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

by Max Boot

AS HE had done upon first arriving in the Philippines, Lansdale also traveled across Vietnam extensively at a time, June 1954, when the country was poised in a gray zone between war and peace. His most instructive trips were to the rural areas in the south that were the strongholds of two religious sects—the Cao Dai (pronounced cow-die) and the Hoa Hao (wah-how)—that would assume enormous importance over the next year. The Cao Dai, founded in 1926, claimed to synthesize all of the world’s major religions, from Christianity to Taoism, and their eclectic roster of saints included Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Sun Yat-sen and Victor Hugo. Their “Holy See” in Tay Ninh Province was a riotous explosion of colors—yellow, blue, red, pink—with paintings everywhere of the Divine Eye.28 The Hoa Hao sect, an offshoot of Buddhism, was formed a decade later, in 1939. By 1954, each one had roughly a million adherents as well as armed forces numbering in the tens of thousands, which had received subsidies and training from the French to fight the Vietminh. The power of these sects was limited only by the disunity in their ranks, since their troops were commanded by independent warlords.