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

by Max Boot

future, as the British were then doing in Malaya. But this the French resolutely refused to do. Having already alienated much of the Vietnamese population, the French suffered a blow from which they would never recover with the ascendance in 1949 of the Communists in neighboring China. Mao Zedong sent military advisers and weapons to the Vietminh. Outside assistance or lack thereof is usually the surest indicator of the fate of any insurgency, and the Vietminh, unlike the Huks, now had it in abundance. In October 1950, Giap threw thirty thousand of his newly trained and equipped troops against the isolated French posts along the 200-mile border between Vietnam and China. By the end of the month, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps had lost control of the border, along with six thousand troops and enough weaponry to equip an entire Vietminh division.17 It was, as a French correspondent noted, an “appalling, stupefying, unbelievable defeat.”18 An indomitable new French general, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, momentarily retrieved the situation and stymied Giap’s Red River offensive in 1951, securing for the time being Hanoi, Haiphong, and the rice-growing regions of the north. But on November 19, 1951, de Lattre left Vietnam, suffering from cancer. He would die in France two months later, leaving behind a grieving widow and a stalemated war effort. As an American diplomat in Paris put it, invoking a phrase that would become associated with Vietnam, “France could see no ligh...