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

by Max Boot

LATER in life, Edward Lansdale would emerge as one of the foremost American authorities on Vietnam and the Philippines. He would also become a virtuoso politico-military adviser, a crack propagandist, and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, a field that has been described as the “graduate level” of warfare—“far more intellectual than a bayonet charge,” in the words of T. E. Lawrence.1 Those were not skills he learned, by and large, in the classroom. Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, to whom he has been compared, Lansdale was not drawn to the region where he would make his name by any academic inquiry, which helps to explain why he did not make his first acquaintance of Asia until he was in his mid-thirties. By contrast, Lawrence first visited the Middle East in 1909 as an