by Max Boot
Ellsberg decided to strike a blow for peace—and to realize his own thwarted ambitions for fame—by releasing a secret study of the war’s history that he had helped to compile, along with numerous other researchers, at the behest of the then defense secretary Robert McNamara. Known as United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, it consisted of forty-seven volumes totaling seven thousand pages. Only fifteen copies were printed, and three went to RAND for safekeeping. Ellsberg sneaked this massive study out of the building to photocopy it in an operation that would have done the CIA proud. Ellsberg was convinced that once the public read this classified history, it would conclude that Lyndon Johnson and other leaders had deceived them. After trying and failing to interest antiwar lawmakers in releasing the study with the benefit of legislative immunity from prosecution, Ellsberg shared most of the material with the New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, a veteran war correspondent, who published it without Ellsberg’s explicit permission beginning on June 13, 1971. Before long, Ellsberg was identified as the leaker and charged with a variety of offenses, including espionage and conspiracy, which carried a maximum punishment of 115 years in prison.
Nixon was not overly concerned at first about these disclosures, which concerned preceding administrations, not his own. Kissinger, however, was more alarmed, and his paranoia, in turn, fed Nixon’s own. Kissinger warned the president that he would be perceived as a “weakling” if he allowed this breach of security to go unchallenged, knowing that Nixon wanted above all to be seen as a “tough guy.” At the president’s insistence, the Justice Department went to federal court and won a temporary restraining order on June 15 to prevent the Times from publishing any more documents—the first time that such a thing had ever happened in U.S. history. The Times complied while it appealed the judge’s order. To get around this roadblock, Ellsberg slipped some of the documents to the Washington Post, which began publishing them by the end of the week. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled, six to three, in a landmark First Amendment case, that the Times and the Post had a right to publish the Pentagon Papers.36
On July 1, 1971, the New York Times ran excerpts from a classified memorandum Edward Lansdale had written in July 1961 to General Maxwell Taylor. Titled “Resources for Unconventional Warfare, SE Asia,” the memo listed as assets not only various covert American and allied units but also two Philippines-based organizations that Lansdale had personally set up while working for the CIA: Eastern Construction Company (formerly Freedom Company) and Operation Brotherhood. The memorandum punctured their cover story as private groups by making clear that they received “U.S. support (on a clandestine basis).”
And that was only the start of the revelations. Four days later, on July 5, 1971, Lansdale found himself mentioned in a front-page article focused on the U.S. role in Indochina in 1954. In the view of the Times, the Pentagon Papers contradicted “the repeated assertion of several American administrations that North Vietnam alone was to blame for the undermining of the Geneva accords.” One document, in particular, showed “how the Eisenhower Administration sent a team of agents to carry out clandestine warfare against North Vietnam from the minute the Geneva conference closed.” That team was “headed by the legendary intelligence operative Col. Edward G. Lansdale.” Inside the newspaper was a full page of quotations from Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission report. The excerpts amounted to only a fourth of the entire report and for some reason did not include one of the juiciest revelations—that Lansdale had given Ngo Dinh Diem money to facilitate the murder of the Hoa Hao rebel Ba Cut. (That would not become known until the declassification of the full report in 2014.) But what was published was titillating enough, including details of how Lou Conein and his team had infiltrated North Vietnam to conduct sabotage operations. These actions were not as damning as the Times made them out to be: the U.S. could hardly be accused of violating an accord it had never signed, and Lansdale’s small-scale covert operations hardly compared with the massive scale of Vietcong subversion in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, the publication of the Pentagon Papers exposed to public view some of the most sensitive aspects of Lansdale’s first deployment to Vietnam.
In a letter to “The Old Team,” written on the day his memo to Maxwell Taylor was published, Lansdale called Ellsberg “a loon with a martyr complex.” “I like Dan personally,” Lansdale wrote, “but I feel strongly that he broke a trust when he purveyed the papers. They simply weren’t his to play God with and neither he nor any of us can tell the extent of harm that might result to those who trusted us.”37 Lansdale was particularly “heart-sore” about the impact of Ellsberg’s revelations on the Filipinos he had worked with. He wrote to Oscar Arellano, founder of Operation Brotherhood, after Arellano came under attack in the Philippines for his association with the CIA: “What hurts me most is that friends whom I love, innocent, decent ones, got hurt through me—the last damn thing I’d ever want to have happen. Please forgive me. I apologize. Want me to bend over for a swift kick?”38
Yet in spite of his disgust at Ellsberg’s actions, Lansdale continued to maintain friendly, if distant, relations with him. Later he was to say, “His heart was in the right place when he was with me and he was always trying hard, so I excused all sorts of things.”39
Few others could keep such a balanced perspective on such a polarizing figure. Ellsberg was admired by the left as a hero—the Beatles lined up to get his autograph40—while the right pilloried him as a traitor. Richard Nixon particularly overreacted to the Pentagon Papers leaks, and his actions contributed to his own downfall. Paranoid about more leaks, Nixon ordered the creation of the infamous Plumbers Unit, whose actions would lead to the Watergate scandal. The former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and the former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles to dig up dirt on him. They also concocted wilder plots, redolent of earlier anti-Castro plans that Lansdale had overseen at Operation Mongoose, such as slipping Ellsberg LSD to make him appear “incoherent” in public.41 While the White House operatives did not actually feed Ellsberg hallucinogenics, they did illegally wiretap the home telephone of Morton Halperin, a former National Security Council staffer who had joined Ellsberg’s defense team. And to try to get the federal judge overseeing Ellsberg’s trial to suppress the evidence of White House illegality, the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman offered to have him appointed FBI director.
The White House’s blatant attempts to interfere with the court proceeding backfired: Ellsberg’s case was dismissed and Nixon’s actions formed a significant part of the articles of impeachment against him. Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers did not hasten the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War as he had hoped—Nixon and Kissinger were already ending the war—but it did hasten the end of the Nixon presidency itself.
IN HIS memoirs, Henry Kissinger pithily summed up the change that had occurred during the sixties. “A decade that had begun with the bold declaration that America should pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the survival and success of liberty,” he noted, “had ended in an agony of assassinations, urban riots, and ugly demonstrations.” 42
Edward Lansdale watched the agonizing end of the stormy sixties and its bleed over into the louche seventies as a retiree quietly living in the suburbs of northern Virginia, composing his memoirs and offering advice that was ignored. As if he were a real-life version of Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, writing unsent letters to famous recipients (and indeed he had now taken to expressing his views in letters to the editor of the Washington Post), he could not in the slightest affect the troop drawdown in Vietnam (of which he approved), the forays into Cambodia and Laos (of which he was less approving), the neglect of South Vietnamese democracy (of which he was bitterly critical), or the secret negotiations with Hanoi (of which he was ignorant). The process begun in the Kennedy administration, of Lansdale’s gradual fall from power, had been completed by that revolutionary year of 1968. All that remained was to reckon with the cost of the polici
es he had opposed without effect—and to reckon, too, with the cost to himself and others of his secret past, now brought into the open by the actions of an erstwhile friend and subordinate.
34
A Defeat in Disguise
I suspect that we’re going to wind up with the twelve Politburo guys dictating the peace, while we cover up the fact with all sorts of face-saving statements and devices.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
IN hindsight there was something fitting about the way that 1972, the momentous year that would see a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex, began in the Lansdale household. On February 12, a fire broke out in Ed’s book-lined, wood-paneled study. He was out of the house when it happened. Helen was alerted by Canbo’s barking. She immediately shut the door to the study to keep the flames from spreading and called the fire department.1 By the time the firefighters put out the blaze, many of Ed’s books, pictures, and papers had burned; others were left a “charred mess.”2 (Some of the papers he later donated to the Hoover Institution still have burn marks around the edges.) Even his typewriter was destroyed; all that was left was a “melted glob.”3
Lansdale never did figure out how the fire started. And he never noticed, or at least never commented, on the symbolism of what had occurred: many of his papers—the records of his past—were literally going up in flames just as his greatest achievements in the Philippines and Vietnam were about to meet a similar fate.
LUCKILY FOR Lansdale, by the time that the fire broke out, his memoir was finished. It was published by Harper & Row on March 15, 1972. The title had changed as often as its contents. Contemplated titles included “The Good Fight,” “There Is My Country,” “Yankee Do,” “On Common Ground,” “The Juan and Dan Wars,” and “Memoirs of a Cold Warrior.” Harper & Row opted for “Mission in Southeast Asia,” which Lansdale didn’t like—he felt it was too “stodgy.” 4 So the book came out as In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia, a title borrowed from a study of Vietnamese folk songs that Lansdale had completed in 1967.
One thing that did not change even after the publication of the Pentagon Papers was the author’s quixotic refusal to come clean about his work for the CIA between 1950 and 1956. What Lansdale wrote was generally accurate as far as it went, but it was far from the whole truth. When he mentioned Operation Brotherhood and Freedom Company, for example, he made them sound as if they had been started by Filipinos. Besides his desire to cloak his secret agent past, Lansdale had another motive to rewrite history: he wanted to enhance the status of the Asians he had worked with. “Our friends come out smelling like roses, untainted and heroic in it and against a proper background,” Lansdale told Charles “Bo” Bohannan. “As you know from long ago, I decided that Asia needed its own heroes—so I’ve given them a whole bookful of them, with us ’uns merely being companionable friends to some great guys.”5
Other emendations were done for more personal reasons. To spare Helen’s feelings, Ed left out any mention of his relationship with Pat Kelly, an omission all the more glaring because she had played such a central role in leading him to empathize with Filipinos and Vietnamese and to understand the nature of their societies. Yet for appearance’s sake she needed to be blotted out of the official portrait of his life, her name appearing only once in the entire book—in the acknowledgments, tucked into a lengthy list of other people.6
Lansdale’s decisions about what to include and what to exclude were understandable, but they came at a cost of lost credibility. Reviewing In the Midst of Wars for the Saturday Review, an influential weekly magazine, the historian Jonathan Mirsky wrote that “there is only one difficulty” with the book: “from the cover to the final page it is permeated with lies.”7 In the New York Times, the war correspondent Peter Arnett criticized Lansdale for ending his account in 1956 when Diem was “firmly in power in Saigon.” “With all we know of the later dramatic developments of the war, and with all Lansdale knows,” Arnett wrote, “his memoirs are like reading a history of the American Civil War that ends with the first election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.”8 In the daily Washington Post, the former NSC aide Chester L. Cooper criticized Lansdale for refusing to admit that his friends could do any wrong and for sheathing his heroes, Magsaysay and Diem, in a “mist of nostalgic affection.”9 In the Post’s Sunday “Book World,” the foreign correspondent Sherwood Dickerman complained that “the national mood nowadays calls for either repentance or justification,” but that Lansdale provided neither.10
Not even Pat Kelly thought that Lansdale’s book had succeeded, and not only because any mention of their long liaison had been left out. Writing from Manila, she told the first-time author, with her typical honesty, that In the Midst of Wars “should have sounded more like you and not like an edited, censored document that has been declassified.” She demanded to know, “Why don’t you write a book just like you write your letters???”11
Given the negative reviews and the antiwar mood of the day, it was hardly surprising that In the Midst of Wars was far from a best seller. Harper & Row printed 16,100 copies but managed to sell only 3,100 in the first month, worse than any of its other lead titles.12 The book did little to burnish Lansdale’s reputation, which increasingly was that of a dreamer and an idealist out of touch with the hard realities of Asia. His approach to the Cold War, focused on winning “hearts and minds” to beat the Communists at their own game, had once been considered revolutionary but now was judged hopelessly passé. A different approach, focused on coexistence with Communism, was being pioneered by, of all people, the onetime scourge of Alger Hiss, Nikita Khrushchev, and Helen Gahagan Douglas.
ON THE cold and hazy morning of February 21, 1972, Air Force One landed in Beijing. Waiting to greet President Richard Nixon and his party was an honor guard accompanied by China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, and a gaggle of American journalists. Zhou was wearing a gray Mao suit and blue overcoat; Nixon, like a photographic negative, wore a blue business suit and gray overcoat. Photographers’ shutters clicked and television cameras whirred as the two men shook hands. “How was the flight?” Zhou asked. “Very pleasant,” Nixon said. The formalities over, the two leaders climbed into big black limousines for a journey into the city down a road cleared of other cars. Like Prince Potemkin preparing for a visit from Catherine the Great, the Chinese had arranged everything in advance. As the motorcade drove by, pedestrians and bicyclists hardly looked up; they had been ordered to act as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about the president of the United States dropping by for a visit.13
Nixon’s visit to China, which would last until February 28, had taken three years to arrange and was the pinnacle of his presidency. As he loved to do, Nixon had confounded expectations: an inveterate Cold Warrior, he had pierced the “Bamboo Curtain.” His intent was partly to put pressure on Moscow, and he succeeded in persuading the Soviets to launch “détente,” an easing of tensions with the United States symbolized by the president’s visit to Moscow from May 22 to May 30, 1972. But Nixon also wanted to put pressure on Hanoi to settle the Vietnam War; “if we don’t get any Soviet breakthrough, if we don’t get the Chinese, if we can’t get that ensemble, we can’t get anything on Vietnam,” the president told Kissinger.14 By this measure, the “opening to China” backfired. Le Duan, North Vietnam’s leader, was furious that Beijing had thrown a lifeline to the “drowning” Nixon and feared that this presaged a sellout of North Vietnamese interests comparable to the 1954 Geneva Accords. To prevent this from occurring, and to take advantage of a more favorable strategic situation in South Vietnam brought about by the drawdown of U.S. forces, North Vietnam’s Politburo ordered an all-out offensive to overrun South Vietnam.15
Beginning on March 30, 1972, First Secretary Le Duan and General Vo Nguyen Giap committed 120,000 troops and 1,200 armored vehicles to the three-pronged assault that became known as the Easter Offensive.16 The attack enjoyed initial success, leading to concerns in Washington that
South Vietnam would collapse. That catastrophe was averted with American aid. While B-52s pounded North Vietnam, other American aircraft came to the support of embattled South Vietnamese forces. The role of U.S. advisers, numbering just 5,300 men,17 was crucial in calling in air strikes and stiffening the resistance of the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). South Vietnamese soldiers were capable of fighting doggedly and skillfully, but the officer corps remained riddled with corruption and cronyism—the problems that Lansdale had decried and against which his protégé General Nguyen Duc Thang had unsuccessfully fought. But in 1972 embedded American advisers were able to make up for these shortcomings; they, in effect, provided the leadership that many ARVN units otherwise lacked.
The situation in II Corps, a vast area encompassing the Central Highlands, was typical. The South Vietnamese commander was Lieutenant General Ngo Dzu, a pleasant enough man and not especially corrupt by South Vietnamese standards but primarily a staff officer of scant value as a combat leader. His deputy commander, General Nguyen Huu Hanh, was a Communist sympathizer who had no desire to fight the North.18 Luckily the senior American adviser was the indefatigable John Paul Vann, a civilian who had once been a lieutenant colonel and now occupied a major general’s billet. Only five feet eight inches tall and 150 pounds, he was a small man with an outsize command presence. Vann and his fellow advisers orchestrated a crescendo of air strikes by American pilots flying Cobra gunships, various fighter-bombers, B-52 bombers, and AC-130 gunships. Other American aircraft—Huey and Chinook helicopters and C-130 transport aircraft—delivered supplies, evacuated the wounded, and moved units around the battlefield. “Wherever you dropped bombs, you scattered bodies,” Vann exulted.19 By early June 1972, the Northern attacks had been repulsed with heavy casualties. The People’s Army of Vietnam lost an estimated forty thousand men, while their South Vietnamese counterparts lost eight thousand.20
