by Max Boot
This time, the government was listening, in no small part because everyone was so eager to avoid the trauma of “another Vietnam.” The Reagan administration implemented the recommendations of the Singlaub panel to sell to El Salvador slow-moving, highly precise AC-47 gunships rather than speedy A-37 jets, whose bombs risked more collateral damage, while also training a disciplined police force and putting much greater emphasis on civic action. Most importantly, the administration backed the democratically elected president, José Napoleón Duarte, who took office in 1984. The El Salvadoran version of Ramon Magsaysay, Duarte curbed abuses by right-wing “death squads” while implementing the policies that, with American aid, led to the end of the civil war in 1992.
ONE OF the inescapable burdens of aging is to watch one’s boon companions disappear. In August 1983, Edward Lansdale had to euthanize his beloved poodle, Canbo. “He had a hard time standing up, with legs not working well, and had even about given up eating,” Ed wrote to his brothers. “Gallantly, he tried hard to keep going, but it just didn’t work out. . . . It sure was hard to say good-bye to him.”15 No new dog took Canbo’s place. For the first time in decades, Ed would be without a canine companion.
The news about Charles “Bo” Bohannan, Lansdale’s eccentric former subordinate, was no more encouraging. On June 28, 1982, Bo wrote laconically from Manila, “Got my PCS orders to the wild blue yonder or Fiddler’s Green, depending on whether you take the flyboy view or the traditional yellow leg.” (“PCS” is the military acronym for Permanent Change of Station; “yellow leg” is the slang for cavalry.) He was suffering from esophageal cancer, and the doctors at Clark Air Base gave him only four to eight months to live.16 Ed wrote back promising to visit the Philippines over Christmas to see him and trying to buck him up: “Aren’t you just too ornery to believe the docs? A truly splendid American like you still has the fighting spirit for the tough ones.”17 Lansdale never did get to see Bohannan again. He died on September 7, 1982.
BY THIS time, Ed’s own health was failing. In the summer of 1981, he discovered that he had trouble signing checks. His son Pete insisted that he go for a checkup. The doctors discovered that, at the age of seventy-three, he had suffered a ministroke. He was released after a couple of days and “shocked” the doctors by driving out to Colorado with Pat to give a talk at the Air Force Academy.18
On the evening of August 25, 1983, Lansdale collapsed in the hallway of his McLean home. He told Pat he would go to the hospital in the morning. But the next morning, while getting out of bed, he blacked out. “I . . . must have hit all the furniture in the room on the way down, as well as ripping the blanket off Pat and waking her up abruptly,” he said. “I came to on the floor with a bloody head and banged up body and Pat kneeling over me. . . . I was a sight. Two black eyes, a broken nose, broken ribs, and a black and blue chest.”19
Lansdale was rushed by ambulance to Fairfax Hospital, one of the top teaching hospitals in the country, where doctors discovered that he was suffering from an irregular heartbeat—technically a type of cardiac arrhythmia known as torsades de pointes. His years of hard living—working too long, suffering too much stress, smoking and drinking too much—had taken their toll. He had to be repeatedly defibrillated, with doctors sending three hundred jolts of electricity through his chest fifteen or twenty times a day in order to get his heart pumping normally. “It’s a horrific experience. Most people never forget it for the rest of their lives,” recalled Dr. Douglas Israel, a cardiologist who was then a third-year medical student assigned to the team treating Lansdale. “His reaction was just, ‘Ow’—very understated, very impressive.” Lansdale was to remember that the “electronic paddles kicked like a mule”—“a great scene on TV doctor shows, but lousy in real practice.”20
Dr. Israel would spend three days at his patient’s side. Like others who dealt with Lansdale over the decades, Israel found him to be a “good listener,” “friendly and open,” and, above all, informal. He called Lansdale “sir” or “general.” His patient insisted on being called just plain “Ed,” something that the young physician could not bring himself to do.21
The doctors restored Lansdale to a semblance of health by implanting first a temporary pacemaker in his groin and then a permanent one in his shoulder. “There’s a lump in my shoulder that wasn’t there before,” he wrote to his college friend Hubert “Pooley” Roberts the following year. “I feel like the Tin Man of Oz, not the Million Dollar Man.”22
By the fall of 1986 Lansdale was suffering from “heavy lethargy,” which made it hard for him “to form the sentences” when he tried to write.23 Marc Leepson, a journalist who visited him on September 22, 1986, reported, “When you meet Ed Lansdale today, it’s difficult to conjure visions of the daring risk-taker who starred in one of the most fascinating espionage dramas of the Vietnam War.” Leepson found that Lansdale “speaks matter-of-factly about his adventures, an intermittent cough betraying the signs of a recent illness. Lansdale still wears his trademark mustache, but it is now dull gray, faded. He sometimes forgets names and dates, but talks willingly and with conviction about his long military career and the legend that has grown up around him.”24
Not long before Leepson’s visit, Ed and Pat had gone to California to see his brother Phil Lansdale and his wife along with other friends such as Calvin Mehlert and Daniel Ellsberg. Afterward Ed wrote to Phil, “It’s hard to admit, but I came close to crying when we said goodbye in Cupertino.” It was almost as if he could sense that he would never see his brother again.
EDWARD LANSDALE celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday on February 6, 1987, as a survivor from a world that no longer existed. Having been born in 1908 when aviation and automobile travel were still in their infancy, in a pre–World War I age when the Romanovs were presiding over an empire that was crumbling beneath their feet, he had lived into an era where television and jet travel had become humdrum, and one in which Mikhail Gorbachev was presiding over the dissolution of a second Russian empire in under a century. Coming into the world only a decade after the American victory in the Spanish-American War—that “splendid little war,” in Secretary of State John Hay’s words—he had witnessed the agonies of two world wars followed by a stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.
Little more than two weeks after Lansdale’s birthday, Washington, D.C., was battered by a massive winter storm on the evening of Sunday, February 22, 1987, that paralyzed much of the northeastern seaboard. By sunrise on Monday, eighteen inches of snow had fallen in the suburbs. The “thick, wet snow . . . snapped hundreds of tree limbs and power lines in the Washington area,” the Washington Post reported, “leaving residents in more than 200,000 homes and businesses shivering from what some utility officials called the worst power outage in the region’s history.”25
Pat Lansdale awakened that frosty morning to see the heavy accumulations outside. Turning to Ed, she saw that he was not waking up. He had died sometime during the night, his many infirmities having finally caught up with him: congestive heart failure, cardiac arrest, and coronary artery disease would be listed as the causes of death.
In characteristic fashion, Ed Lansdale’s exit from the world was quiet and unobtrusive. He was forever the “Quiet American,” eschewing histrionics even in his death throes. In her grief, Pat phoned Ed’s son Pete, who lived in the Washington area. He and his wife Carolyn drove as fast as they could through the blizzard. They had to park a mile away and walk over unplowed streets to reach the house where Pete’s father lay as stiff as the icicles outside.26
Ed’s other son, Ted, got the news in New York. He had by then retired as a lieutenant colonel from the Air Force and was working in public relations. When his colleagues heard that his father had died and that he had been a general of some kind, one of them said, “Look, I’ve got some media contacts. Maybe we can get an obit in the Times or something like that.” Knowing his father’s outsize reputation, Ted replied there was no need: “I think that’s taken care of.”27
> As Ted had expected, the next morning the New York Times ran a front-page obituary that commemorated his father as a “dashing Californian . . . whose influential theories of counterinsurgent warfare proved a success in the Philippines after World War II but failed to bring victory in South Vietnam.”28 The Washington Post ran not only a lengthy obituary but also an editorial that called him a “disappointed but unapologetic” advocate of winning “the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people” in order to combat communism.29 News articles about his death appeared in many other magazines and newspapers around the world. The Nation magazine called Lansdale “the Quiet American and the Ugly American made one flesh,” and preposterously claimed, “His tools were civic action and death squads.”30 Far from employing “death squads,” Lansdale had always counseled against excessive violence. This was but one more myth added to the Lansdale legend by critics and supporters alike.
IF THERE is one thing that the American armed forces know how to do well, it is conducting funerals with full military honors. The long line of twentieth-century wars—the Philippines, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—provided, alas, plenty of practice. Veterans from all those conflicts, and more, are laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. The onetime home of General Robert E. Lee, this sprawling plantation across the Potomac River from the federal capital was turned into a burial place in 1864. Its more than six hundred gently rolling acres already contained headstones and monuments commemorating many of the people with whom Edward Lansdale had been associated during his long career—an illustrious list, including Wild Bill Donovan, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Creighton Abrams, John Paul Vann, and John Foster Dulles. In death, as in life, Lansdale would take his place among them.
The service began at 1 p.m. on February 27, 1987, at Fort Myer, adjoining the cemetery. It was “a cold, dreary, cloudy day”31 and the grass, a brilliant, immaculately tended green in the summer, was hidden underneath a coating of grayish-white snow. The dark wooden pews of the colonial-style redbrick chapel, topped with a white steeple, were packed that afternoon. Bill Colby, the former CIA director, who a few years earlier had anointed Lansdale one of the “Ten Greatest Spies of All Time,”32 was there. So were many other colleagues from the spy world. Also in attendance were many members of Lansdale’s old teams, the Saigon Military Mission and the Senior Liaison Office, including Joe Baker, Lou Conein, Joe Redick, and Bernie Yoh, and, of course, a number of Vietnamese friends, among them the former South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington, Bui Diem. Both of Edward Lansdale’s sons were there with their families.
Pat Lansdale was the grieving widow, having lost a man she had fallen for forty-one years earlier, when she was an attractive war widow and he was an advertising whiz turned intelligence officer with a movie-star mustache and an intense interest in all things Huk. Together they had shared adventures in the Philippine boondocks, and had somehow stayed connected during the rocky decades that followed, in spite of Ed’s refusal to leave his first wife. Helen’s premature death had vouchsafed them fourteen happy years together as husband and wife, a period of late-life contentment now brought to an end.
Pat “looked bewildered and bereft but did her best to put a brave face on things,” one mourner, the biographer Cecil Currey, observed.33 It would have been hard for her to hide her exasperation that her late husband was about to be buried alongside her predecessor—a woman she had spent years resenting for keeping them apart—underneath a substantial marble tombstone inscribed “Edward G. Lansdale, Major General, U.S. Air Force, 1908–1987” and “Beloved Wife Helen Lansdale, 1901–1972.” Eventually, after Pat Lansdale’s own death in 2006, at the age of ninety-one, she too would take her place in the same grave. It was somehow fitting that Pat, for so long the hidden “other woman,” was not to receive any notice on the tombstone, her presence commemorated only with a small plaque set unobtrusively into the nearby lawn.
Ed Lansdale’s funeral service was conducted by Sam Karrick, a Christian Science practitioner and retired army colonel who had served with Lansdale in Vietnam. Many of the attendees were surprised to learn that Lansdale had been a Christian Scientist; he was not demonstratively religious, nor had he abstained from alcohol, tobacco, or aspirin.
There were only two eulogies. One was delivered by Spencer Davis, an old newsman who had known Lansdale since they had met in the Philippines in 1947; it had been Davis who on October 31, 1963, the very date of Lansdale’s enforced retirement from the Pentagon, had delivered the news that a coup had taken place in Saigon against Ngo Dinh Diem. He ended with a tribute to “unconventional Ed Lansdale—the good American. We salute you!”34
The other eulogist was Rufus Phillips, Lansdale’s onetime protégé who had first met him as a twenty-four-year-old Yale graduate sent by the CIA to Saigon in 1954. Now Phillips was fifty-eight years old and nearing his own retirement. In the years since leaving government service in 1963, he had run his father’s engineering firm and sought political office in Virginia, winning a race for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors but losing contests for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. If Lansdale was the revealer of the counterinsurgency gospel, as many of his teammates believed, then Phillips was his foremost apostle—the Saint Paul of the movement. In his soft Virginia accent, Phillips paid tribute to the “selflessness” of his mentor’s “ideas”: “Ed had a simply elegant premise that the only way to win a people’s war was to give the people a government they could trust and be willing to fight for. It worked in the Philippines, it worked for a time in Vietnam before we and the Vietnamese strayed too far into the thicket in which the force of numbers, material and money seemed to equal victory.”
Choking up, Rufe Phillips concluded, “We shall not see his like again but his ideas shall never die.”35
The rest of the service was a far smaller but equally touching version of the send-off John F. Kennedy had received twenty-four years before. A caisson pulled by six horses carried Lansdale’s flag-draped casket to its final resting spot on a snow-covered hill on the southern edge of Arlington National Cemetery. A black riderless horse, empty boots reversed in the stirrups, joined the funeral cortege—an honor first given to Alexander Hamilton in 1804 and ever since reserved for presidents and high-ranking officers. The U.S. Air Force brass ensemble played “Nearer My God to Thee” and “Amazing Grace.” A bugler blew the melancholy strains of taps. Soldiers from Pete Lansdale’s old regiment, the Old Guard, resplendent in their dark blue uniforms, fired three crisp volleys over the grave. “It was all very somber and elegant and full of military symbolism,” Cecil Currey wrote.36
This was a poignant, if slightly incongruous, farewell for a general who during his lifetime had always eschewed pomp and formality. “I almost expected Ed to sit up in his bier momentarily,” Currey wrote, “and exclaim, ‘Jeez! You mean all this is for me?’ ”37
FOUR YEARS after Edward Lansdale’s death, following the lightning-fast American victory in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” That same year, the Cold War, the conflict to which Lansdale had devoted much of his life, came to an unexpected end with the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. Four years after that, in 1995, President Bill Clinton restored diplomatic relations with Hanoi.
By then, Le Duan, the hard-liner who had displaced Ho Chi Minh and guided North Vietnam to victory, was long dead; he had predeceased Lansdale in 1986. His successors had pulled Vietnamese troops out of Cambodia and adopted a market-based economic policy known as Doi Moi that was unveiled just months before Lansdale’s death. The traumas of the Vietnam War were at long last evanescing, the wounds finally healing. Vietnam and America were on a long and winding path—a road not previously taken, if you will—that by the twenty-first century would lead them to become de facto allies against North Vietnam’s erstwhile backer, the People’s Republic of China.
Lansdale did not live long enough to see this improbable twist of fate.
But he would hardly have been surprised to learn that the American ideology of freedom, in which he had believed with boundless devotion ever since as a boy he had read green leather-bound books on the American Revolution in his father’s library, had prevailed over the illiberal forces of Communism. Ed Lansdale had been serenely confident all along about the universal appeal of the Declaration of Independence and its “self-evident truths.”
AFTERWORD
Lansdalism in the Twenty-First Century
Perhaps Americans will never learn the simplicity of fighting a political war.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
EDWARD LANSDALE spent much of his career trying to convince America’s military and political leaders that there was more to defeating insurgencies than killing insurgents. As he put it near the end of his life, “Damn hard for guerrillas to get the people to help them throw down a government that the people feel is their very own.”1 This was a seemingly obvious insight but one that was strongly resisted by most American military commanders and their civilian masters during the Vietnam War. As Lansdale observed, “We mostly sought to destroy enemy forces. The enemy sought to gain control of the people.”2
A future generation of American military leaders would turn out to be just as averse to Lansdale’s arguments. As soon as the Vietnam War was over, the military services threw out all of the lessons of counterinsurgency, learned at such high cost. After a visit with Special Operations Forces at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in 1980, Lansdale noted sadly, “The only remnant of the old days is a brief, one-week course on special operations—counter-guerrilla, counter terror, counter revolution—just as a little familiarization course. Apparently the last remnant of counterinsurgency. How times have changed.”3
