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

by Max Boot

chamber of commerce.” In Halberstam’s telling, he was an expert on “how to fight guerrilla wars the right way” who became “part of a huge American mission which used bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.”2 Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 Vietnam: A History, drew Lansdale in equally unflattering hues as “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former advertising executive,” an ineffectual “romantic” who “overlooked the deeper dynamics of revolutionary upheavals” and who “seemed to be oblivious to the social and cultural complexities of Asia.”3 Tim Weiner, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, was more scathing still, deriding Lansdale as a “Madison Avenue . . . con man” who dreamed up impractical schemes to overthrow Fidel Castro.4 By contrast, Neil Sheehan, in another Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), lauded Lansdale as a Machiavellian genius, a “legendary clandestine operative” who ruthlessly and effectively bulldozed opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to consolidate the nascent state of South Vietnam. Sheehan wrote with what some might consider flattering exaggeration: “South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale.”