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
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