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

by Max Boot

LANSDALE KEPT a stiff upper lip in public, but in private he was close to despair about the state of the war effort. In mid-October 1965, he wrote perceptively to Helen,

I’ve analyzed the political situation here rather thoroughly by now—but migosh, what to do to construct something out of the horrible mess! I’m scared to tell everyone how really bad it is. . . . What has happened here is that after 20 years of war almost all the tensile strength has gone out of the social fabric. Military operations just make it limper. The village folks just don’t seem to give a damn about anything except to please be left alone. The VC have an infrastructure in place throughout the villages—but the villagers are duly resentful of them, too—along with being disbelieving of the GVN. They’ve lost faith in themselves and tomorrow.

Reversing this dire state of affairs, Ed admitted, was “a whopping big, complex job. . . . The VC own the countryside, and we aren’t going to defeat them by talking.”30 But talking was primarily what he did, because he lacked any real power.

Lansdale wanted to create a national consultative council to lead the transition to civilian rule and to focus counterinsurgency efforts on “revolutionary villages”—that is, villages such as Binh Hung populated by Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Catholics or other anti-Communist minorities. These two programs would be united by allowing “revolutionary villages” to elect their own leaders as well as delegates to the national consultative council.

Lansdale imagined that this plan “might well bring the turning point of the war here.”32 But while his proposal was embraced by Ky, it was vetoed by Lansdale’s rivals at the U.S. embassy.

In addition to these major proposals, Lansdale and his team spewed out a variety of lesser ideas. Recalling the propaganda coups he had carried out in the Philippines and Vietnam a decade or more earlier, he proposed air-dropping nearly five thousand captured Chinese Communist weapons over North Vietnam to show the peasants “how their government was working with the Chinese to threaten their compatriots in the South” and to force Hanoi to mount laborious and time-consuming searches for “ ‘returned’ armament.”34 He proposed building a “Rural Construction ‘operations room’ . . . in the vicinity of the Prime Minister’s office” to make “the ‘waging of peace’ . . . as exciting as the waging of war.”35 He proposed investing in rural electrification and having Ky stage “fireside chats,” both directly borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when Lansdale was in his twenties and thirties.36 He proposed bringing over Cuban exiles to address a shortage of “doctors, nurses, teachers, other professionals.”37 He proposed scholarships for Vietnamese students to study in American colleges.38 He even proposed serving a traditional Tet holiday meal to encourage Vietcong fighters to surrender.39 Few, if any, of these suggestions came to fruition.

Lansdale’s insistence that “folk music is an effective medium of communication”47 and his interest in using it to mobilize Vietnamese and Americans for the war effort was so unconventional that it struck other power brokers in Saigon as bizarre—all the more so because the most prominent folk singers in America, including Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary,

Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, were associated with the peace movement. Barry Zorthian later spoke contemptuously of how “Ed and his team . . . were sitting in their house singing folk songs and doing what they had done so successfully in the Philippines,” while “the war was moving toward conventional warfare again.”

In his searing novel Matterhorn, the Marine veteran Karl Marlantes, who received a Navy Cross and numerous other decorations as a young lieutenant, vividly evoked the kind of war the Marines fought. The title derives from the fictional Fire Support Base Matterhorn, a mountain peak “shrouded by cold monsoon rain and clouds” that was “flattened and shorn of vegetation to accommodate an artillery battery of 105-millimeter howitzers.” Before long this hill had become “a sterile wasteland of smashed trees, tangled logging slash, broken C-ration pallets, empty tin cans, soggy cardboard containers, discarded Kool-Aid packages, torn candy wrappers—and mud.” Every night Matterhorn’s mighty howitzers would unleash random “harassment and interdiction” fire into the jungle. Marlantes’s protagonist and stand-in, Second Lieutenant Waino Mallas, asks his company commander, First Lieutenant Fitch, what happens if a Montagnard—one of the tribesmen who lived in the hills—got hit by an artillery shell. Fitch doesn’t

care. “You call off the H & I,” he replies, “and the gooks have access to this mountain like a freeway ramp. It’s my fucking troops over any lost mountain man, and it’ll stay that way. I decided that a long time ago.”

Every day Marine grunts would walk into the jungle on terrifying and tiring patrols to try to bring the elusive North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to battle. Simply hacking their way with machetes through the thick vegetation in the stifling heat and humidity, while carrying as much as a hundred pounds of gear, was an ordeal. In the “nearly impenetrable” bush, Marlantes wrote, “their eyes flickered rapidly back and forth as they tried to look in all directions at once,” hoping to see the enemy a split second before they were seen. Once a patrol stumbled onto enemy troops, the jungle would reverberate with the screams of M-16s on full automatic, answered by “the slower, more solid hammering of the heavier-caliber NVA AK-47s.” The Marines would trudge back to Matterhorn punch-drunk with “stultifying fatigue,” their legs covered with leeches, their hands “crisscrossed with infected cuts made b...

It was hard to point to any real progress that all of this military activity was achieving. Lansdale wrote in mid-1966, “While the US military have been going great guns against large VC and NVA units, the hard fact is that the VC are still all over the landscape and their areas of control haven’t diminished all that much.”4 He noted that when he arrived in August 1965, there were an estimated 150,000 Vietcong in South Vietnam. N...

BY 1967, the bipartisan consensus behind the Vietnam War—and the broader American role in the Cold War—was beginning to break down along with civil order in the United States. On April 15, the antiwar cause brought together a hundred thousand protesters in a march from New York’s Central Park to the United Nations led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and the singer Harry Belafonte, while that same day, on the other side of the continent, another forty thousand protesters massed in San Francisco. Prominent liberals, including Senators George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Mike Mansfield, and J. William Fulbright, broke with the president and expressed their opposition to the war.

An anguished Bobby Kennedy, whose own brother had

escalated the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, now compared American actions to those of the Nazis, as did...

By October 1967, when nearly half of all Americans had concluded that getting into Vietnam was a mistake,2 young men on one campus after another were burning draft cards and street battles were occurring in front of the Selective Service induction center in Oakland, California, between riot police swinging truncheons and thousands of “Stop the Draft” protesters.3 On October 21, a hundred thousand antiwar protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and marched on the Pentagon. Wherever Johnson and his appointees appeared in public, they were greeted by protesters. Some brandished signs such as “Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now?” and “LBJ’s fath...

Meanwhile, conservative Democrats and Republicans were getting fed up with the war for a very different reason: they were frustrated that Lyndon Johnson, who increasingly seemed unable to please anyone, chose to fight a “limited war” instead of bombing North Vietnam “into the Stone Age,” as the retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay, a future vice presidential candidate on a ticket with George Wallace, had suggested in 1965. Some even called for invading North Vietnam or at least entering Laos and Cambodia to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Johnson’s friend and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committe...

LYNDON JOHNSON knew that the war wasn’t working, but he did not know what to do about it. Like many an embattled chief executive, his first instinct was to change the team while implementing the same old policy. First to go was Robert McNamara, who was looking increasingly haggard as he came to realize that the military’s optimistic estimates of enemy killed and enemy strength were at odds with the dismal reality on the

ground. McNamara’s fetishistic zest for quantification, which Lansdale had warned against, predictably had led him astray. Once the picture of steely certitude, the defense secretary would now weep at work, leading fellow officials to worry that he was “a very disturbed guy” on the verge of a “nervous breakdown.”7 Worried that McNamara was “cracking up” and might “pull a Forrestal,”8 Johnson eased him out at the end of November 1967 by announcing his appointment as president of the World Bank. Three months later, he would be replaced at the Pentagon by the consummate Democratic Party insider Clark Clifford, who was widely, if wrongly, believed to be more of a hawk.

Changes were also afoot in an increasingly bureaucratized Saigon. In 1967, “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, a master bureaucrat, moved from the National Security Council in Washington to Saigon to take charge of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), the office in charge of all pacification programs. CORDS would fall under MACV, rather than the embassy; Komer would be General Westmoreland’s deputy, and he would have command of military as...

IN the early morning darkness of January 31, 1968, the Washington Post’s Saigon bureau chief, Peter Braestrup, received an urgent phone call from his colleague Lee Lescaze. “They’re attacking the city,” Lescaze said. “What city?” Braestrup groggily asked. “This city,” Lescaze said patiently. “Saigon.” “Ridiculous,” replied Braestrup, a gruff, battle-hardened Marine veteran. “Just some incoming.”1 And then he went back to sleep.

Edward Lansdale and his team at 194 Cong Ly—Charlie Sweet, Cal Mehlert, and Dave Hudson—were just as startled when they were woken out of a slumber around that same time by what Lansdale described as “some loud bangs nearby, followed by automatic weapons fire.”

The Tet holiday is the biggest one on the Vietnamese calendar, and Lansdale and his colleagues had been up until four o’clock in the morning on the previous day reveling with Vietnamese friends. “We shot off giant strings of firecrackers . . . we ate Tet cakes and watermelons, and we drank rice and ginseng wine,” Lansdale recalled, completely unconscious of the chaos that would envelop the city in a few hours. Then they had spent the afternoon of Jan...

Roused out of bed around 3 a.m., Lansdale and the others grabbed weapons and went on guard duty in case the villa was attacked. It wasn’t. But numerous other locations were. At 6 a.m., Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s office called to say the embassy was under attack and not to go there. The two team secretaries, Reggie Miskovish and Martha Devlin (Lansdale referred to them, in the patronizing vernacular of the day, as “our two FS [Foreign Service] girls”), lived at the Park Hotel next to the embassy and called to report “heavy fighting next door.” At virtually the same time, a South Vietnamese senator called to say that the Joint General Staff compound, the Vietnamese military headquarters located next to MACV at the airport, w...

Eighty thousand Vietcong troops had attacked 36 out of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district capitals, 5 of 6 autonomous cities, and numerous hamlets and villages.4 Much of Hue, the nineteenth-century capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty, was seized by Communist forces, who systematically massacred at least 2,500 “class enemies”—mainly South Vietnamese military and political officials and their relatives. It would take U.S. Marines weeks of hard house-to-house fighting to dislodge the Vietcong from their...

Saigon had been infiltrated by more than four thousand Vietcong guerrillas in civilian clothes indistinguishable from the general population, hiding their weapons inside shipments of firewood, rice, and tomatoes. In the predawn darkness of January 31, they fanned out to attack the government radio station, the South Vietnamese military headquarters, the presidential palace, the U.S. embassy, and other targets. Their objective was to hold these locations for forty-eight hours until Main Force reinforcements could arrive in the city. At the six-story U.S. embassy on Thong Nhut (Reunification) Boulevard, completed only three months earlier, nineteen sappers wearing black pajamas and red armbands and armed with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, a...

In the end, the Tet Offensive did not succeed in igniting a general uprising against the South Vietnamese government. Official U.S. statistics showed 58,373 enemy dead between January 29 and March 1, 1968, compared with 3,895 American combat deaths, 214 allied troops (Australians, South Koreans, New Zealanders, Thais), 4,954 South Vietnamese troops, and 14,300 South Vietnamese civilians.12 By coming out into the open, the Vietcong lost a great deal of their infrastructure in the South.

Lansdale noted that the enemy “has been crushed militarily,”13 but, unlike more conventional military men, he warned Bunker that the offensive had the potential to achieve Hanoi’s objectives: it could strike “fear into the hearts of the urban population by demonstrating the inability of the government to provide adequate security,” and it could increase “pressure on the U.S. at home and abroad to withdraw, by seeking to demonstrate the hopelessness of victory and the immorality of our cause (for example, the image of U.S. firepower destroying friendly Vietnamese cities).”14 “The emotional factor in the Viet-Nam war has grown to immense size since the

shock of the Tet offensive,” he wrote. “In the months ahead . . . it promises to become the real pivot factor.”15 To counteract this psychological blow, Lansdale wanted the South Vietnamese government to stage a public relations “campaign built around the battle-cry of ‘Remember Hue!’ ” modeled on American slogans such as “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine.” President Thieu admitted that Lansdale’s idea “had merit,” given popular outrage over Vietcong massacres of civilians in H...

“ED, WE are going through a tremendously traumatic experience here in the States,” Bill Connell, Vice President Humphrey’s chief aide, wrote to Lansdale on March 20, 1968. “The success of the Tet offensive has been most dramatic here at home. Many who were with us have fallen away, and the television stations and newspapers are in full cry against the President and his policies.”

In a sense, the Johnson administration was a victim of its own clumsy and overeager efforts to bolster public support for the war effort. Throughout 1967, the administration had rolled out General Westmoreland to reassure Americans that “we are making progress” and “the end begins to come into view.” In his most memorable phrase, Westy claimed to see “some light at the end of the tunnel.”

Such Pollyannaish views appeared impossible to reconcile with the capabilities the Vietcong had displayed in the Tet Offensive. “What the hell is going on?” Walter Cronkite of CBS News exclaimed. “I thought we were winning the war.”19 In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to Vietnam and produced a bleak half-hour special report that aired on CBS on February 27, 1968. “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” he proclaimed with his typical gravity. Imperturbable, bland, and authori...

It would be a long goodbye: the war would drag on for five more years, and more Americans would be killed after the Tet Offensive than before it.

dynamic polarity

According to the biographer Niall Ferguson, young Kissinger commented in an unpublished essay written shortly thereafter, “That is humanity in the 20th century.”20 Given his life experience, it is understandable that Kissinger emerged with limited faith in democracy, a deep fear of instability, and a pessimistic

view of history. Kissinger was not given to enthusing, as Lansdale did, about the brotherhood of man. He preferred to pursue stability and to defend America’s narrow strategic interests rather than to promote democracy and human rights. Having written his doctoral thesis on European diplomacy after the Napoleonic Wars, Kissinger imagined himself to be another Metternich or Bismarck—another brilliant, cold-blooded statesman shrewdly moving pieces around the geostrategic chessboard with scant regard for the human cost.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had much interest in fostering representative government in South Vietnam—a goal that Lansdale believed was imperative if the Saigon regime was ever to stand on its own. They had already made their disdain for democracy plain when, separately, each had denigrated Lansdale’s plans to hold free and fair National Assembly elections in 1966. In 1971, with South Vietnam scheduled to hold a presidential election, they ignored pleas from Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker not to let Nguyen Van Thieu rig the results. Thieu wound up running unopposed with tacit approval from the White House. Following the example of Ngo Dinh Diem, he even formed his own ruling party, known ironically as the Democracy Party. Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington, ...

Lansdale agreed with his friend Bui Diem, writing in a letter to the Washington Post, “Only if the Vietnamese have a free chance to determine their future now, and use it, will there be any point to all the sacrifices we have made in Vietnam or any rationale to our present withdrawal with which we Americans can live with ourselves afterwards here at home.” But his views were mocked by the Post’s editors, who argued that “this is the time to stop pursuing causes in Vietnam and instead to take whatever gains can be perceived, cut losses, and come home.”22 That reflected the mood of the Nixon administration, too, and helps to ex...

big a boogeyman to too many people to be really effective anymor...

WHILE NIXON and Kissinger knew they did not want to adopt the idealistic—if also practical—reform agenda that Lansdale advocated, they fumbled around for other ways to achieve their goal of “peace with honor.” Their desire was to extract U.S. troops without leaving Nixon open to the charge that he was the first president to lose a war—the same accusation that had haunted Lyndon Johnson.

Nixon thought at first that he could scare North Vietnam into ending the conflict within his first year in office, employing what he called the “Madman Theory”: “We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he had his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”24 But his early 1969 ultimatum failed to spook Le Duan, who, long before Ho Chi Minh’s death in September, had taken charge of North Vietnam’s war effort.

Nixon and Kissenger wound up adopting willy-nilly a multipronged approach toward ending the war. Their first and most important priority was reducing the total number of troops—from 536,000 when Nixon took office to 475,000 by the end of 1969, to 334,000 in 1970, t...

Given plummeting morale in the ranks, the troop drawdown came none too soon; by the end of the 1960s, the U.S. armed forces, mired in an unpopular and ruinous war that they did not appear to be winning, were afflicted with rampant drug use, rac...

The second part of the administration’s approach was to change the strategy of the troops on the ground. In truth, this was the doing more of General Creighton Abrams than of the president. Acting on his own initiative, he scaled back big-unit search-and-destroy operations to focus on securing South Vietnam’s population, although he still...

the meantime, the CIA’s William Colby in 1968 took over the pacification bureaucracy known as CORDS, focusing his efforts on a controversial intelligence-sharing program known as Phoenix that would “neutralize” 81,740 Vietcong cadres between 1968 and 1972, ...

The third prong of Nixon’s strategy was to disrupt North Vietnamese base camps in Cambodia and Laos. When the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–70 accomplished, as the president put it, “Zilch,”27 he ordered a ground “incursion”—the word “invasion” was studiously avoided. A total of 19,300 U.S. and 29,000 South Vietnamese troops moved into Cambodia beginning on April 30, 1970, backed by massive American aerial and artillery bombardment, but, as a South Vietnamese general admitted, “The Cambodian incursion proved, in the long run, to pose little more than a temporary disruption of North Vietnam’s march toward domination of all of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.”28 An incursion into Laos—Operation Lam Son 719—the following year, undertaken by ARVN troops with American airpower and logistical support but no American ground troops, was eve...

While the American and South Vietnamese armed forces were trying to increase the military pressure on Hanoi, Nixon and Kissinger were also pursuing an ambitious agenda to secure a peace deal. Starting in early 1970, the national security adviser would steal away to Paris to conduct secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnam’s Politburo, in the working-class neighborhood of Choisy-le-Roi.30 The talks were stalemated over American demands for a mutual pullout of North Vietnamese and U.S. forces until Nixon and Kissinger decided to make a major concession in May 1971. It was billed as a “cease-fire in place,” but, as Kissinger admitted to Nixon in an Oval Office conversation, “It’s a unilateral withdrawal. We’re not asking them to pull out.”31 Nixon and Kissinger continued to hope that South Vietnam could ho...

Thus was born what became known as the “decent interval” strategy, with Nixon and Kissinger signaling to North Vietnam and its patrons in Moscow and Beijing that Washington wanted a face-saving way out of the conflict regardless of the consequences for America’s allies in Saigon. As Kissinger explained to Premier Zhou Enlai of China on July 9, 1971, “If the [South Vietnamese] government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene.” Zhou inquired...

THE EXISTENCE of the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho talks remained confidential until January 1972, when Nixon announced that they were going on, but even then the extent of the American concessions was not revealed. By contrast, there was no hiding the body bags that kept coming home. More than twenty thousand American troops would die and more than fifty thousand would be seriously wounded during the Nixon administration’s slow-motion disengagement from Indochina. News of this continuing stream of casualties, along with the attacks on Laos and Cambodia, induced despair in many Americans and convinced them that Nixon really was the war-loving madman that he only pretended to be. Domestic opposition surged after panicky National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine. More than 4.3 million students across the country demonstrated against the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings, forcing the temporary closure of 20 percent of America’s colleges.

Among those radicalized by the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State was Daniel Ellsberg, the former member of the Senior Liaison Office who, after a stint working in Saigon for Deputy Ambassador Bill Porter, returned in July 1967 to RAND’s headquarters in Santa Monica. Like