The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based on mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
BY the time that Edward Lansdale returned home to Eisenhower’s America at the end of 1956, he had a firmly established reputation inside the U.S. government not only as the country’s most successful political warrior but also as an inveterate maverick at odds with whichever bureaucracy he happened to find himself in. Lansdale had been fighting with his bosses since his days in San Francisco advertising. He operated best on his own, or at most leading a small team, and he constantly vented his frustrations with the workings of the U.S. government. Referring to visiting “American psywar people,” he wrote in 1956, “One of the really amazing things is some of them actually talk Washington gobbledygook as normal conversational language! It surprised some of my gang, so I told them that such people were not too certain of themselves and so covered up their lack of certainty or depth by talking in a way that sounds profound but is impossible to analyze.”1 Given his contempt for bureaucrats, it was not easy for Lansdale, once he left Vietnam, to find a niche in what he referred to as “the Washington jungle”2 or, alternatively, “the squirrel cage of Washington.”3
Senior executives at the CIA, from Allen Dulles on down, told Lansdale that he was welcome to work in their headquarters, still located in temporary buildings along the Washington Mall.4 There was some talk of sending Lansdale to Egypt to work with Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Lansdale put a stop to that by pointing out “how the Quai d’Orsay [the French Foreign Ministry] would react,” given his feuding with the French in Indochina.5 No other job was forthcoming from the CIA. “My present shop simply didn’t come through with anything concrete, except that they loved me,” Lansdale wrote to his old deputy, Charles “Bo” Bohannan. “I told them I loved them too, and let it go at that.”6
Protestations of mutual affection notwithstanding, it was hardly a surprise that the CIA was not all that eager to find headquarters employment for Lansdale and that he was not that eager to press for a job there. Lansdale had had heated and continuing clashes with many of the career intelligence officers at the CIA, most recently over whether the agency would support Ngo Dinh Nhu’s pro-government political parties. Ed wrote in 1957 to Bohannan that George Aurell (“Big George”), the CIA station chief in Manila, regarded both of them “with undying hatred,” and was reportedly “getting drunk at cocktail parties, receptions, etc.,” naming them “as Company,” and “sounding off to all and sundry that there is [a] new era now, without the bribery that we did.”7
This was not just a clash of personalities but also a difference of ideas about how the CIA should operate. The mainstream view at the spy agency held then, and still does, that the job of a case officer is to create “formal, controlled agent relationships”—that is, to pay or blackmail foreigners into spying on their countries.8 Lansdale was willing to give funding to his friends in the Philippines or Vietnam to help them accomplish certain tasks, whether to publish a pro-Magsaysay newspaper or to lure sect troops over to Diem’s side, but he did not believe in creating formal reporting relationships with agents. In his Saigon Military Mission report, Lansdale went out of his way to express his dissent from CIA orthodoxy: “There is a lesson here for everyone concerned with ‘control’ of foreign persons and groups. The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based on mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish. Once established, the foreign person or groups serve our own best national interests by serving their own national interests, which coincide with ours.”9 This view was anathema at the CIA, where cynical intelligence officers viewed it as hopelessly naïve.
Lansdale was hardly the first or last covert operative to run up against this prejudice. So did, among others, Robert Ames, the CIA’s premier Middle East case officer in the 1970s and 1980s. Ames established an invaluable friendship with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Ali Hassan Salameh, who served as an informal American conduit to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Yet, as the historian Kai Bird has shown, CIA colleagues repeatedly sabotaged the relationship and almost drove Salameh away by demanding, over Ames’s protests, that he sign a contract to become a controlled agency asset—something that he refused to do.10
Not finding a niche in the intelligence bureaucracy, Lansdale in 1957 severed his relationship with the CIA, which had begun in 1950 when he had gone to work for its forerunner, the Office of Policy Coordination. His most productive and influential years had been spent as a CIA officer, and his legend would forever be intertwined with the history of the spy agency, but now he was hanging up his cloak and dagger, choosing instead to join the staff of the Air Force in the world’s biggest and possibly most depressing office building.
THE PENTAGON had been erected hurriedly during World War II by fifteen thousand workers laboring around the clock for sixteen months to create a new home for the fast-expanding Army bureaucracy. (The other services moved in after the war.) The five-story, five-sided design was meant to minimize the use of steel, which was in short supply in wartime, so it featured concrete ramps rather than steel elevators. “The Building,” as it came to be known, had five rings of drab offices housing twenty-seven thousand functionaries, more than seventeen miles of gray corridors, seventy-seven hundred no-frills, institutional windows, eighty-five thousand fluorescent light fixtures, and six and a half million square feet of floor space, three times more than the Empire State Building.11 Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower got lost in the building when he became Army chief of staff at the end of 1945. “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it,” Ike wrote.12 The future president was inaugurating a long tradition of Pentagon employees joking about the place where they worked—a sign of how unhappy most officers were to find themselves confined within its walls, far from the work with soldiers in the field that had drawn them into military service.
If Lansdale was an odd fit within the Pentagon, he was even more of an anomaly in the Air Force, a service then focused on waging nuclear war against the Soviet Union, not on fighting guerrillas. After just three months as Far East action officer for the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations, Lansdale found a more congenial niche in the Pentagon. He became deputy director of the secretary of defense’s Office of Special Operations—“one of those awful Washington titles,” he wrote, “which I’m sure must puzzle the Communists as much as it does me. It merely means that I have an ‘In’ basket with problems that nobody else is damfool enough to want to tackle, so they pass them along.”13
Lansdale’s new boss was the retired Marine general Graves B. Erskine, yet another fighting man—like Iron Mike O’Donnell, Hanging Sam Williams, and Ray Spruance—with whom he would establish a close rapport. “Big E” was a native of Louisiana who had started his military service as a National Guardsman chasing Pancho Villa in 1916. Thereafter he had joined the Marine Corps and earned a Silver Star while fighting in France in World War I. In the interwar years, he served in the Marines’ “small wars” in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, where he experienced guerrilla war firsthand. In 1945, as commander of the Third Marine Division, he spearheaded the bloody invasion of Iwo Jima. He was a four-star general in 1953 when he retired from the Marine Corps to become assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations and director of the Office of Special Operations.14
Not long after Lansdale’s arrival in June 1957, Erskine suffered a heart attack and was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He would spend much of the next two years on convalescent leave, giving Lansdale the opportunity to run the office in his absence. Some bureaucratic rivals tried to use Big E’s ill-health as an excuse to ease him into retirement, but the loyal Lansdale would have none of it. He notified the White House, expecting that President Eisenhower, himself a heart-attack victim, would be sympathetic. The president handwrote a nice “get well” note to “Gravestone” (a macabre pun on his first name), expressing the hope that he would return to work soon. Before taking the note to Erskine’s hospital bed, Lansdale read it to a senior staff meeting at the Pentagon, thereby making clear that his boss had the president’s full support. That “stopped all the sniping,” Lansdale recalled, “and so Erskine and I became very close after that.”15
Headquartered in Room 3E-114 of the Pentagon (an office that, following post-9/11 remodeling, no longer exists), the Office of Special Operations (OSO), which Lansdale ran in Erskine’s absence, was utterly obscure but also quietly powerful, as is so often the case in Washington. Its head was expected to serve as the senior adviser to the defense secretary on special operations, psychological warfare, guerrilla warfare, counterguerrilla warfare, intelligence, and civic action, and with Lansdale installed, it became the primary Pentagon office for dealing with Vietnam issues as well. The CIA often needed military support for its operations in the form of weapons, aircraft, personnel, and other necessities. All such requests were funneled through OSO, meaning that Erskine or, in his absence, Lansdale had to approve the plans. In addition, the head of OSO was a member of important interagency committees that supervised the entire U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. Still only a colonel, albeit no longer as young as when he had first pinned on his wings in 1952 (he turned fifty in 1958), Lansdale was expected to hold his own in interagency meetings with two- and three-star generals as well as senior executives from the civilian intelligence agencies. To make the disparity in their ranks less glaring, Lansdale usually left his uniform at home and wore a civilian suit, “because it was embarrassing really to be junior to them and try to give them guidance.”16
Despite his newfound power, being in the “Washington bureaucracy was a horrible experience” for Lansdale, his aide Jerry French recalled.17 Ed complained in his letters to Pat Kelly that his Pentagon superiors had more “uninspired drudgery for me than any guy should be expected to do.”18 He spent a lot of time looking wistfully out his Pentagon window at the airplanes taking off and landing at National Airport. In the fall of 1957, he wrote to Pat, “Rumors reach me that I’ve been in Manila (also Saigon). Only wish they were true. Unfortunately I’m stuck in a Pentagon job with a view of the airport—and keep wishing I was aboard one of the flights west which seem to take off about every five minutes.”19
In spite of Lansdale’s obligatory complaints about the arid bureaucratic routine, his subordinates discovered that he would often stay in the office late into the night—an indication not only of how devoted he was to his work but also of how little desire he had to go home to a family he barely knew. While Lansdale was as unmindful of his family and as consumed with his work as many other “organization men” of the fifties, he was not a self-serving schemer striving to advance his own interest at the expense of his colleagues. He showed unusual empathy for those around him. French recalled that one day he got word that his brother, a Detroit police officer, had been involved in a serious accident. He immediately left for National Airport to catch a flight to Detroit, and was surprised to find Lansdale in the airport’s waiting area. “He had taken the trouble to leave the office and see me and talk to me at the airport before I took off,” French said. “This meant a lot to me, that a guy who was several ranks above me would do that.”20
While the usual Washington pattern is “kiss up, kick down,” Lansdale, in fact, did the opposite—to the long-term detriment of his career.
FAR AHEAD of most of his contemporaries, Lansdale apprehended in the 1950s that in the post–World War II era the United States would be involved more often in conflicts against shadowy guerrillas than in battles against uniformed foes such as the Wehrmacht or the Imperial Japanese Navy. To his new job, he brought a passion for developing capabilities that would better enable the United States to compete with the Communists in the kind of unconventional combat that he had waged in the Philippines and Vietnam. “Since the cease-fire in World War II, the communist enemy has conquered some 550 million people living on over 4 million square miles of territory,” he wrote in September 1957, attributing the Communist successes to their ability to perfect “unconventional warfare techniques,” while “our Armed Forces . . . are still too dependent upon mechanical means of warfare,” which “tends to make us conventional—even when we are engaged in unconventional warfare.”21
With machine-gun rapidity, Lansdale sprayed out ideas to rectify these shortcomings. In one secret memorandum, titled “A Cold War Program for Defense,” he called for “proper indoctrination” of American personnel sent abroad so that “they will want and know how to make friends among the people,” “a global program of bringing U.S. personnel and foreigners together on a favorable basis,” assigning “trained counter-guerrilla advisers to MAAGs [Military Assistance Advisory Groups] where required,” and stimulating “U.S. thinking on unconventional warfare through seminars conducted by outstanding, experienced persons.”22 In short, he was proposing to train thousands of Edward Lansdales—soldiers who would interact on a sympathetic basis with embattled societies and spread the gospel of freedom.
Lansdale might be accused of an excess of idealism, but he was not naïve—he knew from personal experience how far most Americans fell short of his ideals. And if he needed any reminding, Pat Kelly wrote to him about the way the U.S. embassy in Manila, where she worked for the U.S. Information Agency, was being run: “As of a few weeks ago, the snack bar here is only for American employees and their guests, and Filipino employees may only use it as a special concession or condescension as the gossip goes. The gossip further says that the real joke, brittle and bitter, is that this privilege was given to the Filipinos so that the American in the office can have his coffee bought and brought in by his Filipino clerk while he is busy talking to his wife over the telephone about the cocktail party the night before.”23 This was exactly the kind of racist attitude that, in Lansdale’s view, undermined the American position in the Cold War. In one of his speeches, he said that Filipinos bristled at foreigners with “hidden attitudes of superiority” who treated them as if they were children. “The Filipino is adept at what some call ‘the deep freeze’—a surface compliance or agreeableness hiding their true feelings.”24
Other Lansdale ideas that promoted a philosophy of “soft power,” decades before that term was coined, included plans to give “foreign military personnel . . . training that would allow them to assist in certain situations of a basically civilian nature, e.g., critical road building, flood control, etc.”;25 to send retired American military personnel “as civilian instructors in African educational institutions”;26 and to assign American military advisers to create “a national ideal for the [local] troops to admire and aspire to emulate” by promoting national heroes such as Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines or, in Vietnam, “the fabulous Trung sisters who led Vietnamese armies to battle the invading Chinese in olden days.”27 In a more hard-power vein, Lansdale proposed to take Freedom Company global, utilizing an ostensibly private entity secretly supported by the U.S. government to dispatch military personnel from nations such as South Vietnam, Pakistan, Taiwan, and South Korea to battle Communist advances. He suggested calling the new entity, which anticipated the rise of military contractors decades later, Freedom Inc. and said that “it may be concerned with sending of a single infantry battalion or possibly a force as large as two divisions.”28
Like many visionaries before him, Lansdale was better at generating ideas than at implementing them. Few of his brainstorms were enacted. His lack of skill in manipulating a giant bureaucracy was becoming a bigger problem in Washington than it had been in Manila or Saigon, where he had thrived in a more freewheeling, chaotic culture amid a far smaller American presence.
CHARACTERISTICALLY, LANSDALE did not confine his advocacy to the inner councils of power. In fact, no sooner had he returned from Vietnam at the end of 1956 than he became an active speaker before military, intelligence, and Foreign Service audiences, proselytizing for his version of “counterguerrilla” warfare, as counterinsurgency was then known.
A representative talk was the one that he gave at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on December 1, 1958. He began by addressing the audience as “Gentlemen and Gremlins,” the latter a word coined in the 1940s for an “imaginary mischievous sprite”; it had become a favorite term of his to refer to those who might share his unconventional ideas. His focus was on Southeast Asia, “one of the major battlegrounds of today’s death struggle,” with one-fourth of the world’s population up for grabs. He warned, “We don’t want to be like the French, who went marching out of Hanoi in defeat in 1954, with millions and millions of dollars’ worth of modern U.S. equipment—brave men whose heroism and weapons and numbers were not enough—licked by a local army wearing tennis shoes and pajamas.” To counter the Communists, Lansdale advocated that armies in the region “undertake missions of public works, welfare, health, and education, as well as national security.” “As the soldier becomes the true brother of the people, the enemy and his weapons become identified, with the help of the people, and the enemy when so identified can be defeated.”29
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, much of this might seem to be conventional wisdom—counterinsurgency 101, as codified in the 2006 Army-Marine Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, which preached the importance of winning over the populace rather than simply killing insurgents. But in the aftermath of the greatest war in history—one decided in such epic battles as Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad, and D-Day—there was nothing remotely conventional about Lansdale’s wisdom. He was part of the first generation of postwar counterinsurgents, men such as the British officer Gerald Templer and the French officer David Galula, who were articulating a new doctrine to deal with “wars of national liberation” across the Third World.
The folksy way in which Lansdale delivered his homilies, blending in his own experiences while eschewing hard-to-follow jargon, made an indelible impact on listeners. After a talk that Lansdale delivered at the Army War College in February 1957, lasting from 8:30 p.m. until midnight, two infantry captains were so interested by what he had to say that they stayed up talking with him until 4:30 in the morning.30
Then-Major Samuel V. Wilson, an army officer on loan to the CIA, remembered that in 1957 one of his colleagues went to hear a lecture at the Pentagon. The CIA man returned and said, “Sir, I have just just listened to the most remarkable individual that I have ever heard. When he began talking, he was dry, had a monotonous voice, and I thought I’m not sure that I was wise in coming here. But as he kept talking I was mesmerized by what he had to say.” Wilson had never heard of the speaker. What did you say his name was? he asked. “Ed Lansdale,” his colleague replied. “They call him ‘Landslide’ Lansdale for his exploits in the Philippines, and he’s just come back from Vietnam.”31
SAM WILSON would come to know Landslide Lansdale the following year. Having left the CIA in March 1958, he had some free time before he started attending classes at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in August and spent that interregnum by “snowbirding” (army slang for a short-term assignment) in the Office of Special Operations. Later, he would return to the Pentagon to become Lansdale’s deputy.
A veteran of Merrill’s Marauders, a U.S. Army unit that had fought behind Japanese lines in Burma, Wilson was a highly decorated combat soldier who looked as if he could have stepped out of an Army recruiting poster; the columnist Jimmy Breslin later described him as “six-foot-two, 195 pounds, with blue eyes and light wavy hair and the outdoors on his face and big hands.”32 But he was entranced by this offbeat Air Force colonel with the movie-star mustache who had never fired a gun at the enemy. More than half a century later, looking back on those distant days from his farm in rural Virginia, where he settled after retiring as a three-star general, the elderly Wilson, by then white-haired and infirm, recalled in his soft Southern accent that Lansdale was a “guru” to him: “To me he was a bit of a mystic. He had dark, soulful brooding eyes. He spoke softly and in order sometimes to understand him clearly, you had to lean forward. It took me some time to realize that was really a technique of his. If he spoke softly and you had to lean forward to hear him, he already had placed himself in the position that he wanted to be in. It was subtle but effective.”
Every night after the Pentagon shut down, “Lansdale would stand there leaning against the doorjamb of his office, and I’d put my backside on the desk of the secretary who had long ago gone home,” Wilson recalled. “He’d start almost in midsentence from something he had been talking about a week ago, as though it had just occurred, and spin some sort of yarn. I loved it, I absolutely loved it. I thought, ‘This fella has found the golden fleece. He understands how warfare has changed, and he knows what the dynamics are.’ I felt I had better listen to him and learn all I could. I was kind of like a lamprey eel, sucking on him.” After getting “a good dose of the Lansdale philosophy,” Wilson pronounced himself a “complete convert.”33
After his year at Leavenworth, Wilson, by now a lieutenant colonel, was assigned as director of instruction at the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army Special Forces, not yet known as the Green Berets, had been formed in 1952. Numbering 2,300 men, they were initially envisioned primarily as guerrillas operating behind enemy lines, just like Merrill’s Marauders. By the late fifties, it was dawning on Special Forces officers that, on the “it takes a thief to catch a thief” principle, they were well positioned to become the country’s premier counterguerrilla force.
In 1959, one year after Sam Wilson first met Lansdale, Colonel George M. Jones, the commander of the Special Warfare School, assigned him to put together the school’s first course on fighting guerrillas. Wilson, however, struggled for a name. He recalled thinking that “ ‘counterguerrilla operations’ was too narrow because it did not embrace those nonmilitary factors that so often dominate the scene in this conflict arena. ‘Counterresistance’ was a bad choice because we had identified ourselves so many times in our history with resistance forces that were trying to pursue worthy causes, to include our own revolution. To call it ‘counterrevolutionary’ played right into the hands of Soviet dogma.” Wilson and his colleagues were stumped until he wrote on a chalkboard a new word that they all liked: “Counter-Insurgency.” Eureka. By then it was two in the morning, and a major said, “Let’s go home.”34 They had come up with their term.
By the fall of 1961, the title of the course had been changed to “Counter Insurgency Operations.”35 And soon thereafter “counterinsurgency” would become a familiar military term, first abbreviated as CI and later as COIN. Sam Wilson was not alone in claiming credit for this coinage, but his claim is superior to the Oxford English Dictionary’s attribution of the term to the Times of London in 1962.
As Wilson continued to formulate the course, he recalled, “I would get on the phone and call Lansdale and ask him questions. Lansdale’s theses and little homilies and so on were sprinkled throughout the curriculum.” The regular army, Wilson said, “thought we were crazy. Indeed, they thought we were dangerous. They accused us of trying to think like political commissars by introducing politics to the field of battle.”36 At first, Wilson could not even get regular officers to take the course. His initial groups of students, in early 1961, were CIA operatives and foreign military officers. Gradually more American officers enrolled. Lansdale supported Wilson from his perch at the Pentagon, helping to overcome opposition from more conventionally minded soldiers. He applied similar pressure on the Air Force, leading to the creation in 1961 of the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron (code-named Jungle Jim) to advise foreign air forces, and on the Navy, leading to the creation in 1962 of the first SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) teams to serve as naval commandos. All of these newfangled Special Operations Forces were soon heading to Vietnam. Colonel Jones, for one, was grateful for Lansdale’s help. “Things certainly seem to be moving now in the Special Warfare field,” he wrote to Lansdale in May 1961, “and I attribute most of this to you personally.”37
The growth of Special Operation Forces is usually associated with President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the Army Special Forces to wear their distinctive green beret. JFK was indeed an avid supporter of these specialized troops, but they were already beginning to expand their capabilities before he came into office. Lansdale had no minor role in this process; in fact, he would help to spark the young president’s interest in the subject of “brushfire wars.”38 That made Lansdale one of the godfathers of counterinsurgency in the postwar American military establishment—one of his more significant, if lesser-known, legacies.
ED LANSDALE was hardly the only American official of the late fifties who was frustrated by the failure of the U.S. government to do more to adapt itself to the demands of unconventional warfare. His old friend Navy Captain William J. Lederer, whose first wife, not insignificantly, was a Filipina and who had traveled widely in Asia, had reached similar conclusions. On December 3, 1957, he wrote to Lansdale,
I feel so strongly on this general subject that I have concluded it is impossible to accomplish what you have in mind (not only for the military but for all agencies) unless public indignation is aroused. There is nothing wrong with our foreign policy, the weak link is in its diluted implementation—particularly along the “Lansdale lines.” I am taking a stab at arousing this public indignation. Eugene Burdick and I are writing a book on it which will be published in the Spring; and if you want more information on it, I’ll be glad to send it.39
Lederer had been writing since 1947 for magazines such as Reader’s Digest, but for his latest project he wanted authorial help to get the tone exactly right (“the book had to be written in flawless, relaxed, un-mad perspective,” he noted), and he got it from another Navy veteran he had met in 1948 at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.40 Eugene “Bud” Burdick was a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, who had already written one successful novel (The Ninth Wave, about a California surfer turned political consultant) and would later coauthor the popular potboiler Fail-Safe, about a nuclear crisis.
Together Lederer and Burdick set out to write a series of essays expressing their outrage over the steady deterioration in “the American position in Southeast Asia,” which they attributed to “the way many Americans overseas were recklessly doing the wrong thing, or doing the right thing in the wrong way, or just doing nothing.”41 Eric P. Swenson, an editor at W. W. Norton & Company who was himself a Navy veteran, suggested turning their critique into a novel. And that is just what they did. They brainstormed titles, including “A Handful of Seeds,” “The Mysterious American,” “The Noisy American,” “The Ugly Engineer,” and “The Stumbling American,” before Swenson decided to call it “The Ugly American.”42
The Ugly American appeared in the fall of 1958 shortly after Lederer retired from the Navy. It began with an unflattering depiction of the U.S. ambassador to the fictional nation of Sarkhan—“a small country out toward Burma and Thailand” that resembled Vietnam. Much like Homer Ferguson, the ambassador to Manila from 1955 to 1956 who did not want Lansdale intruding on his turf, Louis Sears is another former senator who is eager to become a federal judge and only slumming in Sarkhan while his appointment comes through. He has nothing but contempt for the locals (he refers to them as “strange little monkeys”),43 and neither he nor any of his staff can read the local language or be bothered to spend time with ordinary people. There is an equally scathing portrait of a secretary in the legation who writes home boasting about all the amenities she and the other Americans enjoy (“There are built-in servants! . . . Liquor over here in the government liquor store is dirt cheap”), while commenting favorably on how little interaction they have with the locals.44 These negative portraits are contrasted with positive depictions of a few Americans who are doing things right, including the “Ugly American” of the title: Homer Atkins is a homely engineer who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty helping the people of Sarkhan.
Another of the book’s heroes is Colonel Edwin Barnum Hillandale, a U.S. Air Force officer who in 1952 “was sent to Manila as liaison officer to something or other.” He is so fascinated by the Filipino people that he “ate his meals in little Filipino restaurants, washing down huge quantities of adobo and pancit and rice with a brand of Filipino rum which cost two pesos a pint.” He regularly ventures out to the rural areas on a motorcycle and, once there, plays his harmonica to enchant the children. He “even attended the University in his spare hours to study Tagalog.” The Filipino musicians with whom he jams on his harmonica call him “the Ragtime Kid.” A diplomat at the U.S. embassy calls him “that crazy bastard.” Yet, Lederer and Burdick wrote, “within six months the crazy bastard was eating breakfast with Magsaysay, and he soon became Magsaysay’s unofficial adviser.” (The by then deceased Magsaysay is the only character to appear under his real name.) The chapter goes on to recount how Hillandale, by repeatedly visiting a province north of Manila that is hostile to Magsaysay, persuades 95 percent of its inhabitants to support him in the 1953 presidential election.45 Later in the narrative, Hillandale takes a break from the Philippines to visit Sarkhan, where he uses his knowledge of astrology to win over local officials. He explains to a skeptical U.S. diplomat, “Every person and every nation has a key which will open their hearts. If you use the right key, you can maneuver any person or any nation any way you want. The key to Sarkhan—and to several other nations in Southeast Asia—is palmistry and astrology.”46
The resemblances to Lansdale are uncanny, even if the real-life Lansdale never mastered Tagalog or owned a motorcycle. “Tragically,” Lansdale wrote, “later Americans in the U.S. advisory days in Vietnam tried to pattern their activities on the fictional Hillandale—and rode motorcycles around, played the harmonica, etc. without getting much else done—except to wind up dead or captured by the enemy. Yes, I used to play the harmonica at times when visiting the provinces, to take up the tedium of long waits alone or to entertain children when they’d gather around and start asking me a lot of questions. But I always had some other purpose for being there.”47
Lederer privately acknowledged that the “first Colonel Hillandale story in The Ugly American is sort of based on Ed.” (He later told Lansdale that the character was a composite of the two of them.)48 Lederer went on to make clear his admiration for Lansdale: “The way Ed operates requires a frightful amount of patriotism, discipline, energy, and skill. He takes some little job in the area; and then proceeds to become the confidential adviser of the man he is trying to help. Everything is done hush hush and Ed sees that everyone but himself gets the credit. His mind is alert. He can dissemble and camouflage as easily as a ballerina can change her costume. He has limitless courage and patience.”49
In spite of its pedestrian writing style, The Ugly American spent seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller lists and sold millions of copies,50 thus winning more converts to Lansdale’s views than a lifetime of his speeches and memoranda could possibly have accomplished. Senator John F. Kennedy sent a copy of the book to every member of the U.S. Senate and later used it as inspiration to create the Peace Corps. In turn, many young Americans volunteered for the Peace Corps after reading The Ugly American.51
In 1963, The Ugly American was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando as Harrison Carter MacWhite, an idealistic American ambassador to Sarkhan. Pat Kelly approved of the casting. Perhaps not the best person to objectively assess Lansdale’s resemblance to the great movie star, she told Ed, “Marlon Brando looked so much like you, especially his mustache, but not his voice which is bad compared to yours.”52 Although the film had almost nothing in common with the book beyond its title and setting, it did have some (probably coincidental) resonance with Lansdale’s real-life story. In the first place, the movie’s suave hero, Ambassador MacWhite, who is a composite of the admirable characters from the book, including Colonel Hillandale, favors driving a “Freedom Road,” built with American aid, into Communist territory in Sarkhan. He sees the road as a weapon to foster military mobility as well as economic development and thus to battle Communism. Lansdale likewise advocated building roads as a counterinsurgency tactic. In 1959, for example, he wrote a Defense Department memorandum proposing that funds be allocated “to complete an all-weather road between Pakse in southern Laos and Kontum in [the Central Highlands of] Vietnam.”53 This project later received a name that could have come straight out of the movie—the Peace Highway.54
The film version of The Ugly American ends with Ambassador MacWhite telling a group of reporters in Sarkhan, “We can’t hope to win the Cold War unless we remember what we are for as well as what we are against. . . . I’ve learned that the only time we’re hated is when we stop trying to be what we started to be 200 years ago. Now I’m not blaming my country. I’m blaming the indifference that some of us show toward its promises.” As he continues talking in a Lansdalian vein, the scene shifts to a suburban home in America where MacWhite is seen speaking on a television set. While he drones on, a distracted man turns off the TV, cutting off MacWhite in midsentence. This is an uncannily accurate depiction of the indifference with which Lansdale’s views ultimately would be received by both policymakers and the general public.55 Despite its cautionary ending, however, the film of The Ugly American further burnished the book’s fame—and indirectly Lansdale’s as well. When Robert F. Kennedy first met Lansdale in 1961, he referred to him in his diary as “the Ugly American.”56
As Lansdale had already discovered after the publication of The Quiet American, his outsize reputation enabled him to get a wider hearing for his views but increasingly rankled many bureaucrats and created animosities that made his job harder. In 1963, the year that the Marlon Brando movie came out, Ed wrote to a friend, “I’ve ducked publicity very hard since it slows down the effectiveness of my activities.”57 If he was ducking publicity, he wasn’t doing so very effectively.
AS FAR as Ed Lansdale was concerned, the most immediate consequence of The Ugly American’s publication was that it served as his ticket back to Vietnam, if only briefly. Inspired in part by the controversy created by the novel, President Eisenhower on November 24, 1958, appointed a committee of gray eminences to undertake a “completely independent, objective, and non-partisan analysis” of U.S. military assistance programs in some forty nations.58 It became known as the Draper Committee, after its chairman, William Henry Draper Jr., a former Army general and Wall Street banker who had been the first U.S. ambassador to NATO.
Lansdale was asked to serve on the Southeast Asia subcommittee chaired by Dillon Anderson, the former national security assistant to Eisenhower and a prominent lawyer in Houston. His fellow subcommittee members were the retired general J. Lawton Collins and a young government economist named Charles Wolf Jr. Together they were slated to undertake a monthlong tour of Southeast Asian nations beginning in mid-January 1959. Lansdale was nervous about clashes with the imperious General Collins, but, Wolf recalled, the “good-humored” and “savvy” Anderson made sure they all got along. Between stops, the four subcommittee members peaceably played gin rummy together on their airplane, an Air Force C-47.59
The group reached its first foreign capital, Manila, on January 30, 1959, to find a city that had recovered from wartime damage and had not yet become as overbuilt and polluted as it would later become. This gave Ed a chance to see Pat Kelly for the first time since their breakup in 1956. Since then their communications had been limited to infrequent letters—and to small gifts such as stockings and lipstick that Ed conveyed via friends and colleagues passing through Manila. This earned him a semiserious upbraiding from Pat: “Why do you have to send emissaries and packages? I really don’t mind the former but I wish you would stop the latter. Why don’t you just drop me a line now and then? Or send me cards or just keep in touch little notes, just to let your friends know you are not spending all your time saving this world?”60 We can only speculate how uncomfortable the lovers’ reunion was; no epistolary record is extant. The most wrenching part of the trip was a visit to Magsaysay’s relatively modest, white marble tomb in the Manila North Cemetery, which Ed found “a bit rough emotionally,”61 all the more so because he had just received news that his father, Harry Lansdale, had died in Detroit. He stood alone in front of the Magsaysay memorial, he later recalled, in an “infinitely sad communion” with “both men who had been so close to me.”62
By February 3, the Anderson subcommittee was winging its way over the South China Sea toward a still-peaceful Saigon. The highlight of their visit was meeting with the shy and cerebral president, who was continuing to expand his authority at the expense of his opponents. Lansdale had contacted Ngo Dinh Diem beforehand, asking, “Would you like to ‘play hookey’ from your work and go swimming at Long Hai with me? I’m sure you are working too hard, as usual, and could stand a day’s vacation.”63 In Hawaii, Ed had even bought a pair of red swim trunks for the portly president.64 Diem did not go to the beach, but he did treat the group to one of his trademark two-and-a-half-hour briefings as well as a private dinner at the palace. His theme “boiled down to a strong plea to maintain [South Vietnamese military] force levels and economic aid at present levels.”65 The subcommittee members came away impressed, Charles Wolf said, with “Diem’s concentration and focus,” his “intelligence and mastery.” They concluded that “Diem was a good bet and we should support him,”66 precisely the conclusion that Lansdale wanted them to reach. “The President is very pleased . . . ,” the American agronomist Wolf Ladejinsky, an aide to Diem, wrote to Lansdale. “He credits you, as he should, with these developments, and he wants you to know this.”67
After leaving South Vietnam on February 6, 1959, the group headed to Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia. While they were in Phnom Penh, a riverside city full of elegant French colonial buildings that had been dubbed the Pearl of the Orient, on February 10–12, a military coup against the modernizing prime minister, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was getting under way. Sihanouk had angered Thailand and South Vietnam, as well as some of his more anti-Communist military officers, by recognizing the Communist regime in China. A wily survivor, Sihanouk crushed the military mutiny, led by General Dap Chhuon, who was “shot while attempting to escape.” Sihanouk blamed the CIA in general and Lansdale in particular for this abortive uprising. His evidence? That Lansdale, “the renowned CIA specialist in cloak and dagger operations,” had signed the guestbook at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s most famous tourist attraction, which was located in a province run by General Chhuon.68 In 1969, Sihanouk got his revenge when he produced, directed, and starred in a movie called Shadow over Angkor, in which he battled and killed a villainous CIA agent named Lansdale.69 “Evidently he loved fantasy,”70 Lansdale chuckled, describing the story as “a complete fabrication.”71
In point of fact, the CIA did have a radio operator with the coup plotters, and when the coup collapsed he was captured by Sihanouk’s troops. CIA officials later claimed that the radioman was there merely to monitor events.72 It is possible that the CIA involvement went deeper—in 1970, the CIA would sanction a successful coup against Sihanouk led by another general—but it is unlikely that Lansdale was involved. He was no longer a CIA operative, and even for a man of his talents it would have been a stretch to imagine that he could have organized a coup during a three-day visit to a country where he had no prior connections. But, given Lansdale’s outsize reputation, few would believe his denials—not even State Department officials on the scene. “The embassy here is quite touchy about my presence,” Lansdale wrote, complaining that “our official family are the usual weak-kneed lot, so I am boiling mad by tonight by their over-sensitivity to my presence.”73
The blue-chip Draper Committee concluded its work with a recommendation that U.S. foreign military aid, then at $1.6 billion, be boosted by another $400 million. President Eisenhower supported this recommendation in principle but held off in practice for fear of blowing a hole in the budget.74 The canny president’s real goal in appointing the committee had been to make the case to Congress and the public for why foreign aid, never popular to begin with and now under heavy attack after the publication of The Ugly American, was in the country’s interest. That the committee had done.
THE TRIP with the Anderson subcommittee reminded Edward Lansdale of what he viewed as his true calling. Although he had grown exhausted in Vietnam by the end of 1956, now, after more than two years in Washington and a short visit to Saigon, he was eager to return. His brief reunion with Pat Kelly further reminded him of how much he was missing on a personal level while living in Washington. But the trip had also revealed how difficult it would be to get a return ticket to South Vietnam. If State Department officials were wary of Lansdale’s spending three days in Cambodia, how much more resistant would they be to letting him spend a longer period in Vietnam? Overriding their objections would be all the harder now that one of Lansdale’s primary patrons was no longer around: suffering from colon cancer whose spread could not be arrested by radiation therapy, John Foster Dulles resigned as secretary of state on April 15, 1959, and died in his sleep the following month at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
A few weeks after returning home from his Asia swing in the spring of 1959, Ed wrote to Pat, “I’m fighting all the brass to get on back to Asia again. . . . I’ll outflank them yet—because that last visit showed me how very much I have been missing in my life.”75 Lansdale would learn that outflanking the bureaucracy was not easy to do, even if the case for his presence in Vietnam was becoming ever more urgent.