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

by Max Boot

The most important shark of all was General William Westmoreland. The U.S. embassy in Saigon may have become the biggest American diplomatic outpost in the world, with 782 personnel in 1965,8 but it was dwarfed by the MACV bureaucracy, whose headquarters staff alone expanded from 1,100 officers and men at the end of 1964 to 3,300 by the end of 1967.9 With its staff overflowing numerous office buildings in Saigon, MACV in 1966 would begin construction on a $25 million headquarters complex next to Tan Son Nhut Airport, complete with a barracks and mess hall, the largest air-conditioning plant in all of Southeast Asia, and four acres of parking lots, all surrounded by watchtowers, searchlights, and a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence. When it opened in the summer of 1967, the new complex was dubbed “Pentagon East.”10 Whatever MACV did was by definition more important than whatever the civilians did, because most interactions with the local population were conducted by American troops. Lansdale could dream up imaginative programs to win “hearts and minds,” but such schemes amounted to little