Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (review)

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Edward Lansdale had an almost mythical reputation among journalists and some U.S. officials for his nation-building achievements in the Philippines and South Vietnam. Ostensibly a career officer in the U.S. Air Force (he retired in 1963 with the rank of major general), Lansdale worked for many years for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and became the CIA’s best known operative in the world. For most of his life he denied the CIA connection, but the smoke and mirrors fooled no one and probably enhanced his reputation as a salesman and magician. As Jonathan Nashel’s assiduous, absorbing book reveals, Lansdale was a bundle of contradictions: furtive and flamboyant, shrewd and naïve, conspiratorial and idealistic, a charlatan and (almost) an innocent abroad.

Born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Detroit in 1908, Lansdale attended the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1930s. Before World War II, he had a successful carrier in advertising, and Nashel suggests that this background helped Lansdale to spend the rest of his career marketing America as a commodity and a product. After working for Army intelligence in World War II, Lansdale served as a psychological warfare expert in the Philippines during the Huk rebellion, and in 1953 he helped Ramon Magsaysay win a presidential election there. Soon thereafter, in Neal Sheehan’s phrase, Lansdale “created South Vietnam” by outmaneuvering both the French and the local enemies of America’s protégé, Ngo Dinh Diem. Lansdale left Vietnam in 1956. By the time he returned nine years later, he had lost some of his cachet, and his upbeat, populist ideas had lost much of their luster. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson told a journalist that “I put Lansdale over there [in South Vietnam] and nothing happened.” Perhaps Lansdale had induced the president and others to expect a miracle.

Lansdale always claimed that he was the model for Alden Pyle, the loose cannon in Graham Greene’s caustic novel The Quiet American, even though Greene, who knew Lansdale slightly, vigorously denied it. Lansdale certainly was the inspiration for “Edwin Hillandale” in The Ugly American, the 1958 bestseller by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick about Southeast Asia. Lansdale knew the authors and basked in their attention. The book’s “ugly” hero had a magic touch with Asians, and, unlike the more “beautiful” Americans who were too frightened or too effete to mingle with local people, he possessed keen insights into the “Asian mind.” Working in the shadows, Lansdale frequently strolled into the limelight, which, like the far more tortured figure T. E. Lawrence, he needed and enjoyed.

Lansdale was displeased with Greene’s bleak neutralism and with Greene’s view of Lansdale/Pyle. From Saigon in 1956, Lansdale worked behind the scenes with people in Hollywood to ensure that the film of the book was an anti-Communist tract and that Audie Murphy, who played Pyle, would be the hero rather than the villain of the piece.

Lansdale emerges from Nashel’s book as a shrewd political animal who often acted as what the French call a faux naif. He was a seasoned bureaucratic infighter, adroit at realpolitik, and believed that the American Revolution could be successfully marketed to everyone in Asia, provided that the sellers and buyers were sincere enough. He believed in the redemptive power of (American) history. Because he spoke no foreign languages, selling “1776” was easier for him in the largely pro-American Philippines, where many people spoke English, than in Vietnam, where almost no one spoke English. In Vietnam Lansdale tried to sell his “product” to people interested in gaining power, rather than in imitating 1776. In fairness it should be noted that Lansdale traveled all over Vietnam in the years before the second Indochina War broke out, and many Vietnamese found his tireless, amiable missionizing a pleasant contrast to the cynical indifference of the French and the top-down style of the Diem regime. But Lansdale went too far when he called...