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

by Max Boot

LATE THAT very Thursday evening—October 31 in Washington, November 1 in Saigon—Lansdale received a phone call at home from an old friend, Spencer Davis of the Associated Press. He had just gotten a flash cable from Saigon that a coup was starting and wondered whether Lansdale could help him flesh out a story. Wearing pajamas and sprawled in a comfortable chair with a book in his lap and a drink close at hand, Lansdale had to admit that he was now retired and knew nothing of what was occurring.41 Fittingly, if coincidentally, his tenure in government had ended on the very day when his friend of nine years, Ngo Dinh Diem—the man who embodied all of his dreams for the future of Vietnam—was being overthrown at America’s instigation, an act that Lansdale had been warning against for nearly a decade. Once Lansdale heard the following day that Diem and Nhu had been not just overthrown but killed—butchered, while their hands were bound, in the back of an armored vehicle by a professional killer—his disappointment and sorrow turned to anger, even rage, not an emotion that this imperturbable operative often displayed. Roger Hilsman, David Halberstam, and Diem’s other critics, he said bitterly, had “some touch of blood on their hands.”42 Before long, even many of those who had been responsible for Diem’s overthrow came to see the enormity of their mistake. A few years later, when the hard-bitten Lou Conein got drunk in Saigon, Lansdale said, “He tearfully asked me to forgive him for ...