by Max Boot
The president could not by statute bar the vice president from meetings of the National Security Council, so Johnson simply moved the key deliberations to Tuesday lunches where the invitation list did not include the vice president. For the rest of 1965—a crucial year in the Americanization of the Vietnam War—Humphrey would be almost as powerless as Lansdale. He was even cut out of domestic policy, in spite of his long and passionate advocacy of the president’s civil rights and social-welfare initiatives. Johnson inflicted on Humphrey every petty humiliation he could think of. He stopped Humphrey from hiring assistants. He dictated that Humphrey ask his permission for the use of an airplane or the presidential yacht—and then he would capriciously turn down Humphrey’s requests. And he not only demanded that Humphrey submit every one of his speeches for presidential approval; he took a meat ax to Humphrey’s planned remarks, slashing them so brutally that Humphrey’s friends thought he had lost his oratorical gifts.24
Yet Humphrey continued to be the good soldier in public, never letting slip any hint of dissent. So staunch a defender of Johnson’s conduct did Humphrey remain that soon he began to alienate his own constituency—the liberals—who were turning against the war. They could not figure out what had happened to Hubert, and they started to look for other champions such as Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. This was the essential tragedy of Hubert Humphrey, a man publicly forced to defend a cause he did not believe in and suffer the resulting brickbats from his closest friends. Humphrey’s old friend the novelist Saul Bellow, who had come to know him in the 1940s while Humphrey was mayor of Minneapolis and Bellow was teaching at the University of Minnesota, had thought of writing a newspaper or magazine article about the vice president but dropped the idea, “anticipating no pleasure . . . in writing about poor Hubert’s misery as LBJ’s captive.”25
WITH HUMPHREY’S fall from grace, Lansdale had less influence over Vietnam policy than ever. “It’s sheer agony to be shoved to the sidelines and watch the mistakes being made by the glory-grabbers,” he wrote in May 1965 to Robert Shaplen of The New Yorker.26
Luckily for Lansdale, he did find another supporter: Senator Thomas Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, a friend of Humphrey’s, a former Nuremberg prosecutor, and a Cold War hawk who would soon experience a precipitous downfall—he would be censured by the Senate in 1967 for diverting campaign funds to personal use. (His son Christopher would later follow him into the Senate.) Dodd wrote to the president on February 23, 1965, urging the dispatch of a “special liaison group” to help the embassy in Saigon “to establish the broadest and most effective possible liaison with the army leaders, with the Buddhists, with the intellectual community, and with the Vietnamese political leaders.” Attached was a list of eight men whom Dodd suggested sending. The very first name on the list was Edward Lansdale, who “enjoys a near legendary reputation in the Far East.”27
As normally happens, this missive wound up on the desk of the Vietnam expert at the National Security Council, a post formerly filled by Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal and now held by CIA officer Chester L. Cooper. His reaction was both wary and weary. “I know the President sometimes must get the feeling that he is being pursued by Lansdale or, at least, by the advocates of Lansdale,” he wrote to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. “For whatever it’s worth, I am in close touch with the General and am on the receiving end of a considerable number of ideas and projects which he and his friends have advanced. Some of these are quite interesting, and we are exploring them. It may well be that Lansdale could be more effectively used than he is at present—either here or in Saigon. But Lansdale is one thing—a platoon of Lansdales is another.”28
On July 27, 1965, five months after his first letter, Senator Dodd tried again, writing to the president, “Because of the very grave situation in Vietnam, I again wish to urge that some consideration be given to assigning Major General Edward G. Lansdale to Vietnam.” This time, however, the response was not a curt dismissal. At the bottom of Dodd’s letter, Lyndon Johnson scrawled, “Tell him I’m going to get Lansdale out to Viet Nam.”29
HOW HAD this miracle been wrought? How had Lansdale finally prevailed in his efforts to return to Saigon, a campaign that in the past had been met with nothing but frustration and derision? In an unexpected twist of fate, his savior was not the man he respected and even revered—Hubert Horatio Humphrey—but a man he viewed with contempt and held responsible for the death of his friend Ngo Dinh Diem: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
Maxwell Taylor had agreed to serve as ambassador for only one year, and when his time expired in July 1965 there was little inclination to extend his stay in Saigon. Increasingly President Johnson was listening not to Taylor but to his onetime protégé General William Westmoreland, who was determined to introduce American combat troops into South Vietnam. In a turnabout from Taylor’s stance in 1961, when he had advocated sending combat forces under the guise of flood relief, he had now decided it wasn’t a good idea after all to Americanize the war, that it would simply alienate the nationalist and xenophobic Vietnamese. When he saw that troops would be sent anyway, Taylor suggested confining them to a defensive role in coastal areas. Westmoreland rejected this “enclave strategy,” which he viewed as “an inglorious, static use of U.S. forces in overpopulated areas with little chance of direct or immediate impact on the outcome of events.”30 Westy wanted American forces to gain the glory of seeking out and destroying the Communist Main Force units in the mountainous jungles of the Central Highlands. By opposing the big-unit approach, Taylor lost his standing with the president. Even though Johnson had little respect for the patrician Henry Cabot Lodge, he decided to send him as ambassador to Saigon for the same reason that John F. Kennedy had: to provide bipartisan cover for a controversial policy.
On July 27, 1965, shortly after his confirmation hearing, Lodge went to lunch with Lansdale at a restaurant in Georgetown and said he wanted to bring him back to Vietnam. As Lansdale recalled the conversation, Lodge said that this was President Johnson’s idea. Rumor also had it that Senator Dodd had threatened to put a hold on Lodge’s nomination unless he enlisted Lansdale’s help.31 Whether that was true or not (Lodge later denied it),32 Lodge was an astute enough politician to realize it would be best to propitiate Lansdale’s congressional supporters.
Lodge reprised the suggestion he had made in September 1963 for Lansdale to take over the CIA station in Saigon. Knowing that the CIA would oppose his appointment, Lansdale demurred.33 He was no more amenable to Lodge’s suggestion that he become the political adviser to a province chief in the hope of turning that province into a pacification showcase. Advising a mere province chief was beneath the dignity of a “king-maker” who had previously molded entire countries and would surely puzzle the Vietnamese, who would wonder whether he was grooming the province chief as the next ruler of South Vietnam.34 Lansdale was more amenable when Lodge suggested that he “take over pacification”35 for the entire country. Now that was more like it! Lodge even offered to let him bring along a team to help him.
Lansdale agreed on the spot. And why wouldn’t he, after having lobbied so long for this very assignment? He would finally be going back to Saigon with a chance to implement his most deeply cherished beliefs.
THERE WAS another, unspoken reason why Edward Lansdale was so eager to depart for South Vietnam: there was not much to keep him in the District of Columbia. He did not particularly like his job at Food for Peace, and his sons were grown and gone.
Now twenty-six years old, Ted Lansdale had graduated from the University of Arizona in the spring of 1964 and that fall entered the U.S. Air Force as a second lieutenant, eventually to specialize in public affairs. Ted had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps: “I figured two Lansdales in counterinsurgency—with one not adept at it all—that wouldn’t do.”36 He was already engaged and would marry the following year.
Ted’s younger brother, Pete, twenty-three years old, had even less interest in following their father’s pat
h. He had joined the Army in 1963 as a private, seeking an alternative to the junior college where he was getting poor grades. (He would eventually get his bachelor’s degree through part-time study at George Washington University.) He even volunteered for airborne training, but soon grew disenchanted. He later recalled, “I had experienced pneumonia in basic training due to cadre incompetence, and saw enough ineptness and incompetence at all levels and rank to make me realize that I had made a big mistake in enlisting.”37 Pete jumped at a chance to volunteer for duty with the Third U.S. Infantry Regiment, better known as the Old Guard. Stationed at Fort Myer, across the river from his parents’ house, the Old Guard took part in John F. Kennedy’s funeral and other high-profile ceremonies; it would become particularly busy transferring the remains of dead servicemen as the war in Vietnam intensified. Pete would marry even before his older brother—in October 1965. The following year he would leave the Army to begin a successful career as a telephone company executive.38
Helen Lansdale remained at home, along with Koko, the poodle Ed had brought from Vietnam in 1956. But while Ed had to a large extent repaired relations with his wife, it was evident that spending time with her was not a priority that could compete with the allure of Asia.
As he prepared to set off for Vietnam, Lansdale’s thoughts, predictably, were not of home but of adventures to come. Ed wrote excitedly to Pat Kelly, “In case you hear rumors about my rushing out to save a country again, they’ll probably be true this time. Lodge has asked me to go along to Vietnam with him as his assistant, to help out in a lot of non-military things. It now looks as though this might get by all the knifings-in-the-back in Washington, and that I’ll really go. I’ve asked for a staff—including some of the old gang—and this too looks like it will be a go.”39 In case he stopped in Manila on his way to Saigon, he asked, “Can I buy a martini at the airport on the way through so you can look at my gray hair while I look at your stretch pants? State Dept has to employ me for this job, so I might well be in striped trousers and sweat shirt.”40
Lansdale had every reason to feel elated. Little did he suspect that he was about to enter the most frustrating and difficult period of his life. His proverbial dream job would turn out to be a nightmare. A few years later, he was to reflect ruefully, “Why did I go to Viet Nam in 1965 to help the murderers of my friend Ngo Dinh Diem? . . . I think that sentiment overcame judgment.”41
28
The Impossible Missions Force
[Lansdale] was the leader of the cult and I was a member of that cult.
—DANIEL ELLSBERG
EDWARD LANSDALE arrived in Vietnam in the late summer of 1965, at a time when Americans could already see glimmerings of the antiwar protests and race riots that would soon convulse their country. The Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles had become a veritable battle zone between August 11 and August 16. More sedately, if ultimately of greater consequence for the war just beginning, at least twenty thousand people picketed the White House on April 17 to demand that “the U.S. get out of Vietnam.” The protest was organized by Students for a Democratic Society, a New Left group (“left-leaning but non-Communist,” in the words of a news report) that claimed chapters at sixty-three campuses across the country. By later standards, the protest was polite and decorous. The New York Times noted, “Beards and blue jeans mixed with Ivy tweeds and an occasional clerical collar in the crowd. The marchers seemed to be enjoying their holiday from exams.” Most Americans still supported the president and the war. This was no mass revolt, but it was the beginning of a movement that within two years would paralyze many American campuses and leave the president feeling under siege in the White House.1
Pop songs are often an accurate barometer of the national mood, and the release of a hit called “Eve of Destruction” by a former pipefitter named Barry McGuire captured the anxiety of the times. Its lyrics, proclaiming “The eastern world it is explodin’ / Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,” were particularly apt, given that the Marine Corps had just launched the first major battle of the American war in Vietnam.
OPERATION STARLITE was intended as a preemptive assault on the First Vietcong Regiment, a Main Force unit, which, according to American intelligence reports, was planning to attack the newly established Marine air base at Chu Lai, sixty miles south of Da Nang. In reality, the Vietcong were not planning any such offensive; they preferred to wear down the Marines with hit-and-run raids. This was only the first sign of how faulty American battlefield intelligence in Vietnam would turn out to be. The Vietcong, on the other hand, consistently had accurate information about the ponderous movements of the increasingly bloated American war machine. They knew Starlite was coming, and they were ready for it.
The plan, drawn up by veterans of the Pacific island campaign of World War II, called for Marines to land simultaneously from sea and air on the Van Tuong Peninsula, taking advantage of a new technology—helicopters—that had not been available during the struggle against Japan. The amphibious assault force, equipped with M-48 tanks and armored amphibian tractors (amtracs), would drive the Vietcong into the blocking force, which was to be inserted inland by H-34 helicopters. And then heavy American firepower—delivered not only by the Marine infantry and armor, helicopter gunships, and fixed-wing aircraft but also by three warships offshore—would annihilate the fifteen hundred or so Vietcong caught in the vise.
Armed with mortars, machine guns, recoilless rifles, and small arms, the veteran Vietcong fighters were waiting when the Marines landed in the early morning hours of August 18, 1965. The fighting was especially intense around the hamlets of Nam Yen 3 and An Cuong 2, both honeycombed with “spider holes” and bunkers. The Marine infantrymen had to back off and let F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks finish the job. These jet-powered aircraft swooped in to drop “snake and nape”—250-pound Snakeye bombs and 500-pound napalm canisters that were certain to kill civilians along with enemy fighters. When the Marines continued taking small-arms fire from Nam Yen 3, they called in tanks, which leveled all the remaining houses with their main guns. As an official Marine Corps history later noted, “Although attempts were made to avoid civilian casualties, some villages were completely destroyed by supporting arms when it became obvious the enemy occupied fortified positions in them.” A few years later, at the height of the American war in 1968, an anonymous Army major would be quoted saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The philosophy embodied in those chilling words was already evident in Operation Starlite.
The Marines could congratulate themselves that Starlite was “the first major U.S. battle victory of the Vietnamese war,” and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge could gloat that it was a “milestone” that showed “that the U.S. can with relative certainty prevent the Viet Cong from ever becoming a regular army.” But the cost of this “victory” was high. The Marines lost 54 men killed and 200 wounded out of 5,500 engaged, while claiming to have killed more than 600 of the enemy, an estimate that was likely as exaggerated as “body counts” always were. It was a foretaste of what was in store for other units, including the army’s helicopter-borne First Cavalry Division (Airmobile), which three months later was to lose nearly 250 soldiers in a battle in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands against North Vietnamese regulars.
And to what end? The Marines, who thought they had destroyed the First Vietcong Regiment, were in for a nasty shock four months later during Operation Harvest Moon, when they encountered the very same Main Force unit again near Chu Lai—and once again it was back at full strength and in control of the area. This was a sign of how easily the Vietcong could replenish their losses from a population base they controlled and how quickly they could reinfiltrate territory from which they had been temporarily evicted by an American offensive. It was an early warning, a warning unheeded, that in this type of war conventional combat tactics could produce lots and lots of casualties—to Americans and Vietnamese, combatants and noncombatants alike—but not decisive results.2
; THESE EVENTS— an increasingly Americanized war in Vietnam, an increasingly divided nation at home—did not form an auspicious backdrop for Edward Lansdale’s arrival in Saigon on August 29, 1965, after an absence of more than four years. Like any other airline passenger coming to Saigon in those days, he would have felt the turbulence of conflict even before landing: aircraft, both military and civilian, were now doing corkscrew turns and heading practically straight down like a cannonball falling out of the sky in order to avoid possible ground fire. Once he stepped onto the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Airport and into the blast-oven heat that was characteristic of Saigon year-round, he would have seen, as did a young American officer named Larry Gwin, an airport teeming with military activity: “Small mountains of military hardware covered every available inch of the field’s macadam surface. Jeeps and trucks and forklifts busted through the maze. Shirtless American GIs struggled and sweated, pulled and tugged, lifted and lugged. . . . Two camouflaged Phantom jets, their wings heavily laden with bombs, took off from an adjacent runway with a terrible roar.”3
Proceeding into the teeming capital city, which he vividly remembered from more placid and pleasant days, Lansdale would have seen American military vehicles joining civilian traffic on the increasingly clogged streets. To make way for even more vehicles, the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV) had widened the streets, cutting down hundreds of Saigon’s “grand, old” trees in the four and a half years since Lansdale had last been there.4 By mid-1966, there would be thirty-six thousand Americans in and around Saigon.5 These well-heeled newcomers drove housing prices through the roof. And because each American-occupied apartment required its own air conditioner and refrigerator, the demand for electricity far outstripped the capacity of the city’s old power plant. Brownouts ensued. To meet the surging power demand, the U.S. military at first anchored generator barges in the Saigon River and then flew in thousands of small generators that could be installed outside each billet. Bert Fraleigh of USAID, who returned for another tour at roughly the same time as Lansdale, noted, “Within a few weeks, the quiet old city was filled around-the-clock with a strong, low-pitched hum from these generators, and the previously clear, perfumed, tropical air became a brown, diesel-fumed miasma, which curiously seemed to cling about forty feet off the ground.”6
