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

by Max Boot

He also embraced Nguyen Khanh as tightly as he could. Before Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor visited Saigon in March 1964, Johnson told them he wanted to see a picture “on the front pages of the world press” showing them holding up Khanh’s arms as a show of support.38 But far from strengthening Khanh, as LBJ expected, the resulting pictures strengthened the Vietcong narrative that Khanh was an American puppet. It did not help that McNamara, while grasping Khanh’s hand, tried to say Vietnam muon nam (“Vietnam ten thousand years”). But his pronunciation was so atrocious that it sounded to many listeners as if he had said, “Ruptured duck wants to lie down.”