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

by Max Boot

Halberstam, Karnow, Sheehan, and Weiner were—and, in the case of the latter two, still are—superb journalists and historians, but none has captured the totality of Ed Lansdale, and, by extension, of this particular part of the Vietnam War itself. The accounts of the first three were circumscribed because the authors knew Lansdale only in the 1960s, a frustrating decade for him, not at the peak of his effectiveness in the 1950s. The time is right, then, for a deeper look at Lansdale, one that is intended to do for him what Sheehan so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann in A Bright Shining Lie or what Barbara Tuchman so effectively did for General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell in Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Like those earlier works, The Road Not Taken is meant to be not only a biography of a pivotal, yet strangely unknown, figure; it is also a work of history with often surprising diplomatic, political, and military implications that seeks to recast our understanding of recent American history—and, indeed, of contemporary American policy debates. As the subtitle suggests, this book is concerned both with Lansdale and with the “American tragedy in Vietnam,” but in order to understand his impact on Vietnam, one must first appreciate what he did elsewhere, not only in the Philippines, where he served prior to arriving in Saigon in 1954, but also in “the Washington jungle,” where he struggled to make a mark in the eight years, 1957 to 1965, between his two Vi...