by Max Boot
By the fall of 1961, the title of the course had been changed to “Counter Insurgency Operations.”35 And soon thereafter “counterinsurgency” would become a familiar military term, first abbreviated as CI and later as COIN. Sam Wilson was not alone in claiming credit for this coinage, but his claim is superior to the Oxford English Dictionary’s attribution of the term to the Times of London in 1962.
As Wilson continued to formulate the course, he recalled, “I would get on the phone and call Lansdale and ask him questions. Lansdale’s theses and little homilies and so on were sprinkled throughout the curriculum.” The regular army, Wilson said, “thought we were crazy. Indeed, they thought we were dangerous. They accused us of trying to think like political commissars by introducing politics to the field of battle.”36 At first, Wilson could not even get regular officers to take the course. His initial groups of students, in early 1961, were CIA operatives and foreign military officers. Gradually more American officers enrolled. Lansdale supported Wilson from his perch at the Pentagon, helping to overcome opposition from more conventionally minded soldiers. He applied similar pressure on the Air Force, leading to the creation in 1961 of the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron (code-named Jungle Jim) to advise foreign air forces, and on the Navy, leading to the creation in 1962 of the first SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) teams to serve as naval commandos. All of these newfangled Special Operations Forces were soon heading to Vietnam. Colonel Jones, for one, was grateful for Lansdale’s help. “Things certainly seem to be moving now in the Special Warfare field,” he wrote to Lansdale in May 1961, “and I attribute most of this to you personally.”37
The growth of Special Operation Forces is usually associated with President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the Army Special Forces to wear their distinctive green beret. JFK was indeed an avid supporter of these specialized troops, but they were already beginning to expand their capabilities before he came into office. Lansdale had no minor role in this process; in fact, he would help to spark the young president’s interest in the subject of “brushfire wars.”38 That made Lansdale one of the godfathers of counterinsurgency in the postwar American military establishment—one of his more significant, if lesser-known, legacies.
ED LANSDALE was hardly the only American official of the late fifties who was frustrated by the failure of the U.S. government to do more to adapt itself to the demands of unconventional warfare. His old friend Navy Captain William J. Lederer, whose first wife, not insignificantly, was a Filipina and who had traveled widely in Asia, had reached similar conclusions. On December 3, 1957, he wrote to Lansdale,
I feel so strongly on this general subject that I have concluded it is impossible to accomplish what you have in mind (not only for the military but for all agencies) unless public indignation is aroused. There is nothing wrong with our foreign policy, the weak link is in its diluted implementation—particularly along the “Lansdale lines.” I am taking a stab at arousing this public indignation. Eugene Burdick and I are writing a book on it which will be published in the Spring; and if you want more information on it, I’ll be glad to send it.39
Lederer had been writing since 1947 for magazines such as Reader’s Digest, but for his latest project he wanted authorial help to get the tone exactly right (“the book had to be written in flawless, relaxed, un-mad perspective,” he noted), and he got it from another Navy veteran he had met in 1948 at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.40 Eugene “Bud” Burdick was a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, who had already written one successful novel (The Ninth Wave, about a California surfer turned political consultant) and would later coauthor the popular potboiler Fail-Safe, about a nuclear crisis.
Together Lederer and Burdick set out to write a series of essays expressing their outrage over the steady deterioration in “the American position in Southeast Asia,” which they attributed to “the way many Americans overseas were recklessly doing the wrong thing, or doing the right thing in the wrong way, or just doing nothing.”41 Eric P. Swenson, an editor at W. W. Norton & Company who was himself a Navy veteran, suggested turning their critique into a novel. And that is just what they did. They brainstormed titles, including “A Handful of Seeds,” “The Mysterious American,” “The Noisy American,” “The Ugly Engineer,” and “The Stumbling American,” before Swenson decided to call it “The Ugly American.”42
The Ugly American appeared in the fall of 1958 shortly after Lederer retired from the Navy. It began with an unflattering depiction of the U.S. ambassador to the fictional nation of Sarkhan—“a small country out toward Burma and Thailand” that resembled Vietnam. Much like Homer Ferguson, the ambassador to Manila from 1955 to 1956 who did not want Lansdale intruding on his turf, Louis Sears is another former senator who is eager to become a federal judge and only slumming in Sarkhan while his appointment comes through. He has nothing but contempt for the locals (he refers to them as “strange little monkeys”),43 and neither he nor any of his staff can read the local language or be bothered to spend time with ordinary people. There is an equally scathing portrait of a secretary in the legation who writes home boasting about all the amenities she and the other Americans enjoy (“There are built-in servants! . . . Liquor over here in the government liquor store is dirt cheap”), while commenting favorably on how little interaction they have with the locals.44 These negative portraits are contrasted with positive depictions of a few Americans who are doing things right, including the “Ugly American” of the title: Homer Atkins is a homely engineer who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty helping the people of Sarkhan.
Another of the book’s heroes is Colonel Edwin Barnum Hillandale, a U.S. Air Force officer who in 1952 “was sent to Manila as liaison officer to something or other.” He is so fascinated by the Filipino people that he “ate his meals in little Filipino restaurants, washing down huge quantities of adobo and pancit and rice with a brand of Filipino rum which cost two pesos a pint.” He regularly ventures out to the rural areas on a motorcycle and, once there, plays his harmonica to enchant the children. He “even attended the University in his spare hours to study Tagalog.” The Filipino musicians with whom he jams on his harmonica call him “the Ragtime Kid.” A diplomat at the U.S. embassy calls him “that crazy bastard.” Yet, Lederer and Burdick wrote, “within six months the crazy bastard was eating breakfast with Magsaysay, and he soon became Magsaysay’s unofficial adviser.” (The by then deceased Magsaysay is the only character to appear under his real name.) The chapter goes on to recount how Hillandale, by repeatedly visiting a province north of Manila that is hostile to Magsaysay, persuades 95 percent of its inhabitants to support him in the 1953 presidential election.45 Later in the narrative, Hillandale takes a break from the Philippines to visit Sarkhan, where he uses his knowledge of astrology to win over local officials. He explains to a skeptical U.S. diplomat, “Every person and every nation has a key which will open their hearts. If you use the right key, you can maneuver any person or any nation any way you want. The key to Sarkhan—and to several other nations in Southeast Asia—is palmistry and astrology.”46
The resemblances to Lansdale are uncanny, even if the real-life Lansdale never mastered Tagalog or owned a motorcycle. “Tragically,” Lansdale wrote, “later Americans in the U.S. advisory days in Vietnam tried to pattern their activities on the fictional Hillandale—and rode motorcycles around, played the harmonica, etc. without getting much else done—except to wind up dead or captured by the enemy. Yes, I used to play the harmonica at times when visiting the provinces, to take up the tedium of long waits alone or to entertain children when they’d gather around and start asking me a lot of questions. But I always had some other purpose for being there.”47
Lederer privately acknowledged that the “first Colonel Hillandale story in The Ugly American is sort of based on Ed.” (He later told Lansdale that the character was a composite of the two of them.)48 Lederer went on to make clear his admiration for Lansdale: “The wa
y Ed operates requires a frightful amount of patriotism, discipline, energy, and skill. He takes some little job in the area; and then proceeds to become the confidential adviser of the man he is trying to help. Everything is done hush hush and Ed sees that everyone but himself gets the credit. His mind is alert. He can dissemble and camouflage as easily as a ballerina can change her costume. He has limitless courage and patience.”49
In spite of its pedestrian writing style, The Ugly American spent seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller lists and sold millions of copies,50 thus winning more converts to Lansdale’s views than a lifetime of his speeches and memoranda could possibly have accomplished. Senator John F. Kennedy sent a copy of the book to every member of the U.S. Senate and later used it as inspiration to create the Peace Corps. In turn, many young Americans volunteered for the Peace Corps after reading The Ugly American.51
In 1963, The Ugly American was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando as Harrison Carter MacWhite, an idealistic American ambassador to Sarkhan. Pat Kelly approved of the casting. Perhaps not the best person to objectively assess Lansdale’s resemblance to the great movie star, she told Ed, “Marlon Brando looked so much like you, especially his mustache, but not his voice which is bad compared to yours.”52 Although the film had almost nothing in common with the book beyond its title and setting, it did have some (probably coincidental) resonance with Lansdale’s real-life story. In the first place, the movie’s suave hero, Ambassador MacWhite, who is a composite of the admirable characters from the book, including Colonel Hillandale, favors driving a “Freedom Road,” built with American aid, into Communist territory in Sarkhan. He sees the road as a weapon to foster military mobility as well as economic development and thus to battle Communism. Lansdale likewise advocated building roads as a counterinsurgency tactic. In 1959, for example, he wrote a Defense Department memorandum proposing that funds be allocated “to complete an all-weather road between Pakse in southern Laos and Kontum in [the Central Highlands of] Vietnam.”53 This project later received a name that could have come straight out of the movie—the Peace Highway.54
The film version of The Ugly American ends with Ambassador MacWhite telling a group of reporters in Sarkhan, “We can’t hope to win the Cold War unless we remember what we are for as well as what we are against. . . . I’ve learned that the only time we’re hated is when we stop trying to be what we started to be 200 years ago. Now I’m not blaming my country. I’m blaming the indifference that some of us show toward its promises.” As he continues talking in a Lansdalian vein, the scene shifts to a suburban home in America where MacWhite is seen speaking on a television set. While he drones on, a distracted man turns off the TV, cutting off MacWhite in midsentence. This is an uncannily accurate depiction of the indifference with which Lansdale’s views ultimately would be received by both policymakers and the general public.55 Despite its cautionary ending, however, the film of The Ugly American further burnished the book’s fame—and indirectly Lansdale’s as well. When Robert F. Kennedy first met Lansdale in 1961, he referred to him in his diary as “the Ugly American.”56
As Lansdale had already discovered after the publication of The Quiet American, his outsize reputation enabled him to get a wider hearing for his views but increasingly rankled many bureaucrats and created animosities that made his job harder. In 1963, the year that the Marlon Brando movie came out, Ed wrote to a friend, “I’ve ducked publicity very hard since it slows down the effectiveness of my activities.”57 If he was ducking publicity, he wasn’t doing so very effectively.
AS FAR as Ed Lansdale was concerned, the most immediate consequence of The Ugly American’s publication was that it served as his ticket back to Vietnam, if only briefly. Inspired in part by the controversy created by the novel, President Eisenhower on November 24, 1958, appointed a committee of gray eminences to undertake a “completely independent, objective, and non-partisan analysis” of U.S. military assistance programs in some forty nations.58 It became known as the Draper Committee, after its chairman, William Henry Draper Jr., a former Army general and Wall Street banker who had been the first U.S. ambassador to NATO.
Lansdale was asked to serve on the Southeast Asia subcommittee chaired by Dillon Anderson, the former national security assistant to Eisenhower and a prominent lawyer in Houston. His fellow subcommittee members were the retired general J. Lawton Collins and a young government economist named Charles Wolf Jr. Together they were slated to undertake a monthlong tour of Southeast Asian nations beginning in mid-January 1959. Lansdale was nervous about clashes with the imperious General Collins, but, Wolf recalled, the “good-humored” and “savvy” Anderson made sure they all got along. Between stops, the four subcommittee members peaceably played gin rummy together on their airplane, an Air Force C-47.59
The group reached its first foreign capital, Manila, on January 30, 1959, to find a city that had recovered from wartime damage and had not yet become as overbuilt and polluted as it would later become. This gave Ed a chance to see Pat Kelly for the first time since their breakup in 1956. Since then their communications had been limited to infrequent letters—and to small gifts such as stockings and lipstick that Ed conveyed via friends and colleagues passing through Manila. This earned him a semiserious upbraiding from Pat: “Why do you have to send emissaries and packages? I really don’t mind the former but I wish you would stop the latter. Why don’t you just drop me a line now and then? Or send me cards or just keep in touch little notes, just to let your friends know you are not spending all your time saving this world?”60 We can only speculate how uncomfortable the lovers’ reunion was; no epistolary record is extant. The most wrenching part of the trip was a visit to Magsaysay’s relatively modest, white marble tomb in the Manila North Cemetery, which Ed found “a bit rough emotionally,”61 all the more so because he had just received news that his father, Harry Lansdale, had died in Detroit. He stood alone in front of the Magsaysay memorial, he later recalled, in an “infinitely sad communion” with “both men who had been so close to me.”62
By February 3, the Anderson subcommittee was winging its way over the South China Sea toward a still-peaceful Saigon. The highlight of their visit was meeting with the shy and cerebral president, who was continuing to expand his authority at the expense of his opponents. Lansdale had contacted Ngo Dinh Diem beforehand, asking, “Would you like to ‘play hookey’ from your work and go swimming at Long Hai with me? I’m sure you are working too hard, as usual, and could stand a day’s vacation.”63 In Hawaii, Ed had even bought a pair of red swim trunks for the portly president.64 Diem did not go to the beach, but he did treat the group to one of his trademark two-and-a-half-hour briefings as well as a private dinner at the palace. His theme “boiled down to a strong plea to maintain [South Vietnamese military] force levels and economic aid at present levels.”65 The subcommittee members came away impressed, Charles Wolf said, with “Diem’s concentration and focus,” his “intelligence and mastery.” They concluded that “Diem was a good bet and we should support him,”66 precisely the conclusion that Lansdale wanted them to reach. “The President is very pleased . . . ,” the American agronomist Wolf Ladejinsky, an aide to Diem, wrote to Lansdale. “He credits you, as he should, with these developments, and he wants you to know this.”67
After leaving South Vietnam on February 6, 1959, the group headed to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia. While they were in Phnom Penh, a riverside city full of elegant French colonial buildings that had been dubbed the Pearl of the Orient, on February 10–12, a military coup against the modernizing prime minister, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was getting under way. Sihanouk had angered Thailand and South Vietnam, as well as some of his more anti-Communist military officers, by recognizing the Communist regime in China. A wily survivor, Sihanouk crushed the military mutiny, led by General Dap Chhuon, who was “shot while attempting to escape.” Sihanouk blamed the CIA in general and Lansdale in particular for this abortive uprising. His evidence? That Lansdale, “the renowned CIA specia
list in cloak and dagger operations,” had signed the guestbook at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s most famous tourist attraction, which was located in a province run by General Chhuon.68 In 1969, Sihanouk got his revenge when he produced, directed, and starred in a movie called Shadow over Angkor, in which he battled and killed a villainous CIA agent named Lansdale.69 “Evidently he loved fantasy,”70 Lansdale chuckled, describing the story as “a complete fabrication.”71
In point of fact, the CIA did have a radio operator with the coup plotters, and when the coup collapsed he was captured by Sihanouk’s troops. CIA officials later claimed that the radioman was there merely to monitor events.72 It is possible that the CIA involvement went deeper—in 1970, the CIA would sanction a successful coup against Sihanouk led by another general—but it is unlikely that Lansdale was involved. He was no longer a CIA operative, and even for a man of his talents it would have been a stretch to imagine that he could have organized a coup during a three-day visit to a country where he had no prior connections. But, given Lansdale’s outsize reputation, few would believe his denials—not even State Department officials on the scene. “The embassy here is quite touchy about my presence,” Lansdale wrote, complaining that “our official family are the usual weak-kneed lot, so I am boiling mad by tonight by their over-sensitivity to my presence.”73
