“Rather than just ‘hold Diem’s hand,’ apparently they want me to accept the hospitality of a friend whom I respect and then follow orders to threaten him with penalties from that close-in position, simply because he doesn’t comply with every wish of some Americans who remain foreign to the scene,” he wrote angrily to McNamara and Gilpatric. “The Communists in Vietnam can be defeated, but this isn’t the way to do it.”46 In his own eyes, and those of his friends, Lansdale was taking a stand on principle in a way that few other government officials would ever dare to do. In the eyes of Lansdale’s
...more
