by Max Boot
At the same time that he was reaching out to South Vietnam’s leaders, Lansdale and his team members were beginning to establish relationships with influential labor, religious, business, and ethnic minority leaders, in order to “get them to work in harmony with the GVN [Government of Vietnam], even though they will be independent of the government.”27 Lansdale was also taking quick trips outside of the capital, “away from the protocol,” to talk to South Vietnam’s rural cadres. “This just means,” he told Helen, “that I stay up nights, working, when I get back to Saigon, to make up for the time I take out. Yet, I can’t get a fix on the pulse of this place without getting around first-hand and easing into [the] local situation patiently.”28
LANSDALE KEPT a stiff upper lip in public, but in private he was close to despair about the state of the war effort. In mid-October 1965, he wrote perceptively to Helen,
I’ve analyzed the political situation here rather thoroughly by now—but migosh, what to do to construct something out of the horrible mess! I’m scared to tell everyone how really bad it is. . . . What has happened here is that after 20 years of war almost all the tensile strength has gone out of the social fabric. Military operations just make it limper. The village folks just don’t seem to give a damn about anything except to please be left alone. The VC have an infrastructure in place throughout the villages—but the villagers are duly resentful of them, too—along with being disbelieving of the GVN. They’ve lost faith in themselves and tomorrow.29
Reversing this dire state of affairs, Ed admitted, was “a whopping big, complex job. . . . The VC own the countryside, and we aren’t going to defeat them by talking.”30 But talking was primarily what he did, because he lacked any real power.
Lansdale wanted to create a national consultative council to lead the transition to civilian rule and to focus counterinsurgency efforts on “revolutionary villages”—that is, villages such as Binh Hung populated by Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Catholics or other anti-Communist minorities. These two programs would be united by allowing “revolutionary villages” to elect their own leaders as well as delegates to the national consultative council.31 Caught up in the excitement of his initial months in Vietnam, Lansdale imagined that this plan “might well bring the turning point of the war here.”32 But while his proposal was embraced by Ky, it was vetoed by Lansdale’s rivals at the U.S. embassy.33
In addition to these major proposals, Lansdale and his team spewed out a variety of lesser ideas. Recalling the propaganda coups he had carried out in the Philippines and Vietnam a decade or more earlier, he proposed air-dropping nearly five thousand captured Chinese Communist weapons over North Vietnam to show the peasants “how their government was working with the Chinese to threaten their compatriots in the South” and to force Hanoi to mount laborious and time-consuming searches for “ ‘returned’ armament.”34 He proposed building a “Rural Construction ‘operations room’ . . . in the vicinity of the Prime Minister’s office” to make “the ‘waging of peace’ . . . as exciting as the waging of war.”35 He proposed investing in rural electrification and having Ky stage “fireside chats,” both directly borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when Lansdale was in his twenties and thirties.36 He proposed bringing over Cuban exiles to address a shortage of “doctors, nurses, teachers, other professionals.”37 He proposed scholarships for Vietnamese students to study in American colleges.38 He even proposed serving a traditional Tet holiday meal to encourage Vietcong fighters to surrender.39 Few, if any, of these suggestions came to fruition.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, given his famous proclivity for carrying a harmonica wherever he went, Lansdale was especially focused on using music to rally and unite the South Vietnamese—and to buck up the sagging spirits of the Americans helping them. In early September 1965, Lansdale renewed his friendship with Pham Duy, one of Vietnam’s most famous folk singers and composers, whom he had first met in 1954. A forty-five-year-old former Vietminh fighter, Pham Duy (pronounced fam zoo-ey)40 had grown disenchanted with Communist censorship and in 1951 moved south, where he became well-known for his prolific output of songs, especially “heart songs.” He was also notorious for his womanizing ways; he claimed that he needed new “love partners” to inspire his creativity, and he did not allow his wedding in 1949 to slow down his search for fresh conquests. “Round-faced, intense and cheerful,” he was a patriot who performed free for South Vietnamese troops—a “troubadour for freedom,” in the words of the Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, who was introduced to him by Lansdale.41
On November 25, 1965, Lansdale and his team hosted Pham Duy and Rural Affairs Minister Nguyen Duc Thang at the Cong Ly house for a Thanksgiving dinner. They brainstormed about how to “use music to popularize Rural Construction operations among villagers,”42 and spent hours recording various songs, including new tunes that Pham Duy had written to inspire South Vietnamese troops.43 A few months later, in March 1966, Pham Duy left for a three-month tour of the United States arranged by Lansdale and paid for by the U.S. government.44
Pham Duy was not the only musician that Lansdale promoted. He also took in hand a young army captain from Arkansas named Hershel Gober who would eventually became secretary of veterans affairs under President Bill Clinton. While serving as a military adviser in the Mekong Delta in 1965, Gober took to composing patriotic ditties such as “Look Over My Shoulder,” written after Vietcong hiding on the bank of a canal fired at a sampan in which he was traveling with a district chief and a militiaman. Gober jumped out of the boat and waded to the canal bank, firing as he went, the two South Vietnamese right behind him. Hence the song’s refrain: “Look over my shoulder and what do you see? / You see a nation fighting to be free!” Lansdale thought that “Hersh” had “an exceptional valuable quality as a man who can move others, in the idiom of folk music,”45 and he persuaded Westmoreland to let him form a troupe of soldier-musicians, known as the Black Patches, to tour South Vietnam entertaining the troops. This was quite possibly the only proposal of Lansdale’s that Westy ever adopted.46
Lansdale’s insistence that “folk music is an effective medium of communication”47 and his interest in using it to mobilize Vietnamese and Americans for the war effort was so unconventional that it struck other power brokers in Saigon as bizarre—all the more so because the most prominent folk singers in America, including Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, were associated with the peace movement. Barry Zorthian later spoke contemptuously of how “Ed and his team . . . were sitting in their house singing folk songs and doing what they had done so successfully in the Philippines,” while “the war was moving toward conventional warfare again.”48
AS IF Lansdale didn’t have enough problems with bureaucratic rivals, he also had to deal with problems within his own group among the strong personalities he had assembled. One recurring source of stress was Dan Ellsberg, who, having spent little time in the Third World, made the mistake shortly after his arrival of drinking water without first boiling it. The result was amoebic dysentery. “Dan was very, very naïve out there,” Lansdale lamented.49
Even more dangerous was Ellsberg’s decision to date a “sexy” Eurasian woman named Germaine who was the mistress of a Corsican gangster. When the Corsican found out, he threatened to slit Ellsberg’s throat. Conein, who had been close to the Corsican mafia for years, told Ellsberg, “Listen, my friend. You are in much more trouble with the Corsicans than with the Vietcong. You know what they do when somebody fools with one of their women? They’ll get you down on the pavement and whip your face with barbed wire.” Lansdale and Conein had to go to the mafia don and plead for Ellsberg’s life. Conein even threatened that if something happened to Ellsberg, he would come looking for the Corsican. Later, after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, Conein regretted what he had done. “If I hadn’t interceded, he might have been bumped off,” he said wistfully.50
Another troublemaker on the team was Charles T. R. Bohannan, the temperamental counterinsurgency stra
tegist who was nicknamed “Sandals” by irreverent young Foreign Service officers in Saigon for his habit of wearing leather sandals that were popular with the hippies of the era.51 The irascible Bohannan had a habit of quarreling with even his closest friends. “Bo and I clashed hard the first night he was here,” Ed wrote home in early September 1965, “and I haven’t seen him since.”52 When Bo returned, he began intriguing to usurp Lansdale’s position as team leader. He made plain his disagreement with the plan for “Revolutionary Villages,” in which Lansdale invested such heavy (and unrealistic) hopes. When sent to embassy meetings, Bohannan would act bizarrely. “He’d sit over in a corner and wouldn’t say a word,” Rufus Phillips recalled. “Or if he did, he was very critical about what was going on.”53
In January 1966, Bohannan wrote Lansdale a strange, rambling memorandum in which he complained, “I have been increasingly cut out from what is going on,” and spoke of resigning not only from the team but “from the war and the human race.”54 He suggested various “cover stories” that could be used to explain his departure, ranging from “nervous exhaustion” to “habitual drunkenness.” “If one of the more picaresque explanations appeals to you, I would be willing to discuss means by which it might be made credible, or, perhaps, true.”55 Lansdale would justify Bo’s termination a couple of months later by citing not any of his suggested excuses but rather ill health—“He has a numbness in one hand and blanks out in eyesight.”56
The real source of Bohannan’s discontent was a feeling, well grounded in reality, that he and the team were being marginalized: “I have not felt that I was making any significant contribution to the ‘team,’ or to the U.S. effort,” he complained.57 Others on the team felt the same way. “Want to know the truth?” Lou Conein said. “I didn’t know what [Lansdale] was doing. Nobody knew what they were doing. . . . Had no money, had no logistical support, except what we had glommed onto from the cookie factory [CIA] in the beginning. Nothing. We’d have VIPs like [LBJ aide Jack] Valenti come by, and we’d have things like that and would sit down and sing songs. I can only take so much of that.”58
Lansdale and other team members were constantly overhearing derogatory descriptions of themselves—they were derided by other Americans as “unstable” do-gooders, freewheelers “from a fly-by-night team,” “suckers,” Lansdale “spies,” and so on.59 Other Americans were even telling the Vietnamese not to talk with the “Lansdale team.” “Rather than proceed further into what looked like an ugly rat’s nest,” Lansdale decided to slow down his attempts to cultivate labor unions, religious organizations, and other groups.60 He even found that his radio messages to William Bundy—the assistant secretary of state, brother of McGeorge Bundy, and one of his few fans in Washington—were being “scrutinized minutely in the various U.S. agencies here, apparently mostly to discover trespass.” The weekly activity reports that the Senior Liaison Office was filing were also generating too much “negative” reaction from colleagues. As a defensive measure, Lansdale decided to end the weekly reports and switch to either submitting memoranda that few saw or reporting orally to Ambassador Lodge and Deputy Ambassador William Porter.61
As if to add insult to injury, the very officials who were preventing Lansdale from exercising any authority were at the same time castigating him for not doing more to take control of the ponderous pacification bureaucracy. When the USAID administrator David E. Bell visited Saigon in early January 1966, he told SLO’s Michael Deutch, “Dr. Deutch, I thought the Lansdale Group came here to coordinate and streamline this multiplicity of forces and activities in pacification—this apparently has not been done?” The mild-mannered Deutch recounted his response: “I am afraid that I lost for a moment control of myself and answered, ‘Mr. Bell, I can assure you on behalf of General Lansdale that we will coordinate everything that your agency lets us coordinate.’ ”62
NO ONE did a more astute job of analyzing Edward Lansdale’s anomalous position in Vietnam than a rising Harvard professor with horn-rim glasses, a German accent, and a tragic view of history who visited the country for the first time in the fall of 1965 as a consultant to Henry Cabot Lodge. “Lansdale is without doubt a man of extraordinary gifts,” Henry Kissinger wrote to Lodge after spending three weeks in Vietnam. “He is an artist in dealing with Asians. He is patient, inspirational, imaginative. He has assembled an extraordinary group of individualists—each a remarkable personality in his own right. Anybody who could first collect such a group and then retain its loyalty over two decades is not an ordinary person.”
Kissinger, however, also understood what Lansdale did not: that the Ugly American could be his own worst enemy. Kissinger noted:
[T]he artistic and highly individualistic temperament of Lansdale and his group have caused them to cut themselves off—sometimes needlessly—from the other elements of the mission. Most other elements of the country-team cordially dislike the Lansdale operation. Some of this is an inevitable by-product of an unusual administrative arrangement. But some tensions could be avoided by greater tact on the part of Lansdale and his colleagues. They too often take the attitude that they will settle the pacification program singlehandedly, that Lansdale alone has the magic recipe and that the major contribution of other members of the mission should be to get out of the way.
Already a leading international relations scholar if not yet a policymaker, Kissinger also delivered an insightful assessment of Lansdale’s shortcomings intellectually as well as bureaucratically. “Lansdale and his associates may be drawing too much on a precedent which is no longer fully relevant,” he warned. “The Philippine Insurrection has as many points of difference from the Vietnamese civil war as similarities to it. In the Philippines the insurrection had never reached the scale of the war in Vietnam. There was no foreign base for the guerillas. The indigenous government was much stronger. There was a tradition of working with Americans. The situation in Vietnam is much more complex, much less susceptible to bravura, individual efforts.”63
Kissinger recommended that Henry Cabot Lodge create “an administrative mechanism to plan, coordinate and follow-up” on the pacification program. While “Lansdale can and should play an important role in planning,” Kissinger added, “he cannot, in my view, be the chief executive officer.” Hardly devoid of self-knowledge, Lansdale was coming to the same conclusion. In a letter to Lodge, he noted that “it would require a strong administrator to manage [pacification] properly,” and “I am not seeking this job.” He suggested that “maybe my main usefulness today would be simply that of bringing Vietnamese together, overcoming their suspicions of one another. The good Lord knows, they are so split up into rivalries and jealousies that somebody or something has to bring them together into enough unity to save themselves. I don’t understand it myself, but I seem to be able to do this.”64
Many within the Johnson administration were concluding that Kissinger and Lansdale were right: a pacification czar was needed. That consensus translated into action at a conference in Honolulu that President Johnson, with typical impetuosity, convened on only a few days’ notice from February 6 to February 9, 1966, while the First Cavalry Division was mounting the biggest search-and-destroy mission of the war so far, the aptly named Operation Masher. (This misbegotten offensive discharged 132,000 rounds of artillery, “1,000 rounds for every estimated enemy fatality,” and yet failed to achieve any lasting success.)65 The focus of the Honolulu meeting was to be on pacification, the not-so-hidden agenda being to distract attention from televised hearings that Senator J. William Fulbright was conducting in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee featuring witnesses who were highly critical of the Vietnam War. The president insisted on bringing half of his cabinet members along with 125 American and Vietnamese officials from Saigon, including Lodge, Westmoreland, Ky, Thieu—and Lansdale. To make way for this enormous entourage, the government took over the entire Royal Hawaiian Hotel, a beachfront property with stucco walls that was known as the “Pink Palace of the Pacific.” The King Kalaka
ua Suite overlooking Waikiki Beach was specially equipped for the president’s use with a “seven-ton air conditioner, a monarchic double bed, and several cases of Tab and low-calorie Dr. Pepper.”66
Over the three frenetic days that followed, Lansdale reported getting perhaps five hours of sleep.67 He had his first recorded meeting with Lyndon Johnson, albeit hardly a one-on-one, on February 7: Lansdale was one of many American and Vietnamese officials who gathered along with the president around a huge oval conference table at Camp Smith, the hilltop headquarters of the Pacific Command. Johnson, predictably, dominated the proceedings with his outsize personality and his stream of colorful colloquialisms. At one point, the mystified Vietnamese delegates conferred among themselves to figure out “just what is this gentleman talking about?” when the president demanded to see “coonskins on the wall.”68
The conference produced the grandiose Declaration of Honolulu, in which Thieu and Ky pledged themselves to promote democracy and prosperity but with little in the way of specifics. One of the few concrete outcomes was the decision to formally designate Deputy Ambassador William Porter to run pacification. Lansdale would be relegated to working as a liaison to the South Vietnamese leadership.
WHILE THE high-level focus on pacification led to Lansdale’s being superseded within the Saigon bureaucracy, it also gave him a temporary boost, if only because Hubert Humphrey was now being allowed to play a role, however small, in the administration’s Vietnam policy. Johnson summoned Humphrey out of his temporary political purgatory to fly back to Vietnam with Lodge, Thieu, Ky, and other American and Vietnamese officials, including Lansdale. Humphrey was terrified by Ky’s habit of twirling his pistols “like a sheriff in a grade B Western,” worried that the prime minister would blow someone’s head off by accident.69 Humphrey’s physician was seated next to Thieu’s wife, “an absolutely smashing Oriental beauty,” who wanted to talk about nothing except her desire for plastic surgery to make her eyes look Caucasian.70 Lansdale was too busy to notice what was going on around him. Working nonstop to arrange the vice president’s unplanned visit, he felt like a “zombie” by the time they landed in Saigon.71
