Ed Lansdale from his present assignment and get him out to the field in an appropriate position. He is a unique national asset in the Saigon setting.”47 Once again, however, Kennedy did not act. McGeorge Bundy later explained that the president “was relatively sympathetic to Lansdale. Lansdale was temperamentally somewhat his kind of person. I don’t think, on the other hand, that he felt so strongly about it that he wanted to push it against strong opposition from either the military or the diplomatic bureaucracy.”48 In his memoir, published a decade later, after tens of thousands of bodybags
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