from attack because it was set back farther from the street.30 To make his meals, Lansdale hired a “grandmotherly” cook named Ti Bah. “She’s doing her best to fatten me up,” Ed wrote to Pat, “except that I still miss out on meals with so much running around.”31

  Ed bragged to Pat about the “20-foot-wide bed” in his bedroom but lamented, “What the hell is the good of an air-conditioned bedroom when I seldom get to use it, and at those times just go to bed with myself, of all people. You get seduced in my dreams, and quite thoroughly, but then I have to wake up from them.” He lasciviously urged Pat to come to Saigon to “enjoy the air-conditioned bedroom.” Pat sent back a typically peppery response—one of the few that survives among their correspondence: “I noticed that you have repeatedly commented on how intact your virginity is. Is this merely a ruse to get me talking about mine? I am not biting. I am awfully interested in the 20-foot bed you claim to have in your abandoned mansion. I sure can use a wide bed to get [out] the tiredness in my bones.”32

  To inaugurate the new house, Lansdale decided to throw a big party, his first one in Vietnam, even though he did not yet have enough glasses for a horde of guests. “You are cordially invited to bring your own glasses and an urge to make merry,” read the invitation from Lansdale and Redick, who styled themselves “the fun-loving Boy Scouts.”33 A gaggle of more than two hundred people, a mixture of Vietnamese and Americans, accepted the invitation on the night of September 11, 1954. A Filipino nightclub band came over to offer entertainment and before long the guests were doing the tinikling, a traditional Philippine dance in which dancers step over and between bamboo poles—in this case, two of Lansdale’s brooms. Lansdale claimed credit for introducing the dance into Vietnam, and would use it thereafter “as a real ice-breaker for parties.”34

  He would host many such gatherings in the years ahead in an attempt to break down political and social barriers among Vietnamese and Americans and to foster a spirit of friendship—as well as simply to have some fun in a high-pressure environment. An American reporter who worked in Saigon during this period called Lansdale’s house “the place to be . . . it was where the action was.”35

  ON DECEMBER 23, 1954, Lansdale departed Vietnam to spend Christmas in Manila, taking with him two of his young team members, Lieutenants Rufus Phillips and Frank “Zsa Zsa” Garber. In his typical manner, Lansdale went straight to the Malacañang Palace and wandered into a conference that President Ramon Magsaysay was having with Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. By way of greeting, he asked Magsaysay whether the coffee was any good that morning. Radford turned around grinning and “said there was only one guy that informal in this part of the world.”36

  Much against Lansdale’s will, Magsaysay dragged him that night to a state dinner; because Lansdale had nothing else to wear, Magsaysay lent him the very barong Tagalog shirt that he had worn at his inauguration. After being spurned by the chief American envoy in Saigon, Lansdale could now spend Christmas morning with a head of state and his family. Lansdale found Monching “moody, saying he was fed up with being president and with all the politicians.” But Magsaysay “brightened up, and I guess stayed happy,” Lansdale wrote, “because he told me later on that he changed into a more relaxed person with me close by.”37 Lansdale, too, turned into a more relaxed person in the Philippines, because he got to spend the rest of Christmas with his beloved Patching.38

  Quickly going to work, Lansdale also had plenty of business to conduct in Manila. He wanted to avoid insinuations that American “imperialists” were arriving to replace the French—a standard trope of Vietminh propaganda—by putting a Philippine face on aid to Saigon.39 Ever the hard-bitten commando, Lou Conein cynically grumbled that Lansdale’s idea was that “all the little brown brothers in Asia should become one big happy family and help one another.”40

  Lansdale had already set up with his Filipino friend Oscar Arellano, “balloon-shaped, energetic, an architect by profession,”41 an organization known as Operation Brotherhood (OB) to bring Filipino doctors and nurses to South Vietnam to provide free medical services. Arellano had also been involved in an earlier Lansdale effort to safeguard the 1953 Philippine presidential election. Once again the CIA was secretly footing the bill. By the spring of 1955, more than a hundred OB doctors and nurses would be treating two thousand patients a day at ten clinics, their efforts focused not only on newly arrived refugees but also on rural residents in districts newly freed from Vietminh control.42

  To complement OB’s efforts, Lansdale created Freedom Company, another CIA-funded organization run by another Filipi
no friend who had been a leader in the CIA-supported National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL). Frisco “Johnny” San Juan was a thirty-two-year-old former anti-Japanese guerrilla who had been commander of the Philippine Veterans Legion. Lansdale called him “a hard-working idealist with executive ability.”43 San Juan brought over fellow Philippine army veterans to teach the South Vietnamese how to handle weapons and maintain military equipment. “I knew we were being helped surreptitiously by the U.S. government, but I believed in what we were doing—I believed in the fight against Communism,” Frisco San Juan explained sixty years later, by then a small, frail, wizened man of ninety-two sitting on the patio of his Manila house, a walker next to his chair, as the wind whistled through the palm trees. “Why should I feel guilty about getting the U.S. government’s help? I wasn’t betraying my country.”44

  When Lansdale first broached the idea of importing experts from the Philippines, Diem scoffed that “the Vietnamese didn’t need the help of a bunch of orators and nightclub musicians,” a reference to the fact that “most of the dance bands in Asia at the time were made up of Filipinos.”45 But when Diem actually met San Juan and other Filipinos who had been active in putting down the Huk Rebellion, he was won over and agreed to sign a contract with Freedom Company. The funds, of course, came covertly from the CIA.

  Diem may have been swayed because one of the very first experts that Freedom Company sent to Saigon was there to protect him. Lansdale persuaded Magsaysay to dispatch Colonel Napoleon “Poling” Valeriano, who was serving as commander of the Presidential Guard Battalion, to reorganize Diem’s bodyguards.46 Freedom Company would also provide bodyguards for Lansdale himself in the form of a couple of Philippine army veterans, Proculo L. Mojica and Amador T. Maik. Mojica later recalled that when Lansdale walked through a marketplace in Saigon he would tell him, “Open your eyes wide, Proc. Don’t hesitate to pull that trigger if you see anything funny.” Fingering his hidden pistol, he recalled, “There were times that I felt I was in Jap-occupied Manila during the Pacific War.”47

  Employing Filipino instructors, Freedom Company also undertook covert training in the Philippines to teach anti-Communist Vietnamese the art of guerrilla warfare; if the Vietminh ever overran South Vietnam, they were supposed to serve as the nucleus of a resistance network. This effort was soon expanded to train South Vietnamese soldiers in Lansdale-style counterinsurgency in order, as Lansdale explained, to get the Vietnamese “gently ‘brain-washed’ by the Filipinos.”48

  HAVING FINISHED his business in the Philippines, Lansdale winged his way back to Saigon on December 27, 1954. He wrote to Pat Kelly, “Felt blue as hell New Year’s Eve without you—sure as hell a contrast to Christmas, which you made so happy for me.”49 But Pat did visit Vietnam early in the new year. She and Ed got a chance for some oceanside relaxation, and she taught Iron Mike O’Daniel to mix martinis the way she liked them and to dance the tinikling. He was so smitten that he took to calling her “Colonel Kelly.”50 This was the first of several trips to Vietnam that Pat would make as her relationship with Ed became increasingly common knowledge among his colleagues.

  Meanwhile, Ed was reassuring his wife that he had tried to contact her on the telephone “all the time I was in the Philippines—even to getting Magsaysay to try it himself—but either the circuits were out or you were.” He concluded with a plea for Helen to let him “know all about Christmas at home.” “It’s awful being so far away and under pressures of our peculiar combat and to miss all the things we are fighting for, without even being able to explain what’s going on.”51

  In truth, by now the tropical capitals, Manila and Saigon, felt more like home than did wintry Washington. As Ed later wrote to Helen, “It’s a sad commentary on the way I’ve had to live, but I know the streets of Saigon and Manila far better than Washington which is now supposed to be my hometown.”52 He knew that Helen did not like how deeply he was becoming immersed in Vietnamese life, just as he had previously immersed himself in Filipino life. “Helen won’t like this,” he wrote to his family, “because it sounds like Magsaysay, but a group of Tonkinese brought in some food and claim that I now belong to Vietnam. The same folks who fed me a colorless liquid which turned out to be essence of cockroach. Honest injun. A Central Vietnam delicacy. I should pick my countries better, huh. At a staff meeting at the Ministry of Defense here, the Secretary of State for Morale Action explained to the staff that I really wasn’t an American, but had been loaned to Vietnam by the Philippines. Nuts.”53 Helen’s groan upon reading this would have been loud enough to carry the whole length of the Pacific.

  Essentially abandoned by her swashbuckling husband, Helen Lansdale was feeling miserable, as Ed’s friend, Wesley R. Fishel of Michigan State University, found when he saw her a few months later. “She apparently thinks you’re one hell of a lug, since, among other things, you forgot her birthday (or was it your anniversary?),” Fishel wrote to Ed. “She sounded very lonely, and had I not been such a gentleman, I would have taken her out to dinner.”54 It was her birthday that Lansdale had forgotten; Helen turned fifty-four in 1955. But, for good measure, he forgot their twenty-second wedding anniversary, too.55

  THE YEAR 1955 brought additional duties for Lansdale. He and his team were writing what was in effect a counterinsurgency blueprint for South Vietnam, even if the word “counterinsurgency” did not yet exist. The preferred term was “pacification.” Ngo Dinh Diem did not like this word, however, because he associated it with the French. So in deference to his sensibilities Lansdale dubbed his agenda “national security action.” Implementing this agenda was an urgent priority because the Vietminh were due to pull out of South Vietnam by April 1955, leaving large areas bereft of any authority. South Vietnam had few trained civil servants, and few members of this privileged caste had any desire to live among the peasants—most had joined the civil service precisely to escape such a fate. Lansdale urged that the army be given the lead role in delivering government services to the most dangerous areas.56 His memorandum on “National Security Action (Pacification)” was issued virtually unchanged by Diem on December 31, 1954.57

  A few days later Lansdale laid out his pacification ideas in a long memorandum for Lightning Joe Collins, essentially echoing what he had written to Diem. He began portentously: “We have no other choice but to win here or face an increasingly grim future, a heritage which none of us want to pass along to our offspring.” And what would it take to win? Lansdale, with Cassandra-like clarity, listed three imperatives whose historical significance could not be underestimated. First, eliminate “dangerous frictions existing among key members of the U.S. team here.” (Oblivious to the rivalries playing out around him, Collins scribbled dismissively in the margin, “Rumors from newspapermen based on cocktail stories.”) Second, implement an “operating philosophy of helping the Vietnamese to help themselves” so as not to “merely make them more dependent on us.” And third: “We must then set about convincing, and accomplishment is most convincing, the people that their own future (and that of their children and children’s children) will be more rewarding under our system than under Communism—more rewarding politically or socially, economically, and spiritually.”

  Having outlined what needed to be done, Lansdale concluded with a suggestion for who could do it. He proposed that the ambassador appoint him to “bring about a coordination of the efforts of our entire team, starting with the U.S. team and, through them, the Vietnamese and French.” Collins might have had his differences with Lansdale, but he could see a good idea when it was presented to him. On the margin he scrawled, “Designated Lansdale to coordinate our phases of program under Gen. O’Daniel’s direction.”58 Thanks to a virtuoso display of bureaucratic maneuvering—a rarity in his career—Lansdale had become the first American charged with overseeing counterinsurgency in Vietnam, a responsibility that in years to come would be exercised by a vast, ponderous bureaucracy.

  To go along with his new responsibilities as “half soldier and half
diplomat,”59 Lansdale received a new position. In December 1954, Collins worked out an agreement with General Paul Ely, the French commander, to transfer responsibility for training South Vietnamese troops to American advisers by July 1, 1955. To take charge of training during the transition, they agreed to create a joint Franco-American organization named TRIM (Training Relations and Instruction Mission)—“one of those screwy military names coined to get some nice initials,” Lansdale explained.60 The French assigned 200 officers to its staff; the Americans 68, a figure that grew by summer 1955 to 120.61 There were four divisions at TRIM, for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and “national security” (i.e., pacification). Colonel Lansdale was designated the first head of the National Security Division, the only one of the four advising the Vietnamese on ongoing operations. It was a title designed, he joked to Pat Kelly, “to keep a fellow working 22 hours a day and happy.”62

  Iron Mike O’Daniel gave him typically concise marching orders: “Sky’s the limit, keep peace in the family (meaning MAAG, the French etc.), and get going dammit.”63

  “I HAVE now moved to [TRIM],” Ed wrote to Pat at the end of January 1955, “where I can save the world except for Wednesday afternoons off, and Saturday afternoons off, and Sundays off, it says in the big mimeographed print here.”64 His new office was a shed with duckboards over its dirt floor, two bare lightbulbs dangling from their cords, and, for furniture, folding chairs, field tables, and open crates to hold files.65

  Both Lansdale’s immediate superior at TRIM and his deputy were French. He got along well with his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Romain-Desfossés, a “tough” and “tanned” paratrooper who sported a red beret and a monocle.66 Destined to go to Algeria soon to fight in another dirty war, he was an old Indochina hand, and he seemed to have the best interests of the Vietnamese at heart, thereby endearing himself to Lansdale. Lansdale did not get along as well with his boss, Colonel Jean Carbonel, who was TRIM’s chief of staff. Lansdale viewed Carbonel as an unrepentant colonialist; Carbonel viewed Lansdale as a naïve meddler in France’s traditional sphere of influence. Their feud was straight out of an opéra bouffe. Carbonel turned his back on Lansdale at parties and refused to speak to him directly. Instead, while looking straight at Lansdale, the English-speaking Carbonel would relay messages to him through his adjutant, who was standing nearby. After Lansdale replied, Carbonel would ask the adjutant, “What did he say?” forcing him to repeat Lansdale’s words.