Review by New York Times Review
Could it have turned out differently? Even before the guns fell silent in Vietnam, Americans began debating whether an alternate strategy might have brought success in the war. For some revisionist analysts, the path to victory would have involved more firepower from an earlier point on more parts of enemy territory. In this interpretation, overcautious civilians compelled the United States military to fight "with one arm tied behind its back." Never mind that this ostensibly "limited" war saw eight million tons of bombs dropped by American and allied aircraft on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1962 and 1973, killing many hundreds of thousands of civilians, or that the United States sprayed some 19 million gallons of defoliants on South Vietnam in an attempt to deny enemy forces jungle cover and food. Never mind that the American troop commitment at its height reached more than half a million men, or that more than 58,000 of them never made it back alive. The more interesting and at first glance attractive argument is the opposite one: that the answer in Vietnam was to deploy less military force, not more. Washington planners, this perspective holds, erred in seeing the struggle principally as a conventional military conflict when what really mattered was the human dimension. They forgot that in a war of this kind it was not enough to be against Communism; one had to be for something. The key to victory lay in meeting the needs of people where they lived, in responding to their aspirations, in winning, as the saying went, their "hearts and minds." One man personified this outlook more than perhaps anyone else: Edward Lansdale, the larger-than-life intelligence operative of America's Cold War who is the subject of Max Boot's judicious and absorbing, if not fully convincing, new book, "The Road Not Taken." A dashing champion of counterinsurgency who helped thwart a rebellion in the Philippines and plotted to oust Fidel Castro, Lansdale was present at the creation of South Vietnam in 1954 as an important adviser to Prime Minister (and later President) Ngo Dinh Diem. His influence would fade, but not his belief that the struggle for Vietnam had to be won - and could be, provided American strategists employed the right combination of political and military measures. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, brings solid credentials to this enterprise, having written well-received histories of guerrilla warfare and America's "small wars." Here he draws on a range of material, official and personal, including a stash of love letters between Lansdale and his Filipino mistress. The narrative dispenses briskly and effectively with the details of Lansdale's early life, including his college years at U.C.L.A. and his successful entry into the advertising industry, where he learned strategies of psychological manipulation that he later applied asa covert warrior in Southeast Asia. A stint as an intelligence officer under "Wild Bill" Donovan in the wartime Office of Strategic Services convinced him that this work should be his life's career. What emerges is a picture of a man who from an early point possessed an unusual ability to relate to other people, a stereotypically American can-do optimism, an impatience with bureaucracy and a fascination with psychological warfare. All these qualities were on display in Lansdale's first major postwar posting, in the newly independent Philippines, where on behalf of the C.I.A. he helped suppress the left-wing Hukbalahap insurgency in the early 1950s. But it was in Vietnam that Lansdale would achieve his greatest renown - and frustration. Neil Sheehan's assertion, in "A Bright Shining Lie," that "South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale," is surely an exaggeration, but it speaks to Lansdale's fundamental importance. Beginning in mid-1954 he ran a covert intelligence operation that sent sabotage teams to North Vietnam and helped facilitate the flow of refugees from north to south. More consequentially, Lansdale was from the start the closest American adviser to Ngo Dinh Diem, his car often parked outside the Saigon leader's residence deep into the night. When in early 1955 the regime faced violent challenges to its rule from sects within South Vietnam, Lansdale persuaded the Eisenhower administration to stand firm with Diem, a critical move that in all likelihood preserved Diem's hold on power. This proved to be the high point of Lansdale's influence in Saigon - and, for that matter, Washington. Diem grew tired of the American upbraiding him for undemocratic moves like closing opposition newspapers. "Do you think that's the right thing for 'the father of his country' to do?" Lansdale asked, to which Diem replied, "Stop calling me papa!" Even as his clout diminished and his worries grew over the regime's coercive actions, Lansdale extolled Diem's achievements and urged continued American support. No other plausible leader existed who could take the fight to the Vietcong. For Lansdale, as for Boot, Diem's ouster and murder in a coup d'etat in late 1963 backed by the United States was a watershed moment, a calamitous development from which the war effort never fully recovered. There's something to this argument - it required about four years for the politics in South Vietnam to settle, and the Communists took advantage of the turmoil - but it misses how bleak and unsustainable the situation was with Diem. Communist forces were already gaining momentum in the countryside after 1962, which is partly why the South Vietnamese military had grown so disgruntled and why the Kennedy administration wanted a change. With his shallow conception of leadership and easy resort to repression, Diem, a Roman Catholic, had long since alienated powerful segments of South Vietnamese society, including the leaders of the Buddhist majority, and his regime enjoyed scant support among the peasantry. The coup against him was enormously popular. It's hard to see Diem surviving in power for long regardless of what John F. Kennedy did in the fall of 1963. To his credit, Lansdale always emphasized the need to focus on developments within South Vietnam. More than many American officials, he understood that even if one somehow stopped the flow of men and materiel from the North, the southern insurgency would remain a formidable threat to the Saigon regime. Bombing North Vietnam was therefore no solution. Unshakable in his conviction that the American way was right for everyone, Lansdale nevertheless insisted on the need to show empathy for local values and practices, to spend time with villagers, and he perceived - to a degree at least - the dilemma at the heart of American strategy: What do you do when the destruction deemed necessary to defeat an insurgency alienates the very population you seek to bring over to the government's side? Many of Lansdale's ideas, however, were kooky: He advocated distributing counterfeit official documents in North Vietnam to sow confusion and fear, providing the Vietcong with booby-trapped ammunition intended to blow up in their faces and having Saigon leaders give "fireside chats" â la Franklin D. Roosevelt - and he understood Vietnamese society and politics less well than this admiring book suggests. His well-founded concern about the problems posed by pervasive South Vietnamese official corruption (grasped, contrary to Boot's claim, by virtually every American intelligence analyst after 1965) did not keep him from championing the unscrupulous, impetuous and flamboyant Nguyen Cao Ky for Saigon's leadership - he of the aviator sunglasses, purple silk scarf and pearl-handled revolver. Ky's embrace of American largess made him the very symbol of corruption in the eyes of a great many Vietnamese (and he once told stunned journalists that his only hero was Adolf Hitler). There is power in Boot's conclusion that Lansdale "never wanted to see half a million American troops thrashing around Vietnam, suffering and inflicting heavy casualties. His approach, successful or not, would have been more humane and less costly." In this sense, the Lansdale way was indeed "the road not taken." Whether that road would have led to the destination he so wanted to reach, however, is doubtful. As much as this irrepressible Cold Warrior might have thought otherwise, Vietnam for the United States was destined to be what it had always been: a riddle beyond American solution. ? Fredrik logevall, a professor of history and international affairs at Harvard, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 21, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* There are several outstanding books combined into one here. Boot, the author of Invisible Armies (2013) and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has provided the first thorough biography of Edward Lansdale (thought by some to be the model for the CIA agent in Graham Greene's The Quiet American). Secondarily, this is a superb history of the Vietnam conflict and includes fascinating military detail and a firm grasp of both American and Vietnamese politics. It also has a personal dimension, as Boot attempts to counter the accepted view of Lansdale as the first in a long line of American imperialists who pulled the U.S. into the disorienting vortex of a grisly and seemingly interminable guerrilla war. Boot argues, on the other hand, that if the military had paid more attention to Lansdale's hearts and minds approach to Vietnam a position he developed in the Philippines and before we might well have escaped the quagmire long before we did. Boot's expertise in counterinsurgency makes his arguments compelling, and his rich portrait of Lansdale as a creative if unpredictable maverick adds a new level of understanding not only to Lansdale himself, but also to the entire Vietnam era. This important book substantially enhanced by excerpts from Lansdale's own writing and augmented by outstanding maps deserves to be read alongside Neil Sheehan's award-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988).--Levine, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Military historian and neoconservative commentator Boot (Invisible Armies) outshines everything ever written about the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) in this exhaustive, fact-filled, and analytical biography. Lansdale was initially an OSS man who was instrumental in defeating a Communist insurgency in the Philippines known as the Huk Rebellion in the early 1950s. He then headed the first undercover U.S. operation in the nascent nation of South Vietnam in June 1954, remaining an important voice in Vietnam War policy until the early 1960s as the debate raged over how to stop North Vietnam and the Vietcong. According to Boot, Lansdale consistently advocated what has come to be known as counterinsurgency-winning "hearts and minds"-and strongly opposed bringing in massive numbers of U.S. combat troops. Throughout, Boot argues forcefully that ignoring Lansdale's advice was a big reason that the Vietnam War turned out to be a disaster. In his afterword, Boot urges American leaders to adopt a form of "Lansdalism"-learn, like, and listen-and apply it to foreign interventions as was done in 1980s El Salvador and 2000s Colombia. This is a detailed, warts-and-all examination of Lansdale's complex professional and personal lives. Maps & illus. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Air Force officer Edward Lansdale (1908-87) remains a controversial figure in the history of the Vietnam conflict. In their books, David Halberstam and Michael Herr excoriated him. He's a hero in Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer's The Ugly American. Here, military historian Boot (Invisible Armies) argues that Lansdale's ideas offered our best attempt at success in this new kind of war. While in the Philippines (1950-53), Lansdale orchestrated reformer Ramon Magsaysay's victory at the polls, which led to peace with the Communist Party. But in Vietnam, he faced tougher adversaries. Lansdale was recalled from Vietnam in 1957. Six years later, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown with U.S. support. Rule by the military ensued, with each new leader as corrupt as the previous one. Lansdale never regained his old touch. His approach of building friendships with indigenous leaders lost out to advocates of big guns and blanket bombing. VERDICT Boot has done a masterly job resuscitating the reputation of a man whom CIA director William Colby called "one of the ten greatest spies of all time." A solid military history and biography, this book will appeal to lovers of both genres.-David Keymer, Cleveland © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A probing, timely study of wrong turns in the American conduct of the Vietnam War.A historian of America's "small wars" with a keen eye for the nuances of counterinsurgency, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Boot (Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, 2013, etc.) finds a perfect personification of America's Vietnam in Edward Lansdale (1908-1987), much as Neil Sheehan did with John Paul Vann 30 years ago with his book A Bright Shining Lie. Lansdale was even less inclined than Vann to make nice with the top brass; as Boot writes, "he viewed the bureaucracy as an enemy and, by so doing, turned it into one." Never underestimate the power of a bureaucrat to thwart one's aims. But Lansdale, an architect of the policy shorthanded "hearts and minds," had a number of convictions hard won in the field, including the truth that no insurgency can be resisted if it has popular support. The idea, then, is to battle official corruptionno easy task given that Boot's narrative takes off during the coup that, to John Kennedy's consternation, ended in the assassination of Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diemand to make sure that the leaders of villages, military cadres, and so on are worth following. Fighting corruption and bureaucracy were battles enough, to say nothing of a huge communist army. Furthermore, the American military, mistrustful of South Vietnam and packed with careerist officers, took over the fight from the people whose war it was, making it "an increasingly Americanized war" as early as 1965. Like Lansdale, Boot understands the role of nation-building in such struggles as Iraq and Afghanistan, and he takes to heart Lansdale's pointed lesson in shunning vast compounds of invading foreigners that "overwhelm the recipients" of American aid, as happened in Vietnam and beyond.Controversial in some of its conclusions, perhaps, as Lansdale's arguments were in their day, and essential reading for students of military policy and the Vietnam conflict. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
