by Max Boot
The battle was all but over on the evening of June 9, 1972, when John Paul Vann set out on a short hop from Pleiku to Kontum aboard his Kiowa helicopter. He did not have with him his regular pilot, an experienced old warrant officer who had burned out after taking one risk too many with the fearless Vann. At the controls was a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant who was not used to the rain squalls and fog they encountered. Apparently overcome by vertigo, he became disoriented and flew the little helicopter straight into a clump of trees. It disintegrated in an orange fireball. As told by Neil Sheehan in his peerless chronicle, A Bright Shining Lie, Vann died instantly along with the pilot and a passenger.21
His death marked the end of an era in Vietnam. The American war was drawing to a conclusion after the death of fifty-eight thousand personnel. Vann and his fellow advisers had rendered invaluable assistance in stopping the Easter Offensive, playing the kind of low-visibility role that Lansdale had long advocated in place of massive combat formations. South Vietnam had been denuded of American ground troops and survived the test of 1972. But it was unlikely to survive in the future if the advisers—and the aircraft they could summon—were withdrawn.
JOHN PAUL VANN was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on June 16, 1972. The Old Guard, the regiment to which Pete Lansdale had once belonged, assembled in the muggy heat in their dress-blue uniforms and white gloves to conduct the coffin to its final resting spot on a horse-drawn caisson. In attendance, in silent testimony to Vann’s outsize influence, was a Who’s Who of Washington, including Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Secretary of State William Rogers, General William Westmoreland, the former CORDS director Robert Komer, and his successor, William Colby, soon to become the CIA’s director. Vann had touched all of them with his fire and zeal. Lou Conein came too, and so did Daniel Ellsberg, who flew in from Los Angeles, where he was about to go on trial in the Pentagon Papers case. This countercultural icon tried to blend in by wearing a blue pinstripe suit, but his presence, in a pew right behind Vann’s family, caused a stir.
Less noticed was Edward Lansdale. Neil Sheehan thought that, in his “light brown business suit,” he looked “unstylish” and exhausted. His “habitual smile” was still there, but his “throaty voice . . . was now tired and old.”22 If Lansdale appeared dejected and beaten, there was a good reason for it. The spring of ’72 had been for him a time of mourning.
In late April, Lansdale had learned that his old aide Dave Hudson, who had worked with him in Saigon in 1967–68, had committed suicide. After leaving Vietnam, Hudson had started a dry cleaning store in La Mesa, California, but just before his death he told Lansdale that he intended to sell the business “and devote his time to helping the people of Viet Nam.”23 Lansdale was left to speculate that the unmarried and childless Hudson had killed himself out of grief over the fate of Vietnam compounded by grief for his recently deceased mother. George Melvin, another member of Lansdale’s old team, spoke for all of them when he wrote, “Dave Hudson’s death hurt. America has lost a most conscientious American in Dave. Dave was a loner, but aren’t we all?”24
At the same time that he was receiving the sad news about Dave Hudson, Edward Lansdale was also seeing his wife take a turn for the worse. “She went into a rather unexpected decline around the first of May,” he noted.25 The exact nature of her illness was impossible to ascertain because, as a Christian Scientist, Helen refused medical care. But it was obvious that both her heart and lungs were giving out. A longtime smoker, she had finally quit the habit, but the fire in their home on February 12 might have triggered emphysema—or so her husband and children speculated. Unable to take her to the hospital, Lansdale called in Christian Science practitioners and nurses to look after her. Their sons, Ted and Pete, came over to help, too, and they were all with her when the end came on May 14, 1972. “I gather,” Ed wrote, “that Helen liked the idea of having all her menfolk present—and fell into a natural and peaceful sleep the last night, simply not awaking.”26 Sam Karrick, a former member of Lansdale’s Vietnam team who was a Christian Science practitioner, conducted the funeral service.
Helen was seventy-one years old, and she had been married to Ed for thirty-eight years. The small-town secretary with “brilliant blue” eyes had met the handsome young aspiring cartoonist in New York in 1932, and they had succored each other in dealing with the misery of the Great Depression and the wreckage of their broken families. Within a few years their union had produced two sons, and by now they were doting grandparents. Most of their marriage, admittedly, had been not a fulfilling one. They had spent long years living apart and only narrowly avoided divorce. But they had drawn closer during the four years of Ed’s retirement. Now she was gone, and there was a hole in his life. “It hit me pretty hard,” Ed wrote a couple of months later, “and I’m taking my time about getting myself oriented again.”27
Even nearly half a year later, Lansdale still sounded disoriented. In October 1972, he wrote that he was struggling to find his “balance again.”28 Stanley Karnow, who profiled him toward the end of the year for the Washington Post, described him as “lonely and dispirited” and living a “rather secluded existence” since his wife’s death.29 This “very lonely period,” as Ed described it, was not destined to last long.30 What Lansdale took care to conceal from Karnow and others, as carefully as any covert operation he had ever supervised, was that within weeks of Helen’s demise he was taking steps to rekindle an old romance.
AS SOON as Pat Kelly heard about Helen’s death, she penned a letter of condolence. Ed wrote back less than a month after Helen’s death, “Patching—Bless you for your letter, which reached out and touched me so at a time of need. It’s a strange period for a person to go through and a bit of affection from someone who means so much to me really helps.”31 Soon the letters between Ed and Pat began to fly with the frequency of 747s back and forth across the vast expanse of the Pacific.
There was no longer any need to limit the relationship to an epistolary one. Ed was a recent widower, Pat a longtime widow. She was now contemplating retirement from her job at the U.S. Information Agency in Manila, where her current boss was Lansdale’s old friend Hank Miller. Her grown daughter, Patricia, and her family were still living in Manila, but they did not require her constant presence. Sensing an opportunity at long last for the life that she had dreamed of ever since she first met Ed, Pat announced in August 1972 that she was going to apply for a special immigrant visa available only to those who had rendered valuable service to the United States. “Hurray!” Ed wrote as soon as he found out. “It’s great news—and a great and wonderful surprise to me.”32
Ed began to dream of showing Pat the United States. “I’ve seen your country,” he told her, “but you haven’t seen mine and I can’t think of anything that would thrill me more than to see it with you. We might even get into more trouble than we ever did in the Philippines. Entice you?”33 A few days later, Pat wrote back to thank him for all his “tempting propositions.” “I have never had such lures dangled over my nose in all my life [so] that perhaps one crazy day when I can hear the rain on the tin rooftops and I am lonely as all get out, I will go straight to the airline office and get me a ticket instead of getting to the Embassy for work, provided I have my special immigrant’s visa by then.”34
Pat admitted to harboring nostalgia, as did Ed, for their days together: “I can never look at a setting sun beyond the mountains or the sea, without thinking of you and those beach trips.” Before long she began to imagine their life together: “You don’t like shopping? Is that the message? I will shop for groceries (bacon and toast for breakfast?). How dull! How about smoked herring and fried eggs and rice, and diced tomatoes or vinegar? That’s what I eat Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes replacing the smoked fish with pork sausage or the cured meat from Tarlac.” She even asked him to go shopping to help her acquire a wardrobe suitable for America: “I dare you to buy me a couple of good bras, preferably Warners (stock #22998 or similar) white, and 34-
B. If you are going to dress me up, you might start from the basic. Am I starting to frighten you?”35
Ed not only went bra shopping; he sent Pat money to finance her trip to America. “I am looking forward so much to this trip and the world it will open for this provinciana from Tarlac,” she wrote. But her anticipation was tinged with nervousness. She was worried about living in a cold, strange country and having to do without some of the comforts that even middle-class Filipinos were used to. “Living in Asia, with maids and drivers around, makes living in the U.S. a little difficult at first, or so I heard,” she wrote.36
Unspoken was an even bigger reason for concern: could she and Ed finally make a go of it as a proper couple after a decade-long liaison followed by sixteen years of intermittent contacts? What would Ed’s boys, whom she had never met, think about his embrace of an old flame so soon after their mother’s death? And, for that matter, what would their neighbors, friends, and complete strangers say about an interracial romance between a white man of English ancestry and a woman with darker skin and an accent? America had turned more tolerant on matters of race since the forties, when Ed and Pat had first met, but antimiscegenation statutes had not been invalidated by the Supreme Court until 1967 (in a case originating in Ed’s new home state of Virginia). With her ticket finally purchased—she was due to fly from Manila to Honolulu on February 19, 1973, and from there to San Francisco—Pat understandably found herself getting “cold feet and thinking up excuses to delay.”37 To shield herself against disappointment, she talked of visiting other friends and getting a job in the United States, thus creating an independent life for herself.
Ed flew out to San Francisco to meet Pat. For propriety’s sake, she stayed with a couple of female friends from the Philippines while Ed stayed at a motel. They got together to visit the wineries of Napa and Sonoma.38 They found each other a bit aged—she was fifty-eight, he sixty-five—and she now wore giant eyeglasses that seemed to engulf her face like a diving mask. But both were still in good health and their feelings for each other had remained undimmed by all the years that had passed since their first meeting in 1946.
By June, Pat was living with Ed in Alexandria and, after a few job interviews, had given up any thought of finding employment. Instead, they had agreed “to get married quietly one of these days before a justice of the peace.” “Since we’re both grandparents, and have known each other more than 27 years now,” Ed explained to his younger brother Ben, “it’s far from being an impulsive, blind thing. She’s a lovely, witty woman whom it’s a sheer joy to have around close by, as well as an old comrade who shared dangers in the Huk country—in the unwritten chapter I left out of my book. The only rub, a minor one now, is our religious backgrounds. She is Catholic, although dismayed by the materialistic trend of that church these days. We’ve agreed to let each other alone on the subject.”39
The simple ceremony took place, fittingly enough given Ed’s devotion to the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of July 1973. The setting was the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, located near their house; Pat, who wore a flowing white wedding dress, had won the religious point, as women usually do. Ed’s younger son, Pete, was his best man; the maid of honor was Hank Miller’s wife, Ann. Ed’s older son, Ted, and his wife, Carol, remained in Florida, where Ted was teaching at an Air Force ROTC summer camp. The boys were taken aback that their father was remarrying little more than a year after their mother’s death, and they knew that his long-standing relationship with Pat had poisoned their parents’ marriage. But they could not begrudge their father his newfound happiness. “This was an uncomfortable event for Dad’s sons and their wives, in many respects,” Pete recalled many years later. “I was there to support Dad in his decision to marry Pat, but could not completely shed my feelings about past issues.”40
Ed and Pat took Amtrak’s then new Auto-Train down to Florida for their honeymoon, which they combined with some lectures that Ed was giving and with a visit to see Ted and Carol. Canbo came along too: “The dog, a giant 75 lb French poodle, crowded Pat out of her place at the train window, insisting he wanted to see where we were going,” Ed wrote to his English friend Peter Richards. “When he tried to crawl into her train bunk one night, I kicked him out. Who in hell does he think married the gal?”41
A couple of months after the wedding, Lansdale told Richards, “We are a couple of very happy people,” “busily enjoying each day” together. The American lifestyle was “new and different to Pat,” who had no idea “that Americans could get so much done on their own without a bunch of servants and helpers.” But they managed, with Ed doing the cooking and Pat taking responsibility for housekeeping and laundry.42
Edward Lansdale had accomplished an improbable transformation. After coming home depressed, dejected, and defeated from Vietnam, after weathering the embarrassment of the Pentagon Papers and the humiliation of savage reviews for his book, after the deaths of two old friends and betrayal by a third, and, most importantly, after the agonizing demise of his wife of nearly four decades—after all of that, he had found contentment again with an old flame, a woman who had already shared many adventures with him and had now walked back into his life sixteen years after breaking off their illicit romance. His sons may have been understandably uneasy, but Ed was to be more content with Pat than he had been in a long time—possibly ever.
Sadly, neither of the two countries that Lansdale loved so well, the Philippines and South Vietnam, was destined to have as happy a time of it in the 1970s.
FERDINAND MARCOS had been elected president of the Philippines in 1965, eight years after the death of Ramon Magsaysay, and reelected in 1969. By the early 1970s, the country was facing growing student protests, crime, and two insurgent uprisings—one by the Muslim separatists of the Moro National Liberation Front, the other by a Communist group called the New People’s Army, a successor to the Huks. On September 21, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law under the rationale of restoring law and order.
Many Filipinos, including Lansdale’s old friends, welcomed the move. Lansdale was skeptical—and with good cause. In a letter to the American defense attaché in Manila, who gushed about the “amazing progress” that was being made under martial law, Lansdale pointed out, “One man can improve physical conditions and make some immediate reforms. Along with it, though, is a power climate surrounding the top that is infectious in terms of corruption and paranoia which ultimately taints and then destroys the ideal of the beginning. I sure hope that Marcos proves the exception and that his acts bring ultimate benefit to the people. I’m far from being convinced of this yet.”43
Lansdale’s concerns were well warranted. Marcos did not succeed in suppressing the insurgencies. Instead, he presided over repression and legitimized a welter of extravagant corruption that finished undoing the good government reforms that Magsaysay and Lansdale had implemented.
IN NORTH VIETNAM, the failure of the Easter Offensive revived interest in the Paris peace talks. By then the negotiations had moved out of the dingy old house in Choisy-le-Roi, which the press had found out about, to a new location, a pleasant white stucco house in the quiet country town of Gif-sur-Yvette which had once belonged to the cubist painter and Communist Party member Fernand Léger.44 With Léger’s abstract paintings and tapestries as a colorful backdrop, Le Duc Tho formally dropped his demand that Nguyen Van Thieu be toppled as part of a peace deal. This made possible the outlines of a deal that was reached by the end of October 1972.
At the core of the agreement was a one-sided bargain: Washington would pledge to withdraw all of its forces from Vietnam, while Hanoi would not have to withdraw more than 150,000 of its troops from the South. Now the North Vietnamese would be in a better position to mount a fresh offensive from inside South Vietnam without having to worry, as during the Easter Offensive, about American air strikes or American advisers. Nguyen Van Thieu understandably was livid over what he viewed as a “surrender” and “sell-out.”45
&nb
sp; After the 1972 election, in which Nixon defeated George McGovern in a historic, forty-nine-state landslide, Nixon and Kissinger pressed for changes to appease Saigon, and when these were not forthcoming, they launched another bombing blitz against the North—Operation Linebacker II. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the Christmas bombing forced the North to sign a peace treaty on America’s terms. In fact, the changes between the preliminary agreement in October 1972 and the final version in January 1973 were minor. John Negroponte, one of Kissinger’s aides, quipped, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”46
To bring Thieu around to support this agreement, Nixon offered a combination of threats—including a cutoff of American aid—and reassurances that the United States would rescue South Vietnam if the North attacked. South Vietnam’s president had no choice but to comply. “We were doomed to failure,” he reflected gloomily, “but we could not do otherwise.”47
THE PARIS PEACE ACCORDS brought precious little peace. On the very morning when the cease-fire was to go into effect, the New York Times reported, “Communist troops cut Route 14, the one road that connects Kontum [in the Central Highlands] with the rest of the world, and a few days later attacked a string of hamlets just west of the city.” 48
Edward Lansdale was not, of course, privy to the secret conversations of the president and his closest aides, but he knew long before the signing of the treaty that South Vietnam was being abandoned. In August 1972, he wrote, “I suspect that we’re going to wind up with the twelve Politburo guys dictating the peace, while we cover up the fact with all sorts of face-saving statements and devices.”49
Lansdale took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to warn that a “bloodbath” could occur after an American pullout that would cause millions of South Vietnamese to flee their country. “It is all too likely that they would turn to us Americans and plead for a way out. What would we do then? Set up refugee camps for maybe five million or so people in Southern California or the Black Hills or Cape Cod?” Lansdale warned his fellow Americans that they were mistaken to “think that our morality will permit us to isolate ourselves from postwar Vietnam” or “that generous United States economic programs for postwar rehabilitation and development will buy political solutions.”50