by Max Boot
This was a neat inversion of Greene’s plot, one that infuriated the author, who later decried the “treachery” of the film’s writer and director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz.58 (The second movie version of The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, would be more faithful to the novel, but Greene would not live to see its release in 2002.) What Greene may not have realized was that Edward Lansdale had taken a considerable hand in altering the movie’s political message to make it pro-American.
Lansdale met Joseph Mankiewicz when the filmmaker arrived in Saigon at the end of January 1956 to research the script. The product of a leading Hollywood family (his older brother, Herman, was the screenwriter of Citizen Kane), Mankiewicz had won Oscars as the director and writer of A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). More recently he had directed Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar (1953) and Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Richard Burton, who later worked with him on Cleopatra (1963), wrote that Mankiewicz was himself a quiet American—an “Oxford don manqué,” with an “ever-present pipe” and a “way of making considered statements with his twinkling eyes peering through a miasma of tobacco smoke.”59
With a talent for witty, ribald tales, Mankiewicz was just the sort of person who would have gotten along well with a CIA operative who had once dreamed of becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. Over dinner at Lansdale’s Rue Duy Tan house, Mankiewicz said he had bought film rights to The Quiet American “to prevent the British or French from making an anti-U.S. movie.”60 Lansdale helped him craft an alternative storyline. A few weeks later, Ed wrote to Helen, “Seems that Mankiewicz liked the plot twist for ‘The Quiet American’ that we discussed. . . . Quite a change in the French propaganda!”61 A month later, Lansdale sent Mankiewicz a follow-up letter urging him to “go right ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all.”62
A liberal anti-Communist, Mankiewicz took Lansdale’s advice and produced a film that Graham Greene did not recognize. He was able to win permission from Diem to film in Vietnam—the first Western moviemaker granted that privilege—thanks to Lansdale’s intervention.63 In October 1957, when the film was ready for viewing, Lansdale wrote to Diem that “Mr. Mankiewicz’s ‘treatment’ of the story” was “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair”—“I feel that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown.”64 Lansdale arranged a screening of the film in Washington, inviting representatives from “practically all [U.S. government] departments, agencies, and services concerned with psychological, political, and security affairs.” “They all seemed to enjoy it as much as I did,” Lansdale wrote to his old friend Iron Mike O’Daniel, now retired from the Army and chairman of a new lobby group, the American Friends of Vietnam, which had been formed to support the Diem regime.65 On January 22, 1958, the American Friends of Vietnam, whose ranks came to include prominent politicians, academics, and journalists, sponsored a “world premiere” screening of The Quiet American in Washington. Tout le monde of “Washington’s society” turned out “in all its glitter,” wrote the pro-Diem Times of Viet Nam.66
Lansdale may have been losing influence in Washington and Saigon, but he had not lost his touch for psychological warfare. His handling of The Quiet American was as deft a propaganda coup as all of the rumors he had spread to encourage emigration from North Vietnam in 1954–55 or the anti-Huk rumors he had spread in the Philippines a few years earlier. He was shaping Western public perceptions so as to bolster the new Republic of Vietnam even as he was experiencing an erosion of his preeminent position of influence in Saigon.
ONE OF the final projects that Lansdale undertook in 1956, his last year in Vietnam, was to improve the quality of Ngo Dinh Diem’s vacations. This was not as trivial as it sounds: Lansdale was convinced that well-rested leaders make better decisions. Diem had an official vacation home at Dalat, a town in the Central Highlands, but it was so quiet there that he was restless. He returned to Saigon after brief stays in Dalat, Lansdale noticed, looking “haggard” and confessing that he had been unable to sleep.
After much importuning, Diem agreed to spend a couple of days at a beach cottage at Vung Tau, on the coast of the South China Sea about an hour’s drive from Saigon, along with his brother and sister-in-law. Lansdale and Pat Kelly came too. Pictures snapped during this idyll show Pat in a white one-piece swimsuit and the always soignée Madame Nhu in a black one-piece number happily cavorting in the waves. Lansdale had brought swim trunks for Diem, but the president insisted on jumping into the surf in his underwear—to Lansdale’s amazement, he wore “old fashioned long johns.” Lansdale played Scrabble with the cerebral Nhu and lost steadily as long as the game was in French. When they agreed to play in both French and English, Lansdale won and Nhu immediately stopped playing. “He doesn’t like to lose,” Madame Nhu explained. Diem was still prone to deliver long lectures on Vietnamese politics but “with the steady sound of the surf and the wind through the pines,” his eyelids would begin to droop in mid-monologue and Lansdale would quietly steal away to let him get some much-needed rest.
When they returned to Saigon, Diem said he had never felt so refreshed. Yet after Lansdale left Vietnam, the president returned to his habit of short, fitful getaways at Dalat. When Lansdale wrote to remonstrate with him, Diem explained that Vung Tau was becoming infested with Communist guerrillas and that he didn’t want to risk his soldiers’ lives to safeguard a vacation. Even in matters of holidaying, Lansdale’s influence on Diem was hardly unlimited.67
Despite the negativity that now swirled around Lansdale, Diem still wanted him to remain where he was. In mid-1956, Diem asked Washington to keep his adviser in Saigon for two more years and to place him in charge of U.S. political strategy for all of Southeast Asia.68 Diem told a mutual friend, Lansdale reported, “that his reason for suggesting this was that the U.S. doesn’t send out ambassadors or economists who understand the problems or peoples of the area, and Asia trusts me.”69 Lansdale was humbled by the praise (“Wow!”), but he was exhausted and ready to leave. By the fall of 1956, he was making arrangements to return to the United States before Christmas, confident that the secret mission he had been given by Allen Dulles—to build a viable South Vietnamese state as an anti-Communist bulwark in Southeast Asia—had been accomplished.
IN THE fall of 1956, the Eisenhower administration had to deal with two simultaneous foreign crises. Israeli forces attacked Egypt on October 29 in a coordinated offensive with the British and French, who were alarmed by the nationalization of the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company. Eisenhower feared that their actions would drive Egypt’s strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, into the arms of the Soviets. A week later, on November 4, the Red Army invaded Hungary to put down a revolt against Soviet rule. By comparison with these dispiriting developments, South Vietnam stood out as an improbable success story—a ray of sunshine amid diplomatic troubles around the globe.
South Vietnam had come a long way from the disorderly days of June 1954, when, just after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Edward Lansdale had first arrived, so bereft of resources that he had no car or home, to find no state worthy of the name and no statesman worth supporting. When, a few weeks later, Ngo Dinh Diem was appointed premier, few expected his ramshackle regime to last two and a half months, much less two and a half years. Lansdale had labored indefatigably and, on the whole, successfully to construct a stable government against daunting odds.
During that period of the mid-1950s, the Quiet American, as he was becoming known, had helped arrange for nearly a million refugees to escape North Vietnam and resettle in the South. He had, in addition, initiated the pacification of the South Vietnamese countryside, while employing his psywar skills to buttress South Vietnam and undermine the North with propaganda coups, such as the almanac predicting ill fortune for the North and the film version of The Quiet American. Most significantly, he had helped Diem prevail against foes both in Saigon and in Wash
ington during the Battle of the Sects. His failures—especially his inability to prevent the South Vietnamese army from being restructured to fight conventional adversaries and to restrain Diem’s authoritarian instincts—would loom larger in the future, when they would be seen as critical weaknesses in the fight against a resurgent Communist threat, but for the time being these shortcomings seemed to pale in comparison with his achievements. For Lansdale’s service in Vietnam, to go along with the National Security Medal he had received in the Philippines, he would get a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest decoration the Department of Defense can award for “exceptionally meritorious and distinguished service” outside of combat.70
“When I left at the end of 1956,” Lansdale later said, “I left a very popular Vietnamese leader running things, a man who was being very responsive to the needs of the people. I thought the show was on the road when I left.”71 In his optimism, he perfectly reflected the buoyant mood of America. In the spring of 1957, Diem would undertake a triumphal tour of the United States that would include an address to a joint session of Congress and a ticker-tape parade in New York. The press, public, and policymakers hailed him as, in the words of Life magazine, “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” a leader who “has roused his country and routed the Reds.”72 Americans were ecstatic that his unexpected success had made it unnecessary, at least for the time being, to commit their own troops to prevent another “domino” from falling to Communist designs.
Yet Diem’s achievement would prove more transitory than those of such contemporary nation builders as David Ben-Gurion, Sukarno, Syngman Rhee, and Lee Kuan Yew. The reasons for his ultimate failure can be ascribed primarily to a combination of geography—i.e., the proximity of a hostile and heavily militarized North Vietnam—and personality—i.e., the diffident and autocratic traits that disfigured Diem’s rule. But the downfall of Diem and the country that he had created can also be ascribed in no small measure to the unwise influence exercised by his patrons in Washington. The problems would reach crisis proportions in 1963, leading to Diem’s assassination and the subsequent Americanization of the conflict, with tragic consequences for all concerned. But already long before then, the bitter seeds of despair were being planted in 1956 as Edward Lansdale was returning home.
For Washington made no attempt to replace his constructive, if not always decisive, position of influence, thus setting South Vietnam on the road that would, within less than a decade, render it a failing state kept alive only with heavy infusions of American blood. How different history might have been if Lansdale or a Lansdale-like figure had remained close enough to Diem to exercise a benign influence and offset the paranoid counsel of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who would push the regime into a fatal and far from inevitable confrontation with the Kennedy administration. Perhaps Lansdale’s achievements could not have lasted in any case—perhaps Diem would have fallen and Hanoi would have prevailed no matter what—but the course on which Washington had now embarked made failure far more likely and at far higher cost.
The first intimations of how things were about to change, and not for the better, came shortly after Lansdale’s departure, when the new chief of the CIA’s Far East Division, Al Ulmer, visited Saigon to announce “that the era of free-wheeling improvisation was over, and that the CIA in Saigon would begin operating like a normal station, with more emphasis on intelligence collection.”73 The next CIA chief of station, Nicholas Natsios, who took over in the spring of 1957, concentrated, as an in-house history puts it, “more on illuminating the workings of the regime than on helping it against its adversaries.”74 For the CIA station, “normal” intelligence gathering meant recruiting a member of Diem’s housekeeping staff to steal trash from his wastebaskets. By contrast, when Lansdale wanted to know something, he went straight to Diem or another official and asked—and more often than not he learned more than traditional spies, with their elaborate tradecraft, ever did.75
With Lansdale departing after two and a half turbulent and momentous years, the bureaucracy was returning to its comfort zone, as if Saigon had suddenly become Stockholm—the capital of a stable and prosperous state where the only tasks expected of the pinstriped American representatives were to attend dull banquets and convey routine démarches. Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon nor any other institution was prepared to fill the resulting vacuum by providing Diem with the kind of guidance that Lansdale once had offered.
As the CIA’s official history notes, Lansdale’s departure marked the end of an era—“When Lansdale left Saigon in December 1956, he took with him whatever modest capacity the United States had to persuade Ngo Dinh Diem of the need to win the consent of the governed.”76 Maybe it was simply a coincidence, but the post-Lansdale epoch would turn out to be far more sanguinary and far less successful.
PART FOUR
WASHINGTON WARRIOR
(1957–1963)
Brigadier General Lansdale addresses a graduating class at the U.S. Army Civil Affairs School at Fort Gordon, Georgia, November 1, 1960. He was a frequent speaker on counterinsurgency in the years between his two tours in Vietnam. (HI)
18
Heartbreak Hotel
I can’t go on the same old way and still retain respect for either of us.
—PAT KELLY
THE Washington, D.C., world to which Edward Lansdale returned just before Christmas 1956 bore little resemblance to the one that he had left in September 1950. Back then, President Harry Truman was building up America’s military strength for a costly conflict on the Korean Peninsula while dealing with a “Red Scare” stoked not only by the McCarthy political witch hunts but by the Communists’ appropriation of China and by the Soviet Union’s acquisition of “the Bomb.” President Dwight Eisenhower, who had just been elected to a second term in November 1956, was now presiding over a far more placid international scene, notwithstanding the short-lived Suez Crisis and the tragic Hungarian Uprising. The nation seemed at long last to be at peace and enjoying the growing fruits of prosperity, symbolized by the stock market’s reaching in 1954 a peak not seen since just before the Wall Street crash of 1929. A new, mass-produced entertainment aesthetic was transforming America and soon much of the world, exemplified by the opening in 1955 of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchise in a suburb of Chicago.
Lansdale’s home with Helen and their two sons, Ted and Pete, was sagging, however, under the emotional weight of a father and a husband who had been largely absent for more than a decade, making a mockery of the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear-family ideal promulgated on TV. But to a casual observer, their household in the Palisades neighborhood appeared like any other mid-1950s suburban domicile, replete with juvenile excitement over Slinkys and Frisbees. Nationally, the teenage world was being “all shook up” by the appearance of a twenty-one-year-old singing sensation from Memphis. Helped by three transformational appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis Presley would dominate the charts with hits such as “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog.” As if embodying the Presley lyrics, Lansdale himself would soon be engulfed in his own “heartbreak”—indeed, multiple heartbreaks.
AMONG THOSE Lansdale had left behind in Saigon was his beloved dog Pierre. In practically every letter that he wrote to Helen Lansdale or Pat Kelly between 1954 and 1956, he gave lengthy updates on the poodle’s doings. A typical example of his canine obsession: “Pierre has had a haircut for the hot weather, which is very much with us and tried to fight a fight to the death with a big black mutt next door.”1 It is questionable whether Ed’s family was that interested in reading so much about a dog they had never met, but the lengthy accounts of Pierre’s activities were a sign of how much, in lieu of a real family, the animal meant to him. (The dog also gave him a safe subject to write about, avoiding both government secrets and personal secrets concerning his relationship with Pat Kelly.) “See, he’s rapidly becoming a member of the family,” Lansdale said.2
In May 1956, howev
er, Pierre ran out of the yard and into the street, never to return. This was Lansdale’s first heartbreak, one that he tried to assuage by immediately acquiring a “blue-eyed, brown-haired poodle pup” called Koko who was an “expert at gnawing off shoe-laces and refusing to be house-broken.”3 Koko accompanied Ed back to Washington, where he was glad to discover that the puppy had “given up chewing my gloves and pissing on the floor.”4
AND WHAT of Lansdale’s other friends—his human friends? No one was more important to him than his darling Patching. He had not, of course, seen as much of Pat Kelly once he moved to Saigon as he had in the days—1945 to 1948, 1950 to 1954—when he lived in Manila, but still he had visited the Philippines and she South Vietnam. Their affair was well known to Lansdale’s associates in both Vietnam and the Philippines. Charles “Bo” Bohannan told Frisco San Juan, the head of Freedom Company, that “if and when Ed will be free, he will take Pat as his life partner.”5
Whenever Pat was away from him, Ed wrote plaintive letters about how much he missed her. On January 29, 1955, for example, just a few weeks after getting back to Saigon after spending Christmas with Pat and the Magsaysays in Manila, he wrote, “I love you. With this simple, straightforward sentence, about love, not resolutions, we move into a letter in which someone who misses you very much, loves you very much, and is out to save the world with one box top ripped from a carton of Chesterfields, is trying to say how much he misses you, at 3:30 in the morning while punch drunk from work, and at 7:30 in the morning and at 17:00 and all through the day in this place.”6 More than a year later, on April 13, 1956, after one of the big parties that he regularly hosted in his villa, Ed wrote, “Darling, I am drunk and sitting here all alone to write to you, after getting rid of all the people having fun and reminding me that I need you for real happiness. . . . I love you, honey chile.”7