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WALL STREET JOURNAL 5
Jan 17
Review: ‘The Road Not Taken’ in
Vietnam As
war began, Edward Lansdale’s lonely voice argued that winning local
support—not battles—was key to victory
The
Road Not Taken By
Max Boot
Liveright, 715 pages, $35
Edward Lansdale (1908-87) was one of America’s most important military
thinkers and practitioners, and yet he is barely known to the wider
world. In “The Road Not Taken,” Max Boot aptly calls him “the American
T.E. Lawrence ”: eccentric, rebellious and charismatic, a man who had an
uncanny way of bonding with Third World leaders and who believed that
the art of war was, as Mr. Boot puts it, “to attract the support of the
uncommitted.”
He changed the course of history in the Philippines by leading a fight
against Marxist guerrillas there in the 1950s and played a key role in
the early stages of the Vietnam War—though with tragically less success.
Had Lansdale’s advice been taken, Mr. Boot argues, South Vietnam might
still have fallen to the communists, but far fewer than 58,000 Americans
would have died there. “The Road Not Taken” is an impressive work, an
epic and elegant biography based on voluminous archival sources. It
belongs to a genre of books that takes a seemingly obscure hero and uses
his story as a vehicle to capture a whole era.
Lansdale grew up in Detroit, the son of a businessman who worked in the
auto industry. As the father’s fortunes rose, Mr. Boot tells us, the
family moved from a working-class neighborhood to the suburbs. Lansdale
attended UCLA, where he earned a degree in English and participated in
ROTC, receiving a reserve commission in the Army. During World War II,
he joined the Office of Strategic Services, though not as an overseas
operative. Stateside, he gathered intelligence and recruited agents.
“Not much in the way of heroics,” he later said, “but it was truly
fascinating work for me.” About a year later he was accepted back into
the Army and, near the war’s end, shipped out to the Philippines, where
he remained for a few years after the war, returning there again in 1950
as an adviser to the government (and reporting to the CIA).
Like Lawrence of Arabia and Kit Carson among the Indians, Lansdale
immediately grasped that wars can be about cultural expertise as much as
battle formations. “I have always felt,” he said, “that if you are going
to report on something, don’t take the word of other people, go out and
eyeball it.” His technique, natural to his larger-than-life personality
yet unusual for American officialdom at the time, was to get to know the
indigenous people and to treat them as equals. He believed that the
answers to Washington policy questions emanate upward from the foreign
terrain itself. As one Filipino remarked: “Ed had a way, he could make a
friend of everybody except Satan.”
In the Philippines, where guerrillas were attempting to overthrow the
government, it did not take long for Lansdale to realize that the
“blunderbuss” approach of the Filipino security forces was making
enemies of the very rural population that needed to be won over. He not
only befriended Ramon Magsaysay, the Philippine defense minister, but
literally moved in with him. They spent days at a time together out in
the mountainous jungles until they both thought as one.
It was in the Philippines, while fighting the Marxist Huks, that
Lansdale coined the phrase “civic action,” a reference to the need for
giving the rural population a stake in the outcome of an insurgency war
so that it is motivated to join your side. “Lansdale was one of the few
Americans of this period who had read Mao Zedong’s works,” Mr. Boot
notes. Quoting Mao, Lansdale said that one must “keep the closest
possible relations with the common people.” On a small scale, that meant
being “courteous and polite.” In a larger and more lethal dimension, it
meant avoiding indiscriminate violence. Lansdale hated airborne strikes
because they killed civilians. He gave Filipino soldiers cheap cameras
to photograph the enemy they had just killed: This simple plan made
casualty figures more accurate and encouraged the troops not to shoot
women and children. By the early 1950s he had come to hate the mentality
of body counts and other statistical reductions of war that would later
defeat the United States in Vietnam.
On the heels of victory in the Philippines, Lansdale headed for South
Vietnam, where his worst enemies would be not the Vietnamese but
American officials. The French would soon leave the country, and the
U.S. would step into their imperial-like role. In 1954, following the
French defeat, Vietnam was divided into two parts, with the northern
part governed by a lethally aggressive regime that combined nationalism
and communism and was soon fomenting guerrilla attacks in the
pro-Western south.
First, Lansdale alienated the U.S. Ambassador, J. Lawton Collins, one of
the few generals who had seen action in both the European and Pacific
theaters during World War II and who, partly because of that experience,
inhabited a military mind-set that was, Mr. Boot says, “unsuited to the
complexities and difficulties of Vietnam.” Collins wanted to cut the
South Vietnamese army in half, partly because, in his view, it was
costing U.S. taxpayers too much money. Lansdale, by contrast, wanted it
to take control of rural areas being vacated by the anti-French,
communist Vietminh and then to integrate local militias into the
national army so as to provide a Vietnamese solution—and not a foreign
one—to communist aggression.
By 1955, Lansdale and his small team were writing a counterinsurgency
blueprint for South Vietnam. The core of it was, as one might expect, an
approach centered on protecting the local population and winning its
support, not winning large “battles” and claiming conquered acreage. The
strategy could only succeed, Lansdale believed, with credible civilian
governance. And so he befriended the leaders of various South Vietnamese
sects—political and tribal—as well as the prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem,
just as he had befriended Magsaysay in the Philippines. He was accused
of bribing the sect leaders, but as a British officer once said about
Lawrence, he “could certainly not have done what he did without the
gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount.”
It was Lansdale’s genius to intuit in the 1950s that, despite the great
set-piece victories just a few years before—at El Alamein and
Stalingrad, for example—the future would be less one of conventional
warfare than of guerrilla fighting. He advised the Kennedy
administration that it needed a new ambassador in South Vietnam who
could “influence Asians through understanding them sympathetically” and
who would be alert to the guerrilla tactics being employed to topple
South Vietnam. His advice was ignored. Writing much later from
hindsight, after tens of thousands of body bags had come home, Walt
Rostow, Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, would say that
Lansdale’s counsel represented “a kind of last chance” to avoid the
ensuing tragedy.
From the beginning, Diem had been a difficult ally for the U.S. In the
1950s, Lansdale argued that Diem, for all his faults, represented the
best available option for a non-communist government in Saigon. He was,
however, increasingly concerned about Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, a
paranoid, Mussolini-esque figure, and about his wife, the scheming
Madame Nhu. Even so, he advised President John F. Kennedy to keep Diem
in power.
The administration ignored Lansdale’s advice and toppled Diem in
November 1963, after which came infighting, more coups, and the collapse
of the strategic-hamlet program, a strategy that had worked to pacify
the countryside by reducing communist infiltration through protected
communities. Indeed, Diem’s assassination led to a situation in South
Vietnam that went from bad to worse, with massive U.S. escalation, high
body counts, and a terror-stricken population. The war continued in such
a way through 1968, when Gen. Creighton Abrams would turn the strategy
in a direction vaguely akin to Lansdale’s intentions.
The most iconic moment of Mr. Boot’s biography comes in 1961, when
Lansdale, just back from Vietnam, briefs the new defense secretary,
Robert McNamara. Lansdale “unceremoniously dumped his cargo of dirty
weapons caked with mud and blood, on the secretary’s immaculate desk.”
He told McNamara that these very weapons had been used “just a little
bit ago before I got them.” Lansdale then talked about how and why an
enemy with tattered pajamas and sandals was “licking” South Vietnamese
soldiers who had been generously supplied with equipment by the United
States. “Always keep in mind,” Lansdale told McNamara, that the struggle
was not about weapons and the material things of life but about “ideas
and ideals,” which the communists had in abundance. McNamara listened
stone-faced, uncomprehending. After all, Lansdale’s ideas could not be
reduced to the logic of mathematics by which the defense secretary lived
and breathed.
Lansdale was also alienated by President Johnson’s military commander,
Gen. William Westmoreland, another hero of World War II, who oversaw the
build-up of conventional U.S. forces in Vietnam. In the mid-1960s,
Lansdale wrote in a letter: “Are paddy farmers in a combat zone to be
shot just because they inadvertently are standing in the way of Vietcong
targets or are they to be protected and helped?” Westmoreland would
choose the former option. For his part, Lansdale ended his involvement
with Vietnam in 1968. He brought out “In the Midst of Wars” in 1972—Mr.
Boot calls it a “deliberately opaque” memoir—and died of a heart ailment
15 years later, at the age of 79.
Mr. Boot’s full-bodied biography does not ignore Lansdale’s failures and
shortcomings—not least his difficult relations with his family—but it
properly concentrates on his ideas and his attempts to apply them in
Southeast Asia. In Mr. Boot’s judgment, the American war there “would
have been more humane and less costly” if McNamara, Westmoreland and
other American officials had taken his advice. “The Road Not Taken”
gives a vivid portrait of a remarkable man and intelligently challenges
the lazy assumption that failed wars are destined to fail or that
failure, if it comes, cannot be saved from the worst possible outcome.
—Mr. Kaplan is the author of “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” to be
published in March. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security. |