would have been so easy for him to give just a little bit, sort of grease the skids.” That’s what Wilson himself did during the course of a long Army career that culminated in his appointment in 1976 as a three-star general to command the Defense Intelligence Agency. In his view, “a bureaucracy is a system which is necessary to get things done. Neither good nor bad. It exists for a purpose and the task is to make it work.”37 That is not a perspective Lansdale shared. He viewed the bureaucracy as an enemy and, by so doing, turned it into one.
