by Max Boot
There was only one problem. The Lansdales had already sold their house at 4503 MacArthur Boulevard in anticipation of the move to Hawaii. They had to move temporarily into a high-rise apartment before buying a four-bedroom house at 1917 Wakefield Street in Alexandria. The hometown of both George Washington and Robert E. Lee, Alexandria had been a busy Potomac River port in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but by 1968 it had become a bedroom community for workers from Washington. As a retired federal employee, Ed Lansdale fit right in. His house on Wakefield Street was built of brick and wood and resembled a farmhouse, an impression heightened by the many trees and bushes that surrounded it. Ed took charge of cooking the meals and tending the vegetable garden—and of walking his seventy-five-pound black poodle, Canbo (Vietnamese for “cadre”), who had replaced the deceased Koko, the dog he had acquired after the end of his last stint in Vietnam in 1956.
IN THE wood-paneled study of the house, with a window affording a view of his front lawn, Lansdale would work on a memoir that he agreed in September 1968 to write for Harper & Row. Lansdale warned Cass Canfield, the legendary publishing executive who commissioned the book, that it would not be a “tell all”: “I was privileged to be a sharer of some of our national policy ‘secrets,’ some of which remain alive and a potential danger to courageous people who are allied with America’s larger interests. I’m not about to cause harm to them, if I can help it. This means that, if I were to write memoirs, there would be odd and obvious gaps in the telling.”8 Lansdale’s reticence would reduce the book’s marketability, but Canfield was undaunted and went ahead with the contract.
Lansdale’s initial target date for delivery of the manuscript was September 1969, but like countless other authors, he would miss his deadline.9 Lansdale found writing “much harder than [he] had contemplated.”10 By the beginning of 1970, a year and a half after starting, he was complaining to his agent, “Ouch! I didn’t know it was going to be such a long, long grind when I started. I hereby give permission to hit me over the head and stop me if I ever get to thinking of doing this again.”11
At first, the narrative started in the Philippines in 1950 and ended with his departure from Vietnam in 1956. His subsequent activities in the Pentagon and again in Vietnam he found so “full of frustrating might-have-beens that it would be sheer agony for me to write about.”12 But his editor, Genève Young, insisted that he prune back his account of the 1950s and add in a narrative of his work up to 1968. This Lansdale did—in multiple versions—only to have his next editor, Ann Harris, tell him that the book was too long. Acting very much like a Christian Scientist denying the unpleasant realities of the physical world, he took advantage of these instructions to expunge all mention of his second tour in Vietnam. He called it “a sordid epoch, I must still be bleeding emotionally from it. . . . I didn’t write about it too lucidly.”13
WHILE PRIMARILY engaged in recounting his past exploits, Lansdale did not give up hope of influencing future policy toward Vietnam under the administration of Richard Nixon, who had beaten the Democratic nominee, Lansdale’s old champion Hubert Humphrey, in a closely fought election. Scrupulously nonpartisan, “neither hawk nor dove,”14 Lansdale had not supported either candidate, while maintaining links to both. He gathered in October 1968 with Rufus Phillips and other old teammates from Saigon to work on an agenda for the next administration similar to the “Concept for Victory” paper they had produced in 1964. Also participating were two current, if low-level, government officials: Sven Kraemer of the National Security Council and Ted Cantrell of the State Department.
The paper’s starting point was bleak: “(1) A politically viable South Viet-Nam does not yet exist. (2) North Viet-Nam retains the military initiative and an imposing military capability. (3) The American people are tiring quickly of the war.” In assaying a way forward, Lansdale and his friends counseled against both withdrawal and escalation, recommending instead that further aid to the South Vietnamese be made contingent “upon their doing their utmost to live up to the ideals and precepts contained in their own Constitution.”15
Taking to the pages of Foreign Affairs for the first time since 1964, Lansdale used the October 1968 issue to advance an even more daring idea in an article entitled “Viet Nam: Still the Search for Goals.” He suggested that “a peace settlement might provide for the division of Viet Nam into three parts: a communist North, a free South and a coalition Center. The people throughout Viet Nam would be given an appropriate period to move to the area governed by the regime of their choice.” He hoped that millions of Vietnamese would “vote with their feet,” as they had done in 1954–55, and leave the North for freedom in the South. But the idea was impractical and attracted unfavorable attention in South Vietnam. As Ellsworth Bunker noted in a cable back to Washington, “Widespread critical reaction to the ‘Lansdale Solution’ has been noted here in the press, among members of the National Assembly, and from other opinion leaders. Emphasis is often placed on the fact that the Vietnamese people want unity, not further division.”16
Lansdale’s Foreign Affairs essay got no traction with the incoming Nixon administration. Neither did the policy paper that he and his friends prepared. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had their own ideas of how to handle Vietnam and, despite their personal acquaintance with, and even admiration for, Lansdale, there was scant overlap between their thinking and his.
RICHARD NIXON might have been expected to sympathize with Edward Lansdale, like him a middle-class Southern Californian and an outsider to the political establishment who was often looked down upon by those with more distinguished pedigrees. Both had been raised in small religious sects—Lansdale a Christian Scientist, Nixon a Quaker. Neither man had had much use for government bureaucrats, and both reserved special disdain for the State Department, which Nixon believed to be full of “snobs in striped pants.”17 And both men were, of course, famous for their staunch anti-Communism. During the Eisenhower administration, Nixon had been a booster of Lansdale’s and remained a supporter even after leaving the vice presidency. But, in the final analysis, the differences between Lansdale and Nixon were more significant than their similarities.
Lansdale was, like Hubert Humphrey, optimistic, sunny, and gregarious. Nixon, on the other hand, was a grim loner, an introvert who had turned himself into a successful politician—an extrovert’s business—through sheer force of will. Like his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, he was intensely resentful of those he perceived to be his social betters and vindictive toward his self-designated “enemies.” “Can you imagine what this man would have been like if somebody had loved him?” wondered Henry Kissinger.18
Nixon was often restrained from taking precipitate actions by Kissinger, his chief foreign policy adviser. He later wrote that those closest to the president “were expected, we believed, to delay implementing more exuberant directives”—such as bombing foreign countries on a whim—“giving our President the opportunity to live out his fantasies and yet to act, through us, with the calculation that his other image of himself prescribed.”19 But if Kissinger held Nixon back in some ways, he only encouraged Nixon in his Machiavellian tendencies.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who had arrived in New York in 1938 at the age of sixteen. He became a dazzling writer and speaker of English, with a talent for witty aperçus (“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy”), but he never lost his Teutonic accent or gravitas. As a boy, he had witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Most of his extended family perished in the Holocaust. As a sergeant in the U.S. Army, he would return to Germany with an army of occupation where he would see the price that Germany had paid for the rise of Nazism. He would be particularly anguished when, along with other GIs, he liberated a concentration camp near Hanover. A friend of his emerged from a hut to say, “Don’t go in there. We had to kick them to tell the dead from the living.” According to the bio
grapher Niall Ferguson, young Kissinger commented in an unpublished essay written shortly thereafter, “That is humanity in the 20th century.”20
Given his life experience, it is understandable that Kissinger emerged with limited faith in democracy, a deep fear of instability, and a pessimistic view of history. Kissinger was not given to enthusing, as Lansdale did, about the brotherhood of man. He preferred to pursue stability and to defend America’s narrow strategic interests rather than to promote democracy and human rights. Having written his doctoral thesis on European diplomacy after the Napoleonic Wars, Kissinger imagined himself to be another Metternich or Bismarck—another brilliant, cold-blooded statesman shrewdly moving pieces around the geostrategic chessboard with scant regard for the human cost.
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had much interest in fostering representative government in South Vietnam—a goal that Lansdale believed was imperative if the Saigon regime was ever to stand on its own. They had already made their disdain for democracy plain when, separately, each had denigrated Lansdale’s plans to hold free and fair National Assembly elections in 1966. In 1971, with South Vietnam scheduled to hold a presidential election, they ignored pleas from Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker not to let Nguyen Van Thieu rig the results. Thieu wound up running unopposed with tacit approval from the White House. Following the example of Ngo Dinh Diem, he even formed his own ruling party, known ironically as the Democracy Party. Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington, thought that the United States was making a fundamental mistake: “Kissinger invited the blossoming of one-man rule. Eventually, this would prove the most destructive and destabilizing factor of all.”21
Lansdale agreed with his friend Bui Diem, writing in a letter to the Washington Post, “Only if the Vietnamese have a free chance to determine their future now, and use it, will there be any point to all the sacrifices we have made in Vietnam or any rationale to our present withdrawal with which we Americans can live with ourselves afterwards here at home.” But his views were mocked by the Post’s editors, who argued that “this is the time to stop pursuing causes in Vietnam and instead to take whatever gains can be perceived, cut losses, and come home.”22 That reflected the mood of the Nixon administration, too, and helps to explain why it did not seek Lansdale’s guidance. Lansdale had hoped for more influence, but wasn’t especially surprised to be excluded. “I know that I’ve become too big a boogeyman to too many people to be really effective anymore,” he acknowledged.23
WHILE NIXON and Kissinger knew they did not want to adopt the idealistic—if also practical—reform agenda that Lansdale advocated, they fumbled around for other ways to achieve their goal of “peace with honor.” Their desire was to extract U.S. troops without leaving Nixon open to the charge that he was the first president to lose a war—the same accusation that had haunted Lyndon Johnson.
Nixon thought at first that he could scare North Vietnam into ending the conflict within his first year in office, employing what he called the “Madman Theory”: “We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he had his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”24 But his early 1969 ultimatum failed to spook Le Duan, who, long before Ho Chi Minh’s death in September, had taken charge of North Vietnam’s war effort.25
Nixon and Kissenger wound up adopting willy-nilly a multipronged approach toward ending the war. Their first and most important priority was reducing the total number of troops—from 536,000 when Nixon took office to 475,000 by the end of 1969, to 334,000 in 1970, to 156,000 in 1971, to 24,000 in 1972, and eventually, in 1973, to zero. Given plummeting morale in the ranks, the troop drawdown came none too soon; by the end of the 1960s, the U.S. armed forces, mired in an unpopular and ruinous war that they did not appear to be winning, were afflicted with rampant drug use, racial tensions, and even “fraggings”—troops killing their officers.
The second part of the administration’s approach was to change the strategy of the troops on the ground. In truth, this was the doing more of General Creighton Abrams than of the president. Acting on his own initiative, he scaled back big-unit search-and-destroy operations to focus on securing South Vietnam’s population, although he still sent troops to fight costly clashes such as the Battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969. In the meantime, the CIA’s William Colby in 1968 took over the pacification bureaucracy known as CORDS, focusing his efforts on a controversial intelligence-sharing program known as Phoenix that would “neutralize” 81,740 Vietcong cadres between 1968 and 1972, with roughly a third killed and the rest either captured or defected.26
The third prong of Nixon’s strategy was to disrupt North Vietnamese base camps in Cambodia and Laos. When the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–70 accomplished, as the president put it, “Zilch,”27 he ordered a ground “incursion”—the word “invasion” was studiously avoided. A total of 19,300 U.S. and 29,000 South Vietnamese troops moved into Cambodia beginning on April 30, 1970, backed by massive American aerial and artillery bombardment, but, as a South Vietnamese general admitted, “The Cambodian incursion proved, in the long run, to pose little more than a temporary disruption of North Vietnam’s march toward domination of all of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.”28 An incursion into Laos—Operation Lam Son 719—the following year, undertaken by ARVN troops with American airpower and logistical support but no American ground troops, was even less successful. The operation would last only forty-two days, not the planned ninety days, and pictures of South Vietnamese troops hanging onto helicopter skids to escape would prove an international embarrassment.29
While the American and South Vietnamese armed forces were trying to increase the military pressure on Hanoi, Nixon and Kissinger were also pursuing an ambitious agenda to secure a peace deal. Starting in early 1970, the national security adviser would steal away to Paris to conduct secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnam’s Politburo, in the working-class neighborhood of Choisy-le-Roi.30 The talks were stalemated over American demands for a mutual pullout of North Vietnamese and U.S. forces until Nixon and Kissinger decided to make a major concession in May 1971. It was billed as a “cease-fire in place,” but, as Kissinger admitted to Nixon in an Oval Office conversation, “It’s a unilateral withdrawal. We’re not asking them to pull out.”31 Nixon and Kissinger continued to hope that South Vietnam could hold out on its own without any American military presence, even while North Vietnamese troops remained in the South, but they were realistic enough to know this might not be possible and cynical enough not to care.32
Thus was born what became known as the “decent interval” strategy, with Nixon and Kissinger signaling to North Vietnam and its patrons in Moscow and Beijing that Washington wanted a face-saving way out of the conflict regardless of the consequences for America’s allies in Saigon. As Kissinger explained to Premier Zhou Enlai of China on July 9, 1971, “If the [South Vietnamese] government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene.” Zhou inquired what time period would suffice between the American withdrawal and the Communist conquest of South Vietnam. Kissinger’s answer: “Say eighteen months.”33
THE EXISTENCE of the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho talks remained confidential until January 1972, when Nixon announced that they were going on, but even then the extent of the American concessions was not revealed. By contrast, there was no hiding the body bags that kept coming home. More than twenty thousand American troops would die and more than fifty thousand would be seriously wounded during the Nixon administration’s slow-motion disengagement from Indochina. News of this continuing stream of casualties, along with the attacks on Laos and Cambodia, induced despair in many Americans and convinced them that Nixon really was the war-loving madman that he only pretended to be. Domestic opposition surged after panicky
National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine. More than 4.3 million students across the country demonstrated against the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings, forcing the temporary closure of 20 percent of America’s colleges.
Among those radicalized by the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State was Daniel Ellsberg, the former member of the Senior Liaison Office who, after a stint working in Saigon for Deputy Ambassador Bill Porter, returned in July 1967 to RAND’s headquarters in Santa Monica. Like his old boss Edward Lansdale and his close friend John Paul Vann, Ellsberg had long been critical of the way the war was being conducted. But, unlike them, he now gave up hope that the war effort could be reformed, embracing immediate withdrawal as the only solution.34 On April 15, 1971, he left RAND, a Pentagon contractor, liberating himself to come out publicly against the war. Ellsberg now opposed the conflict with the same zeal with which he had once supported it. He began to claim that everyone associated with the conflict, including himself, was a “war criminal” and that anyone who did not actively try to stop the war was a “good German.”35
