by Max Boot
IF ASKED to answer that question in the summer of 1966—“Just what was that all about anyway?”—Ed Lansdale would have answered that his top priority was ensuring a fair election for the Constituent Assembly on September 11, 1966. The assembly was supposed to draft a new constitution that would make possible a transition from military to civilian rule. It would replace the earlier constitution that Diem had crafted with Lansdale’s help in 1956 and a more recent version promulgated by General Nguyen Khanh in 1964; both had become dead letters.
In late May 1966, Lansdale wrote to his team members describing the period leading up to the election in dramatic terms: “In every great human struggle, there comes a climactic point which prejudices the outcome. If seen for what it is, at the time, and properly exploited, the end of the struggle can be hastened. In my opinion, one of those vital moments of history lies just before us in Viet Nam—between now and September.” In preparation, he instructed each member of SLO to “refresh himself on the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights,” adding, “Texts are in the almanac at the office.”29
When Lodge heard about Lansdale’s plans to stage a free election, he launched into a lengthy diatribe about how he and Lyndon Johnson had spent most of their lives rigging elections. “Get it across to the press that they shouldn’t apply higher standards here in Vietnam than they do in the U.S.,” he instructed aides.30 One of Lodge’s closest aides believed that “Lansdale wanted the reality of elections, while Lodge was convinced we needed only the appearance of a democracy in order to do what we had to do. Which wasn’t the same thing.”31
Lansdale thought he could change the ambassador’s attitude by enlisting the aid of Richard Nixon, Lodge’s 1960 running mate, who was passing through Saigon. Jet-lagged and jowly, sporting the five o’clock shadow that was a cartoonist’s delight, Nixon appeared at the Cong Ly house to meet Lansdale and his team. Going around the room, shaking hands with everyone, Nixon finally came to Lansdale and asked him, “Well, Ed, what are you up to?”
Lansdale got straight to the point: “Mr. Vice President, we want to help General [Nguyen Duc] Thang make this the most honest election that’s ever been held in Vietnam.”
“Oh, sure, honest, yes, honest, that’s right,” Nixon replied, “so long as you win!”
Daniel Ellsberg, who was present, noted that Nixon then “did three things in quick succession: winked, drove his elbow hard into Lansdale’s arm, and, in a return motion, slapped his own knee. My colleagues turned to stone.”32
Nixon’s future national security adviser was no more supportive. At a White House meeting on August 2, 1966, following his second trip to Vietnam, Henry Kissinger said that Lansdale “was too much of a Boy Scout” and that Phil Habib should be put in charge of the elections instead.33
Such skepticism about the possibility of implanting democracy in Vietnam was understandable. But there was a hardheaded logic to what Lansdale was doing. It was not just a case of misapplied idealism on his part. As Tran Ngoc Chau, one of the most energetic and honest officers in the South Vietnamese army, explained, “Give villagers a way to get rid of a corrupt or abusive district chief other than having him killed by the VC, and they’ll take to it very quickly.”34
In spite of his lack of institutional backing, Lansdale plowed ahead. In July 1966—shortly after the South Vietnamese army had violently suppressed a Buddhist uprising in Hue and Da Nang led by Tri Quang, the same monk who had helped bring down Ngo Dinh Diem—there was a debate within the military junta over whether to rig the election. The prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, called in Lansdale to ask for his advice. Eschewing the cynicism of Lodge and Nixon, Lansdale urged him to think of “how he would look in the history books as the first Vietnamese to organize a truly honest election.” This inspired Ky to make an impassioned plea before a conference of province chiefs to hold above-board balloting. A province chief commented “that he had come to the Seminar expecting to receive the usual cynical instructions, as in the past, but that he went away convinced that the Government truly wanted honest elections.”35
The task of running the elections was assigned to Nguyen Duc Thang, the young minister of revolutionary development (as rural affairs had been renamed), to whom Lansdale had grown close. He readily adopted the suggestions made by Lansdale and his team. These included employing four thousand military cadets as poll watchers and loosening military censorship to make it possible for the press to provide extensive coverage of the campaign. Lansdale also persuaded MACV to substitute U.S. military aircraft for missions that would normally be flown by Vietnamese aircraft, freeing those airplanes to ferry ballots and election materials around the country.36 No aspect of the campaign escaped Lansdale’s attention. He even convened a meeting cohosted by Henry Cabot Lodge’s wife to brainstorm about how to increase turnout among female voters.37
The result of Lansdale’s efforts was that on September 11, 1966, 4.2 million voters (81 percent of those registered) turned out to choose among 542 candidates running for 117 seats. It was generally agreed that this was the freest and most honest election in the entire history of Vietnam. “I’m right proud of what was done,”38 Lansdale said, and with good cause. Robert Komer, the top Vietnam expert on the National Security Council, wrote to him, “Everyone here from the top down has been immensely pleased with the elections. Few probably realize how much your constructive backstairs advice on how to play by the rules must have helped.”39
THE 1966 Constituent Assembly elections would turn out to be Lansdale’s most important—and virtually sole—achievement during his second tour in Vietnam. But gaining a victory was like taking a powerful narcotic. Having done it once, Lansdale was eager to do it again. There would be a new constitution promulgated in 1967 and more elections to come—village and hamlet elections in the summer, a presidential election in September—and Lansdale was now eager to stick around and help to make them a success too. Although Colonel Sam Karrick, among others, urged him to leave when his reputation “is at a peak,” 40 he was rethinking his determination to disband his team and depart Vietnam in “late 1966.” By the fall of 1966, he was talking to Henry Cabot Lodge about staying through September 1967 even though he professed himself to be “bone-weary from the past year.” 41
While Lansdale was generally far more realistic in his assessment of the situation than Westmoreland, Lodge, and other senior officials, and less prone to trumpeting illusory progress, he, too, had a weakness for imagining that his own initiatives could turn around a failing war effort. In a nine-page paper titled “The Battleground in 1967,” he held out the hope that 1967 would prove “to be the turning point of the present war,” not because American and South Vietnamese forces would win decisive battlefield victories (Lansdale was under no illusions on that score), but because they would succeed in wresting the initiative from the Vietcong in the “people’s war.”42 Walt Rostow, who had replaced McGeorge Bundy as National Security Adviser, passed along Lansdale’s memo to President Johnson with a glowing recommendation: “This is Ed Lansdale at his best—worth reading.”43
Henry Cabot Lodge consented to let Lansdale stay on to pursue his quixotic vision. “I would like you to keep right on as you are, mingling with Vietnamese of all kinds, and maintaining your many friendships, thereby providing me with valuable information on which to base important judgments,” the patrician Lodge, never one to mingle overmuch with the masses, told Lansdale in January 1967.44 He did not, however, say anything about giving Lansdale any new power. “Either give the political ball entirely to the traditional U.S. Institutions; or give Ed a political charter,” Rufus Phillips urged the State Department.45 Lodge chose to do neither. Instead, he left Lansdale in the same perpetual limbo that he had been in ever since his arrival in Vietnam in August 1965: tasked with transforming Vietnamese politics but lacking the power to command the American pacification bureaucracy.
For all of Lansdale’s complaints, he tacitly accepted this arrangement
by agreeing to stay on without gaining any concessions about his role. It was a formula for more rage and frustration, and ultimately for defeat, even if Lansdale was momentarily blinded to this reality by the success of the 1966 Constituent Assembly election.
31
Waiting for the Second Coming
The one place that a Vietnamese can afford to cry real tears.
—VISITOR TO LANSDALE’S HOUSE
BY 1967, the bipartisan consensus behind the Vietnam War—and the broader American role in the Cold War—was beginning to break down along with civil order in the United States. On April 15, the antiwar cause brought together a hundred thousand protesters in a march from New York’s Central Park to the United Nations led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and the singer Harry Belafonte, while that same day, on the other side of the continent, another forty thousand protesters massed in San Francisco. Prominent liberals, including Senators George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Mike Mansfield, and J. William Fulbright, broke with the president and expressed their opposition to the war. An anguished Bobby Kennedy, whose own brother had escalated the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, now compared American actions to those of the Nazis, as did a growing chorus of academics.1
By October 1967, when nearly half of all Americans had concluded that getting into Vietnam was a mistake,2 young men on one campus after another were burning draft cards and street battles were occurring in front of the Selective Service induction center in Oakland, California, between riot police swinging truncheons and thousands of “Stop the Draft” protesters.3 On October 21, a hundred thousand antiwar protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and marched on the Pentagon. Wherever Johnson and his appointees appeared in public, they were greeted by protesters. Some brandished signs such as “Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now?” and “LBJ’s father should have pulled out.”4 Vice President Humphrey was mobbed at Stanford University by antiwar protesters shrieking, “War criminal,” “Murderer,” and “Burn, baby, burn.”5
Meanwhile, conservative Democrats and Republicans were getting fed up with the war for a very different reason: they were frustrated that Lyndon Johnson, who increasingly seemed unable to please anyone, chose to fight a “limited war” instead of bombing North Vietnam “into the Stone Age,” as the retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay, a future vice presidential candidate on a ticket with George Wallace, had suggested in 1965. Some even called for invading North Vietnam or at least entering Laos and Cambodia to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Johnson’s friend and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke for many on the right when he said, “We should go in and win, or get out.”6 On both sides of the ideological divide, support for Johnson’s war was plummeting.
LYNDON JOHNSON knew that the war wasn’t working, but he did not know what to do about it. Like many an embattled chief executive, his first instinct was to change the team while implementing the same old policy. First to go was Robert McNamara, who was looking increasingly haggard as he came to realize that the military’s optimistic estimates of enemy killed and enemy strength were at odds with the dismal reality on the ground. McNamara’s fetishistic zest for quantification, which Lansdale had warned against, predictably had led him astray. Once the picture of steely certitude, the defense secretary would now weep at work, leading fellow officials to worry that he was “a very disturbed guy” on the verge of a “nervous breakdown.”7 Worried that McNamara was “cracking up” and might “pull a Forrestal,”8 Johnson eased him out at the end of November 1967 by announcing his appointment as president of the World Bank. Three months later, he would be replaced at the Pentagon by the consummate Democratic Party insider Clark Clifford, who was widely, if wrongly, believed to be more of a hawk.
Changes were also afoot in an increasingly bureaucratized Saigon. In 1967, “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, a master bureaucrat, moved from the National Security Council in Washington to Saigon to take charge of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), the office in charge of all pacification programs. CORDS would fall under MACV, rather than the embassy; Komer would be General Westmoreland’s deputy, and he would have command of military as well as civilian personnel. This would make him a far more powerful “pacification czar” than William Porter had been. At the same time, Westmoreland was getting a new deputy and successor in waiting—General Creighton “Abe” Abrams, who was widely seen as more capable and intelligent. Westy was not leaving quite yet, but Henry Cabot Lodge was. In April 1967, after less than two years in Saigon on his latest tour, he was replaced as ambassador by Ellsworth Bunker.
Bunker’s father had been one of the founders of the National Sugar Refining Company (makers of the Jack Frost brand), and he spent his life until the age of fifty-six in the sugar business, rising to become president of his father’s old firm. He did not enter government service until 1951, when, at the age of fifty-seven, he was appointed ambassador to Argentina by an old friend from his undergraduate days at Yale, Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He made enough of a name for himself as ambassador first to Argentina and then to Italy that, although he was a Democrat, President Eisenhower appointed him ambassador to New Delhi. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in turn, made him a diplomatic troubleshooter, sending him to resolve disputes between the Dutch and the Indonesians in West New Guinea, between the Egyptians and the Saudis in Yemen, and, most importantly, between various warring factions in the Dominican Republic following the U.S. military intervention in 1965. Bunker’s success in brokering Dominican elections earned him Johnson’s lasting gratitude.
Even though Bunker was already seventy-three years old, Johnson turned to him again to take charge in Saigon in 1967. Few could have predicted that he would remain in the job until 1973, long after Lyndon Johnson himself had left the White House. The Vietnamese nicknamed him “Old Man Refrigerator” because of his aristocratic bearing and cool demeanor. While Bunker was invariably polite, dignified, and friendly, he also displayed a steely quality that marked him out as a man not to be trifled with. With his white hair, lean frame, and elegantly tailored three-piece suits, worn even in the tropical climate of Vietnam, he looked like a casting director’s conception of a CEO. He knew how to manage a large organization, and he would run the embassy far more effectively than the vain and imperious Lodge had done.9
After winning unanimous Senate confirmation, Bunker landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport on April 25, 1967, a few hours after Lodge had left. When he saw that Lansdale was part of the reception committee, he asked Ed to ride with him in his car back to the ambassador’s residence. En route, Lansdale mentioned that Lodge had said he had talked to Bunker about his future, and that Bunker wanted him to go. Not at all, Bunker said. He wanted Lansdale to be his guide to the byways of Vietnamese politics.10 With Bunker’s arrival, one of Lansdale’s friends said, he got a “second wind.”11
Indeed, Lansdale found that he liked Bunker better than Lodge: “He was a true, old-fashioned gentleman. His word was his bond, which wasn’t true of Cabot Lodge.”12 But just because Lansdale related better to Bunker did not mean that the new ambassador, well aware of Lansdale’s reputation as an independent and sometimes insubordinate operator, was going to cede him any more power than the old one had.
BY THE summer of 1967, shortly after the U.S. armed forces had concluded two of their most massive search-and-destroy missions yet (Operations Cedar Falls and Junction City), both characteristically indecisive, the rest of Lansdale’s original team had left Vietnam. He replaced them with three newcomers, all with perfect backgrounds to become his protégés. Charles Sweet was a youthful-looking former USAID worker and volunteer in Vietnam with the International Voluntary Services, a private-sector nonprofit group founded by pacifist Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren. Having first come to Vietnam in 1964, he was fluent in Vietnamese and would devote much of his time to organizing residents of Saigon’s District Eight into opposing t
he Vietcong. David E. Hudson, who had been in Vietnam since 1961, was a “lean, intense man with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses” who had worked for Rufus Phillips at USAID’s Rural Affairs Office in 1962–63.13 The third newcomer, Calvin E. Mehlert, was a diminutive and quirky Foreign Service officer who was “sharp of mind, pen, and of tongue as well.”14 Fluent in French, Vietnamese, and Chinese, “Cal” would often wear Vietnamese-style black pajamas and blend into the background. He was widely considered one of the best—if not the best—American speakers of Vietnamese, a “consummate Foreign Service officer with dazzling linguistic ability.”15
The diminished size of Lansdale’s team—down from a dozen operatives to only three, supported by two embassy secretaries, two Filipino bodyguards, and a few Vietnamese household staff—was a sign of his reduced role in Vietnam. Mehlert later remembered how he and Lansdale would sit by themselves after dinner in the Cong Ly house for a game of dominoes and a glass of sweet vermouth. “It was a kind of ritual every night: sliced lemon and sweet vermouth,” he said. “It was very quiet.”16 It makes for a rather melancholy image: Ed Lansdale and Cal Mehlert, rattling around a spacious villa by themselves, far removed from either the decision-making or the fighting in Vietnam. It suggests that, like a dusty Ming dynasty vase, Lansdale was increasingly seen as a relic of a bygone era.
