From his office at military intelligence headquarters in Manila, Major Lansdale had cast an increasingly jaundiced eye on all this. While he had come to know Roxas quite well, he was little impressed with the man—although his opinion may have been colored by Roxas’s irksome habit of bumming cigarettes from him. More to the point, Lansdale felt the United States stood poised to squander an enormous reservoir of goodwill among the Filipino population if it ignored the legitimate grievances and worsening conditions of the poorer classes.
