The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  This was the price that Lansdale paid for his growing fame. His very appearance in any country, even for an hour, was treated with panic, as if he were a modern-day Pied Piper capable of magically making governments rise and fall with a few catchy notes from his harmonica. Writing of the powers imputed to him by critics, including so many serving ambassadors, Lansdale cracked, “If I could only figure out what it is they think I’m doing, I’d go do it.”29

  SAIGON WAS the city, after Manila, closest to Lansdale’s heart—the scene of earlier triumphs mixed with inevitable frustrations, of song-filled soirees and close brushes with death, of friendships forged and dear friends lost. Now he was returning to this bustling metropolis, which still retained its colonial charm, on January 2, 1961, for the first time in nearly two years,30 at a pivotal moment in the history not only of Vietnam but of the United States as well. Less than two months before, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, young, handsome, and charismatic, had defeated the dour vice president, Richard M. Nixon of California, in a bruising presidential contest decided by the slimmest of margins. The primary national security issue was a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that Kennedy sincerely, if erroneously, claimed had been created by the Eisenhower administration’s restrained defense spending. Vietnam was almost entirely absent from the election in spite of Kennedy’s long-standing interest in that country. He had visited Vietnam in 1951 and had come back presciently skeptical that the French war effort could succeed without addressing Vietnamese desires for independence. After the Geneva Accords were signed, as noted by the historian Fredrik Logevall, he had become a staunch supporter of Ngo Dinh Diem and echoed Eisenhower’s warnings that the fall of South Vietnam could send “dominoes” toppling across the region.31

  No one knew how the untested president-elect would react to the new Vietcong offensive. Would he send more American advisers or even combat troops? Would he support Diem or jettison him? Would he press for liberal reforms or conclude that authoritarianism was the best option? Or would he abandon South Vietnam altogether if it was deemed incapable of defending itself? Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor his transition team had focused on the problem of Vietnam; Laos, which appeared to be in imminent danger of falling to the Communist Pathet Lao, had gotten more attention. Thus the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy remained to be defined as Lansdale stepped onto the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Airport to be greeted by the familiar tropical heat and smell of rotting vegetation.

  Lansdale was surprised to find that, after opposing his trip, the U.S. embassy “killed me with kindness.”32 The reason was that, as CIA station chief Bill Colby, a daring wartime commando with a deceptively nondescript appearance, later wrote, “There were rumors that Kennedy was considering naming Lansdale as his Ambassador to Vietnam.”33 Colby thought that Lansdale was “very suspicious of the CIA station” initially, which was to be expected in light of Lansdale’s clashes with Colby’s predecessors, but eventually the CIA man won him over, and the two became friends. Colby, a future CIA director, was later to say that he had “great respect” for Lansdale and felt “very warm and friendly and very supportive of him,” feelings that Lansdale fully reciprocated.34 Predictably, Lansdale was less impressed with Ambassador Durbrow, whom he found to be worn-out, ill, and ineffectual.35

  Among the many other people Lansdale saw were the arch-schemer Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, the caustic and comely Madame Nhu, a power couple that was becoming even more important in the councils of government than when he had left in 1956. She asked about “that beautiful girl who was at Long Hai [beach],” recalling his waning days in Vietnam, when he had prevailed on Diem and his family to take a seaside vacation. Lansdale wistfully had to admit that he hadn’t seen much of Pat Kelly for the past two years “and was even more curious than she about that beautiful girl.”36

  Seeking to reestablish his old relationship of trust with Ngo Dinh Diem, Lansdale found that at first the president “was a bit cautious with me. I suspected that he was waiting for me to drop Washington’s other shoe as a follow-up to the Ambassador’s demands that he reform his ways.” Lansdale sought to dispel Diem’s wariness: “I reminisced on what we had gone through together in the past and he joined in, adding the story of the 11 November [1960] coup as he saw it.” His reserve starting to melt, Diem gave Lansdale a tour of his bedroom, not something he would have done with an outsider, to show the damage inflicted by the paratroopers’ .50-caliber machine-gun fire. “Our meetings from then on became more like the old days, with plenty of give and take . . . ,” Lansdale wrote, “but only after I convinced him that I still had affection for the Vietnamese people and was trying to understand their problems before sounding off.”37

  Diem’s primary complaint was not with the United States but rather with his aides, who were lacking in “strong executive capability.” The president was feeling overworked because he felt there were so few others he could trust.38 Of course, part of the problem was self-inflicted: Diem was by nature a micromanager and an introvert who found it hard to reach out to others. Aware of Diem’s shortcomings, Lansdale closely questioned him about how often he met with his vice president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho, who was also the economics minister. Diem assured him that he saw Tho “all the time.”

  Lansdale asked, “When’s the last time you had him over for dinner?”

  Diem replied, “Oh, a short time ago. I don’t know exactly when.”

  Lansdale then went over to the Economic Ministry and talked to Tho, who told him that he hadn’t had dinner with Diem in a year or two. Asked whether he would like to have dinner with the president, Tho replied that he would love to.

  Lansdale went back to see Diem and told him, “Tho hasn’t seen you for a year for dinner. Why don’t you call him right now and invite him tonight for dinner?” Diem did just that, and relations between the two men briefly improved.39

  The rapprochement between Diem and Tho was but one example of the kind of political action that Lansdale favored and that was largely neglected in his absence. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between Diem and Tho would go sour once again after Lansdale left Saigon, and Tho would join the cabal plotting a coup against Diem a few years later.

  LANSDALE FOUND that in Saigon, amid the cyclos and the cafés, the cocktails and the sumptuous banquets, the “guerrilla fighting in the countryside . . . seems far, far away.”40 There were “crowds of people” on the streets and shops full of goods but, just as in Manila in 1950, the atmosphere of frenetic gaiety was permeated by “suspicion and fear.” He was disgusted by infighting and plotting among “the intellectuals and Americans in Saigon.” “They don’t know how hard the Communists have hit them yet,” he wrote. Many of his acquaintances were “in jail or in exile. Others are sitting around griping.” He felt besieged by “so damn many kibitzers.” “It was almost as bad as Washington,” he wrote to Pat Kelly. “The Americans and Vietnamese sit around writing papers all the time, in triplicate.” “What a place,” he lamented. “It got me down.”41

  To get away from “the protocol” and get a taste of the real war, he asked Diem to borrow a helicopter and a member of his staff to tour the provinces. Diem wanted to know where he was going. Lansdale refused to say. “I’ll tell your pilot that; I don’t want to tell you,” he replied, because he didn’t want to give the president time to construct a Potemkin village for his inspection. Diem played along, assigning his secretary of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, to accompany Lansdale, and even providing some sandwiches for them to munch en route.42

  Early on the morning of January 10, 1961, only ten days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Lansdale, along with Joe Redick and Thuan, took off in a South Vietnamese C-47 transport aircraft from Saigon bound for Soc Trang, a provincial capital with a South Vietnamese army base set amid one of the world’s lushest rice-growing regions, the Mekong Delta. Amid the watery rice paddies, worked in the age-old manner by water buffalo and farmers in black pajamas and conical bamboo hats, Lansdale discovere
d a disturbing development: “Vietnamese artillery firing on villages down in the Delta.” “That shocked me more than almost anything else,” he said. “That’s something you don’t do in a guerrilla war, you know. In a people’s war, you never make war against your own people.” Lansdale demanded that the battery commander cease firing, which made the officer so angry that for a minute Lansdale thought he was going to get shot. Fortunately the defense minister “talked him out of it.”43

  Amid the Vietcong resurgence in the Mekong Delta, Lansdale managed to find one good-news story—the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau Peninsula. Its unusual and inspirational leader was known as “the fighting priest.” Father Nguyen Loc Hoa was a Catholic cleric who had once been a colonel in the Chinese Nationalist Army (he had adopted a Vietnamese name after moving to Vietnam). After Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat, Father Hoa (pronounced wah) had fled with his parishioners. Eventually Diem allowed them to settle in one of the least promising parts of South Vietnam—an area of swamps and forests that resembles the Florida Everglades. They had to build their own village out of mud dragged out of the water.

  Lansdale had met Father Hoa in Saigon and been impressed by this almost six-foot-tall figure with, in a journalist’s words, wire-rim spectacles, a placid countenance, and a “wide smooth face with gently slanted gray eyes.”44 Father Hoa, who spoke fluent Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and English and typically wore a .45-caliber pistol on his hip, regaled him with tales of how he had organized his own 300-man militia, named the Sea Swallows after a local bird. When the Vietcong first struck, the Sea Swallows had nothing to fight with save staves and knives. But by counterattacking swiftly, Hoa’s men seized M-1 rifles and Browning Automatic Rifles from the enemy. After appealing for support from Saigon, Father Hoa was given some outdated weapons captured from the Binh Xuyen along with a pittance to pay his fighters. Gradually, his community, which had started with 375 Chinese Catholic refugees, grew with the addition of Vietnamese farmers. By early 1961, there were 1,200 people living in Binh Hung.

  Lansdale and his party alighted from their helicopter on “a small landing pad in the midst of deep mud just outside the village.” As soon as they got off, three of Father Hoa’s men, who had been wounded in combat, were put aboard the helicopter for transport to a hospital in Soc Trang. “Some of these tough guerrilla troops gave me the only salute they knew, the three-fingered Boy Scout hand salute,” Lansdale wrote. Father Hoa’s followers reported that they had lost seventeen men in one recent battle while killing thirty to sixty Vietcong.

  Much of the combat in this “dirty war” was not waged with guns. “The majority of casualties,” Lansdale found, “are foot wounds, caused by the most common weapon: a long iron nail.” The Vietcong would drive six-inch nails into thin boards and hide them in the mud where, in an omen of things to come for American soldiers, the booby trap would perforate the foot of any unsuspecting Sea Swallow who stepped on it. Sea Swallows were thus forced to advance “with a sliding motion that looked as though they were ice-skating.” Because they had nothing to wear but basketball shoes bought in Saigon, they took to adding inner soles made of iron sheeting.

  While Lansdale was visiting Binh Hung, the imperturbable Father Hoa received a report of Vietcong movements to the north. He wanted to check it out and invited Lansdale, Redick, and the minister of defense to accompany him. They all climbed aboard a motor launch “and went chugging northerly up a canal,” while a company of Sea Swallows shadowed them on foot. The “tall grass and mangrove swamp along the canal showed how easily ambushes could be laid,” Lansdale wrote. Eventually they reached the tiny village of Cai Doi, where, Lansdale wrote, “Secretary Thuan and Father Hoa shook hands with many of the villagers, talking about rice, fish, and the Viet Cong.”

  And then it was time to return to the isolated, mud-brick redoubt of Binh Hung. This was a moment of maximal danger, for, as Father Hoa explained, “A favorite VC tactic is to let a group through on an outward march and then to ambush them on the return. The group becomes unalert when a patrol seems to have been uneventful.” Father Hoa and his party were accompanied on the return trip by a second company of troops and another boat. The journey was uneventful, but Lansdale told Pat Kelly that he “broke all the rules” in order to go out “with a small patrol of local villagers” in terrain where “not even the French ever dared to go, nor the Vietnamese Army.”

  Even though he had seen for himself that the Vietcong were gaining ground, Lansdale returned to Saigon buoyed by this foray into the increasingly embattled Mekong Delta. “The morale of Vietnamese officials and people in the 5th Military Region was quite refreshing to encounter after visiting people in Saigon–Cholon, which is full of defeatist rumors,” he wrote, echoing an observation often made by visitors to war zones, who find, paradoxically, morale soaring on the dangerous front lines and sagging in the safer rear areas.45

  LANSDALE’S GOOD feelings had dissipated somewhat by the time he left Vietnam on January 14, 1961, after additional exposure to the hothouse atmosphere of Saigon, where political intrigue was an art form not infrequently practiced for its own sake. The self-serving politicos in the capital were far removed, geographically and ethically, from Father Hoa’s stout Sea Swallows, and their entreaties and imprecations depressed him. “Everyone wanted me to do some sort of miracle,” he wrote to Pat Kelly the day of his departure, “and did their level best to make sure I wouldn’t have a chance. . . . It’s heart-breaking to see what a bunch of self-centered people have done to ruin the dreams in the Philippines, Vietnam + Laos. . . . Whatever happened to people with guts like Spruance and O’Daniel?” 46

  In that melancholy mood, Lansdale flew to Hawaii to write a lengthy report on the trip amid crashing waves and gently swaying palm trees. He returned to Washington via Los Angeles, Tucson, and Chicago, arriving home during an unwelcome cold snap on the afternoon of January 18, 1961.47 Two days later, a new president a decade younger than the fifty-three-year-old “Ugly American” would take office, uncertain of what to do about the growing Communist challenge in Indochina. One of the very first documents he would find on his Oval Office desk would be a report on Lansdale’s trip.

  21

  The Ambassador Who Never Was

  I don’t know which has the worst jungle, Vietnam or Washington.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THE snow began to fall at noon on Thursday, January 19, 1961, the day after Edward Lansdale’s return, and continued deep into the night, inch after inch compounding the capital’s misery. Washington, essentially a Southern city, was notorious for its inability to cope with snow, and the situation was now exacerbated by overcrowding. The city was so jammed with inauguration-goers that one national magazine was reporting that “by midweek it seemed easier to get a Cabinet job than a bed.”1 Thousands of cars were abandoned in the snowdrifts, and airplanes were diverted from National Airport. Many guests could not reach the inaugural-eve parties.

  By the time Washington awoke on Friday morning, the snow had finally stopped. An army of three thousand workers, using seven hundred trucks and snowplows, cleared the streets, while soldiers wielded flamethrowers to melt the snowbanks that had accumulated on the inauguration grandstands in front of the freshly painted Capitol building.2 The ceremony began at noon under a winter sun and a brilliant blue sky. Despite what seemed to locals to be an Arctic chill, John F. Kennedy left his overcoat and silk top hat behind when he strode to the podium in his formal morning dress to take the oath of office. Seemingly impervious to the weather, he stayed outside for hours, sitting in the open air on a reviewing stand in front of the White House to watch the inaugural parade go by. The New York Times was to write, “Bronzed by the Florida sun during his pre-inauguration holiday, with his brown hair neatly brushed, he looked the picture of health as he tackled the White House job.”3

  We now know that appearances were deceiving. Far from being in rude health, Kennedy, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, suffered from an astonishing variety of ailments, i
n his case including Addison’s disease, inflammations of the prostate and colon, and compression fractures of the spine. He had nearly died in 1954 during a back operation designed to relieve his almost unbearable suffering. Simply to keep functioning and stay off crutches he had to take numerous hot baths daily, sit in a rocking chair (which put less pressure on his lower back than a conventional chair), and allow himself to be injected with painkillers and amphetamines by a physician with the apposite moniker of “Dr. Feelgood.”4 That Kennedy was in so much pain throughout his life makes his considerable accomplishments—including his wartime heroism aboard a small patrol-torpedo boat that bucked like a bronco—appear all the more impressive in retrospect.5 But Kennedy did not want the truth revealed at the time, because it would have left him open to charges that he could not withstand the physical rigors of the presidency.

  Kennedy’s medical condition was not the only secret to emerge after his death. We now know, too, about his incessant womanizing, which hardly slowed after he married the ravishing and perspicacious Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. Historians have speculated that his insatiable, nearly pathological quest for fresh sexual conquests was driven in part by a sense of mortality—“an existential pinch on the arm to prove that he was there,” in the words of his biographer Robert Dallek—and in part by his “deep difficulty with intimacy.”6 Whatever the case, his indiscreet private life left him exposed to the potential of blackmail, venereal disease, and sheer embarrassment.