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

by Max Boot

from well-known entertainers such as Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore were supplemented by shipments of the film Ninotchka, Greta Garbo’s 1939 satire of Soviet life. The newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, who subsequently founded the National Enquirer, chipped in with a campaign asking fellow Italian Americans to send letters and telegrams to their friends and relatives in the old country urging them to vote against Communism. Jay Lovestone, an American labor activist and erstwhile Communist with close ties to the CIA, mobilized his Italian labor union contacts to assist in the campaign. The result, from Washington’s perspective, was entirely satisfactory: the Christian Democrats won 48.5 percent of the vote in 1948, up from 36 percent in 1946, and acquired an absolute majority in parliament. It is not clear, admittedly, how much of the outcome was due to CIA efforts. American economic aid such as the Marshall Plan, signed into law just weeks before the vote, and efforts by the Vatican to mobilize church members were also of considerable importance—to say nothing of De Gasperi’s own appeal. But in the minds of policymakers the 1948 Italian election established a covert-action template that could be followed successfully in other elections where the Communist threat loomed large. Arthur Krock of the New York Times spoke for many when he commended officials for the “perfect handling of the American interest . . . in the peninsular roughhouse.”