by Max Boot
This was the bureaucratic equivalent of a suicide note, and it duly produced the expected result. On September 30, 1963, Lansdale received notice that his office was being eliminated. “The mice finally gnawed through the work and got my office ‘disestablished,’ ” Lansdale wrote to Colonel Ed Black, an army friend in Saigon.36 Lansdale elected to retire effective October 31, 1963. His hair was still thick, his brush mustache still dark, his posture still military erect. He was just fifty-five years old and still vigorous, if battered by too many bureaucratic beatings to count.
Much as Lansdale might have liked to blame his downfall on the “impersonal bureaucracy,” he was at fault, too, for incessantly making war on the powers that be. “He set himself up in such a way that he created waves of antagonism from within the more orthodox bureaucratic circles,” Sam Wilson was to say, “and he kind of thrived on it, thumbed his nose at it. It would have been so easy for him to give just a little bit, sort of grease the skids.” That’s what Wilson himself did during the course of a long Army career that culminated in his appointment in 1976 as a three-star general to command the Defense Intelligence Agency. In his view, “a bureaucracy is a system which is necessary to get things done. Neither good nor bad. It exists for a purpose and the task is to make it work.”37 That is not a perspective Lansdale shared. He viewed the bureaucracy as an enemy and, by so doing, turned it into one.
The relentlessly upbeat Lansdale tried to put the best gloss on what had happened to him. He wrote to Pat Kelly in Manila,
There was a lot of inside wrestling that went on, some of it emotional as could be, so part of my feeling is a big lift of spirit in dumping this load. I was trying to get in to help affairs in Vietnam before they got too bad, but was shoved hard to one side—completely out of being able to help as Diem made some clumsy moves and then Washington made some clumsy moves. Much the same thing was happening with a lot of other affairs. So, I said heck, if I’m not going to be able to help in any way that counts, let me out. And they did.38
To Hanging Sam Williams, Lansdale wrote, “So, with a phew of relief and a considerable lift of spirits, I’m looking forward to retirement.”39
But Sam Wilson saw that, beneath his cheerful exterior, Lansdale was “upset” and “depressed” because “he felt he’d been treated unfairly for no reason.” The final indignity occurred at Lansdale’s retirement party in the Pentagon. It was held on October 31, 1963, in a meeting room connecting the suites of the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary. While various colleagues were delivering flowery toasts and speeches in honor of Lansdale, Robert McNamara walked in. And he kept on walking, striding purposefully forward, one polished wingtip after another, never looking at what was going on through his rimless spectacles, much less stopping to join in the tributes to a man who had left behind a successful advertising career to devote the last twenty-one years of his life to his country’s service.40
LATE THAT very Thursday evening—October 31 in Washington, November 1 in Saigon—Lansdale received a phone call at home from an old friend, Spencer Davis of the Associated Press. He had just gotten a flash cable from Saigon that a coup was starting and wondered whether Lansdale could help him flesh out a story. Wearing pajamas and sprawled in a comfortable chair with a book in his lap and a drink close at hand, Lansdale had to admit that he was now retired and knew nothing of what was occurring.41 Fittingly, if coincidentally, his tenure in government had ended on the very day when his friend of nine years, Ngo Dinh Diem—the man who embodied all of his dreams for the future of Vietnam—was being overthrown at America’s instigation, an act that Lansdale had been warning against for nearly a decade.
Once Lansdale heard the following day that Diem and Nhu had been not just overthrown but killed—butchered, while their hands were bound, in the back of an armored vehicle by a professional killer—his disappointment and sorrow turned to anger, even rage, not an emotion that this imperturbable operative often displayed. Roger Hilsman, David Halberstam, and Diem’s other critics, he said bitterly, had “some touch of blood on their hands.”42 Before long, even many of those who had been responsible for Diem’s overthrow came to see the enormity of their mistake. A few years later, when the hard-bitten Lou Conein got drunk in Saigon, Lansdale said, “He tearfully asked me to forgive him for the Diem action.”43
It was not truly Conein’s fault. He was just following orders. But there was much to ask forgiveness for. As Lansdale wrote decades later, “It was morally wrong and strategically stupid to divide our political base in Vietnam when that political base, small as it was, was facing an energetic and exploitive enemy. Napoleon had a maxim about not dividing your forces in the face of the enemy.”44 Because the Kennedy administration had violated this “truism,” the anti-Communist forces were left demoralized, disarrayed, and divided. America would have no choice but to send its own sons to fight if it wanted to avert a Communist victory.
What made Lansdale’s anguish all the greater was his belief that he might have averted this cataclysm if he had been dispatched to Saigon. And he was not the only one to think so. On December 11, 1963, Lansdale received an extraordinary letter from Dillon Anderson, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, who had worked with him on the Draper Committee in 1958 to study American foreign aid programs. “First,” Anderson wrote, “let me say that I think it’s a damn shame that you are not in Viet-Nam where your unique talents (1) might have saved our nation the anguish and a flavor of the guilt for the bloody termination of the Ngo regime; and (2) your particular skills in dealing with political problems might help us save this salubrious corner of Asia from going down the drain. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”45
There was nothing Edward Lansdale could do about it, either, especially now that Diem, the one man who might have been able to hold the country together, had been cut down in a blaze of bullets. South Vietnam was careening into free fall, and it was going to drag America, tethered by an umbilical cord of commitments, down with it.
PART FIVE
BASTARD CHILD
(1964–1968)
Lansdale with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky of South Vietnam, returning from the Honolulu Summit, 1966. Lansdale was close to both men, but they could exert only limited influence over their own governments. (Image Works)
25
“A Hell of a Mess”
I am not going to lose Vietnam.
—LYNDON JOHNSON
AT 12:34 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, just three weeks after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death, the United Press International news service sent out the first intimation that something terrible had just happened in Dallas. Just seconds before, the UPI correspondent Merriman Smith, who was sitting in the press pool car trailing the presidential limousine, had seized a radio telephone to inform the UPI’s Dallas bureau chief, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”1
Only four minutes had elapsed since those shots had rung out, hitting not only President Kennedy but also Governor John Connally of Texas, who was in the same vehicle, along with their wives, Jacqueline Kennedy and Nellie Connally. The president’s car, a 1961 Lincoln convertible, was even then bearing its occupants at high speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1:35 p.m., as William Manchester noted in his magisterial account of the shooting and its aftermath, “UPI bells chimed on teletype machines around the world: FLASH PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S DEAD.” “Over half the population wept,” Manchester wrote, quoting an opinion poll. “Four out of five, in the words of the report, felt ‘the loss of someone very close and dear,’ and subsequently nine out of ten suffered ‘physical discomfort.’ ”2
The mourning and shock would continue—in some ways they would never end—as John F. Kennedy’s body was borne back to Washington in the cargo hold of his own airplane, a Boeing 707 designated Air Force One. After his murder that Friday afternoon in Dallas, the hope and perceived innocence that had characterized the init
ial years of the Kennedys’ mythical Camelot would never return, the vanquishing of a youthful president somehow symbolizing America’s expulsion from an illusory Eden. On Saturday, November 23, the casket was placed on display in the East Room of the White House, where notables—senators, generals, former presidents—arrived to say their final goodbyes. On Sunday, November 24, an estimated three hundred thousand people lined up in silent respect along Pennsylvania Avenue to watch a caisson drawn by six matched gray horses pull the flag-draped casket from the White House to the Capitol building. Hundreds of thousands more stood in another line stretching for more than three miles, waiting in near-freezing temperatures for as long as ten hours for a chance to walk through the Rotunda to pass by the coffin. The poignant farewell concluded on Monday, November 25, with a funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral attended by world leaders and royalty followed by burial at Arlington National Cemetery with full pomp and circumstance.
MANY PEOPLE never accepted—and never will—the verdict rendered by numerous independent investigations, that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. The murder of a beloved young president, an idol and an inspiration to millions, appeared too consequential an event to be the work of one deranged misfit, a disgraced former marine armed with a mail-order rifle. The fact that Oswald himself was killed shortly thereafter by a gunman with Mafia links only added to speculation that Kennedy had been the victim of a far-reaching plot. In the decades after Kennedy’s murder, phrases such as “grassy knoll” and “the Zapruder film” would enter the popular culture, thanks to an industry of conspiracy-mongers, their work culminating in 1991 with the release of the director Oliver Stone’s $40 million epic JFK.
The film features a shadowy character, played by Donald Sutherland and identified only as X, who claims that Kennedy was killed by the “military industrial complex” in a plot orchestrated by “General Y.” The movie furnishes some telltale clues to Y’s identity. X says that Allen Dulles was Y’s benefactor and that Y was in charge of Operation Mongoose. In case there is any further doubt of Y’s identity, the camera briefly pans to his office desk. His nameplate is obscured but the visible part reads “M/GEN. E.G.” above the words “U.S. AIR.” It does not take much imagination to infer that this is the desk of Major General E. G. Lansdale, U.S. Air Force. And just as the identity of Y was obvious, so too the identity of X was never in doubt either. Stone himself identified X at a press conference as L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who had worked as a liaison officer in the Pentagon’s special operations office when it was run by Lansdale between 1961 and 1963.3
Stone held up Prouty as a fearless truth-teller—a man who, in his words, “will go down in history” for revealing the “Secret History” of the United States and uncovering “the ugliest nest of vipers the civilized world has probably seen since the dreaded Mongol raiders of the tenth and eleventh centuries.”4 (The Mongol invasions actually occurred in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.) In reality, Prouty was a crank with a febrile imagination—“a complete nut,” in Rufus Phillips’s words.5 He was a “good pilot of prop-driven aircraft,” Lansdale later said, “but had such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff that I kicked him back to the Air Force.”6
Prouty would be associated after his retirement from the Air Force in 1964 with the white supremacist Liberty Lobby, the Church of Scientology, and the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche; he grandiosely compared LaRouche’s federal prosecution for conspiracy and mail fraud to the trial of Socrates. He also claimed that the fall of the Berlin Wall was stage-managed by David Rockefeller to profit from “the rubles and the gold,” that he had personally seen a UFO, and that “the Churchill gang” murdered Franklin D. Roosevelt.7
Prouty’s old boss was a favorite target of his bizarre and inventive accusations. He claimed that Lansdale had concocted the entire Huk threat—that so-called Huk attacks were actually carried out by Philippine army special forces in order to elect Ramon Magsaysay president, although he never explained why Washington would want to elect Magsaysay if there was no Huk threat.8 In a similar vein, he claimed that the members of Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission were “a band of superterrorists” who deliberately created the Vietcong by moving a million Vietnamese from the North to the South in 1954–55. Their goal, Prouty explained, was to spark a war that could profit the military-industrial complex.9 (In reality, as we have seen, most of the refugees were Catholics who were staunchly anti-Communist.)
To back up his grave accusation that Lansdale was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, Prouty could offer but one piece of “evidence”: a photograph taken on November 22, 1963, near Dealey Plaza, showing a man in a suit walking by three tramps who are being escorted by two police officers. The man is visible only from the rear, but Prouty nevertheless claimed that this was none other than Lansdale and that the “tramps” were actors hired by the conspirators.10 Yet even Prouty insouciantly admitted, “The picture could be a hundred other people and I could be wrong.”11 He was definitely wrong about the tramps: they were finally identified by an enterprising reporter in 1992, who established they really were vagrants and not assassins in disguise.12
There is no reason to imagine that the man seen from the back was Lansdale—why, after all, would he have wanted to kill Kennedy? Prouty and Stone claimed JFK had mortally offended the “military-industrial complex” by embracing the cause of peace and trying to end the Cold War. In reality, while Kennedy contemplated reducing the number of U.S. advisers in Vietnam if conditions continued to improve, he also made clear that the “security of South Viet Nam is a major interest of the United States” and that “we will adhere to our policy of working with the people and government of South Viet Nam to deny this country to Communism.”13 Nor did Kennedy end attempts to overthrow or kill Fidel Castro, as JFK suggested. On November 22, 1963, at the very time that the president was being killed in Dallas, a CIA case officer was meeting in Paris with a disaffected Cuban military officer to give him a hypodermic syringe filled with poison, disguised as a Paper-Mate pen, which could be used to “eliminate” Castro.14 And far from cutting the defense budget, Kennedy, as he boasted in a speech in Fort Worth on the very day of his demise, had increased defense spending by more than 20 percent.15
Even if Kennedy had actually been intent on reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, ending the plots against Castro, or cutting defense spending, Lansdale would hardly have objected. He was a critic, not an advocate, of the Americanization of the Vietnam War. He was never a proponent of expensive weapons systems; he argued that the best weapon was a well-trained soldier, diplomat, or spy who would deal sympathetically with the local populace. And, although he ran Operation Mongoose, he was happy to end his participation in what he viewed as a thankless task. A staunch advocate of spreading liberty abroad, Lansdale was scarcely likely to undermine liberty at home by participating in a military coup d’état against the lawfully elected president—a man he had worked for and respected, even if he was less enamored of the president’s younger brother.
Far from plotting to kill John F. Kennedy, as numerous conspiracy-mongers continue to allege, Lansdale was as grief-stricken as the rest of the country by his shocking death and as uncertain about what would come next. Like most Americans, he must have wondered whether Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been seeking power all his life, could rise to the challenge of exercising the supreme authority he had now inherited by dint of an assassin’s bullets.
BORN IN 1908 a few months after Edward Lansdale, Johnson had been raised in the dirt-poor Hill Country of central Texas. His mother dressed him in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, just as Lansdale’s mother did, and imbued him with a sense that he was superior to his impoverished classmates. When Lyndon was young, his father, Sam Ealey Johnson, was a considerable success; not only did he make a comfortable living trading in cattle, cotton, and land, but he also won election to the Texas legislature. Lyndon idolized his strong-willed father and was de
vastated when he lost all of his money and his 433-acre ranch in the recession of 1922, which also hit the Lansdale family hard. In an instant, as Johnson later said, he “dropped to the bottom of the heap,” and his father went from a big man in the community to a laughingstock.16 The humiliation of his family’s downfall gave him added impetus to succeed, while also infusing him with deep-rooted resentment of those who were more privileged than he was.
Johnson would first come to Washington in 1931, while Lansdale was moving from Los Angeles to New York, as the aide to a newly elected congressman. He soon became the “boss” of the hitherto inconsequential Little Congress made up of Hill staffers—a feat he achieved by stuffing the ballot box just as he had done as an undergraduate at Southwest State Teachers College to win student body elections. “My God,” a future president of the organization wondered, “who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?”17 By 1937, while Lansdale was moving to San Francisco to launch his advertising career, Johnson was already a congressman himself, having won a special election when he was only twenty-eight years old. His first attempt to win a Senate seat in 1941 failed after his adversary stole more votes than he did. Vowing never to be beaten in such a manner again, Johnson did just enough to squeak out an 87-vote victory in the 1948 Senate election. By 1953, while Lansdale was engineering Ramon Magsaysay’s election as president of the Philippines, “Landslide Lyndon” had been elected leader of the Senate Democrats. Two years later, while Lansdale was fighting the “battle of the sects” in Saigon, Johnson became at the age of forty-six the youngest majority leader in Senate history—and the most powerful.