The Road Not Taken Read online

  Thus began a long process that eventually resulted, with Lansdale’s encouragement, in the Philippine armed forces utilizing some of the Negritos as intelligence gatherers and scouts against the Communist rebels known as the Huks.

  THE NEGRITOS were not the only Filipinos won over by Lansdale. So was practically everybody he met. One of his Filipino friends later said, “Ed had a way, he could make a friend of everybody except Satan, I think. And he was the one American that was liked by practically every Filipino.”19 An American correspondent in the Philippines noted that “he had a good way of talking with the Filipinos on the basis of man to man, no condescension, no talking down. They appreciated that after so many years of the Japanese and American colonials.”20

  Lansdale amply returned their affection. “Filipinos and I fell in love with each other. Almost everything I did there was done with tremendous brotherly love,” he later said.21 But some Filipinos—and, more to the point, Filipinas—he loved more than others.

  5

  In Love and War

  Pat [Kelly] showed me all these things up in the mountains that I would have never known otherwise, and very few people have ever known.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  ED Lansdale’s closest Filipino friend initially was Juan C. Orendain, an American-educated lawyer with the quintessentially American nickname Johnny, who happened to be as informal and friendly as Lansdale himself. He “joins with me,” Lansdale wrote on January 11, 1946, “in a quiet crusade against neckties”: “Johnny is now . . . the only man to show up at Cabinet meetings without tie or coat, while some of the fussier ministers glare at him.”1 Lansdale became very close not only with Johnny but also with his wife, Louise, and their children, who called him “uncle” and for some of whom he served as godfather.

  Beyond their dislike of formal attire, Orendain and Lansdale were bound together by a romantic vision of America as a force for good. Orendain related to Lansdale the story of how as a little boy on the island of Panay he met his first Americans during the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902. “Rumors of the approach of ‘savage’ Americans had spread dramatically. Johnny was sure that they ate little boys like him for breakfast.” The whole family tried to flee, but Johnny and a smaller brother got tired and sat down to rest. “Suddenly what Johnny took to be a giant in blue was standing before the boys. He was smiling and holding out something to Johnny in his hand. It was an apple. Thus Johnny met two things brand new to him, an American and an apple. Johnny took the apple to his parents and neighbors hiding in the hills and convinced them that the Americans were friendly. They returned home. Soon afterwards, an American sergeant started a school in the barrio, with Johnny among the students.”2

  Orendain later went to law school at Stetson University in Florida, where he learned to make the best apple pies Lansdale had ever tasted, and grew up conditioned to think almost as well of the United States as Lansdale himself did. That made Orendain a natural object of suspicion under the Japanese occupation. At the very first dinner that Lansdale shared with the Orendain family in 1945, he heard the story of how during the war they were “stopped by Japanese troops and their five-year-old son sang to the soldiers the only song he knew, ‘God Bless America.’ The non-English-speaking soldiers patted him on the head for the pretty song and fortunately didn’t ask him for his name, which was MacArthur Orendain.”3

  One day in early 1946, a few months after Lansdale’s arrival in the Philippines, Orendain stopped by his quarters with a friend in the car—a good-looking war widow in a white dress. Her full name was Patrocinio Yapcinco Kelly, but she was known simply as Pat Kelly. She was then working for a Manila newspaper. Before long she would go to work at the U.S. War Damage Commission. Later she would spend many years working for the U.S. Information Agency at the U.S. embassy in Manila. Talking to her, Lansdale saw at once that she was “full of fun”—and full of good information, too.

  Lansdale was intensely interested in a Communist-dominated rebel group that had once fought against the Japanese and was now beginning to fight against the independent government of the Philippines. They had been known as the Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or People’s Anti-Japanese Army, but, in emulation of Mao Zedong’s forces, they had recently changed their name to Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan, or People’s Liberation Army. The Huks (pronounced hooks) were led by urban Marxist intellectuals, but their foot soldiers were ordinary young farmers fed up with the abuses of the Philippines’ feudal system, in which a handful of wealthy families owned the land and the vast majority of peons had to work it for negligible recompense. Pat Kelly had gone to high school with Luis Taruc, the Huks’ military leader, in Tarlac City, north of Manila, in an area of central Luzon, the Philippines’ principal island, where the Huks were particularly strong. Lansdale was eager to meet Taruc and other Huks. Pat volunteered to serve as his guide. Together they would venture out to the roughest backcountry of Luzon in dangerous and uncomfortable circumstances. Thus was born a friendship and soon a romance.

  “I can still see you the first time I ever saw you, sitting up so, in a white dress, in Johnny’s jeep,” Ed wrote to Pat a few years later. “You interested and excited me then, Pat, although I didn’t know how deeply in love with you I was until we went to Baler [Bay].” (The trip, to a beach 140 miles northeast of Manila, took place later in the year.)4

  Meeting Pat would spark the most intense and extended love affair of Lansdale’s life. It would also lead him indirectly to his greatest success in the Philippines, his acute and sympathetic understanding of the Filipino people being intensified and extended by his relationship with this highly perspicacious and alluring Filipina.

  AS LONG as Western men have been journeying to the Orient (a term that once encompassed all of Asia and North Africa), they have, inevitably, fallen in love with the women they found there. The practice has a provenance as ancient as the stories of Antony and Cleopatra, Paris and Helen of Troy. As soon as Europeans reached the Americas, Africa, and Asia beginning in the fifteenth century, conjugal relations with local women followed. The Age of Discovery, in other words, was also an age of sexual discovery, with all kinds of tropes and innuendos that are now considered racist. What was the erotic fascination of the foreign and hence mysterious East? A good part of the appeal, as the onetime New York Times Beijing bureau chief Richard Bernstein notes, lay in “an Eastern erotic culture that had always been more frank and less morally fastidious about sexual needs than the Western Christian erotic culture, which valued exclusivity with a single lifetime partner and associated sex for pleasure with sin.”5 Countless travel accounts echoed the observations of François Pyrard, a French sailor who spent five years in captivity in the Maldives Islands in the early seventeenth century. He wrote that “the women of all India are naturally much addicted to every kind of ordinary lewdness.”6 This image of the East as an erotic playland was further reinforced by the Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton, who translated two erotic masterpieces, The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, into English. Like later advocates of “free love,” Burton inveighed against the “silly prejudice and miserable hypocrisy” of Europe and advocated “the comparatively unrestrained intercourse between men and women” which supposedly existed “among savages and barbarians,” because it “relieved the brain through the body.”7

  Many years later, the literary scholar Edward Said would accuse Western explorers of being invidious “Orientalists” who exploited the people they came into contact with. There is an element of truth in the charge, but many were also driven by genuine enthusiasm for discovery, and the exploitation was not entirely one-sided—many poor Asian women saw relationships with Westerners as an opportunity for economic betterment and an escape from tightly constricted lives in traditional societies.

  While conceivably beneficial to both sides, the possibility for tragedy always lurked in these cross-cultural romances. The best-known work on this theme is Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly, which wa
s based on actual incidents that had occurred in late nineteenth-century Japan. The protagonist is Pinkerton, an American naval officer living in Nagasaki who, through a marriage broker, finds a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San (“butterfly” in Japanese). The two get married before Pinkerton sails off for America. He is gone three years. The whole time, as any opera lover knows, Cio-Cio-San pines for him and refuses an offer of marriage from a Japanese prince. But when Pinkerton finally returns, he brings back a new American wife. Once they learn that Cio-Cio-San has given birth to Pinkerton’s son, the couple unfeelingly decides to adopt the boy. Hiding her own emotions, Cio-Cio-San agrees to give up her son, but when Pinkerton arrives to collect him she cuts her own throat, leaving the child clutching an American flag. No doubt there were many such heartbreaks—even some suicides—that resulted from liaisons between Western men and Asian women. Pat Kelly was made of sterner, more substantial stuff than Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San, but her own East–West romance with Edward Lansdale would have its own share of frustration and heartbreak.

  PART OF Pat’s appeal for Ed was the timeless attractions of youth and beauty. She was fourteen years younger than Lansdale’s wife: born on March 13, 1915, she was thirty-one years old in 1946, black-haired and attractive, while Helen was forty-five and prematurely gray. Ed himself was thirty-eight, equidistant in age between the two women, and he was lonely stationed abroad without his family. It was natural that he would take a liking to the “beautiful as well as brainy”8 younger woman, who was full of knowledge about the problems that most concerned him—issues of which his wife, back home, was entirely unaware. And all the more so because Pat was possessed of a livelier personality than his Stateside wife, according to those who knew both women.

  Helen Lansdale was an old-fashioned, self-conscious “lady” who had gone to a finishing school and behaved according to the prim standards of the early twentieth-century provincial American upper class, Dunkirk, New York, branch. Her mise-en-scène was a world in which women wore white gloves, ate small, crustless snacks known as “tea sandwiches,” and made polite, uncontroversial conversation. She was not happy that her husband’s work interfered with her dream of having an intact family in genteel conditions back in the United States.9

  Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, who served as Lansdale’s deputy at the Pentagon in the early 1960s, later said,

  I do not recall Helen Lansdale as being intellectually inclined or curious about what was going on in the world in general, especially in the realm of U.S. foreign policy and national security. . . . She was more of a 19th rather than 20th Century lady, more comfortable with the social customs and cultural mores of that period. And Ed, while deeply steeped in history, was more of a 20th Century figure who was constantly probing the future. She was looking back, he was looking forward. Helen was family-oriented, would have been at her happiest in a small cottage with a white picket fence and raising children. Ed enjoyed a secluded rendezvous, a mountain hideout or a small hidden beach—but only to rest up and gather his strength for the next adventure.10

  Pat—more curious, intellectually sophisticated, opinionated, and outgoing—was instinctively in greater sync with Ed’s personality and interests. She had, according to Rufus Phillips, another of Lansdale’s associates, a “very vibrant Filipino personality” and was “a lot of fun to be around.” She was also full of “shrewd observations” on Philippine politics, if also, on occasion, “pretty acerbic” and “sarcastic.”11 Pat’s grandchildren would say she had “great looks and an outgoing personality,”12 adding that, unlike most Filipino women of her time, who were raised to be quiet and meek, she “commanded” a room.13 Little wonder, then, that Pat “bewitched” Lansdale.14

  PAT WAS one of six children of Fernando Yapcinco and Maxima Alcedo. Both parents were half Chinese and half Filipino, hailing from Pampagna Province, in central Luzon. Her father was one of the first surveyors in the Philippines, and he traveled all over the country doing work for the government. Pat was born in the Visayas when her father was working there; her family thereafter joked that she was a vampire because Filipinos believed that vampires dwelled there. Tarlac Province, where Pat grew up, was a land of lush vegetation, towering mountains, and sprawling sugar and rice plantations. It had been a center of resistance to Manila ever since a 1660 uprising against Spanish rule. The existence of the plantations and the propensity to revolt were not unrelated: Tarlac suffered all the inequities of the Philippines’ feudal landownership system. Tarlac was dominated by two intermarried clans: the Aquinos and the Cojuangcos. In Pat’s youth the leading political figure was “Don” Benigno S. Aquino Sr., a future speaker of the National Assembly, and the leading landowner was “Don” José Chichioco Cojuangco, scion of a wealthy sugar clan. Aquino’s son Benigno Jr. (“Ninoy”) married Cojuangco’s daughter Corazon (“Cory”), thus producing a political dynasty: Both his wife, Cory, and his son Benigno Aquino III would become president. Pat’s lineage was far more modest, but in a country where literacy was a status symbol, she was far closer in background to the wealthy Aquinos and Cojuangcos than to the desperately poor, uneducated sharecroppers who toiled on the plantations.15

  When the Japanese attacked the Philippines in 1941, Pat was working in the library of the Manila Tribune. That she was working at all made her unusual among Filipino women of that era. That she waited until she was twenty-six years old to marry made her doubly unusual; at that time, recalled her granddaughter, many Filipinas were getting married as young as sixteen.16 Her husband was James Kelly, an orphan of Irish Filipino ancestry and thus another offspring of East–West romance. He died of tuberculosis in 1944, a victim of the shortage of medical care in that year of total war, leaving Pat not only his last name but a daughter, Patricia, born just a few months before his demise. Philippine society frowned upon single mothers and working mothers, and Pat was both, but she was not overly concerned about social conventions. After her father’s death in 1949, Pat would become head of her whole family, displaying her business acumen by running a family-owned store and modest real estate holdings in Tarlac while performing a full-time job in Manila. Pat, then, was an independent woman who beguiled Lansdale in ways his more domestic wife had never done.17

  Lansdale’s love letters reveal just why he was so taken with his new paramour. He told Pat that “you had the brightest mind I’d met in the Philippines” (a comment that might seem racist if taken out of context, but in fact Lansdale was greatly impressed by many Filipinos), “you are the most intensely interesting person I’ve met,” and “you’re uncanny in your great gift for understanding people.” Sounding like many a smitten lover, he was enchanted “with those legs of yours,” “that glorious lilt of hips and fanny you achieve somehow in your walk,” “that favorite spot of mine behind your knee,” “that hoydenish impish smile of yours,” “that delightful glint in the eye that you have and that makes you so much fun to be with.”18 As if attempting to channel Cole Porter, he called her “the most delectable, intriguing, and wisest half of me.”19 In turn, Pat teased Ed constantly and he loved it. “If I didn’t enjoy your needling so much, I’d give you a spanking,”20 he said. Like Ed, Pat cultivated a hard-boiled exterior but could be very emotional. He called her “sophisticated a bit on the outside and so warm and spicy inside that worldliness.” “Hecks sake,” he wrote in the innocent slang of the 1940s, “no wonder I tumbled for all time.”21

  “I have it bad, my beloved,” he wrote to her two years after their first meeting. “Yes, I love you. . . . You’re so very very much in my thoughts and in my being.”22 He recalled moments they had shared together: “How can I forget that drizzle at Baler Bay . . . or the cold night near the Experimental Farm at Baguio when you were so warm all snuggled close or that next-to-last visit to Atimonan [a beach town] when we were so hungry for each other.”23 He remembered, too, “those noons again by the Manila Hotel and my head in your lap and I could almost feel you under my head and see how you looked from a lap’s eye vi
ew.”24 In another letter, he recalled “the honest way you used to drink bourbon and water—when we weren’t working on gin,”25 and the way she would put “half a jar of mustard on one hamburger.”26

  His interest was not transitory, nor limited to physical passion. “You’re the one person I want to share my life with . . . ,” he wrote, adding, “If it’s love, it’s something I’ve never known before. I’m just not a whole person away from you, and cannot understand why God brought us together when I had previous obligations”—an oblique reference to his existing marriage—“unless He meant us for each other.”27

  IT IS not always clear, in retrospect, when Lansdale was traveling with Pat Kelly around the Philippines or when he was traveling by himself or with male friends such as the Associated Press reporter Spencer Davis, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Ed’s periodic journal entries make no mention of Pat, because they were meant to be read by his wife and brothers. But it is clear that she was along on many of his post-1945 expeditions, and it was her role as an invaluable intermediary and interpreter, not only of language but also of customs and mindsets, that would account for so much of his success with the Filipino people. He was later to say, “Pat showed me a lot of the back country that the Huks went through. . . . She showed me all these things up in the mountains that I would have never known otherwise, and very few people have ever known.”28