Edward Lansdale's Cold War

Epilogue: Southeast Asia after Edward Lansdale

208 Epilogue Southeast Asia after Edward Lansdale This understanding of a straightforward security threat is interwoven with another perception—namely, that we have our view of the way the US should be moving and of the need for the majority of the rest of the world to be moving in the same direction if we are to achieve our national objective. . . . Our ends cannot be achieved and our leadership role cannot be played if some powerful and virulent nation—whether Germany, Japan, Russia or China—is allowed to organize their part of the world according to a philosophy contrary to ours. —Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to President Lyndon Johnson, November 3, 1965 “ I p u t L a n s d a l e over there but nothing happened” was President Johnson ’s caustic comment to columnist Drew Pearson when Lansdale did not deliver the victory that proved so elusive to the United States.1 After LBJ sent the fabled cold warrior back to Vietnam in 1965 to rework his magic and fashion a stable anticommunist state, Lansdale spent three more years in Vietnam, yet he, along with over 500,000 American soldiers, failed to achieve this goal. “Quite an unusual enemy we are up against,” he wrote in 1966 to Henry Cabot Lodge, then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, when reflecting on the sacrifices the communists were making during the war.2 The fact that Lansdale had personally been waging war against them for over a decade Epilogue 209 points to his utter failure to grasp the political nature of the Vietnamese revolution. His blindness toward the multiple strengths of the communists must be factored in with the continued dependence of the South Vietnamese upon the United States. Ward Just’s assessment of “the Saigon government, that thin coat of paint on the listing hull,” captures the artificiality of the American creation in a brutally honest way, one that Lansdale never could recognize.3 Symptomatic of this problem was a 1966 meeting he had with Nguyen Can Ky, then co-leader of South Vietnam’s government. “Prime Minister Ky called Ed in to ask for his advice. Ed pointed out that Ky should think of how he would look in the history books as the first Vietnamese to organize a truly honest election. He then passed Ky some thoughts on what he (Ky) might say.”4 The fact that Ky would solicit an American’s opinion about how his own country should be organized speaks to Lansdale’s extraordinary power of persuasion—and the power of America to elicit such a reaction from a client state. It also helps explain why the American intervention in Vietnam failed. Ho Chi Minh’s forces needed no such lecture from their allies. The disparity between the communists’ and the South’s abilities to wage war could be catalogued in a thousand ways. Whenever an American asked, “Why do ‘they’ fight so much better than ‘our side’” the answer—the structural flaws within the South Vietnamese government, one that Lansdale helped create, versus the passionate commitment of the North Vietnamese and their ability to motivate generations to fight for a unified communist state—was self-evident. Lansdale, though, never gave up on his efforts. At another meeting he urged Ky to adopt a constitution, thereby giving his rule at least a democratic facade. Ky’s response was telling: “I’m just thinking of you Americans. You want us to write a constitution and elect someone every four years. Like Marcos, huh?”5 Unfazed by such responses, Lansdale continued his unflagging efforts to impose democratic ideals on a series of corrupt and authoritarian South Vietnamese governments whose leaders’ relationship to democracy was at best of secondary concern to them (recall that Ky spoke with admiration of Hitler). And at another time Lansdale related to the U.S. ambassador a conversation with Nguyen Van Thieu, Ky’s erstwhile colleague: “I asked about the composition of his Administration, if he becomes President. Thieu laughed and said, ‘go ahead and give me a lecture about a “broadly based Government.” ’ He explained that ‘this is what Americans talk to me about.’”6 Lansdale’s fanciful vision of democracy remained distinct from the true revolution taking place throughout Vietnam, regardless of Thieu and Ky’s cynical understanding of the source of their own power. 210 Epilogue If the South Vietnamese...