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

by Max Boot

Middle East. Phil Habib was good at his job and was, as a colleague recalled, “very skeptical of anyone who wasn’t a career professional.”3 Colonel Sam Wilson, Lansdale’s old Pentagon deputy who was now working for Lodge, recalled that Habib was “merciless” and “ruthless” in waging a struggle to minimize the influence of Lansdale, whom he viewed as a “charlatan.” 4 Barry Zorthian, the chief of a burgeoning public relations bureaucracy known as JUSPAO (Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office), said, “Phil Habib didn’t like Lansdale one bit. He regarded Lansdale as a meddler and, in Vietnam terms, almost as irrelevant. Phil belonged to the establishment—the conventional standard machine structured to carrying out State Department missions. He regarded Lansdale as an unprogrammed loose cannon, a maverick upsetting things without discipline, without acceptance or commitment to Washington direction.”5 It was hard to tell whether Zorthian was describing Habib’s feelings or his own, because he felt exactly the same way. He was especially resentful because Lansdale had brought in Hank Miller, another senior U.S. Information Agency officer, to work under him, potentially challenging JUSPAO’s authority. An Armenian American, Zorthian had served as a Marine officer during the Pacific campaign and remained a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. He had spent his postwar career rising up the ranks of what became the USIA. Now, as head of JUSPAO, he presided over his own office building on Aven...