The Road Not Taken Read online

  Ed, for his part, would show indifference to moneymaking throughout his life, choosing instead to pursue advancement in a less remunerative but even more cutthroat business—counterinsurgency—in which he would preach ideals of brotherly love at odds with his grandfather’s self-centered outlook. But, in a paradox that would define his personality, he would not be above employing ruthless tactics that Edward Philips, a hard-nosed businessman, would have approved of.

  BY CONTRAST with Grandfather Philips, who, according to Phil Lansdale, “was unable to complete a sentence without a four-letter word or three,”7 Ed Lansdale’s father, Henry (known as Harry), was a straight arrow. Phil recalled that he saw their father, a devout Christian Scientist, swear and take a drink only once in his entire life. “Dad dressed immaculately and his language was immaculate,” Phil later wrote.8

  The son of a plumber in Washington, D.C., Harry had dropped out of Business High School in the District of Columbia after just two years (1897–99) to support himself, employing the shorthand he had learned in school to work as a clerk and stenographer. He received his first big break in 1903, at age twenty, when he was hired as secretary to the brilliant and mercurial John H. Patterson, founder of National Cash Register—still in business today as NCR, a computer maker. Harry’s brief career at National Cash Register ended abruptly in 1906 when Patterson demanded to know how long he had been working there. “Three years,” the young man replied. “That’s long enough,” said Patterson, and fired him on the spot.9 (Thomas J. Watson Sr., who would become the first great CEO of IBM, would be cashiered by Patterson seven years later in similarly abrupt fashion.)

  In 1905, the year before he was fired, Harry married Edward Philips’s daughter Sarah (known as Sadie), whom he had met while she was living with relatives in Washington. Now he was out of work and had a wife and his first son to support. Desperate for a job, Harry found employment working for Harry Leland, founder of the Cadillac Automobile Company. He was still working at Cadillac when Ed was born. But he would not stay long. Over the next quarter century the peripatetic Harry Lansdale would move from one automotive firm to another, many of them, such as Krit and Hare’s Motors, now long forgotten. Ironically Harry did not enjoy steady success until the Great Depression, helping in the 1930s to form the National Automotive Parts Association, better known as NAPA Auto Parts, which he would run as general manager and vice president until his retirement in 1955.

  “We never knew,” Ed Lansdale was to say, “whether we were going to be rich or poor next week.”10 As boys, Ed and his brothers knew what it was like to be an outsider, because the fluctuations of their father’s career kept the family moving from one part of the country to another at a time when regional variations were much greater than they became after the advent of superhighways, television, and chain stores.

  THE FIRST “horseless carriage” appeared on the streets of Detroit in 1894—a rickety vehicle with no top and no hood and an average speed of seven miles per hour. Its designer and builder, Charles B. King, shocked the public with his bold prediction that these contraptions would “in time supersede the horse.”11 That day was to arrive sooner than all but a few dreamers could have imagined. By 1916, when Teddy Lansdale was an eight-year-old boy living in Detroit, the city was home to thirty-five factories supplying over half the world’s automobiles.12

  The Lansdale family lived in Highland Park, a municipality enclosed by the city of Detroit, located only six miles from downtown. It was a rough, blue-collar neighborhood where Teddy stood out in his fancy, middle-class wardrobe, which made him look, he said, like a “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” When young Teddy had to walk to school in Highland Park in his velvet suit sewn by his mother’s sister, Aunt Adelaide, past Eastern European autoworkers and their families, each block was a fight for survival.13 “I was barely large enough,” he recalled, “to hold up the lid of an ash can as a shield in the boyhood gang tussles on the streets, which started with rocks, then progressed to . . . ‘bee-bee guns.’ ”14

  TEDDY LANSDALE was just as much of an outsider in the family’s next destination—Bronxville, the suburban “village” in Westchester County, New York, where the family lived from 1920 to 1922. Anxious to preserve its status as “the most desired residential village near New York City,” as the local newspaper called it, Bronxville welcomed only white, native-born Christians. Houses were typically sold with “gentlemen’s agreements” designed to keep Jews and Negroes from moving in. Among the wealthy families lured by Bronxville’s appeal were the Kennedys, who moved there in 1929, to a brick mansion on a six-acre estate, when the future president was twelve years old.15

  Moving to this small, homogenous suburb from polyglottal Detroit must have been quite jarring. One of Teddy’s few memories of this town, where he lived from the ages of eleven to thirteen, was that he was set upon by a gang of more privileged kids from a nearby private school. To escape, he ran into the Lansdale yard, where he and his older brother Phil returned fire with “snow rocks”—rocks encased in snow and ice to look like snowballs. “Their iced snowballs stung,” Ed later wrote. “Our iced rocks stunned.” The attackers beat a hasty retreat before this tactical escalation, which showed that Lansdale could already be ruthless when the occasion called for it.16

  YOUNG LANSDALE, by then known as Ed rather than Teddy, continued to stand out just as much when he moved to Los Angeles in 1922, wearing his East Coast, baggy-kneed “knickers”—which the other kids at his junior high school considered effeminate, or “sissy,” attire17—but he would soon become a quintessential Californian.

  L.A.’s population would swell from 576,763 in 1920 to 1.5 million in 1940, not counting what a guidebook described as a “large transient population of tourists, job-hunters, climate-seekers, elderly retired persons and Hollywood hopefuls.” Newcomers were attracted not just by economic opportunity—by the chance to find a good job and buy a home of one’s own—but also by the lure of warm weather, free beaches, and palm trees and aromatic orange groves. Lacking established social structures, Los Angeles was unusually open to ideas, good and bad, to original thinkers and hucksters alike. As a guidebook gushed, it presented “a new sense of freedom” that would tempt newcomers to sample “new pleasures, new habits of living, new religions.” Lansdale imbibed this “sense of freedom” as he was growing up; it helped to mold his conviction that, with his guidance, foreign lands could shake off the constraints of history as easily as his hometown had done.

  Los Angeles also served to shape Lansdale’s predilection for breezy manners and open-neck clothes instead of the more constricting suits and military uniforms most of his contemporaries were wearing and the more stuffy, formal way in which they typically behaved. Los Angeles, after all, was a place where, as a guidebook noted, “boys blaze forth in multihued silk shirts” and “men go hatless, women stockingless.” Lansdale would grow up to become a quintessential maverick who, long before the birth of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, developed an aversion not just to wearing neckties but also to the regimentation that formal business attire denoted.

  WHEN HE was a boy, Ed’s interest in American history was fired by his father, who recalled as they watched a parade of returning World War I veterans “what his great aunt had told him about seeing her grandfather march with other Revolutionary veterans when she was a little girl. It sound[ed] to me like some recent yesterday, as did other family comments of, ‘Oh, yes, he was the one who fought at Yorktown.’ ”18 Looking back on his long-ago boyhood, the elderly Ed Lansdale noted that such remarks “telescoped our country’s history for me in an intimate and wondrous way, bringing our first Fourth of July up until it seemed almost yesterday.”19

  Although he appreciated history, Ed was an indifferent student. He especially struggled with foreign languages—an ironic handicap for someone who later became renowned for his understanding of foreign societies. But like his father, he loved to read, especially pulp novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey. His reading, however, extended
well beyond these juvenile favorites. His most cherished tomes were a “collection of writings from the American Revolution . . . bound in green suede leather.” Most likely he was reading the nine volumes of American Archives, a compilation of the writings of the Founding Fathers published between 1837 and 1853. From its pages, Lansdale developed a devotion to the Revolutionary firebrands Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, both masters of the art of propaganda that he would later practice in both its civilian guise of “advertising” and its military version, “psychological warfare.”20

  Lansdale would often cite a celebrated, if likely apocryphal, exchange between Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. “Where liberty is, there is my country,” said Franklin. Paine supposedly replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine.”21 Paine’s words formed Lansdale’s personal credo, while the Declaration of Independence, which Paine advocated and Adams signed, would form the intellectual heart of his counterinsurgency doctrine.22

  His embrace of the Founding Fathers can be seen as his reaction to the “terrific flux” of American society in the early years of the twentieth century. Some would react to this great dislocation by adopting new philosophies such as progressivism, socialism, fascism, or communism; others, by reasserting religious faith. Neither a communist nor an active Christian, Lansdale would be guided by a personal doctrine of “Americanism” that he traced back to the verities of the Revolutionary generation.

  A FIRM belief in Horatio Alger–like individualism and self-help, which was typical of self-made men in those pre–welfare state days, was inculcated into all of the Lansdales. As a businessman used from an early age to supporting himself, Harry did not believe in providing his boys with an allowance. He forced Edward and his brothers to do chores such as washing the dishes and to take jobs such as delivering newspapers to earn spending money and even to buy their own clothes. As a demonstration of their father’s insistence on self-reliance, Phil Lansdale recalled how his father taught him to swim on Maceday Lake, northwest of Detroit: “He walked out to the end of the pier. He pushed me in the lake, and walked back into the house.” Phil “learned how to swim instantly but . . . wouldn’t speak to Dad for weeks.”23

  It was not just his father who set an example for Edward Lansdale of how to be “independent” and how to “stand on your own”—lessons that would prove valuable when he was dispatched later in life with little preparation or institutional support to unfamiliar societies.24 So did his mother Sarah, Edward Philips’s daughter, a warm-natured woman who did not have much education but who was a resourceful homemaker and a doting parent.25 At a time when women were just being given the right to vote and women drivers were still a rarity, she would race trolley cars in her single-cylinder Cadillac and think nothing of driving thousands of miles with her sons from the East Coast, when the family lived there, to visit her native California in the summer.26 Sadie Lansdale was a much more steady presence in her boys’ lives than their hardworking father, who was seldom home. She passed along a healthy dose of self-confidence to her boys. “She was absolutely convinced,” Ben Lansdale wrote, “that they were the smartest of all children, good in every way, and with the ability to accomplish whatever they set out to do.”27

  Sadie was also an amateur painter, a hobby that Ed picked up. Ben, who drew too, said his brother was “a very good amateur artist” whose “pictures were dynamic, quite unlike the wooden, static things I painted.” As an adult, Lansdale would produce sketches and paintings that he would give away as a mark of friendship.

  Another Lansdale ploy would be to play the harmonica in order to break down barriers with skeptical Asians—a practice made famous by The Ugly American, which has the Lansdale stand-in, Colonel Edwin B. Hillandale, using his mouth organ to charm Filipinos in the provinces and, back in Manila, joining in late-night jam sessions with a dance band, “playing his harmonica close to the mike, improvising like Satchmo himself.”28 It was Lansdale’s father who first taught him to play the harmonica. His mother thought, his brother Ben recalled, that “it would be nice if we boys learned to play musical instruments a little more highly toned.” Ed studied violin with an instructor, but “he never really got his heart into it and consequently never became a very accomplished player.”29 Later, the harmonica sometimes would be the only weapon Lansdale carried.

  RELIGION PLAYED a significant role in Lansdale’s upbringing. Sarah Lansdale had been raised a Protestant, Harry a Catholic. They had been married in a Protestant ceremony, but both converted at some point early in their marriage to a new faith, Christian Science, under the influence of Sadie’s unmarried sister, Adelaide.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Church of Christ, Scientist, founded in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, was a controversial new religion. It became notorious for rejecting medical science and trying to cure disease with faith healers known as practitioners. Eddy’s attack on medicine grew out of her conviction that physical suffering was imaginary. The only thing that was real, she taught, was God, “the immortal Mind,” and “by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God.”30 In Eddy’s view, all disease and other misfortunes could be cured by faith and prayer. She taught that positive thinking could banish evil and transform the world.

  All the Lansdale boys were required to attend Christian Science Sunday school, and although none became devout Christian Scientists when they grew up, all of them, and Ed especially, were to be affected by church teaching in ways they may not have realized. Late in his life, Harry Lansdale was to quote to his son David a passage of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875) that was particularly meaningful to him: “At all times and under all circumstances overcome evil with good. Know thyself and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil.”31 Overcome evil with good: that was Edward Lansdale’s unspoken mantra throughout his years on the front lines of the Cold War. His deeply held assumption that he could transform Pacific societies to live up to America’s ideals had its origins not only in his reading about the American Revolution and in his Los Angeles upbringing but also in the mind-over-matter teaching of his parents’ faith.

  Christian Science was important to Ed Lansdale in another way: it gave him sympathy for the underdog and added to his empathy for minorities. Christian Science had only a hundred thousand adherents at the time of Mary Baker Eddy’s death in 1910.32 In the early days, before the passage of years and the publication of its prestigious newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, had enhanced its legitimacy, the faith was every bit as controversial as contemporary movements such as the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology. In a typical attack, the Reverend A. Lincoln Moore of the Riverside Baptist Church in New York thundered in 1906 that “Christian Science is unchristian, anti-Christian, anti-biblical, Christless, Godless—in brief, Pagan.”33 Such anti–Christian Science bigotry translated into schoolboy taunts when Lansdale was growing up. He later recalled that “it’s not a very popular religion and you’re looked at askance wherever you go.”34

  ED LANSDALE’S growing identification as an outsider, both religiously and geographically, made him unusually cosmopolitan and tolerant for his day. He emphatically rejected the anti-Chinese prejudice that his mother exhibited. “When I went to college at the University of Michigan,” Ed’s brother David remembered, “I made good friends with a Chinese guy. . . . I wanted to bring him out to the house for dinner, and my mother wouldn’t let me. She wasn’t going to have a ‘Chinaman’ in her house. Isn’t that something?”35

  While Sadie’s bigotry seemed outlandish to David in the 1980s, it was hardly unusual for a white Californian of the 1920s and 1930s weaned on lurid and falsified tales of crime, depravity, and drug addiction in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In 1906–07, shortly before Lansdale’s birth, the San Francisco Board of Education mandated that all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children attend a segregated “Oriental School.” In 1913, the California legislature, te
rrified of the so-called “yellow peril,” voted to deny landownership to Japanese immigrants. Japanese Americans were spit upon in the streets and denied service in barbershops, where they were told, “We don’t cut animals’ hair.”36 Even people as liberal, enlightened, and worldly as John F. Kennedy casually referred to Asians as “chinks.”37

  Not Edward Lansdale. He was never contaminated by the bacillus of racism. “Asians were a minority who had a very rough time,” he recalled, but he never “joined with the majority’s denigration of the minority.”38 Growing up in Los Angeles, which by 1930 had the second-highest non-white population of any major city in the country,39 he knew and got along with many people of Asian and Latin American ancestry. Far from harboring, like his mother, anti-Asian prejudice, he was imbued from an early age, his best friend from college remembers, “with the romance of the South Seas, the Orient.” At his college fraternity house, he even wore a sarong—a typical article of clothing on many Pacific islands and in Southeast Asia—in place of pajamas or a nightshirt.40

  Language, skin color, ethnicity: none of it made much of a difference to Edward Lansdale. As a religious and geographical outsider, as well as a maverick by temperament, he invariably identified with minorities even if he belonged to the ethnic majority. He saw people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds as individuals, and sought to appeal to them as equals. This made Lansdale an unusual, and unusually effective, agent of American power—if not always a successful one.