by Max Boot
Because Ellsberg carried such a high civil service grade, he came in with rank and perquisites greater than Lansdale’s own. (Ellsberg earned $37,678 a year, Lansdale $36,490.)41 And he became the only team member to be given a villa to himself. He was not shy about flaunting his rank in spite of his lack of experience in Vietnam. “That didn’t cut any ice with anybody else on his damn team,” Rufus Phillips said. “He had a hyper ego.”42
If Ellsberg could be arrogant with others, he was, however, deferential to Lansdale. “I loved Lansdale,” he said decades later in his comfortable home in the hills near Berkeley, California, now white-haired but still handsome, voluble, and intense even in his eighties. “He was a father figure to me. I really revered him and continue to have the same warm feeling; that never changed. I felt just like the other members of the team did. It was a cult. He was the leader of the cult, and I was a member of that cult.”43
After getting to know Lansdale, Ellsberg concluded that he was more impressive in private than in public:
Many people from their dealings with him got the impression that this guy is actually nutty, lightweight, stupid in his mind, crazy ideas and nothing else, just a salesman. I know that’s not true. I experienced him very often as strikingly shrewd in his calculations and his understanding and his analysis. I also understood at the time that he was capable of dissembling to people that he did not want to reveal anything to, by sounding like a hick. . . . That is not the case. This was a very shrewd, smart guy.44
Shrewd and smart Lansdale may have been, but most of his bureaucratic rivals in the burgeoning American establishment in Saigon shared the pejorative view—“nutty, lightweight, stupid”—that Ellsberg ascribed to those who did not know him well. As the American war was reaching its full fury, with offensives larger than Operation Starlite becoming a routine occurrence, Lansdale would have the unenviable task of trying to overcome the suspicion and resentment of his colleagues in order to influence the course of American and Vietnamese policy.
29
Waging Peace in a Time of War
Most other elements of the country-team cordially dislike the Lansdale operation.
—HENRY KISSINGER
IN the American political system, the length of titles is usually in inverse proportion to the importance of the title-holder. The most powerful person of all is known simply as the president. His cabinet members are known as the secretary of state or the secretary of the treasury. Lesser officials, by contrast, are styled as under secretaries or deputy secretaries or assistant secretaries or, worse, deputy assistants or assistant deputies. It was, therefore, an ominous sign that Edward Lansdale’s formal title in Vietnam was quite a mouthful: he was to be head of the Senior Liaison Office and chairman of the U.S. Mission Liaison Group to the Secretary General of the Central Rural Reconstruction Council.
The council was, in theory at least, a powerful body within the South Vietnamese government. It was chaired by none other than the flamboyant prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, and it included the secretary of rural affairs, a cabinet-level official who would be Lansdale’s closest interlocutor within the Vietnamese regime. “Rural reconstruction” was the Vietnamese term for what Americans called “pacification.” Thus the Rural Reconstruction Council would be responsible for the counterinsurgency program in the countryside. The problem lay with the U.S. Mission Liaison Group, the working group at the U.S. embassy composed of representatives from the Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV) and the civilian agencies that had a role in pacification.
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge expected Lansdale to orchestrate these various agencies in order to get “an effective political-social program moving in Viet Nam.” But Lansdale was authorized to act only in an “advisory capacity.” He would have no power to compel compliance—the same problem that had handicapped him during Operation Mongoose. Somehow, he was supposed to find a way of “tactfully and persuasively braiding together the separate economic, social, information, military, and other programs as necessary.”1 The problem was that all of the American agencies that Lansdale was supposed to “braid together” had far more money, manpower, and mandates than his Senior Liaison Office had, and they were all headed by strong-willed personalities who were not inclined to cede him an inch. It was, in the words of Bert Fraleigh of USAID, “a relatively small pond filled with many large sharks gobbling up or chasing the pilot fish. Cabot [Lodge] is like the ponderous but happy porpoise in all this and can’t tell the fish apart even with a program.”2
ONE OF the most ferocious man-eating “sharks” was Philip Habib, who was in charge of the embassy’s political section. A generously proportioned, first-generation Lebanese American born in Brooklyn, he was in the midst of one of the most glittering careers in the history of the Foreign Service; he would eventually rise to become President Ford’s under secretary of state for political affairs and President Reagan’s special envoy for the Middle East. Phil Habib was good at his job and was, as a colleague recalled, “very skeptical of anyone who wasn’t a career professional.”3 Colonel Sam Wilson, Lansdale’s old Pentagon deputy who was now working for Lodge, recalled that Habib was “merciless” and “ruthless” in waging a struggle to minimize the influence of Lansdale, whom he viewed as a “charlatan.” 4 Barry Zorthian, the chief of a burgeoning public relations bureaucracy known as JUSPAO (Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office), said, “Phil Habib didn’t like Lansdale one bit. He regarded Lansdale as a meddler and, in Vietnam terms, almost as irrelevant. Phil belonged to the establishment—the conventional standard machine structured to carrying out State Department missions. He regarded Lansdale as an unprogrammed loose cannon, a maverick upsetting things without discipline, without acceptance or commitment to Washington direction.”5
It was hard to tell whether Zorthian was describing Habib’s feelings or his own, because he felt exactly the same way. He was especially resentful because Lansdale had brought in Hank Miller, another senior U.S. Information Agency officer, to work under him, potentially challenging JUSPAO’s authority. An Armenian American, Zorthian had served as a Marine officer during the Pacific campaign and remained a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. He had spent his postwar career rising up the ranks of what became the USIA. Now, as head of JUSPAO, he presided over his own office building on Avenue le Loi, where, in a second-floor auditorium, his press section provided daily briefings for hundreds of reporters. They came to be known as the “Five O’Clock Follies” for their tone of excessive optimism. But if the press briefings were overly crude and propagandistic, “Zorro” was more subtle and persuasive in private meetings with selected journalists. As one reporter later wrote,
He would take a deep drag off his cigarette, look pensively out the window of his upstairs office, release a sigh of resignation with the smoke, and then speak to a reporter, softly, reluctantly, off-the-record and in all confidence of course, about poor Ed Lansdale, the hopeless romantic. There was always enough about Lansdale to provide evidence that he might be a well-meaning but slightly nutty soul, and Zorthian’s interpretation of him found its way into the works of David Halberstam and Frances FitzGerald, who were, ideologically, not overly resistant to the idea, and into the writings of other journalists. While Zorthian worked the media, Habib made sure that Lansdale got nowhere in the bureaucracy.6
Although Zorthian and Habib were to prove Lansdale’s most inveterate foes, they were hardly alone in protecting their prerogatives from this interloper. Gordon Jorgensen, the chief of the CIA station (known for cover purposes as the Office of Special Activities), had started off working under Lansdale in the 1950s and might have been expected to be amenable to his former boss’s arrival. In fact, when a reporter told him the news, he “damn near dropped his martini.” The reporter he was talking with could tell that mentally Jorgy was “throwing up the barricades to protect his turf, and that’s what everyone was doing out there at that time.”7 Charlie Mann, head of USAID’s office, was no more amenable to Lansdale’s intrusion.
He controlled a substantial development-aid budget, and he damn sure wasn’t going to let Lansdale tell him how to spend his money or direct his people.
The most important shark of all was General William Westmoreland. The U.S. embassy in Saigon may have become the biggest American diplomatic outpost in the world, with 782 personnel in 1965,8 but it was dwarfed by the MACV bureaucracy, whose headquarters staff alone expanded from 1,100 officers and men at the end of 1964 to 3,300 by the end of 1967.9 With its staff overflowing numerous office buildings in Saigon, MACV in 1966 would begin construction on a $25 million headquarters complex next to Tan Son Nhut Airport, complete with a barracks and mess hall, the largest air-conditioning plant in all of Southeast Asia, and four acres of parking lots, all surrounded by watchtowers, searchlights, and a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence. When it opened in the summer of 1967, the new complex was dubbed “Pentagon East.”10
Whatever MACV did was by definition more important than whatever the civilians did, because most interactions with the local population were conducted by American troops. Lansdale could dream up imaginative programs to win “hearts and minds,” but such schemes amounted to little while Westmoreland’s troops were turning the countryside into a “free fire” zone. Philip Caputo, a junior Marine officer who landed with the first combat battalion at Da Nang on March 8, 1965, was later to write in his acclaimed memoir Rumors of War, “Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.”11 Lansdale perceived that that was not a winning strategy, but he had no authority to alter what Westmoreland and his forces were doing.
GIVEN HIS aversion to bureaucracy, Edward Lansdale had little patience for his duties chairing the Mission Liaison Group. In a letter home, he called the meetings a “sort of big formal deal once a week, which brings out my most impish nature,” adding, “Maybe I’ll teach everyone yet not to get me to attend formal meetings.”12 He preferred to spend his time, as he had done in the past, getting to know the key Vietnamese players—listening to them and winning their trust in his characteristic, low-key style. A young, Vietnamese-speaking USIA officer who met Lansdale for the first time in 1965 found that he had not lost his mastery of the art of conversation. “He was one of the few skilled conversational operators that I encountered over time,” recalled Frank Scotton, “in that he was a sensitive listener who drew people’s thinking and motivation forth, then when he wished, melded it with his own purpose, and fed back a homogenized version that the other person could digest. It was better than just telling someone.”13
As soon as the Cong Ly house was open and functioning, Lansdale began hosting lunches and dinners for Vietnamese officials to foster the kind of conversations he enjoyed, gradually adding Americans into the mix to foster more “team work.” His first buffet dinner, for twenty-six people, was held on the evening of September 12, 1965. “In a burst of enthusiasm,” he wrote to Hubert Humphrey, “I invited the Presidency staff to meet with technicians from all the Ministries (Health, Agriculture, Forestry, etc) at my house for supper, to meet the team and even to get acquainted with one another.” The language barrier that had previously stymied Lansdale was melting away—most of the conversation was conducted in English, “the really fashionable language here”—and he thought the talk was “amazingly frank and heartfelt.” They spoke “in terms of love for our fellow man, which means as much to a lad brought up by his parents with Confucian principles as it does to one believing in Christian principles.”14
Among those attending this love-in, in the jargon of the sixties, was Nguyen Tat Ung, the secretary of rural affairs. Lansdale felt he was making real progress in fostering a good relationship with Ung, whom he judged to be an “unusually capable person.” Unfortunately a week later, on September 17, 1965, he received word that Ung and several of his aides had been killed in an airplane crash. This “tragic setback” would delay his attempts to reinvigorate a rural pacification program that had become largely moribund since Ngo Dinh Diem’s downfall two years earlier.15
Ung’s replacement was General Nguyen Duc Thang, a thirty-four-year-old officer who was widely seen as the most effective and most honest general in the entire army. Unlike most of his peers, he had a horror of political maneuvering and stayed aloof from coup plots. He spoke fluent English, having learned the language while attending artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Sporting an olive-green GI uniform, tall and heavily built, he even “looked like an American,” Dan Ellsberg thought. Thang liked to repeat the story of a little boy who came up to him, asking, “Hey, OK, you number one, give me cigarettes!” Thang gave him a tongue-lashing for begging and for using pidgin English rather than the proper Vietnamese greetings. The little boy, startled, blurted out, “You speak Vietnamese?”16
Thang, like Lansdale, believed that it was important to win “hearts and minds,” and that a first step was to curb military abuses against the populace. By the beginning of 1966, Lansdale was writing that Thang “is a younger version of Ramon Magsaysay (even to the foot jingling), and we’ve become close friends.”17 But Thang started off “with practically no staff in his Ministry,” thus occasioning yet another delay while he staffed up.18 Even once he acquired a staff, he still faced the problem of trying to implement a pacification program on behalf of a government that was barely functional. A regime that could not pick up the garbage in Saigon was not likely to defeat an entrenched insurgency in the countryside.
WHILE LANSDALE was cultivating Thang, he knew that it was even more important to strike up a good relationship with Nguyen Cao Ky, the ambitious air force general-turned-prime minister. A native of northern Vietnam, Ky had learned to fly under the French. Like Thang, he was only thirty-four years old, and he was, in many ways, a typical fighter pilot. Brave and impetuous, he would personally lead bombing missions against the North. He loved drinking, gambling, and womanizing. His fellow pilots knew he had fallen hard for an Air Vietnam stewardess named Dang Tuyet Mai when he ordered an entire squadron to fly at treetop level over her neighborhood.19 Before long, he had divorced his first wife, a Frenchwoman he had met while training in France, and married Mai. Prime Minister and Madame Ky would tour the country wearing matching jet-black flight suits, flight boots, blue flying caps, and sunglasses. An American who saw them exclaimed, “Good God, they look like Captain and Mrs. Midnight.”20 (Captain Midnight was a fictional aviator in a popular radio and television series.)
Ky had a tendency to shoot from the hip; he got into trouble for comments such as expressing admiration for Hitler’s “leadership and sense of discipline.” He wanted to get things done, but he did not have the patience for tedious paperwork. Upon taking office, he threatened to shoot rice and salt “profiteers,” but when the police arrested two suspects they had to be released because the evidence was inconclusive.21
“I’m rather taken by Ky,” Lansdale wrote in the fall of 1965.22 He found Ky to be “honest, intelligent, well-motivated” and gifted with the ability to “talk to people.”23 Ky and Lansdale developed a “close personal relationship,” in the words of Rufus Phillips.24 Lansdale and his team wrote a speech for the prime minister to commemorate his first one hundred days in office, and on October 1, 1965, Ky delivered “big chunks of it” as scripted.25
Lansdale had less luck wooing General Nguyen Van Thieu, Ky’s nominal superior. At age forty-two, Thieu was the grand old man of the ruling junta known as the Directory—a name that sounds as if it had come out of one of Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction paperbacks. While Ky made a bold splash from the beginning, Thieu preferred to bide his time in the background, quietly plotting to accumulate power. Ky was impetuous, Thieu reserved. He also worked harder and had a much higher tolerance for paperwork. But, as if to offset these virtues, he was intensely calculating and suspicious of others, even paranoid.
Lansdale met the head of state at a Se
ptember 21, 1965, dinner arranged by the influential bureaucrat Bui Diem, a future ambassador to Washington. As an icebreaker, Lansdale was asked to recount his relationship with the legendary Cao Dai warlord Trinh Minh Thé, who had died in the battle of Saigon in 1955. The assembled Vietnamese, all younger by at least a decade than the fifty-seven-year-old Lansdale, did not know their own country’s history. They asked Lansdale about French reports that he had bribed Thé with twelve million dollars. Repeating his selective account of what had occurred, Lansdale told them that Thé was a “pure patriot and would have scorned bribery as much as I. The only money we each spent was for the meals we shared. I still believe in his ideals of unity, morality and freedom in Vietnam.” Thieu and the other dinner guests, Lansdale remarked, “seemed quite moved by the story.” This shared history gave Lansdale an opening to tell Thieu that the people of South Vietnam were hungry for a government that would “care about the people” and “serve with morality.” Thieu responded warmly, but, as Lansdale was to learn, what the general said was often far removed from what he did. 26
Thieu had few, if any, confidants beyond his wife, and he was not about to take an American into his confidence; he remembered all too well the fate suffered by Diem, who had gone from pet to pariah with Washington. So it was impossible for Lansdale to create the kind of close relationship he had had with Magsaysay or Diem. Complicating the situation was the rivalry between Thieu and Ky: Lansdale’s closeness to Ky made Thieu even more suspicious of him.
