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

by Max Boot

What made Lansdale’s anguish all the greater was his belief that he might have averted this cataclysm if he had been dispatched to Saigon. And he was not the only one to think so. On December 11, 1963, Lansdale received an extraordinary letter from Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, who had worked with him on the Draper Committee in 1958 to study American foreign aid programs. “First,” Anderson wrote, “let me say that I think it’s a damn shame that you are not in Viet-Nam where your unique talents (1) might have saved our nation the anguish and a flavor of the guilt for the bloody termination of the Ngo regime; and (2) your particular skills in dealing with political problems might help us save this salubrious corner of Asia from going down the drain. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”45 There was nothing Edward Lansdale could do about it, either, especially now that Diem, the one man who might have been able to hold the country together, had been cut down in a blaze of bullets. South Vietnam was careening into free fall, and it was going to drag America, tethered by an umbilical cord of commitments, down with it.