by Max Boot
And that was certainly the way it appeared to some of those who met Lansdale in this period. Michael Delaney, an International Voluntary Services worker, remembered that when Lansdale came to speak at the IVS compound in Saigon, he “seemed exhausted and rather sickly,” and his “rah-rah presentation”—the war was winnable, he recalled Lansdale saying, “with sufficient will and morale”—“was just too unsophisticated, almost insultingly so, to pass muster at this stage of the game.”17 Delaney did not, of course, know what Daniel Ellsberg had long since discovered: that in private Lansdale could be far more realistic than “rah rah.”
A White House aide who visited Saigon and met with Lansdale was even more scathing. John P. Roche was a blunt, blue-collar intellectual who was on leave from Brandeis University to work on the White House staff. On a trip to Vietnam, Roche was dazzled by Ambassador Bunker, “a superb human being with a backbone of tempered steel.” He was considerably less impressed by Lansdale, whom he described as “essentially a public nuisance who has been waiting around in an alcoholic haze for the Second Coming of Magsaysay. Spends most of his time explaining to visiting firemen that if he had been listened to, the war would be over—and that he is responsible for whatever progress we have made. He should be kept in the United States and given a job that will keep him too busy to write a book.”18
It was a caricature, but one with enough verisimilitude to sting. Even more stinging was LBJ’s response. Instead of upbraiding Roche for insulting a distinguished public servant who had gone to Vietnam at his behest, the president told a secretary to “call John and tell him I liked his memo very much.”19
WHAT ROCHE and Delaney did not see was that, while his fellow Americans increasingly looked down on Lansdale, many Vietnamese still sought him out for guidance, even if they, too, were aware that he was no longer the power broker of old. “Every afternoon and evening,” Cal Mehlert recalled, “someone would drop by, looking for encouragement from the one American they felt understood their situation.”20 The Cong Ly villa was, as one South Vietnamese journalist wrote in Lansdale’s guest book, “the one place that a Vietnamese can afford to cry real tears.” (“A moving description,” Lansdale noted, “but so many do it these days that it sort of gets me down.”)21 They came because Lansdale remained unusual among American officials in Saigon in his attitude toward the Vietnamese. As he noted in a letter home, “Most of the other Americans just seem to ignore the fact that there are Vietnamese around—and that we ourselves cannot win here; it is going to take the Vietnamese to do so, regardless of how many U.S. casualties there are.”22 Sensing that Lansdale was different, wrote the New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth, “the Vietnamese continue to consult Lansdale, talk to him, trust him.”23
As a sign of how close Lansdale remained to so many Vietnamese, he was asked to stand in for the late Cao Dai warlord General Trinh Minh Thé at the wedding of his oldest son on July 27, 1967, an honor that would not have been accorded to any other American. Lansdale wrote an entertaining account of the ceremony for Ambassador Bunker and other officials. The wedding took place before the family shrine, piled high with “gifts of food from the groom, including a whole roasted pig. Bride and groom, side by side, made obeisance before the shrine. The bride sank prostrate before it, while the groom made four complete kowtows, bumping his forehead on the floor in front of the shrine. . . . Neither the groom, the bride’s father, nor I kissed the bride after the ceremony. We chewed betel nut just before it, so maybe that’s the reason why.” The wedding party left amid a heavy rainfall. “A very good sign, the rain,” one of the family members told Lansdale. “In the romantic stories of China,” Lansdale explained to the ambassador, “the rain is used as poetic description of moments in the act of love.”24
It was a side of Vietnamese society that all too few Americans saw: one far removed from the sordid reality of bar girls and beggars, “free fire” zones and search-and-destroy missions.
LANSDALE TRIED to create a release valve from wartime pressures by continuing to hold regular soirees at his Cong Ly villa. His goal was to bring “selected Vietnamese and Americans together to talk freely on current problems, exchange ideas, get opinions off the chest, and discover that we are all members of the human race.”25 Lansdale’s soirees still drew a Who’s Who of official Saigon. Photographs show Lansdale and his team laughing, relaxing, and singing with the likes of Henry Cabot Lodge, William Westmoreland, Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Duc Thang, Barry Zorthian, and distinguished visitors such as John Steinbeck, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. Scattered among them are a few women—mostly embassy secretaries with beehive hairdos typical of the era.
The bashes would start around seven o’clock in the evening and not end until midnight or later. Upon arrival, guests were invited to deposit their pistols in a chest near the door—“just like going into Tombstone,” one attendee recalled.26 A buffet supper was usually served along with drinks. Music was an invariable part of any evening, with guitar players such as Sam Wilson and Bernie Yoh accompanying singers such as Pham Duy and Hershel Gober. Lansdale sometimes would put down his cigarette—he often seemed to have one dangling out of his mouth—and join in on his harmonica. On occasion everyone would dance the tinikling, the Philippine pole dance. Lansdale later kidded the portly Barry Zorthian over his “skillful attempt to break up the bamboo poles we used to dance the tinikling.”27
Even fellow Americans who generally thought Lansdale was an ineffectual nuisance were happy to accept invitations. “I couldn’t for the life of me find a policy where Lansdale had an influence,” said the Foreign Service officer Peter Tarnoff, a future under secretary of state, but the parties were a “relaxed” environment where “alcohol flowed freely although people were not dead drunk.” For the “younger set,” men like himself, the gatherings offered a place where they could share candid impressions of the war effort, most “fairly negative.”28
WHEN HE wasn’t hosting these receptions, Lansdale’s attention in 1967 was focused on the next set of Vietnamese elections. Village and hamlet elections were to be held from April to June, followed by an election for the presidency and the Senate in September and an election for the National Assembly in October. There were 660 candidates for the Senate elections alone,29 but Lansdale held out the most hope for the local elections. “To my mind,” he wrote early in 1967, “this can bring about the most revolutionary change in Viet Nam of the last 100 years, and be the real start of democracy—much more than the promulgation of a Constitution or election of a President. It will be the first time that village people will get power into their own hands, with their elected officials having the say on how village funds will be spent.”30 But the election of village chiefs would make little difference if the same corrupt and repressive military officers remained in power at the district, provincial, and national levels.
Lansdale argued that whoever was elected president must be able to compete with Ho Chi Minh in projecting the “image of a Confucian Vietnamese nationalist.” The problem, he lamented, was that “there is no potential candidate for the Presidency in South Viet Nam who has an image to compare favorably with Ho’s, in the minds of the electorate.” The worst possible candidates, in his view, were generals who “are viewed for what they were before 1954 by most Vietnamese”—which is to say as “corporals or sergeants in the French forces fighting against the Vietnamese nationalists.” The problem was exacerbated by the military’s notorious corruption. “When a tarnish of colonialism is further clouded by personal behavior that goes against the Confucian ideal of leadership,” Lansdale warned, “the problem becomes hard indeed.”31
Fed up with the military dictatorship, Lansdale favored a transition to civilian rule. But Ellsworth Bunker continued Henry Cabot Lodge’s policy of embracing the military junta because it offered stability and continuity. The only real question in the minds of American policymakers was which general should run for president. They favored Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the “gregarious, impulsi
ve, incautious and flamboyant” prime minister and air force commander, over the “withdrawn, suspicious, and highly cautious” head of state, General Nguyen Van Thieu.32 But when the generals met among themselves, they selected Thieu for the presidency and Ky for the vice presidency. Thieu, cunning if boring, had defeated the flashy but erratic Ky in the only vote that counted.33 The actual election was an afterthought: The Thieu–Ky slate won with a paltry 34.8 percent of the vote after two of the strongest civilian candidates were disqualified.34 Once again, after a destabilizing interval of four years, South Vietnam had an autocratic Catholic president who had been born in the North.
Thieu’s ascendance was grim news not only for Ky but also for Lansdale, who was closer to Ky. Lansdale offered to come in for “advisory talks,” and Thieu agreed to see Lansdale for what Lansdale described as “quite candid sessions.” Lansdale would challenge the president in a way that few others dared—asking, for example, “How can you make a speech about ending corruption in ARVN to a group of junior officers when you’re standing next to General So-and-so whom you’d just put in charge of an operation—and all the junior officers know that he’s the biggest crook in ARVN?”35 Such sessions may have made Thieu think, but they did not make him follow Lansdale’s guidance as Diem and Magsaysay had once done. In a conversation with a friend, the new president said that he was suspicious of Lansdale because of his reputation as a “kingmaker” and because Ky had “made plain to one and all” that Lansdale was “his friend.”36
In truth, Lansdale was disappointed with both Thieu and Ky. “Thieu and Ky are very weak leaders at the moment,” he wrote. “Given their natures, I doubt that they will improve much.”37
IF THE United States wanted to find a real leader in Vietnam, Lansdale suggested, it needed to look elsewhere—specifically to General Nguyen Duc Thang, the young minister of revolutionary development with whom he had become fast friends. Thang was, Lansdale said, “the only Vietnamese leader I have been permitted to work with closely over a long enough period,” and he was “the only Vietnamese of stature who demonstrates inspired leadership.”38 Thang and Lansdale were, the latter wrote, “in close agreement on how to wage and win a ‘people’s war’ against Asian Communists.”39
Lansdale was hardly alone in his high estimation of Thang. It was a judgment almost universally shared. The New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr called him “the most effective administrator, innovator and inspirational leader South Vietnam has produced in seven years.” Mohr accompanied Thang on one of his regular tours of the provinces, which he undertook at Lansdale’s urging, making him the only senior government official whom most peasants ever encountered. The Times man was impressed by the general’s conduct: “He invariably takes off his cap when he speaks to a village woman and invariably shakes hands with every man. He scolds policemen or hamlet officials who try to shoo children away or line people up in ranks.” When an official ordered an old man to dismount from his bicycle until Thang passed, the general “showed a rare burst of anger.” “I hate that,” he exclaimed. “I want the people to have dignity.”40
Lansdale had high hopes for Thang, and he thought they were beginning to be realized just before the September 3, 1967, presidential election, when Ky moved Thang from the revolutionary development ministry to become the army’s vice chief of staff. In that position, he could impose the kind of practices upon the South Vietnamese army that Magsaysay had imposed on the Philippine army, persuading soldiers to embrace rather than to brutalize the peasantry. “Not quite in a Magsaysay position yet, but close to it,” Lansdale wrote.41 “My personal blue chips are on Thang—to reform the Vietnamese Armed Forces and to spark them into gaining a real win for us.”42
But Thang did not turn out to be nearly as adept a politician as Magsaysay. In the summer of 1967, he made the fatal mistake of getting entangled in the internecine jockeying between Ky and Thieu. Although he refused Ky’s entreaties to become his campaign manager and to utilize his ministry personnel to support Ky’s candidacy, he did agree to see Thieu on behalf of Ky to ask the chief of state to withdraw from the presidential race. That sealed his fate as far as Thieu was concerned. The new president now regarded Thang as an enemy whose power had to be curbed. When Thang tried to prosecute a province chief and district chief in Binh Dinh Province for peculating “huge sums of piasters” intended to compensate local residents who were being resettled to make way for an American air base, Thieu sided with the II Corps commander, who had appointed the local officials and wanted the investigation blocked.43 Lansdale wrote to Bunker that he did “not believe that the central government can truly strengthen its political position through effective programs capable of convincing the body politic that the government is both effective and honestly concerned about its citizens, until the political power of the Corps Commanders is eliminated.”44 Far from eliminating their power, Thieu was enhancing the hold of the corps commanders and undermining Thang. When Thang asked his fellow generals to adopt a code of conduct—stipulating, inter alia, that they live within their pay, limit themselves to only one house and one vehicle, and not use soldiers as domestic servants—his proposal was met with “stunned disbelief.”45
In frustration, Thang resigned in January 1968, just before the Tet Offensive. American officials were irate, lamenting, as CIA Director Richard Helms wrote, the loss of a man who “has provided a quality of leadership and courage in his relationships with other senior leaders that, one can safely predict, will not be replaced.”46 Not wanting to alienate the Americans, Thieu gave Thang another post, appointing him commander of IV Corps in the Mekong Delta. Lansdale hoped that “as a Corps Commander, he will be free to initiate the desired reforms and reorganization in his own area, as rapidly as possible.”47 His agenda included indoctrinating troops on “why we fight,” basing promotion purely on merit rather than personal connections, and demoting or dismissing “lax or incapable officers.”48
But Thang could do little because Thieu consistently undercut him. He resigned again in June 1968 just as his staunchest American supporter, Edward Lansdale, was leaving the country. This time, the United States did not pressure Thieu to bring Thang back; Bunker had developed a close relationship with Thieu, and he did not want to spark a crisis over the fate of one general. Thang was appointed to a meaningless job as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint General Staff, “but,” reported the New York Times, “he has no duties and he spends his time o nha—or ‘at home’—studying mathematics for his own amusement.”49
The system of corruption that Thang had tried to uproot long outlasted his tenure. Some province chiefs were rumored to pay ten million piastres for their posts ($50,000), with “the approved method of pay-off” being for “the wife of the nominee to ‘lose’ the money to the wife of the collector at poker or mah-jongg, which Vietnamese ladies of leisure play with a skill and ferocity—and for stakes even when the game is on the level—that would dazzle the sisterhoods of the Rockaways,” wrote Tom Buckley of the New York Times. As a result of this system, founded on family connections, personal loyalties, and graft, Buckley noted, “incompetence and dishonesty are not necessarily punishable offenses, nor is merit often rewarded for its own sake.”50 Lansdale was virtually alone among senior American officials in perceiving that this was a major problem—that the corruption and unaccountability of South Vietnam’s government could pose a fatal flaw in the American war effort.
WITH THE 1967 elections concluded, however unsatisfactory the results, Edward Lansdale’s thoughts turned once again to home. “Just plain tuckered out,” he planned to leave Vietnam in early November and “loaf for a solid month in the U.S. before even starting to think again.”51 He did indeed go home for an extended period to spend the holidays with Helen, but he did not stay there. Come January 1968, he returned to Saigon. Ever the optimist, he still hoped that he could put in a few “licks” for the cause of freedom.
Lansdale expected that 1968 would be a pivotal year, and he did
not want to be away. At the end of October 1967, he wrote to Ellsworth Bunker, “I believe that Hanoi is gambling on the climax of the war coming in 1968.” He anticipated that North Vietnam’s leaders would try to repeat their success against the French: “Hanoi policy-makers and historians saw the defeat of the French forces as having reached its decisive point through the anti-war sentiment in Metropolitan France rather than on the field of battle in Viet Nam; Dien Bien Phu was fought by the Viet Minh mostly to shape public opinion in Paris, a bit of drama rather than sound military strategy. It worked and made a handful of Vietnamese leaders famous inside the Communist world.” Now, he warned, Hanoi was going to implement a similar plan to “bleed the Americans” and “get the American public to force U.S. withdrawal,” because “they believe the American public is vulnerable to psychological manipulation in 1968.”52
It was an uncannily accurate prediction, which showed that, for all his inability to exert influence, Lansdale still had a better grasp than most Americans of what was happening in Vietnam.
32
The Long Goodbye
The emotional factor in the Viet-Nam war has grown to immense size since the shock of the Tet offensive. In the months ahead . . . it promises to become the real pivot factor.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
IN the early morning darkness of January 31, 1968, the Washington Post’s Saigon bureau chief, Peter Braestrup, received an urgent phone call from his colleague Lee Lescaze.
“They’re attacking the city,” Lescaze said.
“What city?” Braestrup groggily asked.
“This city,” Lescaze said patiently. “Saigon.”
“Ridiculous,” replied Braestrup, a gruff, battle-hardened Marine veteran. “Just some incoming.”1
