5

In Love and War

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

—EDWARD LANSDALE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he found was that central Luzon, a low-lying, agricultural region of rice paddies and sugar fields interspersed with barrios (villages) stretching 125 miles north of Manila Bay to Lingayen Gulf and bounded by the Zambales Mountains to the west and the Sierra Madre to the east, was increasingly dominated by the Huks. This area, home to more than a million people, even came to be known as Huklandia.

“Central Luzon is still a place where fear starts as the sun sets each day,” Lansdale wrote on March 19, 1947.

Farmers hurry home out of the rice paddies and cane fields. Buses stop for the night in the nearest town and the highways become empty, except for occasional pairs of armored cars hurrying along on patrol. In the larger towns, police sling their carbines and rifles on their shoulders and hurry into the center of town, usually opposite the marketplace, where they stand nervously under a street lamp in a group and peer into the shadows and stop every passing vehicle. Home folks finish their suppers and then hurry to close the doors of wooden homes or put the door panels in the nipa shacks . . . and make sure the lights are set for all night long.

Yet Lansdale kept going through the threatening darkness: “It’s strange to roam around at night and see lights in all the houses and to realize that people are sleeping next to the flickering candle, coconut oil or carbide lamps, hoping the light will keep evil-doers away from their bedsides.”29

In entering these Huk-dominated areas, Lansdale was armed with little more than his smile and his harmonica; his pistol would not have protected him from an ambush. Usually his personality was disarming enough. “You don’t kill a guy laughing at you, being nice to you,” he later said.³⁰

An example of how he operated came in a trip to Huklandia in 1947. “I stopped in one town on the Pampagna River one hot noon to get a coke at a little sari-sari [convenience] store,” he recounted. “The town had supplied a lot of men to the Huks, so most of the men were either dead by now or hiding out with the Huks in the swamps or hills. As I drank the hot coke, a group of local people gathered around and stared at me, more sullenly than most do.” He was “taking a bitch puppy from a family in Pampagna to relatives in Tarlac”—almost certainly to Pat and her family—so he got the puppy out of the jeep and gave him the last of his coke. “I winked at some small boys watching me as I did this,” Lansdale wrote, “and they smiled shyly. I smiled back, and then all those standing around suddenly smiled.” The ice broken, Lansdale “wound up sharing lunch with a family, sitting on the split bamboo floor of their nipa house.” Although he didn’t say so, odds were that Pat was along to act as translator and guide.³¹

Lansdale benefited, of course, from being in a land in which Yanquis were generally looked upon with affection. Yet even though most Filipinos were pro-American, life-threatening dangers abounded for an outsider. On Sunday, June 8, 1947, a “beautiful morning,” Lansdale was inspired to paint his “yearly landscape.” He stuck his “water colors, cold beer, sandwiches, camera, and .45 pistol in the jeep, put on a sport shirt and walking shorts, and drove”—along with Pat—“about 10 miles north of Manila to Novaliches dam.” Since it was “sizzling hot,” he and Pat popped open cans of beer as soon as they stopped. They were just taking their first sips when behind them they heard someone say “ps-s-s-st Joe.” “So I turned around for a look,” Lansdale wrote. “There, 10 feet behind me was a Filipino with a big handkerchief across his face and with an M-1 [carbine] raised to his shoulders on a dead bead with my head.”

“Hey, take it easy,” Lansdale told him, while starting to reach for the .45 pistol beside his seat. He thought better of it when he realized the bandit wasn’t alone. There were five men altogether, all armed. So he and Pat obeyed their instructions to exit the jeep with their hands raised. As four of the bandits began unloading the jeep, “the one with the M-1 kept inching up closer behind me,” Lansdale wrote. “I sensed that he was extremely nervous and probably out on his first holdup.” He remembered that a U.S. Army lieutenant had been murdered in this area the previous year under similar circumstances, and he “started to get scared.”

The bandits were speaking Tagalog, which Pat no doubt translated for Ed. “The nervous guy with the M-1 behind me said something about killing the kano (me) and then searching the body,” Ed wrote. “You are in bad trouble now, just doing this to me,” he replied. “Don’t get into really bad, serious trouble doing anything more.”

The bandits took Lansdale’s new Rolex watch and his wallet along with Pat’s Semca wristwatch and handbag and all of their other possessions. Then they blindfolded Ed and, leaving Pat behind, made him climb into the jeep before taking off cross-country. Just as Lansdale was wondering what was going to happen next, the jeep stopped. He was afraid that he was going to be killed on the spot. To prevent that from happening, he recounted, “I asked them for one of my cans of beer. They opened one and gave it to me, so I told them they might as well drink up my beer.” This calmed the bandits, and it was to become a standard Lansdale ploy when meeting hostile men. (Many years later he explained that you need to give potential killers “something else to think of fast, and I would ask them if they needed cigarettes or need some food or did anyone want a drink.”)32 Taking advantage of the change in mood, Lansdale “told them it was a lousy trick to make me walk so far back on a hot day and to give me another open can of beer for the walk.” Lansdale finally decided to risk taking off his blindfold and climb out of the jeep. The young, nervous bandit with the M-1 was still talking about killing him, but an older bandit took charge and escorted Ed down “a muddy trail next to a rice paddy.”

Lansdale walked five miles back to the dam to reunite with Pat and to call Filipino and American MPs. The only way we can be sure that Pat was present during the robbery, given the care that Ed took to excise any mention of her from his letters home, was the police report that he filed. Paragraph four read, “At the time of the robbery, I was accompanied by Mrs. P. Y. Kelly, who was also robbed of her possessions.”33

THIS ARMED robbery hardly dissuaded Lansdale from trying to get close to the Huks. He went to great lengths to track down their leader, Luis Taruc. One of the few genuine peasants in the Huks’ leadership, Taruc had gone to an American-run school and, like Johnny Orendain, had formed an emotional attachment to American history. “I cherish Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, especially Lincoln,” Taruc later told an interviewer.³⁴ But Taruc had been influenced by an American soldier in a very different way than Orendain had been. As a boy, he had met an American sergeant who was a dedicated Communist and set him on the path, after brief labor as a tailor, to becoming a Communist himself. During World War II, Taruc led Huk guerrillas against the Japanese occupiers. In 1946, he won a seat in the Philippines Congress as a candidate of the Democratic Alliance, a leftist political party. But President Manuel Roxas accused him and other Huks of being terrorists and refused to seat them. Denied a chance to influence his country’s future via the political process, Taruc and the other Huks took to the hills in late 1946 to resume guerrilla warfare. Not yet thirty years old, Taruc was appointed the Huks’ military supremo.

He and his comrades found a receptive audience among subsistence farmers who had long-standing grievances against a landowning elite that kept them in a state of semifeudal peonage. Many ordinary Huks wanted reform, not a revolution, but they were led by Marxist ideologues who enforced a strict discipline on their ranks. Those who were suspected of disobeying commands were subject to summary “liquidation” as “traitors.” The Huks had little if any direct contact with Chinese or Soviet organizers, so instead they studied the American reporter Edgar Snow’s 1937 book Red Star over China, about Mao Zedong’s movement, for pointers on how to conduct a revolution.³⁵ Just like their Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts, the Huks sent cadres into the barrios to hold covert political rallies and to gather intelligence, food, and recruits. Meanwhile, armed guerrillas in mobile columns ambushed military units and terrorized government officials and their supporters.

Lansdale thought he might be able to meet Taruc if he visited the home of his sister in a small town in central Luzon. He knew that Taruc’s sister was pregnant and losing her teeth, so he brought along some calcium tablets and a message that he “would sure love to talk to her brother if he ever sneaked into town.” He found her house dark, but the door was partially open, so he stuck his head inside and asked, “Anybody home?” The answer came when he felt gun barrels poking into his ribs. Taruc’s bodyguards were in the house, and they were convinced Lansdale was a spy. The first thing he could think to say was, “Don’t shoot, look at the floor. . . . If you’re going to shoot me, do it outside. . . . Don’t get the floor bloody and the women have to scrub up after you.”

Talking fast, Lansdale argued that he was too valuable to kill. He pointed out that the Huks risked sending couriers through military checkpoints to Manila to give their press releases to news agencies so that they could be published in the United States and eventually read by President Truman. Lansdale suggested that talking to him was a much simpler way to get the president’s ear because, he claimed rather presumptuously (and prematurely), his reports were read by Truman himself. So he whipped out a pad of paper and asked them, “What do you want to tell the president of the United States?”

The Huks obligingly proceeded to air their grievances. Once they were done, their anger spent, they told him that Taruc’s sister was in the bedroom. Lansdale went in to introduce himself and give her the pills. He learned that Taruc had gone out of the back window just as he had come in the front door.36 Lansdale never did succeed in meeting the elusive rebel leader, but he did manage to walk away from another close call thanks to his quick thinking.

IN ADDITION to meeting the Huks for himself, Lansdale was interested in studying how the American-trained Philippine army fought them. On Saturday, March 29, 1947, he set out for central Luzon to see “where men were killing men in dubious battle.” A battle was being waged on Mount Arayat, a “lonely mountain that rises with volcanic abruptness from the central plain where no mountain should be.” It was being used as a Huk base, and now it was under attack by the Military Police Command of the Philippine army. Lansdale had been invited to “come up and see the fun” by Major Napoleon “Poling” Valeriano, like Pat Kelly an invaluable interpreter of local politics and culture who was to become one of his closest associates in both the Philippines and Vietnam.

Valeriano was a 1937 graduate of the Philippine Military Academy (modeled on West Point), the U.S. Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas, and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was also a survivor of the Bataan Death March who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp to join guerrilla resistance against the Japanese.37 Since the start of the Huk Rebellion, he had developed a reputation as one of the most able and ruthless officers in the entire Philippine army. He was in charge of the Nenita unit, a “hunter killer” team whose purpose, he explained, was “to seek out and destroy top leaders of the Huk” and “by disciplined, ruthless action to strike terror into the guerrillas and their supporters.”³⁸ It had been nicknamed the “skull squadron” by rebels who accused Valeriano’s men of taking Huks’ heads as trophies. Although friends with Poling, Lansdale did not share his lust for battle. “I have broken bread and shared cans of beer with folks on both sides of this squabble,” Lansdale said, “and I couldn’t square with myself if I had to sit and listen to the orders being issued to kill people I knew.”

Instead of joining the army troops as they advanced up Mount Arayat, Lansdale went down a carabao (water buffalo) track by himself (or accompanied only by Pat Kelly) and made camp that night in “a flat place with a five foot tree growing in it.” He strung his mosquito net from tree to jeep, ate his rations, and watched as “the base slope of Mount Arayat lighted up with flashes.” “I slept most of the night,” Lansdale wrote, “except for the heavier firing when I awoke long enough for a cigarette and to wonder if there were any Huks on the mountain and what a bad spot they were finding themselves in.”39

As these comments suggest, Lansdale was sympathetic to the ordinary Huks and skeptical of the heavy-handed tactics being employed against them by the Philippine army—similar to those being employed by the French and later the Americans in Vietnam. “Most of the Huks . . . believe in the rightness of what they’re doing, even though some of the leaders are on the communist side of politics,” he wrote. “And there is a bad situation, needing reform, which still exists in central Luzon. Agrarian reforms still seem to exist only on paper and I suppose armed complaint is a natural enough thing after the guerrilla heritage of most of these folks.”⁴⁰

As for the Military Police Command, the force on the front lines against the Huks, he thought it was “so riddled with politics it can only make weak passes at the Hukbalahaps who are in open rebellion in Luzon. And, the Philippine Army itself is involved in one scandal after another as its officers sell off the U.S. surplus they are supposed to be guarding for the Republic.”⁴¹ Both sides were guilty, he believed, of deplorable excesses: “Cruelty and a lust for murder are commonplace. Philippine Army MPs take but few prisoners. They merely shoot their newly captured Huks, often in the back of the head. It is hard to prove sedition, the true crime, against these folks, so why waste time with legal proceedings? On the other hand, MPs live but a few agonized moments after the Huks capture them. Both MPs and Huks have told me they learned to kill during the Jap occupation.”⁴²

Lansdale realized that the blunderbuss approach of the security forces was creating more enemies than it was eliminating—exactly the same problem the U.S. armed forces would later face in Vietnam. The problem was that as a lowly army major he did not yet have the power to force his Filipino counterparts to adopt a different approach.

THE YEAR 1947 would bring significant changes in Ed Lansdale’s professional and personal life. In August his family—Helen Lansdale and their two boys, Ted, age eight, and Pete, age six—arrived from California to live with him in a military housing compound in Manila. Relations between Ed and Helen were predictably tense after a two-year separation, and they did not improve upon Helen’s arrival.

Manila undoubtedly had made real strides since the dark days of the immediate postwar period. Lansdale wrote in early 1948 that a U.S. military officer from 1945 would have gotten lost in “the city of today”: “He would be mostly amazed at the six-lane divided concrete boulevard which they’ve made out of the bumpy Espana Street,” and he “would see few Army vehicles, hear less shooting,” and he would “go to new night clubs” like the Riviera, Town House, and El Cairo.43 But there were still many lingering signs of the war, including the ubiquity of pontoon bridges and Quonset huts, which were intended to be temporary but remained in place years after Japan’s surrender. There were also reminders of the ongoing rebel war, including a growing population of rural residents who, driven out of their homes by mounting violence between the Huks and the army, had become squatters in Manila.

Helen Lansdale, newly arrived from the San Francisco Bay Area, was disgusted by the privations posed by her new surroundings. She wanted to keep everything “beautiful” and “immaculate,”⁴⁴ said a friend of hers, and that was impossible to achieve in the tropics. “She was a nice person,” Ed’s associate, Rufus Phillips, said many years later, “but I think not suited for living abroad under fairly chaotic circumstances. . . . She liked an ordered existence.”⁴⁵ To make matters worse, Helen fretted about Ed’s safety while he was off on expeditions to Huklandia. She became upset when he came home from a trip with bullet holes in his vehicle, so he stopped telling her about his adventures.⁴⁶ But she was reminded of the danger they lived in when, as Ed recalled, “the Philippine army would escort us from parties with armor, light tanks, scout cars, and heavy weapons.”⁴⁷

Ed’s Filipino friends would joke upon meeting Helen, “What! Ed’s wife? Why, he never told anyone he was married.” “Since Helen and the boys arrived,” Ed wrote, “I have discovered that that is the Number One humor line in Manila.”⁴⁸ This jest was, of course, not very funny to a wife who must have increasingly suspected that her husband was cheating on her, for his relationship with Pat was an open secret around town. Peter C. Richards, a British-born Reuters correspondent who was a good friend of Lansdale’s, recalled that he and his wife socialized with both Pat and Ed and Helen and Ed: “We got along well with him and his wife as a couple, and we got on well with him and Pat as a couple. And you might say almost simultaneously. I don’t know how that worked, but it worked all right. That was their problem, not ours.”49

WHILE COPING with a new domestic situation, which forced him to juggle a wife and mistress in a scenario ripped from a French bedroom farce, Edward Lansdale also had to get used to new professional responsibilities. In 1947, he switched from the Army to the newly established U.S. Air Force, which he believed would offer “more elbow room for fresh ideas,”⁵⁰ even if he had no intention of learning to fly. “I wanted a share of the thinking that would help guide my country in the troubled days I saw looming,” he later wrote, and he figured that “in an air age” the Air Force “would assume the mantle” of intellectual leadership from the Army.⁵¹ At the same time that Lansdale was switching services, he was also changing jobs—much against his will. But his desires did not carry much weight when balanced against those of the most powerful American in all of Asia.

By then a five-star general, Douglas MacArthur was Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan and Commander of Army Forces in the Pacific. He was focused primarily on the rebuilding of Japan, which he directed from a walnut-paneled office on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi Insurance Building in Tokyo, across from the Imperial Palace, yet he remained keenly interested in the Philippines. He would have Philippine newspapers flown to him every day, and he would mark up, with visible annoyance, all the anti-American comments he read. Lansdale, reading the same newspapers in Manila, summed it up: “As far as the Manila press was concerned, the ‘big white brothers’ are just so many s.o.b.’s.” The newspapers now were full of criticism that, as Lansdale noted, “GI drivers were racing through the streets killing off pedestrians or bumping into jitneys (which were probably built out of stolen Army jeeps).” Another sore point was the location of U.S. military bases—“The Filipinos want military bases in the Philippines, but not near anybody and certainly not near Manila.”52 GIs did not help their own cause with wanton displays of racism against “Flips,” as they often called the locals.

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 to 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.