by Max Boot
Vietnamese Communist historians later said the years from 1955 to 1959 were “the darkest period” in the party’s history, with membership in the South declining by two-thirds, but, as Lansdale suspected at the time and as became obvious in retrospect, the cost of such repression was high. Diem needlessly alienated individuals who were not Communist true believers and hounded some of them into the arms of the insurgents. The Hanoi regime, while still bent on using “peaceful means” to reunify the country, authorized its southern cadres to use limited force to defend themselves. Acts of terrorism began to reappear in the countryside in the late 1950s.
THE TERM “workaholic” had not yet been coined—it would not be added to the lexicon until 197122—but Edward Lansdale was an exemplar of the phenomenon avant la lettre. His days immersed in tension-filled intrigue on the front lines of the Cold War were taking a personal toll, all the more so because he was finding himself in an increasingly painful conflict with the man he was supposed to be mentoring, Ngo Dinh Diem. In a letter home, he explained, “Work goes on from the moment I roll groaning out of the sack in the early morning until late night; some of the gang talk to me while I shave; I write orders while sitting on the bathroom throne; and keep moving all the time; in just one phase of my work (the joint French-US one) I have to keep 23 big projects moving; there’s just no time for personal life.”23
Seeking to escape from the Saigon pressure cooker in the summer of 1955, Lansdale floated the idea of returning to the Philippines to become Ramon Magsaysay’s CIA liaison, a job now occupied by his old deputy Charles “Bo” Bohannan. John Foster Dulles, however, was reluctant to grant this request because, as he told Eisenhower, “Lansdale was now in a position of special responsibility in relation to Premier Diem.”24 But the Dulles brothers let Lansdale take a holiday in the Philippines to see whether it made sense to send him back permanently.
Returning to Manila, Lansdale enjoyed his chance to relax “sitting in the sun under some coconut trees”25 as well as to spend time with Pat Kelly; when he came back to Saigon at the end of July, he wrote that he was “deeply grateful” to her “for a wonderful leave.”26 But his appearance in Manila also prompted a resurgence of the old accusation that he was Magsaysay’s Rasputin. That charge resonated because his visit coincided with Magsaysay’s decision on July 12, 1955, to grant formal recognition to Diem’s regime following a propaganda campaign covertly orchestrated by Bohannan.27 Senator Claro Recto, the Nacionalista leader who had supported Magsaysay in 1953 but had now turned against him, charged that Lansdale had given Magsaysay two hundred thousand dollars to secure the presidency. “The rumors in 1953 were that I’d given him 3 million dollars,” Lansdale wrote to his family, “and I’m disappointed that Recto thinks I’m such a cheapskate.”28
The CIA operative’s reputation as a kingmaker in Manila ensured the hostility not only of Recto and his allies but also of Homer Ferguson, a former Republican senator from Michigan who had been given the post of ambassador as a sinecure after losing his reelection campaign in 1954. New to his job and ignorant of Asia, Ferguson did not want to risk being upstaged by a well-connected competitor. All of this opposition led John Foster Dulles to conclude that Lansdale’s visit “had been counterproductive.”29
Lansdale had to write sheepishly to Magsaysay, expressing the “hope that the use of my name to attack you hasn’t hurt you. It sure hasn’t helped me any. But, neither of us bruises too easily.”30 He was left to reflect that he had become a victim “of so much publicity, and so much of it unfavorable” that he felt “a little like Lenin who had to be sent through Germany in a sealed car. No fun in being notorious.”31
BACK IN Saigon, Lansdale at least had the consolation of being moved out of TRIM to work at the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) directly under his friend Iron Mike O’Daniel. “Means I won’t have disgruntled French working alongside me all day long,” he noted merrily.32 His relief was short-lived, however, for in November 1955 Iron Mike was replaced by another officer with a colorful nickname—Lieutenant General Samuel T. Williams, better known as Hanging Sam.
MAAG’s new commander had gotten his start as a private in the Texas National Guard chasing the Mexican revolutionary-cum-bandit Francisco “Pancho” Villa in 1916. Subsequently commissioned an officer, he was wounded and decorated for heroism in France in 1918. His nickname derived from his days in 1943 commanding an infantry regiment in Texas. He sat as a judge in the court-martial of a soldier accused of raping and killing a ten-year-old girl. When the defense tried to present psychiatric testimony to show that the defendant was insane, he snapped, “I’ve heard enough! Let’s hang the sonofabitch!” During the Normandy campaign, Hanging Sam was relieved of his job as an assistant division commander and busted down to colonel after berating his incompetent division commander for “goddam stupidness,” but he made a comeback to become a well-respected division commander during the Korean War. 33
Arriving in Saigon, he was dismayed by what he found at MAAG—“it was an enormous mess,” he fumed, a situation that he blamed on his predecessor Iron Mike, who “was an aggressive fighter” but “knew no more about running an office than the man in the moon.”34 The fastidious Williams was disgusted one morning when he saw coming up the stairs of MAAG an unshaven American, “dirty as hell,” who left his “very dilapidated automobile” parked where it wasn’t supposed to be. He asked the first officer he saw, “Who is that character?” The answer: “He’s one of Lansdale’s people.”35
Hanging Sam immediately summoned to his office Colonel Lansdale, who arrived just as a brigadier general was leaving, “his face bloodless and stunned,” warning Lansdale, “God help you.” Williams launched into a diatribe about the slovenly appearance of Lansdale’s men. “You run them like a band of gypsies!” he thundered. “What have you got to say for yourself?” In truth the “dirty as hell” officer was just back from an arduous trip to meet with Vietnamese mountain tribes that Lansdale was trying to bring over to the government side. But instead of explaining this, Lansdale insouciantly replied, “I like gypsies, sir.” This set off another explosion from Williams—an upbraiding, Lansdale wrote, meant “not only for my own ears but for every living creature in the entire metropolitan area and maybe even the ships at sea.”36 On another occasion, Williams exploded when he spotted one of Lansdale’s officers using an umbrella in the rain, a breach of army etiquette. “What kind of candy-assed, sissified bunch have you got in that outfit of yours?” he demanded.37
Such outbursts might have made Lansdale hate Williams, but they did not. They reminded him of his exuberant and combative grandfather Edward Philips. Lansdale invited Williams to dinner and struck up a friendship with him. By February 1956, he was reporting that the general “has started taking me into his confidence quite a bit, and we’re starting to team up the way I did with O’Daniel.”38
In spite of their budding friendship, the two men would disagree over how the Vietnamese army should be trained. A veteran of the Korean War, Williams worried primarily about a conventional invasion across the DMZ. During the five years (1955–60) he spent in charge of MAAG, he removed the Vietnamese army from the civic-action role Lansdale had emphasized, sending troops back to their barracks to train for a conventional war. The army that he was building was ill equipped to handle the guerrilla threat that South Vietnam would soon face. Lansdale tried to warn against this ill-fated military transformation, but, just as he had been overruled on the nature of the political system in South Vietnam, he was overruled on the nature of the South Vietnamese military, too—another mistake with severe repercussions that would become obvious in the years ahead.
GENERAL TRAN VAN DON, the new Vietnamese army chief of staff, noted Lansdale’s diminished status after the sects had been defeated. Initially, he wrote, Diem “relied heavily on Lansdale, so much so that members of his staff had orders to always put him through to Diem, night or day, whatever he was doing.” But Lansdale “went a little far when he tried to have
Diem copy Magsaysay” by creating a Philippine-style democracy. By the end of 1955, Tran Van Don was not seeing Lansdale at Diem’s side as regularly as before and asked Diem why not. The prime minister answered, “Lansdale is too CIA and is an encumbrance. In politics there is no room for sentiment.”39
Lansdale was getting his own intimations of Diem’s displeasure. “I hear by the bamboo telegraph,” he wrote on March 31, 1956, “that Diem has decided I’m too tricky a person and doesn’t trust me any more.” The two men had just disagreed about “the sovereignty of the people,” a rather large issue, with Diem claiming that it was “an outmoded idea.” In support of his position, Diem cited “Austrian and German jurists.” Lansdale replied heatedly that this “Hegelian nonsense had brought on a disastrous world war and was a really dangerous philosophy for a state. And as for sovereignty of the people, this was still the U.S. idea, and the most powerful nation in the world still found it practical in all of today’s complex situations.” Lansdale’s attitude was: “Somebody has to talk straight to him, and if he wants me muzzled, I’ll leave. I like the guy, but won’t buy fascism.”40
As this exchange made clear, Lansdale was intent on implanting representative government in South Vietnam, as he had done in the Philippines, but Diem, far from being an American puppet, had his own ideas. In a series of state-building steps from 1955 to 1956, the South Vietnamese leader consistently opted to define his government in autocratic, rather than democratic, terms.
Diem, then only the prime minister, took no chances when he called a referendum for October 23, 1955, on whether the former emperor Bao Dai should remain as head of state or whether the position should go to Diem himself. Lansdale cautioned that the most Diem should do to influence the outcome would be to print the pro-Diem ballots in a propitious color—“the cheerful red of Asian weddings”—while printing the pro–Bao Dai ballots in an unlucky hue—“an uninspired shade of green.”41 But Diem did not stop there, mounting a propaganda campaign to revile Bao Dai as an “evil king” with a weakness for “gambling, women, wine, milk and butter” and as a “dung beetle who sold his country for personal glory.” No campaigning in favor of the erstwhile emperor was allowed.42 Ignoring Lansdale’s imprecations against voter fraud, Diem then announced that he had won 98.2 percent of the 5.8 million ballots cast, a “totally unbelievable” figure that Howard Simpson of the USIA said “would have made a Tammany Hall boss blush.”43 Armed with these dubious election results, Diem proclaimed himself president of the Republic of Vietnam.
Diem also made sure that the outcome of elections for a new Constituent Assembly on March 4, 1956, would be to his liking, with his supporters winning two-thirds of the seats. Lansdale subsequently defended the vote in his memoir, but at the time he was not impressed, writing home that “such rigging is just as bad as what the Commies do, and how can the average guy feel that the government is his own . . . which is the only way to really lick Communism any place.”44
The newly chosen assembly’s first task was to craft a new constitution, with the assistance of Lansdale’s old friend the Filipino lawyer Johnny Orendain. With Lansdale’s protests ignored by Washington, however, the National Assembly promulgated a constitution that gave Diem, at his insistence, virtually unlimited authority.45
Diem further enhanced his power by ending the old practice of letting villages select their own leaders. From now on, village, district, and province chiefs would be appointed by Saigon. Lansdale did not find out about this move until after he had left Vietnam. He called this a “disastrous” decision because it “transgressed the ancient Vietnamese edict that ‘the Emperor’s rule ends at the village wall,’ and gave Communist agitprop cadre a highly effective argument to turn villagers against the Diem regime; everything that went wrong in a village could be blamed upon the Diem-appointed officials, whether they were responsible for it or not.”46
Lansdale felt betrayed by the failure of his American colleagues to back his pro-democracy push. He complained about getting enough “knives in the back from Americans and allies” to make him “sound like a clanking hardware store when I try to get things done.” He was, of course, used to dealing with opposition from other Americans, but by the fall of 1955, even with Lightning Joe Collins gone, it was “worse than at any time I can remember.”47
So upset was Lansdale by the U.S. government’s support for the Ngos’ repressive moves that he flew back to Washington in January 1956 to protest personally to the Dulles brothers as well as to get treatment for a nagging toothache.48 The CIA director and secretary of state were not won over by his argument that “this was one of the times when principled idealism was the most pragmatic and realistic course.” They thought, Lansdale wrote, that he was being “too visionary and idealistic” and advised him to “disengage” from providing any further “guidance to political parties in Vietnam.”49
Yet even as Lansdale’s influence was slipping in Saigon, his reputation in the wider world was still swelling.
THE LEGEND of “Lawrence of Arabia” was concocted single-handedly by the American impresario Lowell Thomas, who in 1919 premiered a lecture and slide show on Colonel Lawrence’s exploits that played to packed houses in New York and London and beyond. The legend of Edward Lansdale had more authors, but one of the most important—and inadvertent—was Graham Greene.
In December 1955, the eminent English writer published The Quiet American, a novel featuring a character named Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, who was an undercover intelligence operative, a supporter of Trinh Minh Thé’s, the owner of a black dog, and an enthusiast for promoting a “third force”—that is, a democratic alternative to communism and colonialism. For understandable reasons, the widespread assumption, held not least by Lansdale himself, was that he was the model for the protagonist, who was hardly painted in flattering hues: Graham depicted Pyle as a naïve young interloper who supplied Trinh Minh Thé with explosives that maimed innocent Vietnamese. “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” sighed Thomas Fowler, the world-weary English correspondent who is the novel’s narrator. In retribution, he would arrange for Pyle to be murdered by the Vietminh.50
Lansdale first heard of the new book at a diplomatic party early in 1956. As he reported to his wife,
At the reception, the Embassy staff were teasing me about my love life. Seems that Graham Greene has written a new novel, supposedly based upon me. Called the “Quiet Man” or maybe it’s the “Quiet American.” Anyhow, a naïve American, me, makes friends with a murderous Vietnamese called General The (Trinh Minh The, I suppose) who fools him and leads him astray, but the American finally wakes up and finds he has been sucked in by a very despicable guy. Meanwhile the story says he has had a wild love life, I presume due to General The. Sounds as though the French propagandists are really able to sell a bill of goods to the British, since the French peddled stories that I was very naïve and The sold me a bill.51
By mid-February, Lansdale had managed to get his hands on a copy and decided that “the book has about everything wrong politically.” It was also wrong in details such as Greene’s inaccurate description of plastic explosives. “However,” he continued, “I like the way the fellow writes. . . . Trouble is, it will fill a lot of Americans with quite a false picture of things here, and follows the French propaganda line quite faithfully, despite its being critical of the French.”52
Lansdale remembered seeing the English novelist only once, in 1954, when Greene was sitting on the terrace of the colonial-era Continental Hotel, a favorite haunt of expatriates in Saigon, along with a large number of French officers who began to boo Lansdale when they saw him. Lansdale was with two of his friends, the husband-and-wife New York Times correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Peggy Durdin. Peg stuck her tongue out at the crowd on the terrace and said, “But we love him,” and turned around and gave Lansdale “a big hug and kiss.” In an anecdote a bit too good to be true, Lansdale recalled saying, “Well, I’m goi
ng to get written up someplace as a dirty dog. Thanks a lot!”53
In truth, Greene always denied that he modeled Pyle on Lansdale. “Pyle was a younger, more innocent, and more idealistic member of the CIA,” he wrote. “I would never have chosen Colonel Lansdale, as he then was, to represent the danger of innocence.”54 The novelist claimed that his inspiration was Leo Hochstetter, a young American economic aid official with whom he had shared a room one night while visiting Colonel Jean Leroy, the Catholic warlord. According to Greene, Hochstetter, who was assumed by the French “to belong to the CIA,” lectured him on the “long drive back to Saigon on the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam.’ ”55 Greene’s denials are buttressed by the fact that, while he worked on The Quiet American between March 1952 and June 1955, he completed a draft before Lansdale arrived in Vietnam for good in June 1954.56 That makes it unlikely that Lansdale was the model for Alden Pyle, as generations of writers have assumed,57 but The Quiet American’s success only added to Lansdale’s luster by association.
If The Quiet American, the novel, was anti-American, the movie version, which came out in 1958, was very different. In the movie, Trinh Minh Thé is not really responsible for the terrorist bombings in Saigon—the Vietminh are. Thé, along with the Alden Pyle character (played rather woodenly by war hero Audie Murphy), is framed by the Communists. Thomas Fowler (the veteran English actor Michael Redgrave) sets up Pyle to be killed by the Vietminh not because of his revulsion at Pyle’s complicity in terrorism but because he is a Communist dupe who is intensely jealous of Pyle for stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong—played, bizarrely, by the Italian actress Giorgia Moll. The cinematic version ends with Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin), the detective investigating Pyle’s murder, telling Fowler that he has been “used” and “childishly manipulated” by the Communists: “If you will pardon my attempt at colloquial English, Mr. Fowler, they have made a bloody fool of you.”
