by Max Boot
But ultimately Ed decided against becoming an author, at least for the time being. “I am never about to write the truth of some past events—the way they turned out made nice history for the nations involved and I’m happy to keep history in the fiction class,” he told his friend Peter Richards.4
Instead of writing a book, Lansdale wrote a five-page proposal for a new educational institution to “teach practical American political action, for export abroad.” He called it Liberty Hall, and imagined it could be a “non-profit, public-service corporation” with a “center with offices and class rooms, probably in the area of Washington, D.C.” The initial students would “be a carefully picked handful of U.S. official personnel, primarily from the Foreign Services.” The instructors “would be a small group of experienced people”—obviously Lansdale had himself and his old colleagues in mind—who would also be available as “consultants to the U.S. government as well as to foreign governments.”5
To turn his brainstorm into reality, Lansdale attracted the support of the American Security Council, a Chicago-based organization founded in 1954 by Robert E. Wood, a retired general and former president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., and Colonel Robert McCormick, the flamboyant publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Wood and McCormick had been prominent America Firsters before Pearl Harbor, and they became McCarthyites in the 1950s. The American Security Council, initially designed to root out supposed Communist infiltrators in the private sector, agreed in 1965 to support a revamped version of Lansdale’s school to be called the Freedom Studies Center.6 Lansdale grew disenchanted, however, as soon as he realized that the American Security Council was “almost a John Birch Society roll call” and that everyone involved in the project was “either Republicans or too far right to be Republicans.”7
Although Lansdale was a staunch anti-Communist, he was no John Bircher or McCarthyite or, for that matter, even a Republican. Studiously neutral in domestic politics, like many other military officers, he nevertheless felt very much at home working with Cold War liberals who were determined to fight Communism abroad while striving to improve society at home.
THE SPIRIT of Cold War liberalism was personified by Lansdale’s friend Richard W. Reuter, a jowly, Brooklyn-born pacifist with a passing resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover. A conscientious objector, Reuter had worked during World War II for the American Friends Service Committee and after the war for CARE, a leading international charity based in New York. In 1962, he had been appointed by President Kennedy as director of Food for Peace, an eight-year-old agency created to send some of America’s agricultural surplus to needy nations. While Lansdale, a career military man, and Reuter, a career aid worker, came from very different backgrounds, they shared a similar vision of promoting “civic action” to stymie Communist subversion.
Upon hearing that Lansdale was being forced out of the Pentagon, Dick Reuter offered him a job at Food for Peace working on long-range planning, and Lansdale accepted. He began work on December 3, 1963, in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House, as a consultant paid $68.96 a day.8 When one of Reuter’s aides asked for some biographical background to release to the media, Lansdale replied with his trademark wryness, “Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi (echoed by Phnom Penh) possibly will pick this up to say FFP is becoming a front for a U.S. spy or gangster organization, confirmed by my presence. On the other hand, maybe the news that I have retired from military service will cheer them up, since I doubt that this is known very widely.”9
Although now working at Food for Peace, Lansdale was by no means convinced that providing more food to poor countries would result in more peace. “Just 50 years ago,” he noted, “some remarkably well-fed people started World War I. . . . I’m thinking of the waistlines of those gentlemen in the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, the waistlines of the cheering crowds in the streets, the waistlines of the burghers in spiked helmets who went wheeling into Belgium on their bicycles, the waistlines of the Colonel Blimps who crossed the Channel into France. Man, they had food in those days! But, did it bring peace?”10 Rather than giving out aid indiscriminately, Lansdale argued, it should be used to “cause fundamental strengthening of the rights of man in the receiving countries,” with countries that promoted the “reign of law” receiving more assistance than those that did not.11 Lansdale’s idea of tying aid to human-rights reforms anticipated by four decades the Millennium Challenge Corporation created by President George W. Bush in 2004.
His other ideas would be stillborn, just as most of his ideas had been at the Pentagon. Lansdale kept on coming up with imaginative proposals—including a “Jules Vernian” concept for deploying an international corps of aquanauts to explore the ocean’s depths12—yet he had to concede privately, “My heart really isn’t in it.”13 His passion, as it had been for many years, was to return to Vietnam and help that nation in its crucible of agony.
“WITH MORALE sagging like the mattress in a Bowery flop-house,” Lansdale wrote of Vietnam in March 1964, shortly after Nguyen Khanh’s coup, “some tangible victories are needed.”14 To figure out how to attain those victories, he joined forces with Rufus Phillips and Charles “Bo” Bohannan, both recently returned from working for USAID in Vietnam. In the spring of 1964, the three of them met in the Kensington, Maryland, home of Bo’s mother to hash out ideas. By June 1964, they had produced two strategy papers intended for high-level circulation within the Johnson administration. In Phillips’s recollection, Lansdale did almost all of the writing.15
The main paper, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam,” warned that the “Communist insurgents have a firm political base which the Vietnamese people understand,” with a “program to gain control of the people,” “a strong belief in eventual victory,” “iron discipline,” and a “leadership skilled in subversive insurgency.” These problems would remain “even if South Vietnam were isolated completely from North Vietnam or outside Communist help.” Thus, Lansdale did not suggest bombing North Vietnam or sending more troops to South Vietnam. “Overt U.S. intervention against North Vietnam or Cambodia is neither necessary nor appropriate,” he wrote. At a time when there were fewer than twenty thousand American advisers in South Vietnam, he concluded, “Military forces and equipment already in Vietnam should be more than sufficient to cope with most military aspects of the Vietcong insurgency.”
Lansdale was more receptive to a foray into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail “if dramatic, positive acknowledged action seems required.” But he preferred a covert campaign of subversion aimed at Hanoi. He suggested that “notable leaders from North Vietnam now residing in Saigon” could “form a Council of Liberty and issue a liberation policy for NVN.” With his long-standing penchant for “black ops” and “psy-ops,” he suggested “the publication of two ‘black’ newspapers, for distribution to the Vietcong, each espousing one side of the apparent Sino-Soviet split,” the distribution of “contaminated ammunition” that would blow up in the faces of Vietcong fighters, and the promulgation of “black ‘orders’ to VC units” telling them to stop “collection from peasants.”
As for military action in South Vietnam, Lansdale argued that the ARVN should be ordered to “vigorously seek to bring the enemy to battle, and to destroy him.” But he also believed that the ARVN should be told, “No ordnance shall be expended from aircraft or artillery, unless both the officers in charge and any U.S. advisers or personnel present are satisfied that the target does not include non-combatant women or children. Mistakes mean court-martial.”
No such rules would ever be implemented in Vietnam, and partly as a result untold numbers of civilians would be killed by South Vietnamese and American forces. The U.S. military would not recognize the utility of such restrictive rules of engagement, designed to avoid alienating the populace, until decades later in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To stabilize the turbulent South Vietnamese political situation, Lansdale suggested that the leaders of the government sign, “in their blood if need be,” a declaration of lib
erty outlining “the principles of service to freedom and country essential for victory, with a pledge to uphold them or else suffer public shame.” A new assembly of notables, including “representatives from all major patriotic political parties and groups,” could then supervise the transition “from Junta to Constitutional government.” Unlike more naïve exponents of democracy, Lansdale did not think that it made sense to hold early national elections; he argued that the electoral process should begin gradually, with elections for district chiefs in areas where “conditions are deemed secure enough.”
The crux of Lansdale’s paper was his suggestion, yet again, for the dispatch to Saigon of a “small team of winners” who “have proven their ability to defeat Asian Communist subversive insurgents.” A second paper, just three pages long and titled “A Catalyst Team for Vietnam,” explained that such a team would not need “elaborate logistics or separate headquarters,” but it would need “the backing of the President or it will suffer the same fate as so many other well-intentioned efforts in Vietnam.” Lansdale was seeking to recreate the kind of position of influence he had occupied in the Philippines from 1950 to 1953 and in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1956. He hoped to build up Nguyen Khanh as, in Rufus Phillips’s words, a “national hero by leading the transition back to elected government,”16 the way he had previously done with Ramon Magsaysay and Ngo Dinh Diem.
The problem was that Lansdale no longer had an influential position in the government or the support of those who did. He was stymied—until he met an eminent legislator who would shortly become the second most important elected official in America.
IN FEBRUARY 1964, when he first met Edward Lansdale, Hubert Horatio Humphrey was the Senate majority whip, the number-two leadership position behind Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and the unofficial leader of Washington’s liberals. A onetime college professor, Humphrey had become mayor of Minneapolis, his first elected position, at the age of thirty-four in 1945. Three years later, he had electrified the delegates to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with a fiery speech in favor of civil rights, urging them to “get out of the shadow of state’s rights and walk forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights.”17 Thanks to Humphrey’s emotional appeal, the convention narrowly approved a civil rights plank over the strenuous opposition of Southern delegates, many of whom walked out to endorse the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond for president.
By the time Humphrey arrived in Washington in 1949 as a senator from Minnesota, he was thoroughly disliked by the Senate’s crusty Southerners. To the Old Bulls, he seemed to be an overbearing, self-righteous know-it-all with a tendency to talk too much. Humphrey did not help matters when he insisted on lunching with a black aide in the Senate’s once segregated dining room.18 Almost as bad from the Southerners’ perspective, he publicly attacked the Senate’s cherished system of seniority, which allowed them to block civil rights legislation.19 Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, dean of the Southerners, was heard to say within Humphrey’s hearing, “Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?” This scorn was especially painful for someone like Humphrey who, by his own description, “was a more than normally gregarious person, who wanted to be liked.”20
Humphrey sought a bridge to the Southerners and found one in Senator Lyndon Johnson, who in 1951 began inviting him to his office to talk and drink. Johnson knew that he needed Northern support to pass legislation and to achieve his presidential ambitions; Humphrey knew he needed Southern support to break his isolation in the Senate and realize his own presidential dreams. Johnson promoted Humphrey within the Senate, but there was a price to be paid for acknowledging Lyndon Johnson as one’s liege lord—a significant price. Robert Caro writes, “Once, after Johnson had given Hubert Humphrey an order on the Senate floor and he hadn’t moved fast enough to suit the Leader, Johnson, snarling, ‘Get goin’ now!,’ had kicked him—hard—in the shin to speed him on the way, and Humphrey had accepted the kick without complaint, had even pulled up his pant leg the next day to proudly show a reporter the scar.”21
This was typical of Lyndon Baines Johnson: he could be saccharine with those he was cultivating, but once he was sure of their support, he would go out of his way to humiliate them, to make clear that they had to bend their will to his. Johnson made this explicit when, in August 1964, he asked Humphrey to be his running mate. “This is like a marriage with no chance of divorce,” he told the vice presidential nominee. “I need complete and unswerving loyalty.”22
Johnson insisted, as soon as the Democratic convention ended, that Humphrey and his wife, Muriel, accompany him and Lady Bird to his ranch in Johnson City, Texas. Once there, the president said they were going for a horseback ride. But first Humphrey had to be properly attired. “He called me into his bedroom,” Humphrey recalled, “and pulled out an outfit that dwarfed me. The pants were huge, so big that I thought I could put both my legs in one pant leg and still dance a polka. The jacket draped like a tent over a shirt whose neck was several sizes too large. I looked ridiculous and felt ridiculous as I smiled wanly from under a cowboy hat that was made for his head and clearly not mine.” The mortification only worsened once Johnson put Humphrey atop a “big and spirited horse” in spite of his running mate’s total lack of riding experience. “There seemed to be an acre of cameramen and reporters grinning and clicking as the horse sort of reared,” Humphrey wrote, “leaving me filled with fear and clutching that horse like a tiny child on his first merry-go-round ride, hanging on for dear life.”
The president, Humphrey noted, “got a big kick out of it.”23
NINE MONTHS before the 1964 election, Humphrey would be introduced to Edward Lansdale and Rufus Phillips by Bert Fraleigh, a rural-development expert at USAID who had gotten to know Humphrey while working in Taiwan for Food for Peace, a program that Humphrey had sponsored. Fraleigh had subsequently gone to work at the Rural Affairs office in South Vietnam, where his boss, Rufus Phillips, found that, much like Lansdale, he “had a ‘can-do’ attitude, without a bureaucratic mindset.”24 Humphrey admired Fraleigh and took seriously his suggestion to invite Lansdale and Phillips in for a talk about Vietnam. “Meeting Humphrey,” Phillips later wrote, “was to encounter a human dynamo, brimming with energy and obvious intelligence but also human interest and curiosity.” The senator listened intently—more intently than any other high-level official that Phillips ever encountered—and understood what he was hearing. He displayed “an instinctive feel for the unconventional people-based, political nature of the war, the ‘x factor’ that McNamara failed to comprehend.”25
Humphrey was receptive to the unorthodox message being delivered by Lansdale and Phillips in large measure because it accorded so perfectly with his own view. Like Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was a liberal at home and a hawk abroad—but one with more idealistic tendencies than the ruthless president. Humphrey was a supporter of the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the defense budget, while also being the leading champion of Food for Peace, the Peace Corps (created in 1961), the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (also created in 1961), and the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was, in short, an advocate of standing up to the Soviet Union militarily while also an advocate of using peaceful means to promote American interests.
Those competing instincts carried over to Vietnam. A Humphrey aide, Ted Van Dyke, recalled, “Humphrey was always equivocal and a bit confused on Vietnam. He was torn two ways. On the one hand, he bought into the anti-Communist Cold War context at that time. On the other hand, he wanted everything limited to an advisory role only.”26 Edward Lansdale, with his “Concept for Victory,” gave Humphrey a way to square the circle: to support South Vietnam without sending American boys into battle.
The Minnesotan became Lansdale’s biggest booster in the U.S. government. When he did not have time to see Lansdale and Phillips himself, he delegated that task to his chief of staff,
William Connell, a hard-liner on Vietnam who had served in the Navy in World War II and who was at odds with more dovish staffers like Van Dyke. Connell later said that Lansdale was “a very decent person, very intelligent” who was “obsessed with an idea . . . a revolutionary idea,” and “probably sacrificed a career to try to get something done.” He was “probably a little nutty,” but then, Connell reflected, “most people that get things done and shake things up have to be a little nutty.”27
Lansdale sent Connell an early draft of the “Concept for Victory” and incorporated Connell’s suggested changes.28 With Connell’s help, Humphrey then drafted a memorandum to President Johnson, dated June 8, 1964, extolling Lansdale’s ideas and urging that Lansdale be sent to Vietnam to implement them. He described Lansdale as “the key American figure in Magsaysay’s defeat of the Huk forces in the Philippines, the key figure in the development of counter-insurgency work in the Defense Department, as well as being the key adviser to Diem in the first two years of his reign.” His letter concluded, “It is strongly suggested that the President ask Lansdale to discuss this whole matter with him.”29
Such a strong suggestion coming from the Senate minority whip—a man whom Johnson already had in mind as his vice president—could not simply be ignored. But that did not mean that Johnson had any intention of following his guidance. While Johnson valued Humphrey’s skills as an orator, he had little respect for his future vice president’s political or military acumen. Humphrey, he said disdainfully, is “all heart and no balls.”30
