The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  Abrams also took steps to end the Vietcong rocketing of Saigon. In June 1968, enemy rockets crashed into Saigon on twelve consecutive days, much as London had been targeted by German V-1 and V-2 rockets in 1944–45. With terrifying explosions occurring at random throughout the metropolitan area, hundreds of civilians were being killed and wounded. As Lansdale noted, “The blind caprice of enemy gunners . . . made each inhabitant feel that he might be the next target.”33 Westmoreland did not think it was a big deal; the rocketing, he said, “is of really no military consequence.” Abrams disagreed. He understood that allowing the capital to be attacked was deeply demoralizing. So he instituted various measures to stop the barrage, including having helicopter gunships orbit at night over likely launch points and sending out patrols to ambush the rocket crews. An American colonel observed that “it was almost like somebody just turned the volume down.”34

  Still with a modicum of influence, Lansdale urged Abrams to modify the way he visited with the chief of Vietnam’s Joint General Staff, General Cao Van Vien. Westmoreland, in the manner of a head of state, would visit Vien’s headquarters in his sedan accompanied by a flotilla of motorcycle outriders and a truckload of bodyguards. Vien, in turn, would be waiting to receive him with an honor guard. Westy would ask him, “How are you this morning, general? How are things going?” “Everything is fine,” Vien would reply. Westmoreland would tell him that things were going fine with the American forces too. And then he would return to his colleagues to report that “everything’s going well with the Vietnamese.” Of course, Lansdale said, “Half their troops have deserted or something, but they aren’t about to tell Westmoreland.”

  The always informal “Ugly American” suggested to Abrams that he escape the deadly formalities. “Do you drive?” he asked the general. “Of course I do,” Abrams replied.

  So why don’t you go over in a jeep and take an aide if you want, but you don’t really need an aide. Cao Van Vien will be there with all his troops lined up and you say, General, can I park my jeep somewhere around here? Be a human being. Say I’m worrying about something—pick something that your troops aren’t doing right—and Vien’ll say, “You haven’t heard anything yet. Let me tell you what’s happened with mine.” And you get down to the truth pretty quickly. And maybe you can help each other a bit. . . . It’s about time we got this thing on the basis of humans talking to each other!35

  Westmoreland had ignored such advice from Lansdale before.Abrams took it as part of the process of creating what the historian Lewis Sorley described as “a better war.” But Lansdale would not stay long enough to see the changes for himself. He was scheduled to leave in mid-June 1968 and, despite pressure he was receiving from some Vietnamese, including President Nguyen Van Thieu, to stay on,36 he was determined that this time he would leave for good.

  BY NOW, Lansdale had all but given up any hope of significantly influencing the turn of events. Promoting General Nguyen Duc Thang had been his last hope to make an impact, and as Thang’s influence waned, so did Lansdale’s. He was left to become more an analyst of Vietnamese society than a political player in his own right, as he had been in the 1950s.

  Already Lansdale had become known within the U.S. government for issuing memoranda that were more anthropological than political. In 1967, for example, he had compiled a two-and-a-half-hour recording of songs performed at the Cong Ly villa. It was billed as “In the Midst of War: Folk Music, Viet Nam, 1965–1967,” and featured both Vietnamese and GI tunes. “These tapes tell the story of a human side of war that should be told,” Hank Miller, the narrator, intoned.37 This was, as the anthropologist Lydia Fish later noted, “perhaps the only example known to military history of folklore being used for the transmission of intelligence.” Lansdale also issued many memoranda along the lines of his description of the Trinh Minh Thé family wedding or a lexicon of Vietnamese slang, which Fish has described as “models of ethnographic field notes.” Lansdale sent copies of the tape recording to President Johnson, General Westmoreland, Ambassador Bunker, and other prominent personages. All he got back in return were form letters. “It was very disappointing to me,” Lansdale said a few years later, “and I don’t know to this day whether they ever listened to them or not.”38

  Undaunted by the apathy of his superiors, Lansdale pressed on with his well-intentioned, but ultimately futile, mission of trying to get his fellow Americans to better understand the place where they were fighting. As a grand finale to his time in Vietnam—a total of almost seven years spread across two tours a decade apart—Lansdale produced a series of lengthy memoranda. One memo on “Vietnamese Soothsaying” included a classified annex with the names of “certain soothsayers,” which had been omitted from the main report, “in case there is ever a desire for some clandestine operational use of these persons.”39 Who but Ed Lansdale would ever think to make “operational use” of soothsayers? Another memo detailed the history and politics of the Cao Dai, whose temple in Tay Ninh Province he had first visited in the summer of 1953.40

  His pièce de résistance was a study of South Vietnam’s convoluted politics. “If I’m not present in VN as a sort of living conscience for our Mission,” he told Helen, “this can be a substitute.”41 The resulting study was so long, at sixty-eight pages plus six annexes, that Lansdale told Walt Rostow, the national security adviser, “Be not dismayed by the bulk of this document, although I admit that it looks to be the heft of the leaflet I’d like to drop on Ho Chi Minh’s head from 10,000 feet up.”42 The report’s findings were not sanguine. Lansdale wrote that the government had “dominant political influence” over no more than half the population, primarily city dwellers and government employees and dependents. The remaining people, including most rural residents, were either controlled by the Communists or in areas of disputed control. “It seems evident that our nationalist friends will have to create much more dynamic polarity than they have been able to do since 1963, if they are to win a political struggle against the Communists,” Lansdale concluded.43

  As he regularly did with Lansdale’s memoranda, Rostow forwarded this paper to President Johnson with his recommendation: “This is Ed Lansdale’s bare-knuckled account of Thieu’s political problems and what we face in Vietnamese politics, including how corruption works. It is worth reading.”44 Whether Johnson read the memo or not, he continued to support Thieu without pressing him to make his rule more popular and effective.

  BY MID-JUNE 1968, when Edward Lansdale was due to leave Vietnam for the last time, the “traditional bong-mai blossoms, the chrysanthemums called bong-cuc, the van-tho Buddha flowers, mong-ca rooster combs, mandariniers, and dahlia were withered and gone,” he poetically noted, with remembrances of things now past. “Masses of barbed wire, now rusting under the rains that had come with May, clogged streets here and there about the town. Trash and garbage were being heaped on the pavements, as public services slowed.” 45 Because of the mini-Tet fighting, the streets were full of kids. “The primary schools are filled with refugees, so this means that the kids cannot go to school and now have to play at home or in the streets,” Lansdale observed. “And what do you think they play? Just what you think they play. They have made guns out of sticks, with tin cans and wire stuck on to show that they are up to date with the more Buck Rogerish looking weapons of the Americans and of the enemy’s imports from Czechoslovakia.” 46

  Given “so much suffering among the people in the urban areas,” Lansdale thought of not holding a farewell party. Vietnamese friends persuaded him to go ahead but “without the usual singing and dancing.” So a more “subdued” gathering convened, only two days after Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles, at the Cong Ly house at 4 p.m. on June 8, 1968, the early start necessitated by the curfew in post-Tet Saigon. Three hundred guests packed the second floor, Lansdale wrote, “to test whether or not the floor actually will collapse according to dire predictions in the past.”47

  At another farewell party, hosted by the attorney Dinh Thach B
ich, a mob of political leaders gathered to pay tribute to Lansdale. Bich’s wife had to move to a neighbor’s house to find room to cook lunch; the heaping platters were then carried back to their house by neighborhood children. Lansdale accused the politicos of not having a vision for their country. “All you want to do is to be president and have everybody bowing and cheering and you smile and wave your hand at them and everything, but it doesn’t go beyond that.” Chastened, the politicians began making stirring speeches about the good they wanted to accomplish. Lansdale was moved and encouraged. “Well goddamn it, you people better start working together or you’re going to lose your country,” he said.48

  South Vietnam’s congenitally suspicious president, Nguyen Van Thieu, heard a distorted version of what had happened at Bich’s house. When he called in Lansdale for a farewell visit on June 13, he said, “The police tell me that you’re trying to start a revolution with all these politicians.”

  “Goddamn it, Thieu,” Lansdale snapped (or so he later recalled). “You know what I’m doing? I am doing your job. I’m a foreigner and you should never let a foreigner do your job as president. You should do what I was doing.”49 He then told Thieu that he should get out of his office more and talk with both ordinary people and politicians. He should also “encourage political leaders to band together,” and set an example of honest and moral leadership. The meeting concluded with Lansdale telling Thieu he needed to be “much closer to the people to win the struggle.”50

  It was, as Rufus Phillips wrote, “vintage Lansdale—no one else could have talked to a Vietnamese leader that way and be listened to.”51

  AS EDWARD LANSDALE departed one last time from the always bustling Tan Son Nhut Airport on June 16, 1968, never to return, he tried to put a brave face on the situation. In a valedictory letter to current and former team members, he admitted, “We took some clobbering,” but then went on to say, “There are a lot more Vietnamese having a much bigger say about their future today than there were when we arrived in 1965. We did our bit to bring this about. So, if we didn’t do all the important things we had in mind originally—we sure did a whale of a lot of them!”52 In truth, Lansdale knew he had not accomplished nearly as much as he or his most enthusiastic backers had hoped.

  The good news was that the nonstop coups of the immediate post-Diem period had yielded to the more stable rule of General Thieu and his military junta, and their government had attained more popularity in the wake of Communist atrocities during the Tet Offensive. There was even a semblance of a functioning parliament, although its role was largely symbolic. Lansdale’s greatest triumph on his second tour was the honest legislative elections of 1966. But, despite a patina of democracy, the Saigon regime was still a long way from realizing the lofty principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that Lansdale cited as his lodestars. Corruption and factionalism, in particular, remained cancers eating away at the state. When Clark Clifford visited Saigon shortly after Lansdale’s departure, he found “a group of squabbling and corrupt Generals, selfishly maneuvering for their own advantage while Americans and Vietnamese continued to die in combat.”53

  The larger problem was that America was no closer to winning the Vietnam War than it had been when Lansdale arrived in 1965. Although the North Vietnamese had suffered serious losses, most recently during the Tet Offensive, Hanoi’s will to win remained as strong as ever, while America’s was eroding by the day. Lansdale’s warnings about the futility of a conventional military strategy had been ignored, along with his advice to strengthen the South Vietnamese state.

  A sign of Lansdale’s spectacular fall from grace was the lack of media attention to his departure. His arrival in August 1965 had been a major story covered by every newspaper and broadcast network in America. His departure in June 1968 was covered by only one newspaper, the New York Times, which buried a small item headlined “Lansdale Retires from Saigon Post” on an inside page next to a giant advertisement for patio furniture.54 The Washington Post waited more than three months, until late September 1968, to run an interview with Lansdale. The Post account noted that he had tried to carve out a niche as a thought leader and catalyst for action. The problem was that “in a situation where everyone considers himself to be his own expert after a two-month stay, the post of thought leader is held at a discount.”55

  In the final analysis, everything that Lansdale had done on his second tour—from studying Vietnamese customs to overseeing the 1966 elections to cultivating his would-be Magsaysay, General Nguyen Duc Thang—had been “held at a discount” by the decision-makers in Washington and Saigon. The United States was being beaten in a war for the first time in its history, in political if not military terms, and Lansdale was returning home a beaten man.

  PART SIX

  THE BEATEN MAN

  (1968–1987)

  Lansdale at home with Canbo in the 1970s. (ECLPP)

  33

  The War at Home

  What hurts me most is that friends whom I love, innocent, decent ones, got hurt through me.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT was destined to be remembered, like 1789, 1848, and 1989, as a year of revolution. It was not just the year of the Tet Offensive and of Lyndon Johnson’s stepping down. It was also the year of the Prague Spring followed by a Red Army invasion of Czechoslovakia. The North Korean capture of an American intelligence ship, the Pueblo. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Riots in more than a hundred American cities and smoking ruins in Washington. Student protests not only across the United States but also in Britain, Mexico, Germany, France—in Paris most spectacularly. The rise of African American militants led by the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and of leftist militants led by the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen. A chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago—tear gas and nightsticks, cracked heads and watery eyes. To many who lived through it, 1968 appeared to be the start of a final showdown between the Establishment and the counterculture for the future of America—or, as the radicals spelled it, “Amerika.” “We spoke of smashing the State,” the radical organizer turned sociologist Todd Gitlin wrote years later; “the State of smashing us.”1

  Edward Lansdale got a small taste of the unrest convulsing America’s campuses when he returned from Vietnam in June 1968 feeling, as a friend put, “very low in spirits” after years of frustration and defeats.2 Instead of going straight to Washington, he spent a few weeks in California visiting with his son Ted and his daughter-in-law Carol; Ted was stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. Helen even overcame her fear of flying to join him.3

  While on the West Coast, Lansdale gave talks at UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley. Berkeley, in particular, was an eye-opener. Ever since the Free Speech Movement in 1964–65, it had been the epicenter of student protest. On June 28–29, 1968, just before Lansdale’s arrival, the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance held a rally on Telegraph Avenue in support of French student protesters. A riot ensued that left a dozen police officers and thirty-one protesters hospitalized. An underground newspaper headlined the event, “WAR DECLARED. . . . Enemy Troops Deploying on Telegraph Avenue, Allies Put Up Fierce Resistance, Then Fell Back,”4 and millions of Americans had a distinct feeling that a domestic war, partly brought on by objections to the Vietnam War, had indeed been declared.

  Lansdale’s talk at the university produced what he described as a “wild session.” Even if he was hardly a conventional hawk, insofar as he believed the United States should reduce its military presence in Vietnam, he was not willing to simply abandon South Vietnam, as many of the antiwar protesters demanded. He found that the students were actually better behaved than the faculty, who offered him lunch at the Faculty Club. Some of the scholars, Lansdale noted, “left the luncheon in anger over some of my jibes at them; I gathered that they wanted to do all the verbal knifing and hadn’t expected me to return the blows.” By con
trast, Lansdale wrote, he managed to disarm the undergraduates with a clever psychological ploy: “When I gathered with the mob of students, I told them that I probably was a dirty old man, but I’d been away from the U.S. a long time and hadn’t had a chance to see girls in mini skirts, and would they mind if the girls sat in the front rows where I could see them? Which the gals did. And, when the lads started acting up, the girls turned around and shut them up. So, it turned out well, with the mob finally giving me a chance to have my say.”5

  In dealing with these radicalized students—separated from him by vast disparities of age, experience, and beliefs—the by-now elderly Lansdale showed the same deft touch that he had habitually displayed with Filipinos and Vietnamese and that mysteriously eluded him in dealings with his own government colleagues.

  ONCE HIS West Coast swing was concluded, Lansdale planned to return to Washington, D.C., with Helen only briefly to pack their belongings and sell their house. He was intending to move to Honolulu, where the University of Hawaii had offered him a fellowship to write his memoirs and train emerging Asian leaders. But sometime in October 1968 he changed his mind and decided to stay in Washington. It is unclear why, although the explanation may have been his wife’s reluctance to move.

  Helen was getting along in years (she was now sixty-seven years old, while Ed was sixty), and understandably preferred to stay in the Washington area where their son Pete and his wife and children lived, rather than move far away to an unfamiliar place. Although Ed had maintained his lines of communication with Pat Kelly, he had grown more devoted to his wife with the passage of time. Some of his last letters from Vietnam communicated more passion for Helen than any of his previous extant correspondence. On March 15, 1968, for example, he wrote, “I love you. I need you.”6 A month later: “I love you and miss you, even though it doesn’t go into words all the time.”7 Now they were together again, settling into the contented domesticity of which she had long dreamed. It is understandable if, after finally having come home, Ed did not want to move again.