The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

administration. In Phillips’s recollection, Lansdale did almost all of the writing.15 The main paper, “Concept for Victory in Vietnam,” warned that the “Communist insurgents have a firm political base which the Vietnamese people understand,” with a “program to gain control of the people,” “a strong belief in eventual victory,” “iron discipline,” and a “leadership skilled in subversive insurgency.” These problems would remain “even if South Vietnam were isolated completely from North Vietnam or outside Communist help.” Thus, Lansdale did not suggest bombing North Vietnam or sending more troops to South Vietnam. “Overt U.S. intervention against North Vietnam or Cambodia is neither necessary nor appropriate,” he wrote. At a time when there were fewer than twenty thousand American advisers in South Vietnam, he concluded, “Military forces and equipment already in Vietnam should be more than sufficient to cope with most military aspects of the Vietcong insurgency.”

In his exile, Thieu offered a pithy summation of the South Vietnamese experience: “It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend.”27

As Charles “Bo” Bohannan wrote in 1982, “Had Lansdale remained in Vietnam in the late 50s and early 60s the story would have been far different. Had we been permitted to advise Nguyen Cao Ky as he desired, again the story might have been far different.”31 And it was not just Lansdale and his circle who thought so. William Conrad Gibbons, one of the foremost chroniclers of the Vietnam War, was to say, “I think one of the tragedies of the whole thing was that [Lansdale] was never put in charge. . . . He had more of an ability to deal with the people there than almost any American—certainly any American of note. . . . Of all the people involved, he had the best understanding of what we ought to do.”32