The Road Not Taken Page 13

  For MacArthur, who was obsessive about managing his public image and was contemplating a run for the presidency in 1948,53 the criticism became intolerable when it reached the American press. On October 20, 1946, the New York Times correspondent Richard J. H. Johnston (derided by Lansdale as a “20-day expert on Manila”)54 published an article claiming, “With morale at its lowest ebb, their carelessness in dress, their unconcealed dislike for the Filipinos and their slovenly demeanor, the American troops on occupation duty in the Philippines are being openly referred to as ‘ambassadors of ill will.’ ” No doubt pacing his office as usual and, we’d like to imagine, smoking one of his trademark corncob pipes, MacArthur demanded something be done about the upsurge in anti-Americanism. Since the current Army public information officer (PIO) in Manila, a full colonel, wasn’t getting the job done, he had to be replaced.

  MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Paul J. Mueller, flew to Manila to find a more capable public affairs man. He called on Major Lansdale and told him, “I have checked with the top of the Philippine government, with all the newspapers, with the top social people in the Philippines, with the top business people, and the only American in this command that they all know is you. The only one they speak favorably of as someone they can talk to is you. None of them know the guy who is PIO now including the editors of the papers and the radio stations and they all know you as a friend.”55

  A few days later Lansdale inexplicably began getting calls about press matters. He went straight to Major General George F. Moore, commander of the Philippines Ryukyus Command (as Army Forces Western Pacific had been renamed), to tell him that the calls should be referred to the PIO.

  “Didn’t we tell you?” Moore said. “You are the PIO because MacArthur wants it that way.”

  It was not an honor that pleased Lansdale. He had enjoyed his time in intelligence and viewed this new assignment as an unrewarding diversion that, given the lowly status of public affairs in the military hierarchy, would be a career dead end. (While he was in G-2, he used to joke “that public relations was the lowest form of life in the army.”)56 He protested that as a mere major he was too low-ranking to deal with the heads of the other staff sections, who outranked him. A career army officer who had received his commission in the Coast Artillery Corps a year after Lansdale was born, Moore told Lansdale that those were the orders and they were not subject to discussion. That approach never worked well with Lansdale, who insolently replied, “I went into this army for patriotic reasons and I’ll leave for the same goddamned reasons. I’ll quit. It’s up to you.” General Moore was unused to being talked to that way by mere majors. Just as unexpected was Lansdale’s next demand: that Moore agree in writing to back up Lansdale in any dispute he might have with more senior military officers. Given MacArthur’s diktat, Moore had no choice but to sign the unusual contract that Lansdale drew up.57

  Armed with this authority and a promotion to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, Lansdale set up a new public affairs office in downtown Manila, at a remove from the military headquarters, so that he could be “very close to the newspapers and the media and the businesses—the Philippine people, in other words.” He made clear to reporters and editors that if they had any questions, they could call him directly rather than dealing with the military or embassy bureaucracies, and that he would “respond very quickly.”58

  In what would come later to reflect his overarching philosophy, he instructed his new staff, “It is time we changed our thinking about our public relations. We have been on the defensive. . . . Now is the time to take the initiative. . . . We should keep the journalists (particularly the Americans) so busy with favorable news that any bad breaks for the U.S. Army will be merely incidental and not be blown up beyond their importance.”59 In another memo, he wrote, “We must make certain that everyone understands that this is the Army of a friendly nation, stationed among friends. . . . That’s the guiding principle. Worth repeating. . . . We are soldier sons of people who have fought for liberty and man’s highest ideals. Let’s keep our own honor bright, our ideals high.”60 These were some of the earliest written expressions of the principles that would hereafter guide Lansdale’s counterinsurgency strategy. Whether acting as an intelligence officer, public relations officer, or a more amorphous politico-military adviser, as he would eventually become, Lansdale always focused on winning over the population by acting in a brotherly fashion.

  “We changed the attitude 180 degrees overnight almost,” Lansdale said with his trademark hyperbole. “It got so that after I was there about a week that the only news about Americans that they ever had would be if I had said that was a true story.”61 Lansdale and his subordinates even went around Manila removing “barbed wire barriers from city streets that U.S. military folks had put up to make parking spaces for themselves.”62

  In his new job Lansdale spent a lot of time on the social circuit. “Being PIO means,” he explained, “that you go on everyone’s dinner list, someplace down the table between the hostesses’ embarrassing cousin from Cebu and the Vietnamese representative. It means, too, a coat and tie in a climate worthy of a T-shirt and shorts only. ‘You meet such nice people’ a PIO is told between bouts of dysentery, alcohol poisoning, and plain indigestion. Sometimes that’s true.”63 On one night alone in July 1948, he was invited to “the opening of an art exhibit at the National Museum, a cocktail party for the S.F. trade delegation at the Manila Hotel, a reception for Americans at the Embassy, a housewarming party at Conchita Mestre’s over on Singalong, and a party at the newly opened Sky Room at the Jai Alai.” “The only difference in the parties,” he commented sardonically, “is that you get fried chicken livers at the Philippine Army parties and sliced turkey at American parties.”

  All of these social events “are the meat and potatoes of a public relations man,” Lansdale noted, “but they sure as hell are weary after a time.” One weekend, he wrote, “I got so fed up on social affairs that I sneaked off to the provinces . . . down south to the beach near Siain, Tayabas, where the barrio folk are friendly and a guy can go without shaving and just lie around under the coconut palms on the beach.”64 Unstated was that Pat Kelly undoubtedly accompanied him on such short, but clearly restorative, jaunts.

  BY 1948, with his tour of duty winding down, his work had made him a local celebrity. “Hellsfire,” he wrote, “I’ve even made the movie ads for premieres of Tagalog movies, with pix of me talking into microphones, and had editorials saying what a fine upright lad I am.”65 When Lansdale and his wife and kids sailed for San Francisco on November 19, 1948, he recalled, “a hundred or so Filipino friends heaped flowers upon my family and me and embraced us as the Philippine Constabulary band marched out on the pier next to the U.S. Army band and surprised me with a serenade of my favorite Filipino songs.” He found the sendoff to be “heartwarming,” but it “puzzled the other passengers.” “As we sailed off, a group of them asked me, ‘What in the hell did you do to deserve that?’ ”66 In response, all that the modest major could do was shrug his shoulders.

  In fact, he knew the answer—that he had succeeded in integrating and ingratiating himself with all levels of Philippine society. During the previous three years, he had traveled from the streets of Manila, jammed with pedestrians and jitneys, to the dense jungles and isolated nipa huts of the boondocks. He had met bandits and congressmen, Negrito tribesmen and farmers, soldiers and Huks. He had seen for himself how both the insurgency and the government operated. He had become, in short, one of the leading experts on the Philippines not just in the U.S. armed forces but in the entire U.S. government.

  The following year, Lansdale could boast, in answer to a question on a military personnel form—“Have you any qualifications, as a result of training or experience, which might fit you for a particular position?”—that he had demonstrated the “ability” to win the “confidence [of] Orientals,” and that he was known on a first-name basis by everyone from the president of the republic “down t
o farmers in [the] provinces.”67 That may seem a self-serving judgment, but it was echoed by Philippine observers. The Philippine Armed Forces Journal, for example, wrote in January 1948 that “the present friendly relations which exist between the United States army forces in the Philippines and the Filipino public” was “traceable in a large measure to Major Edward G. Lansdale.” The newspaper praised him for having a “winning personality and knack for winning friends” and for “not a whit of any holier-than-thou attitude.” Those who spoke with Lansdale, the article said, “invariably have become his most vociferous boosters.”

  No one, of course, was a bigger booster than Pat Kelly, now separated from her beloved by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

  6

  The Knights Templar

  I’ve written the career branch in Washington giving them 100 reasons why I should be returned to the Philippines pronto, except I didn’t tell them the main reason.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THE army transport ship General A. W. Greely was carrying Edward Lansdale and his family back to a United States that had changed considerably since his departure in the fall of 1945. In those three years, more than ten million service members had left the military to enter college on the GI Bill, to take new jobs, to marry, and to live in new suburbs such as Long Island’s Levittown. The austerity of the war years had given way to the so-called baby boom and to a buying spree as once war-rationed Americans shopped for boxy cars from Ford and Chevrolet, big electric refrigerators and blenders from General Electric and Oster, and other luxury goods that came to define the postwar world. In that year, 1948, Americans were just starting to watch television, which by the time of the Vietnam War would shape public perceptions of the fighting in ways that no one could have imagined. In that infant age of television, however, Americans were tuning in to see not battlefield reports but, rather, Texaco Star Theater, hosted by the comedian Milton Berle, or a puppet show called Howdy Doody, which would later be regarded by the baby boomers as an emblem of a more innocent era. (Lansdale was slightly behind the times; he would not watch his first television shows until late 1949.)1

  Harry S. Truman, the Missouri haberdasher turned politician, remained president, as he had been when Lansdale first set out for the Philippines, but now by the will of the voters rather than by the caprices of a death at Warm Springs, Georgia. On November 2, 1948, just a few weeks before the Greely steamed out of Manila harbor, Truman had been elected against all odds over the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, leading to, among other things, Lansdale’s losing a bottle of beer in a bet with Pat Kelly on the outcome of the election.2

  Truman was no longer presiding over a country giddy over the end of the greatest war in history. Americans were now increasingly apprehensive about a new conflict with an expanding Communist axis that carried the risk of World War III and a nuclear conflagration of unimaginable horror. The paranoia of the times led to reports of “flying saucers”—a potential enemy from another planet—and to even more widespread reports about an enemy lurking within American society. Loyalty oaths and investigations for suspected “disloyalty” were the order of the day, with J. Edgar Hoover and other “Red hunters” quick to seize on the hysteria to justify ever-expanding investigations. The headlines brimmed with news about Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of espionage, and about the Hollywood Ten, movie industry figures who went to prison for refusing to testify about their Communist associations.

  YET AS the Greely steamed across the vast blue-green expanse of the Pacific, Lansdale’s thoughts were not on politics or world affairs. His letters reveal that all he could think about was his “darling Patching,” as he called Pat. “It’s rough and windy and hard to write with the paper fluttering and the deck dropping out from under me,” he wrote to her early one morning shortly after sailing out, “but you seemed so close to me this morning that I got up about an hour ago and stood on deck to watch the sun come up the way you used to in Atimonan, and thought about you.”3 (Atimonan is located on Lamon Bay, about a hundred miles southeast of Manila.)

  Before leaving, he had committed to memory every last detail of “the most adorable bewitcher I’ve ever known.”4 Now everything he saw aboard the ship reminded him of the lover he had left behind: “I watch a cloud and it starts turning into your face. I note an ankle on the companionway in front of me and start comparing it with those legs of yours disappearing up the back stairs at WDC [the War Damage Commission in Manila, where she worked]. Someone laughs and I see that hoydenish, impish smile of yours and then hear your quizzical ‘why?’ when I’d start grinning back.”5 Even something as prosaic as a bowl of cream of tomato soup reminded him so much of Pat that, he wrote, “I couldn’t eat the rest of my dinner and went out and walked the deck, thinking of you laughing about such a thing.”6

  Hopelessly smitten with his paramour, he kept thinking of a hundred things he wanted to do with his faraway lover—“to cruise down to Mindanao with you, drive up to the northern end of Luzon, maybe really go to Sorsogon [the southernmost province of Luzon] after all, but most of all just to be with you happy, happy that you’re close and new things are ahead and we’ll share them.”7 He found it “strange how lonely it is for me with hundreds of people around”—including his own family—“none of them with your precious magic.” “I have to fight with myself to put something else in letters to you,” he confessed, “other than I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over again, yet that’s what I want to say.”8

  Pat wasn’t the only person with whom Lansdale shared his feelings. He came clean with Helen, too, and even asked her for a divorce. Believing that the relationship would be transient and that being home could attenuate his feelings for his distant mistress, she refused. “My wife only agrees to a separation for now. No more. To keep any ‘hussy’ from ‘getting’ me,” the dejected husband wrote to Pat on July 5, 1949. In another letter, he told Pat that Helen is “asking how many illegitimate children I have and threatens to investigate, while offering me love, for the children’s sake.”9

  Lansdale could have gone ahead with a contested divorce despite his wife’s wishes, but he chose not to do so. “I haven’t made a clear cut break yet because I didn’t have you by my side giving me the peculiar courage this seems to call for,” he told Pat. “You know how loyal I am to people—and this has been rather terrific on me. Particularly when you write that you’re sort of falling out of love. I don’t believe it, Pat my beloved, and we’re going to spend a lot of our lives together. . . . I haven’t even kissed anyone else since I met you and that’s a pleasure that’s hard for someone like me to forgo. . . . You’re my woman and I want you!”10

  Often throughout the winter and spring of 1949 Ed berated himself for not being able to get a divorce. “I’m mad at myself for giving in to the conventions of polite society and getting so far away from you,” he told Pat.11 A month later, after a long night of heavy drinking, he assured her, “I’m hoping that my own present affairs straighten out as quickly as possible—because we belong together.”12 He formally asked Pat to marry him. “I want you to know I love you and love you and love you and love you and if you were here I’d chew you up,” he assured her.13

  By the summer of 1949, the sobering realities of American law began to dissipate his dream of divorce. “I want you for keeps,” he wrote Pat, “but lawyers tell me I cannot beat the rap, with my kids, etc., today.”14 In the late 1940s, getting a contested divorce was no easy matter.15 California, like other states in the days before no-fault divorce laws, required the plaintiff to prove grounds for dissolving the marriage, such as adultery, extreme cruelty, desertion, incurable insanity, or willful neglect. It was certainly understandable that Ed shied away from such a proceeding, knowing that it could adversely affect his career prospects in the Air Force, to say nothing of the well-being of his two sons. Whatever he told Pat, he also was likely conflicted in his own mind about breaking up his marriage as his parents’ ma
rriage had been sundered. Like many children of divorce, he would not have been eager to emulate his father’s example of leaving his mother, having seen for himself the emotional damage inflicted on the family.

  Although Pat was hurt by Lansdale’s failure to get a divorce, she also fretted, and for good reason, about how she would be treated as a Filipina if she moved to a country where Japanese Americans had been interned in camps only three years before and racial minorities continued to suffer severe discrimination. Lansdale saw for himself the virulence of Jim Crow when in the fall of 1949 he briefly moved to Alabama to attend an Air Force course. He immediately noticed “the ‘colored entrance’ signs on restaurants and hotels” and the segregated compartments on trains.16 Lansdale tried to reassure Pat: “You are a beautiful and wonderful person, with ability to make friends and find happiness any place. That’s all that really counts anywhere in the world.”17 But in the United States of the late 1940s, where immigration laws had stanched the flow of Asian immigrants since 1924, Asian Americans were few outside of Hawaii and the West Coast, and Pat’s skin was not the right color for much of white society.