Edward Lansdale's Cold War

2. Selling America, Selling Vietnam

49 2 SellingAmerica, SellingVietnam Go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America. —Woodrow Wilson addressing the Salesmanship Congress, 1916 H o w e v e r c e n t r a l the idea of progress may be to the workings of advertising, its projection of an ideal future is always mingled with a nostalgia for a recreated past. The art critic John Berger dissected these connections, pointing out that when advertisers design publicity, “they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.” Berger’s argument about the way the past is mythologized and decontextualized in order to project the advertiser’s desired vision of the future ties into Lansdale’s continual use of a mythical past and an idealized future to further U.S. goals in the Third World. Berger provides a useful way to think about Lansdale’s strategy when he argues that advertising “proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.”1 This is precisely what Lansdale did when he marketed ways for people of the Third World to buy into the American Dream, or when he asked Washington officials to invest in his unique ability to comprehend the peasant mind. Just as he wielded the art of publicity in the Philippines, he used consumer goods and the power of consumption in waging his Cold War campaign for America in Vietnam. Lansdale’s awareness of the power of consumer goods to inspire specific desires and to project visions of an American-style future had already been 50 Chapter Two put to work in the Philippines. For instance, he had brought Americana to Filipino children by showing them Walt Disney cartoons. Delivering a fantasy about American consumer culture became a way for him to introduce to the Philippine people the goodness of American values, as becomes explicit from this 1946 passage in his diary: “When all the kids were inside the unpainted and slightly creaky prefab which the men have fixed up into a club, we showed movies, . . . a lot of mickey mouse and donald duck cartoons. As kids will in any country, these little Filipino orphans ate it up, inching their way along the floor until they could get right up to the screen where all these funny characters were.”2 Lansdale saw the cartoons as a cross-cultural medium that drew in the Filipino children through a universalizing American product. They were fascinated by this aspect of the culture, and wanted to be part of it, without fully understanding its workings or cultural codes. This passage offers a vivid image of a culture in the act of being colonized once again, with its children attracted to the great illuminating light of the movies, as of Western civilization. (It also echoes the famous scene in Preston Sturgis ’s 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels, when Depression-era prison inmates are led into a church to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons.) Lansdale’s belief in the uplifting power of Hollywood becomes evident here, just as his vision of the Philippines appears largely shaped by Hollywood-esque assumptions about the cross-cultural sameness of responses to the wonders of technology and the desirability of American-style entertainments. That vision was predicated on an awareness of the power of American goods upon those who did not have them. In an extremely remote village Lansdale took a picture of Filipinos near a country store on which was emblazoned the sign “Drink Coca-Cola.” American ideology and power had permeated this corner of the world, and neither Lansdale nor presumably the Filipinos missed this particular message. The photo is important for another reason: it was taken when Lansdale was out on a military patrol with Magsaysay and his Filipino armed forces, attempting to search out and destroy Huks. For Lansdale, the rewards of capitalist culture functioned as another kind of weapon in his arsenal of confidences. His certainty that American culture was fundamentally right for all other people never seems to have wavered, even as he realized at times that the deep-seated economic problems faced by the vast majority of Filipinos were being exacerbated rather than improved by the semicolonial relationshipthat existed between the Philippines and the United States. He could envision only the benefits to Southeast Asian peoples of becoming more American— of adopting...