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

by Max Boot

The disparity between perception and reality would prove especially acute during the Vietnam War, with the optimistic assessments of American political leaders and military officers often starkly at odds with the dismal reality that American correspondents could perceive with their own eyes. But in 1962–63, before America had sent hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers to fight in Vietnam, the problem was the reverse: not excessive official optimism but rather excessive pessimism. In those years, the Saigon government was making real progress against the Vietcong while also encountering undeniable problems, yet most American journalists and policymakers could perceive nothing but the shortcomings of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime while simply taking it on faith that any alternative would be preferable. This one-sided outlook—too distrustful of the incumbent president, too trusting of his would-be successors—would ultimately prove fatal to Diem’s chances of survival.

In early September 1963, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric told Lansdale that McNamara was thinking of phasing out his Special Operations office. A few days later, Lansdale wrote an anguished and only recently declassified reply: “I assume that the underlying reason for my being appointed as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense was to help the U.S. to achieve some solid victories in the cold war. If this assumption is correct, then, unhappily, I have not succeeded.” Lansdale was upset not only that he was cut out of the loop on Vietnam but also that, the Green Berets aside, his attempts to get the armed forces to focus seriously on counterinsurgency had failed. The army had created “airmobile” divisions equipped with helicopters to fight guerrillas rather than figuring out how to win “hearts and minds” as Lansdale favored. Some were calling him the “father” of counterinsurgency, but, he wrote, “I must disclaim any real kinship with much of the currently giant institution of counterinsurgency . . . and its massive conventional weaponry and operations. The program has borrowed many of my words, but has left out too much of the spirit and true meaning of what I have said.” His seven-page cri de coeur ended with these words: “Sincerely, if there is no way for me to be truly effective in helping get some cold war wins, then I shouldn’t stay on.”

This was the bureaucratic equivalent of a suicide note, and it duly produced the expected result. On September 30, 1963, Lansdale received notice that his office was being eliminated. “The mice finally gnawed through the work and got my office ‘disestablished,’ ” Lansdale wrote to Colonel Ed Black, an army friend in Saigon.36 Lansdale elected to retire effective October 31, 1963. His hair was still thick, his brush mustache still dark, his posture still military erect. He was just fifty-five years old and still vigorous,

Much as Lansdale might have liked to blame his downfall on the “impersonal bureaucracy,” he was at fault, too, for incessantly making war on the powers that be. “He set himself up in such a way that he created waves of antagonism from within the more orthodox bureaucratic circles,” Sam ...

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 ...

The relentlessly upbeat Lansdale tried to put the best gloss on what had happened to him. He wrote to Pat Kelly in Manila, There was a lot of inside wrestling that went on, some of it emotional as could be, so part of my feeling is a big lift of spirit in dumping this load. I was trying to get in to help affairs in Vietnam before they got too bad, but was shoved hard to one side—completely out of being able to help as Diem made some clumsy moves and then Washington made some clumsy moves. Much the same thing was happeni...

To Hanging Sam Williams, Lansdale wrote, “So, with a phew of relief and a considerable lift of spirits, I’m looking forward to retirement.”39 But Sam Wilson saw that, beneath his cheerful exterior, Lansdale was “upset” and “depressed” because “he felt he’d been treated unfairly for no reason.” The final indignity occurred at Lansdale’s retirement party in the Pentagon. It was held on October 31, 1963, in a meeting room connecting the suites of the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary. While various colleagues were delivering flowery toasts and speeches in honor of Lansdale, Robert McNamara walked in. And he kept on walking, striding purposefully forward, one polished wingtip after another, never looking at what was going on through his rim...

LATE THAT very Thursday evening—October 31 in Washington, November 1 in Saigon—Lansdale received a phone call at home from an old friend, Spencer Davis of the Associated Press. He had just gotten a flash cable from Saigon that a coup was starting and wondered whether Lansdale could help him flesh out a story. Wearing pajamas and sprawled in a comfortable chair with a book in his lap and a drink close at hand, Lansdale had to admit that he was now retired and knew nothing of what was occurring.41 Fittingly, if coincidentally, his tenure in government had ended on the very day when his friend of nine years, Ngo Dinh Diem—the man who embodied all of his dreams for the future of Vietnam—was being overthrown at America’s instigation, an act that Lansdale had been warning against for nearly a decade. Once Lansdale heard the following day that Diem and Nhu had been not just overthrown but killed—butchered, while their hands were bound, in the back of an armored vehicle by a professional killer—his disappointment and sorrow turned to anger, even rage, not an emotion that this imperturbable operative often displayed. Roger Hilsman, David Halberstam, and Diem’s other critics, he said bitterly, had “some touch of blood on their hands.”42 Before long, even many of those who had been responsible for Diem’s overthrow came to see the enormity of their mistake. A few years later, when the hard-bitten Lou Conein got drunk in Saigon, Lansdale said, “He tearfully asked me to forgive him for ...

It was not truly Conein’s fault. He was just following orders. But there was much to ask forgiveness for. As Lansdale wrote decades later, “It was morally wrong and strategically stupid to divide our political base in Vietnam when that political base, small as it was, was facing an energetic and exploitive enemy. Napoleon had a maxim about not dividing your forces in the face of the enemy.”44 Because the Kennedy administration had violated this “truism,” the anti-Communist forces were left demoralized, disarrayed, and divided. America would have no choice but to send its own sons to fight if it wanted to avert a Communist victory.

What made Lansdale’s anguish all the greater was his belief that he might have averted this cataclysm if he had been dispatched to Saigon. And he was not the only one to think so. On December 11, 1963, Lansdale received an extraordinary letter from Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, who had worked with him on the Draper Committee in 1958 to study American foreign aid programs. “First,” Anderson wrote, “let me say that I think it’s a damn shame that you are not in Viet-Nam where your unique talents (1) might have saved our nation the anguish and a flavor of the guilt for the bloody termination of the Ngo regime; and (2) your particular skills in dealing with political problems might help us save this salubrious corner of Asia from going down the drain. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”45 There was nothing Edward Lansdale could do about it, either, especially now that Diem, the one ma...

architect of the coup, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge,

General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”), the head of the 22-member Military Revolutionary Committee, would become president of South Vietnam. Nguyen Ngoc Tho, Diem’s vice president, would serve as prime minister to give a patina of civilian legitimacy to the arrangement. But generals would occupy all of the key posts. These military men were utterly unschooled in governance, suspicious of one another, and deeply insecure. They immediately unleashed a reign of terror against officials who had served Diem. Most of the 42 province and 253 district chiefs, including officials known for being especially effective in fighting the Communists, were replaced, often by men who did not know the areas they were assigned to govern. Dreams that South Vietnam would become a more liberal place were shattered as the new military dictators imposed strict censorship, shut down newspapers, and arrested anyone suspected of disloyalty. Martial law would be invoked far more often after Diem’s demise than it had been while he was still in charge. Within weeks, thousands of students were marching in protests and more Buddhist monks than ever were immolating themselves in public. After years of nation building, South Vietnam was

returning to the chaos of the 1954–55 period—just as Lansdale had warned would happen if Diem were removed. This was a heaven-sent opportunity for the Vietcong. “Our enemy had been seriously weakened from all points of view, military, political and administrative. . . ,” a leader of the National Liberation Front crowed. “The police apparatus set up over the years with great care by Diem is utterly shattered, especially at the base. . . . Troops, officers, and officials of the army and administration are completely lost.”25 The number of “violent incidents” across South Vietnam increased from four hundred per week before the coup to more than a thousand in the week after the coup.26 The Strategic Hamlets program, the most promising counterinsurgency program initiated by Diem, was all but abandoned as hamlet after hamlet was overrun by attackers and not rebuilt. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was widened and improved to allow trucks to deliver supplies through Laos all the way to the border with South Vietnam, while seaborne shipments of weapons to transshipment points in Cambodia and to secret landing spots along the ill-patrolled South Vietnamese coast increased. (The South Vietnamese navy was all but immobilized after its chief was murdered during the 1963 coup.)27 The quantity of supplies reaching Communist forces in the South would be four times greater in 1964 than in 1963.28 Most ominously of all, in 1964 the first North Vietnamese regular troops began heading south. Le Duan a...

IN THE early morning hours of January 30, 1964, another coup—the second in less than three months—occurred in Saigon. The instigator was General Nguyen Khanh, a member of the anti-Diem cabal who was aggrieved because he had been promised that no harm would come to the president and that he would get a handsome reward for his treachery. Neither promise had been fulfilled: Diem had been killed, and Khanh had been relegated to a corps command in the northwest. Khanh placed most of the leading generals responsible for the anti-Diem coup under house arrest. Khanh

also arrested Diem’s killer (and Big Minh’s bodyguard), Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, who was subsequently found hanging in his cell. Just thirty-six years old, General Khanh “was a chunky man with a small, dark goatee and slightly protuberant eyes,” noted an American press adviser, and he was given to wearing a “sharply creased field uniform” with boots polished to a mirrorlike sheen.30 Now that he was prime minister, Khanh worked to improve his popularity by importing American-style campaign tactics. “From the way he button-holed passers-by on Saigon sidewalks,” raved Time magazine, “the pint-sized Vietnamese officer in green fatigues could have been Nelson Rockefeller campaigning in the New Hampshire primary.”31 But Khanh did not prove any more adept at governing than Big Minh had been. He was not to be the Vietnamese LBJ.

LYNDON JOHNSON had not been an advocate of the Diem coup; he thought it was “a tragic mistake.”32 Having inherited what Robert McNamara aptly described as “a hell of a mess” in Vietnam,33 the new president struggled to find the right response. Although a liberal in domestic affairs, Johnson was a foreign-policy hard-liner. He had spent long years on the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committees and then on the Senate Armed Services Committee championing a strong national defense and, not incidentally, ensuring that a disproportionate share of the defense budget found its way back to Texas in the form of bases and weapons contracts. Like most of his generation, Johnson was haunted by the failure of appeasement and isolationism in the 1930s. If Saigon fell, Johnson was terrified that he would be held politically responsible by Republicans as Truman had been held responsible for the Communist takeover of China. He would have recurring nightmares in which people kept shouting at him, “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” Waking up “terribly shaken,” he would vow, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”34 He urged his aides, “Don’t go to bed at night until you have asked yourself, ‘Have I done everything I could to further the American effort to assist South Vietnam?”

Yet, determined as he was to save South Vietnam, Johnson hesitated to commit American forces to combat. He feared that a conflict would interfere with his Great Society agenda at home and that his popularity would suffer if he embroiled America in another land war in Asia like the Korean War.36 Balancing these competing imperatives, Johnson quietly shelved plans to reduce the American advisory presence as Kennedy had considered doing. In May 1964, he increased aid to South Vietnam by $125 million and sent another fifteen hundred advisers.

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 th...

This was the genesis of Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign that over the next three years would dump more ordnance on North Vietnam than had been dropped on all of Europe in World War

in keeping with the desire of the president and his advisers to exquisitely calibrate the level of violence, Johnson personally oversaw the selection of targets. A master negotiator, he viewed bombs not as instruments of destruction but rather, in the words of his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, as a way of “bargaining without words.”20 Hanoi, however, did not understand what Johnson was up to. To the Politburo, bombs combined with offers to negotiate simply looked like duplicity.

The commitment of American airpower brought with it the commitment of American ground forces, because, as numerous attacks had made clear, South Vietnamese troops could not adequately guard American bases. “I’m scared to death of putting ground forces in,” Johnson confided to McNamara, “but I’m more frightened about losing a bunch of planes from lack of security.”21 On March 9, 1965, the front page of the New York Times depicted Marines storming ashore from landing craft onto the beaches of Da Nang, a coastal city in central Vietnam, as if it were Iwo Jima. Thirty-five hundred leathernecks, two battalions’ worth, were to provide security at the nearby American air base. They were not supposed to undertake offensive operations or engage in any combat at all unless first attacked. But it was not long before what a later generation would call “mission creep” set in. By August, despite growing unrest at ho...

THE AMERICAN military escalation was supported by almost all of Johnson’s inner circle—but not by the liberal stalwart and vice president, Hubert Humphrey. He remained convinced that the Lansdale approach, focusing on political reform and advisers rather than firepower and combat troops, was still the way to go. At a National Security Council meeting on February

10, 1965, called to discuss a response to a Vietcong attack on a U.S. outpost, Johnson went around the room asking whether anyone dissented from the meeting’s consensus that it was imperative to launch a retaliatory air strike. Humphrey, being his usual ebullient self, spoke up to express “doubts as to whether the strike should take place today” while Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin was visiting North Vietnam. In fact, “he had mixed feelings about whether we should retaliate as Secretary McNamara had recommended.” Johnson seemed to take such reservations seriously. He suggested that the United States send “a message to the Soviet officials as to why we have to react the way we are.” The meeting then moved on, with the president authorizing “execution of the strike plan as revised” before everyone walked out.

By mid-1966, there would be thirty-six thousand Americans in and around Saigon.5 These well-heeled newcomers drove housing prices through the roof. And because each American-occupied apartment

required its own air conditioner and refrigerator, the demand for electricity far outstripped the capacity of the city’s old power plant. Brownouts ensued. To meet the surging power demand, the U.S. military at first anchored generator barges in the Saigon River and then flew in thousands of small generators that could be installed outside each billet. Bert Fraleigh of USAID, who returned for another tour at roughly the same time as Lansdale, noted, “Within a few weeks, the quiet old city was filled around-the-clock with a strong, low-pitched hum from these generators, and the previously clear, perfumed, tropical air became a brown, diesel-fumed miasma, which curiously seemed to cling about forty feet off the ground.”6 In search of female company, off-duty soldiers and contractors

gallimaufry

The ramshackle South Vietnamese government simply could not cope with the influx. Garbage was piling up, potholes were not being repaired, bus service was becoming unpredictable. Surveying the scene, the USIA’s Howard Simpson concluded, “The sleepy colonial capital had become a crowded, dirty wartime metropolis.”10 Lansdale thought that “Saigon looks a bit run-down and war-weary right now but maybe,” he added, with typical optimism, “we can put some spark back in.”

Yellow Fever, a novel by the French journalist Jean Larteguy, came out in 1965. Its characters included an American colonel named Lionel Terryman, clearly based on Lansdale (terre means “land” in French), who is advising a Diem-like president named Dinh-Tu. Larteguy wrote of Terryman, “He could get hold of the most bigoted old scoundrel, the most inexperienced novice and, out of a gang leader, make a president of the republic; out of an odious and tyrannical old fogey, an all-powerful dictator.”

Little wonder that the New York Times wrote that Landale had “made a rather legendary reputation in Asia in the nineteen-fifties.”14 Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post wrote that, like T. E. Lawrence, “Lansdale has inspired admiration, ridicule—and, above all, controversy.” He quoted “one U.S. official” as saying, “If he doesn’t produce a miracle, his friends will be disappointed and his enemies delighted.”15 When Lansdale landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport, wearing

that Edward Lansdale’s formal title in Vietnam was quite a mouthful: he was to be head of the Senior Liaison Office and chairman of the U.S. Mission Liaison Group to the Secretary General of the Central Rural Reconstruction Council.

The council was, in theory at least, a powerful body within the South Vietnamese government. It was chaired by none other than the flamboyant prime minister, Nguyen Cao Ky, and it included the secretary of rural affairs, a cabinet-level official who would be Lansdale’s closest interlocutor within the Vietnamese regime. “Rural reconstruction” was the Vietnamese term for what Americans called “pacification.” Thus the Rural Reconstruction Council would be responsible for the counterinsurgency program in the countryside. The problem lay with the U.S. Mission Liaison Group, the working group at the U.S. embassy composed of representatives from the Military Assistance Command—Vietnam (MACV) and the civilian agencies that had a role in pacification.

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge expected Lansdale to orchestrate these various agencies in order to get “an effective political-social program moving in Viet Nam.” But Lansdale was authorized to act only in an “advisory capacity.” He would have no power to compel compliance—the same problem that had handicapped him during Operation Mongoose. Somehow, he was supposed to find a way of “tactfully and persuasively braiding together the separate economic, social, information, military, and other programs as necessary.”1 The problem was that all of the American agencies that Lansdale was supposed to “braid together” had far more money, manpower, and mandates than his Senior Liaison Office had, and they were all headed by strong-willed personalities who were not inclined to cede him an inch. It was, in the words of Bert Fraleigh of USAID...

ONE OF the most ferocious man-eating “sharks” was Philip Habib, who was in charge of the embassy’s political section. A generously proportioned, first-generation Lebanese American born in Brooklyn, he was in the midst of one of the most glittering careers in the history of the Foreign Service; he would eventually rise to become President Ford’s under secretary of state for political affairs and President Reagan’s special envoy for the

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...

While Zorthian worked the media, Habib made sure that Lansdale got nowhere in the bureaucracy.

Although Zorthian and Habib were to prove Lansdale’s most inveterate foes, they were hardly alone in protecting their prerogatives from this interloper. Gordon Jorgensen, the chief of the CIA station (known for cover purposes as the Office of Special Activities), had started off working under Lansdale in the 1950s and might have been expected to be amenable to his former boss’s arrival. In fact, when a reporter told him the news, he “damn near dropped his martini.” The reporter he was talking with could tell that mentally Jorgy was “throwing up the barricades to protect his turf, and that’s what everyone was doing out there at that time.”7 Charlie Mann, head of USAID’s office, was no more amenable to Lansdale’s intrusion. He controlled a substantial development-aid budget, and he damn sure wasn’t going to let Lansdale tell him how to spend his money or direct his people.

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

while Westmoreland’s troops were turning the countryside into a “free fire” zone. Philip Caputo, a junior Marine officer who landed with the first combat battalion at Da Nang on March 8, 1965, was later to write in his acclaimed memoir Rumors of War, “Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.”11 Lans...

He preferred to spend his time, as he had done in the past, getting to know the key Vietnamese players—listening to them and winning their trust in his characteristic, low-key style. A young, Vietnamese-speaking USIA officer who met Lansdale for the first time in 1965 found that he had not lost his mastery of the art of conversation. “He was one of the few skilled conversational operators that I encountered over time,” recalled Frank Scotton, “in that he was a sensitive listener who drew people’s thinking and motivation forth, then when he wished, melded it with his own purpose, and fed back a homogenized version that the other person could digest. It was better than just telling someone.”

Nguyen Tat Ung, the secretary of rural affairs. Lansdale felt he was making real progress in fostering a good relationship with Ung, whom he judged to be an “unusually capable person.” Unfortunately a week later, on September 17, 1965, he received word that Ung and several of his aides had been killed in an airplane crash. This “tragic setback” would delay his attempts to reinvigorate a rural pacification program that had become largely moribund since Ngo Dinh Diem’s downfall two years earlier.15 Ung’s replacement was General Nguyen Duc Thang, a thirty-four-year-old officer who was widely seen as the most effective and most honest general in the entire army.

Thang, like Lansdale, believed that it was important to win “hearts and minds,” and that a first step was to curb military abuses against the populace. By the beginning of 1966, Lansdale was writing that Thang “is a younger version of Ramon Magsaysay (even to the foot jingling), and we’ve become close friends.”17 But Thang started off “with practically no staff in his Ministry,” thus occasioning yet another delay while he staffed up.18 Even once he acquired a staff, he still faced the problem of trying to implement a pacification program on behalf of a government that was barely functional. A regime that could not pick up the garbage in Saigon was not likely to defeat an entrenched insurgency in the countryside.

WHILE LANSDALE was cultivating Thang, he knew that it was even more important to strike up a good relationship with Nguyen Cao Ky, the ambitious air force general-turned-prime minister.

“I’m rather taken by Ky,” Lansdale wrote in the fall of 1965.22 He found Ky to be “honest, intelligent, well-motivated” and gifted with the ability to “talk to people.”23 Ky and Lansdale developed a “close personal relationship,” in the words of Rufus Phillips.24 Lansdale and his team wrote a speech for the prime minister to commemorate his first one hundred days in office, and on October 1, 1965, Ky delivered “big chunks of it” as scripted.

Lansdale had less luck wooing General Nguyen Van Thieu, Ky’s nominal superior. At age forty-two, Thieu was the grand old man of the ruling junta known as the Directory—

While Ky made a bold splash

Thieu preferred to bide his time in the background, quietly plotting to accumulate power. Ky was impetuous, Thieu reserved. He also worked harder and had a much higher tolerance for paperwork. But, as if to offset these virtues, he was intensely calculating and suspicious of others, even paranoid.

Lansdale met the head of state at a September 21, 1965, dinner arranged by the influential bureaucrat Bui Diem, a future ambassador to Washington. As an icebreaker, Lansdale was asked to recount his relationship with the legendary Cao Dai warl...

Complicating the situation was the rivalry between Thieu and Ky: Lansdale’s closeness to Ky made Thieu even more suspicious of him.

At the same time that he was reaching out to South Vietnam’s leaders, Lansdale and his team members were beginning to establish relationships with influential labor, religious, business, and ethnic minority leaders, in order to “get them to work in harmony with the GVN [Government of Vietnam],

Lansdale was also taking quick trips outside of the capital, “away from the protocol,” to talk to South Vietnam’s rural cadres. “This just means,” he told Helen, “that I stay up nights, working, when I get back to Saigon, to make up for the time I take out. Yet, I can’t get a fix on the pulse of this place without getting around first-hand and easing into [the] local situation patiently.”