The Road Not Taken Read online

  THE ROAD

  NOT TAKEN

  Edward Lansdale and the

  American Tragedy in Vietnam

  MAX BOOT

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  FRONTPIECE: Lansdale arrives at Tam Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, August 29, 1965, to begin his second tour in Vietnam. His embassy rival, Philip Habib, is at left. (AP)

  To Sue Mi Terry,

  for supporting me

  And to the Council on Foreign Relations,

  for supporting my work

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Dramatis Personae

  PROLOGUE:

  The Day of the Dead: Saigon, November 1–2, 1963

  INTRODUCTION:

  The Misunderstood Man

  PART ONE • Ad Man (1908–1945)

  1. In Terrific Flux

  2. Enfant Terrible

  3. An Institution Run by Its Inmates

  PART TWO • Colonel Landslide (1945–1954)

  4. The Time of His Life

  5. In Love and War

  6. The Knights Templar

  7. “A Most Difficult and Delicate Problem”

  8. “All-Out Force or All-Out Friendship”

  9. The Power Broker

  10. “A Real Vindication”

  PART THREE • Nation Builder (1954–1956)

  11. La Guerre sans Fronts

  12. A Fortress Falls

  13. “I Am Ngo Dinh Diem”

  14. The Chopstick Torture

  15. Pacification

  16. The Viper’s Nest

  17. “Stop Calling Me Papa!”

  PART FOUR • Washington Warrior (1957–1963)

  18. Heartbreak Hotel

  19. Guerrilla Guru

  20. A New War Begins

  21. The Ambassador Who Never Was

  22. “The X Factor”

  23. “Worms of the World Unite”

  24. “Washington at Its Nuttiest”

  PART FIVE • Bastard Child (1964–1968)

  25. “A Hell of a Mess”

  26. “Concept for Victory”

  27. Escalation

  28. The Impossible Missions Force

  29. Waging Peace in a Time of War

  30. To Stay or to Go?

  31. Waiting for the Second Coming

  32. The Long Goodbye

  PART SIX • The Beaten Man (1968–1987)

  33. The War at Home

  34. A Defeat in Disguise

  35. The Abandoned Ally

  36. The Family Jewels

  37. The End of the Road

  AFTERWORD:

  Lansdalism in the Twenty-First Century

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  FILIPINOS

  Oscar Arellano Head of CIA-sponsored Operation Brotherhood in South Vietnam.

  Patrocinio “Pat” Yapcinco Kelly Lansdale’s guide to Huklandia; mistress; second wife.

  Ramon “Monching” Magsaysay Defense minister, 1950–53; president, 1953–57.

  Manuel “Manny” Manahan Newspaper publisher; Magsaysay aide.

  Juan “Johnny” Orendain American-educated lawyer.

  Elpidio Quirino President, 1948–53.

  Carlos Romulo Ambassador to Washington, 1952–53, 1955–62; presidential candidate, 1953.

  Manuel Roxas President, 1946–48.

  Frisco “Johnny” San Juan Head of the CIA-sponsored Freedom Company in South Vietnam; a leader in the CIA-sponsored National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) in the Philippines.

  Luis Taruc Huk military leader, 1942–53.

  Napoleon “Poling” Valeriano Philippine Army officer who worked with Lansdale in Vietnam in 1950s and 1960s.

  VIETNAMESE

  Bao Dai Emperor of Vietnam, 1926–45; chief of state, 1949–55.

  Bui Diem South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, 1967–72.

  Cao Van Vien Chief of South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff, 1964–75.

  Duong Van Duc South Vietnamese officer who oversaw pacification of Ca Mau Peninsula, 1955.

  Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”) General who led anti-Diem coup in 1963.

  Ho Chi Minh Vietminh leader, 1941–54; North Vietnam leader, 1954–69.

  Le Quang Vinh (“Ba Cut”) Warlord of the Hoa Hao sect.

  Le Van Vien (“Bay Vien”) Leader of the Binh Xuyen criminal empire.

  Le Duan North Vietnamese leader, driving force behind the war against South Vietnam.

  Le Van Kim South Vietnamese officer, commanded pacification of Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh provinces, 1955.

  Jean Leroy French-Vietnamese Catholic warlord.

  Ngo Dinh Diem Prime minister and then president of South Vietnam, 1954–63.

  Ngo Dinh Nhu Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother and chief adviser.

  Tran Le Xuan (“Madame Nhu”) Wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu.

  Nguyen Duc Thang South Vietnamese general, minister of revolutionary development in the mid-1960s.

  Nguyen Ngoc Tho Vice president of South Vietnam, 1956–63; prime minister, 1963–64.

  Nguyen Khanh South Vietnamese general; president, 1964–65.

  Nguyen Loc Hoa “Fighting priest” who led the village of Binh Hung.

  Nguyen Van Hinh Chief of staff, South Vietnamese armed forces, 1952–54; pro-French.

  Nguyen Van Thieu South Vietnamese general; president, 1965–75.

  Nguyen Van Vy Nguyen Van Hinh’s successor as chief of staff; pro-French.

  Nguyen Cao Ky South Vietnamese air force commander; prime minister, 1965–67; vice president, 1967–71.

  Pham Duy Folk singer.

  Pham Xuan An North Vietnamese spy and Lansdale friend.

  Pham Xuan Giai South Vietnamese officer in charge of psychological warfare, 1950s.

  Tran Van Don South Vietnamese general; a leader of the 1963 anti-Diem coup.

  Tran Van Soai (“Nam Lua”) Hoa Hao warlord.

  Trinh Minh Thé Cao Dai warlord.

  Vo Nguyen Giap Vietminh, North Vietnamese military commander, 1945–75.

  AMERICANS

  George Aurell Chief of the CIA’s Far East Division and CIA station chief in Manila, 1950s.

  Charles T. R. “Bo” Bohannan Intelligence officer who worked for Lansdale in both the Philippines and Vietnam.

  McGeorge Bundy National security adviser, 1961–66.

  Ellsworth Bunker Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1967–73.

  Frank Church Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired hearings on intelligence in 1975.

  William Colby CIA chief of station in Saigon, CORDS chief, and CIA director, 1973–76.

  J. Lawton Collins Army chief of staff; U.S. ambassador to Saigon, 1954–55.

  Lucien “Luigi” Conein CIA officer who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Myron Cowen Ambassador to the Philippines, 1949–52.

  Thomas Dooley (“Dr. America”) Navy doctor who wrote the best seller Deliver Us from Evil, about the 1954–55 exodus of refugees from North Vietnam.

  Michael J. Deutch Engineer and economist; member of Lansdale’s Vietnam team in 1965–66.

  Allen Dulles CIA director, 1953–61.

  Elbridge Durbrow Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1957–61.

  Daniel Ellsberg Member of Lansdale’s team in Saigon, 1965–66; Pentagon Papers leaker.

  Graves Erskine Marine general; head of Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations, 1953–61.

  Philip Habib Chief of the political section, U.S. embassy in Saigon, 1965–66; later under secretary of state.

&nbs
p; William King Harvey Head of the CIA’s Task Force W (dealing with Cuba), 1961–62.

  Donald Heath Ambassador to Saigon, 1952–55.

  Richard Helms CIA officer; CIA director, 1966–73.

  Gabriel L. Kaplan CIA operative, member of Lansdale team in the Philippines, 1950s.

  Sam Karrick Army officer and Christian Science practitioner who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Helen Lansdale Lansdale’s first wife.

  Henry “Harry” Lansdale Lansdale’s father.

  Sarah “Sadie” Lansdale Lansdale’s mother.

  Edward “Ted” Lansdale Lansdale’s older son.

  Peter “Pete” Lansdale Lansdale’s younger son.

  William Lederer Navy captain; coauthor of The Ugly American.

  Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. U.S. ambassador to Saigon, 1963–64, 1965–67; also U.S. senator, UN ambassador, and Republican vice presidential nominee.

  Robert McNamara Secretary of Defense, 1961–68.

  Hank Miller U.S. Information Agency officer who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.

  John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon, 1954–55.

  Edward Philips Lansdale’s grandfather.

  Rufus “Rufe” Phillips III CIA and USAID officer, Lansdale team member.

  L. Fletcher Prouty Former Lansdale aide at the Pentagon who later accused him of complicity in the JFK assassination.

  Joseph Redick CIA linguist who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.

  G. Frederick Reinhardt Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1955–57.

  Walt Rostow Senior JFK and LBJ national security official.

  Robert Shaplen New Yorker correspondent, Lansdale friend.

  Howard R. Simpson U.S. information officer in Saigon in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Raymond Spruance Admiral; U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, 1952–55.

  David T. Sternberg Disabled CIA officer who worked for Landsale in the Philippines.

  Maxwell Taylor Army chief of staff, JFK aide, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and ambassador to South Vietnam, 1964–65.

  John Paul Vann U.S. military adviser to the South Vietnamese army.

  William C. Westmoreland U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, 1964–68.

  Samuel T. “Hanging Sam” Williams Chief of Military Assistance Advisory Group—Vietnam, 1955–60.

  Samuel V. Wilson Lansdale aide at Pentagon; Special Forces officer.

  Frank Wisner Chief of Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–51; CIA deputy director for operations, 1951–59.

  Barry Zorthian Head of Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office in Saigon, 1964–68.

  Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

  —GEORGE ORWELL1

  Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death in Saigon, June 11, 1963. One of the most famous and influential photographs in history, it helped to bring down Ngo Dinh Diem. (AP)

  PROLOGUE

  The Day of the Dead: Saigon, November 1–2, 1963

  We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.

  —HENRY CABOT LODGE JR.

  WHAT caused the tragedy of the Vietnam War? Historians can always point to deep forces to explain that defining event in twentieth-century American history: geography and demography and environment, ideology and economics and sociology, race and class and religion. Implicit is the assumption that whatever happened must have happened, that there was no conceivable alternative. Such a deterministic outlook is alluring but ultimately not compelling; it ignores the role of contingency and the impact of decisions made by human and hence fallible historical actors. At various points from 1954 to 1975—from the beginning of America’s predominant influence in Indochina to its apogee in the 1960s and its humiliating end—events might very well have taken a different course. There were many turning points along the way. One was especially significant.

  When veterans and old-timers, former officials and retired reporters, analysts and historians try to explain how the United States became so deeply embroiled in Vietnam, they often point the finger of blame at one particular twenty-four-hour period: from midday on Friday, November 1, 1963, to midday on Saturday, November 2. What happened in those hours would wind up dashing a vision best enunciated by the American adviser and intelligence officer Edward Lansdale of how Communist advances might be resisted by building up a viable South Vietnamese state that could win the loyalty of its people. The events of November 1–2 opened a Pandora’s box of body counts, bombing runs, free-fire zones, and search-and-destroy missions that would lead ultimately to the destruction of South Vietnam along with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. It would maim the foreign-policy credibility of the Democratic Party, at least temporarily, and terminate the postwar consensus in American foreign policy. More important than anything, it would also lead to the destruction of countless lives, American and Vietnamese, both fighters and (in the case of the Vietnamese) bystanders.

  As with many grand historical events that look inevitable only in retrospect, there was scant premonition of what was to come when dawn arrived in Saigon at 5:42 a.m. on November 1, 1963.1 It was a typically sultry fall morning, a half day off for Catholics to mark All Saints’ Day. But since only about 10 percent of South Vietnam’s population was Catholic, life for most went on as normal. This city of two million people, then still renowned as the “Paris of the Orient,” was, as usual, crowded, noisy, bustling, and odoriferous. Its streets were nearly impassable with the traffic of cars and trucks, ox carts, three-wheeled cyclopousses both pedaled and motorized, not to mention armored personnel carriers, jeeps, and other military vehicles. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands whenever they stepped off a sidewalk.

  It was not just the traffic but also the sights and sounds that could be overwhelming for an outsider. A newly arrived American, a Navy nurse named Bobbi Hovis, noted that “a curious chorus of voices—high-pitched, strident, and overwhelming to the ear—was ever present, and the chanted, spoken, shaken, rattled and drummed sounds of Saigon identified a distinctive community of vendors.”2 She also identified the noisome odors of the city, much reduced in the modern megalopolis but then quite pungent—a mixture of the fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam and the smell of waste, human as well as animal. Given the “almost totally inadequate sanitation facilities,” it was common to see people urinating or defecating in the streets. “With the searing sun beating down upon the walls and sidewalks . . . ,” Hovis recalled years later, with an almost visible wrinkle of her nose, “much of Saigon took on the odor of an enormous outhouse.”3

  Things were considerably more sedate and less miasmic behind the cream-colored stucco walls of the Gia Long Palace, formerly the residence of the French lieutenant governor of Cochin China (southern Vietnam), where servants bustled along the hushed hallways and French was still the language of choice. Here President Ngo Dinh Diem spent long hours over countless cigarettes and small cups of tea, regaling fidgety visitors with his worldview. Here, too, in a “long, high room full of books and mementoes, with a view over the garden,”4 his powerful counselor and brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, unfurled complex conspiracies to protect the embattled regime and strike at its critics. He was assisted in this task by his wife, the attractive and sharp-tongued Madame Nhu. Known as the Dragon Lady to her legions of unadmirers, she favored a beehive hairdo and served as official hostess for the unmarried president.

  The very fact that the Ngos were in residence at the Gia Long Palace was a sign of the turmoil afflicting their increasingly isolated, family-dominated regime. (In addition to Ngo Dinh Nhu, two other brothers wielded considerable power: Ngo Dinh Thuc, the archbishop of Hue, and Ngo Dinh Can, the political boss of the central region.) The previous year, two disaffected air force pilots had bombed the Independence Palace, official residence of the presidents of South Vietnam. The entire left wi
ng was demolished. Madame Nhu suffered minor injuries and three staff members were killed, but Diem emerged unscathed. A bomb had penetrated the very room where he was reading but failed to detonate, a piece of good fortune that the devoutly Catholic president ascribed to “divine intervention.” Subsequently he and his family were forced to relocate to the Gia Long Palace while the neo-Baroque Independence Palace was torn down and a new, modernist structure was built on the site.

  Life had not gotten any easier for the Ngos in 1963. On May 6, the increasingly paranoid Diem had issued an edict banning the public display of religious flags, which, he feared, served to elevate the power of religious groups at the expense of the state. Following the orders of Diem’s overzealous brother, Archbishop Thuc, police in Hue began tearing down flags and banners that Buddhists were posting to celebrate the Buddha’s 2,527th birthday, Vesak Day. The Buddhists were understandably upset, given that just two days earlier Catholics had paraded with their own banners to honor Thuc’s twenty-five years as an archbishop. An angry crowd gathered outside the radio station in downtown Hue on the evening of May 8, 1963. One of their number pulled down the flag of the Republic of Vietnam from the rooftop and replaced it with a Buddhist flag. Other protesters prepared to storm the radio station to force it to play a special message in honor of Vesak. Soldiers and police arrived on the scene, and an angry confrontation ensued. Suddenly there was a loud explosion and gunshots that left nine protesters dead and fourteen wounded. The regime claimed a Communist bomb was responsible, but most observers blamed the security forces. The resulting revulsion against the increasingly authoritarian government was fomented by a minority of militant, urban-based Buddhist monks who accused Diem of anti-Buddhist bias even though the majority of his cabinet members, province chiefs, and generals were Buddhists or Confucians, not Catholics.

  The confrontation took a horrifying turn for the worse on June 11. That morning, as a protest against the government, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist bonze known as Thich Quanc Duc sat down in the lotus position in the middle of a Saigon street while another monk poured gasoline over his head and saffron robe. Then Thich Quanc Duc lit a match and stoically burned to death, never crying out even as his skin blackened and peeled off. Watching this revolting and riveting spectacle was a throng of onlookers, including the Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne. Tipped off by press-savvy monks, Browne snapped an iconic image of this self-immolation that was transmitted around the world and convinced many, not least in the Kennedy administration, that Diem was locked in an unwinnable confrontation with his country’s Buddhist majority that would make it all the harder to resist Communist subversion. Rarely had a single photograph had such a catalyzing effect.