THE POLITICAL PUZZLE

...More importantly, Lansdale and Taylor represent two distinct schools of war supporters-those who saw Vietnam as a crusade and those who saw it as a burden...

...Ironically, he had been the only dissenter in the top councils of the Eisenhower government against the massive retaliation policy, under which there would have been no mobile, “flexible” units to send to Vietnam...

...Lansdale disguised some army units as Huks, who in turn disguised some of their units in regular army uniforms...

...Although the expected August coup did not come off, the American policymakers deemed themselves beyond the point of turning back, so Taylor and McNamara were dispatched to Saigori to scout out possible Vietnamese kingmakers...

...When General Taylor returned from his Vietnam mission for President Kennedy in late 1961, he reported that President Diem had asked for Lansdale’s help...

...His development of the flexible response posture paralleled a series of frustrated battles for more Army funds, which Taylor implies were lost because conservatives like Treasury Secretary George Humphrey wanted a balanced budget so badly that they persuaded Ike to stick with a bargainbasement nuclear strategy...

...During the Ambassador’s one-year tenure in Saigon, there were many big events-Tonkin Gulf, the attack on Pleiku, and enough coups to provide four new Vietnamese presidents...

...This dramatic loneliness is carried throughout the book, although the Pentagon Papers identify Lansdale as a CIA man...

...Vampires and Jaycees Lansdale, a former advertising man who looks like Chet Huntley from the nose up and Walter Cronkite from the mustache down, stayed on in Air Force intelligence after World War I1 because of the “strong appeal for me in the U. S. military’s part in the creation of democratic institutions in postwar Japan and Germany...

...Gradually, there emerged the principles he had followed,” writes the author, such as, “government power should be used for the benefit of those governed...

...Setting out for the Philippines in September, 1950, Lansdale gives the impression that he is a maverick officer on an unorthodox assignment, armed only with his chutzpah and his briefcase...

...He was seen as too blindly Diemist and as a bit strange-writing General Taylor about how he had brought Operation Brotherhood from the Philippines for covert missions in Vietnam under the Asian vice president of the International Jaycees...

...In a carefully arranged diplomatic meeting at the Saigon Officer’s Club, Taylor records that he played tennis with the most eligible plotter, General “Big” Minh, while McNamara watched and calculated nervously on the sidelines...

...Her description of them as “barbecues’, was taken to reflect the sentiments of the ruling family...

...Lansdale was probably more in the spirit of the times than Taylor: you could believe in flexible response, but you couldn’t get excited about it or dream of the romantic accomplishments it might bring...

...It merely gets Lansdale’s adrenalin moving and feeds his righteousness...

...Mission accomplished, Lansdale soon received a radio message to “proceed without delay by first available transportation” to Saigon, where his new reputation would be tested...

...The Vietnam commitment limped upward, although under great official scrutiny, until the summer of 1963-when Diem’s repression of demonstrations by the Buddhist majority sent his government tottering again...

...It is only when Taylor delivers a crisply hawkish position on a strategic question that he returns as the military professional, and on the whole, he fits the Kennedy moldtough, sometimes acidic, but seldom dogmatic and without a grudge against the world...

...It takes Amtxica’s gaze on democratic principles for him to undertake psychological warfare operations in the Philippines, for example, where Lansdale’s team “played upon the popular dread of asuang, or vampire,” to scare Huk soldiers away from encampments near villages...

...Lansdale is America’s first expert in counter-guerrilla warfare-the legendary figure who achieved fame in the fifties by teaching our cold warriors that the only way to defeat Asian revolutionaries, the guerrilla fish in a sea of popular support, was to learn how to paddle around a little ourselves...

...He favored greatly increased bombing, a flexible response in the air, to pound the North Vietnamese...

...But the momentous change was the introduction of substantial numbers of American ground troops in offensive combat roles...

...had in mind would be through suffrage, a free expression of the people’s will through the ballot box...

...Diem looked at me imploringly,” records Lansdale, for help in deciding whether to obey the telegram...

...He opposed all bombing passes on the grounds that “we had a testimonial to the efficacy of the bombing in the world-wide campaign to compel us to stop it...

...Vietnam reveals how lightly both the pragmatists and the crusaders regard the threshold of killing people for anticommunist purposes that boil down to moral or emotional commitments...

...You have to understand other people to help,” was the applauded message of these frontier programs, and Lansdale’s military version, much like Mao’s, was that you have to know the people to win them politically...

...The two vials were being poured together, and the Kennedy Administration bought both flexible response and counter-guerrilla warfare in a logically compatible package, symbolized by the Green Berets...

...I took my American beliefs with me into these Asian struggles, as Tom Paine would have done...

...Of course, Taylor also had bureaucratic reasons to oppose the Eisenhower nuclear strategy: the Air Force was getting missiles, the Navy was in line for nuclear subs,’while the Army was getting little but budget cuts...

...In supreme irony, this posture is precisely the kind of vulgar, blind cold warism that Lansdale (and the less military people who sympathized with him) originally sought to replace with a positive demonstration of our values...

...Taylor’s flexible response ran into, and accepted, Lansdale’s inflexible purpose...

...By temperament and doctrine, he suited the new President and they got along well...

...Some became semi-doves, partisans of negotiations-which Taylor considers a compact with delusion, since South Vietnam must be either free or communist...

...The common ground was the anticommunism that still remained-the Dulles policies that Lansdale was trying to escape in spirit, and Taylor in tactics...

...As late as the end of 1967, with Lyndon Johnson writhing on the political knife of the war and Norman Mailer marching on the Pentagon, Taylor at last thought about withdrawalonly to conclude that “as I was unable to advance any arguments to support it, I did not include it among the alternatives worth considering...

...Both Taylor and Lansdale make no moral distinction between using violence to defend ourselves against direct communist aggression and to defeat it in a c,ontest of principles elsewhere in the world...

...At the apparent end of a long, successful military career that began at West Point under Superintendent Douglas MacArthur,Taylor found himself a very dissatisfied Army Chief of Staff from 1955 until 1959...

...This time, Taylor said, only “Robert Murphy, Abe Fortas, and I” recommended the steadfast course, while the rest exuded pessimism and recommended some change, though not a specific one...

...Taylor never really questioned the anticommunist impulse upon which all his calculations rested...

...Lansdale suggested, with a straight face, that Diem should conduct an ob jective mental review of his presidency to evaluate his own “ethical merits or demerits” and base his decision accordingly...

...He dissented from the Eisenhower-Dulles strategy of massive retaliation (which essentially promised to nuke the communists if they made a move anywhere) because he considered it unlikely that the Russians would believe our threat to blow up the world if they seized the post office in Nairobi...

...They punctured his neck with 1:wo holes, vampirefashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail...

...The war becomes a burden as it sucks away blood and money...

...There was also some psywar...

...Lodge was instructed to review Minh’s arrangemen ts (“except for assassination plans”), and Diem was soon dead...

...He finds Magsaysay, the new defense minister, in the process of chasing a man around his office, getting in blows when he could...

...They form an alliance to get the nasty business of cleaning up the powerful Huks over with as soon as possible...

...The two eminent Americans dropped decreasingly casual hints of their interest in a coup on Minh-feelers between games, seditious innuendos while retrieving stray shots-but Minh only concentrated on his forehand...

...After a period of such moral rearmainent, the underc0ve.r Tom Paine and the French-speaking mandarin president determined that they had all the justification needed for an Asian Declaration of Independence against Bao Dai...

...This attitude is most likely another legacy of the cold war, when there was no difference...

...These feelings seem impossibly naive now, amid the agnosticism that Vietnam has spawned, but the atmosphere of Lansdale and the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps must be remembered as one of release and good will...

...As a counter-guerrilla man long before the fashion, Lansdale contributed about half the ideas that led to Vietnam...

...Taylor’s new doctrine made the troops-and the war-possible, and then he didn’t want them Consistent Defiance Although the Ambassador opposed the use of “white-faced soldiers” in an Asian war, he was no dove...

...Ben Franklin once said, ‘Where liberty dwells, there is my country.’ Tom Paine had replied, ‘Where liberty dwells not, there is my country.’ Paine’s words form a cherished part of my credo...

...The war has soured us back to where he started...

...He told the French that they were unpopular scoundrels in Vietnam...

...When the French start treating the Vietnamese as free and equal brothers,” he said, “the wounds will heal...

...He anticipated the Kennedy-Schlesinger commitment to nurture the “vital center” of democracy abroad, to help in “nation-building” around the world, to show the communists something vibrant and alive and attractive instead of just the other side of the Iron Curtain...

...Lansdale was already in Washington, working on Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers record that by July, 1961, Lansdale presented Taylor with a long, classified report “in response to your desire for early information on unconventional warfare resources in Southeast Asia...

...But by 1961, Washington was populated by people who were pragmatists, at least in comparison with Lansdale...

...Lansdale was a little bit too frothy and consumed even for the hard-liners in the new Administration...

...When President Kennedy and his dandies came to Washington in 196 1, they regarded Maxwell Taylor as a cultural and strategic ally...

...The lyric strains of Lansdale are absent from the Taylor book, for the general recoils from such crusades like a college professor at a Baptist revival...

...Magsaysay is thus established as a man of character, who turns down bribes and subsequently shares with Lansdale a concern for the abridged rights of individuals during relocation programs and suspensions of habeus corpus...

...it is more of a marginal venture, a close judgment call...

...In 1953, Magsaysay won the presidential contest as a reform Huk-defeater...

...While Taylor is a reserved pragmatist, Lansdale is a true believer, a gung-ho cold-war missionary, a man of action, whose writing calls for frequent crescendos of the national anthem in the background...

...Since a purely noble purpose cannot be diminished by finite losses, however great, the cause doesn’t tarnish with adversity...

...Lansdale never really questioned the ethics of his everyday throat-slitting...

...In the early years, he was annoyed not only by the resistance to guerrilla techniques among his military colleagues, but also by their moral listlessness, their willingness to make deals and to coast along without a burning purpose...

...Instead of taking up the enormous task of preparing the country to withdraw from Vietnam, they withdrew silently from the White House, soon followed by LBJ...

...This complicated ambushes, but the government forces came out on top in the contest of wits and arms...

...The cable appears in the Pentagon Papers, but the authors are not identified...

...Recounted with the drama and unlikelihood of a television script, the anti-Huk operation fights Mao with Lansdale‘s version of Mao-their tactics, but for Good instead of Evil, with the conscience gliding undisturbed over the razors of guerrilla warfare...

...Lansdale fired Diem up with a little American history, from which he discovered by induction that Diem was remarkably like George Washington...

...Most of us carried Lansdale’s ideals with us into the 1 9 6 0a~n~d it is worth tracing, through his counterrevolutionary travels, how those ideals got transported, and translated, into the Philippines, and eventually into Vietnam...

...Lansdale approvingly quotes Magsaysay as exclaiming, “The sonnamabeech tried to bribe me...

...Lyndon Johnson became President almost immediately, arid sent Taylor to Vietnam as Ambassador when Lodge came home for some Republican politics in the summer of 1964...

...For one thing, it allows him to resolve ethical scruples about his mission on a high plane of long-range objectives rather than on a day-to-day basis...

...Lansdale, the idealist, has done more to disparage the idea of exporting our beliefs than the isolation of Dulles ever could...

...Taylor characterized Diem as “highly skilled,” and “stubborn and suspicious,” an appraisal far closer to the mark than Lansdale’s portrait of an eager and idealistic pupil lapping up the wisdom of the founding fathers...

...Without any wide circulation, says Taylor, the message went off, and by Monday morning Lodge had inforrned various Vietnamese generals through the CIA that the U. S. would look favorably on a new team...

...For Lansdale, the war is almost a delight because of the absence of personal moral dilemma...

...In a strategy that required intimate knowledge of the people in the country, Lansdale recalls that: . . .the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks...

...General Edward Lansdale’s In the Midst of Wars and General Maxwell Taylor’s Swords and Plowshares record the statements of defense for men who symbolize the two doctrines that combined to produce American counter-guerrilla strategy in Southeast Asia...

...I found more often than not that I went up to the front lines not to urge on the troops, but to escape the worries of the command post, where all battle noises sounded like the doings of the enemy and where it was easy for the commander to give way to dire imaginings...

...And those who direct the contemporary limited wars are comforted by the fact that the carnage is less than one of Dulles’ nuclear wars that we didn’t have...

...You should know one thing from the beginning,” he writes...

...Lansdale’s international display of our ideals readily accepted Taylor’s ratche t-like pressure when the example wasn’t enough...

...He finds not one benefit for withdrawal, even for the record...

...General Taylor symbolizes another idea, flexible response, which, floating on a common sea of anticommunism with Lansdale’s doctrines, helped direct troop ships across the Pacific...

...Despite his misgivings about the advisability of American ground troops in Asia, a legacy of his Korea experience, he also recommended a small contingent of experimental troops (the famous “flood control” proposal of the Pentagon Papers), which was turned down in Washington in favor of a more cautious approach...

...Diem’s survival in 1955 assured him of strong U. S. official support, which had previously been in doubt despite Lansdale’s pleadings, and Diem felt secure enough to consider a power play when the Emperor Bao Dai relieved him of his duties through a telegram from the French Riviera...

...Against the background of the Eisenhower years, the thoughts of the two generals appear quite harmonious, rising to the top of the new administration, but the memoirs show that their personalities were sharply different...

...This is vintage Lansdale...

...He served in Vietnam as a civilian from 1965 until 1968 (with Daniel Ellsberg on his “team” for a time), but not in a critical role like he played in the early years described in his book...

...When the Hiks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill...

...The CIA is mentioned only three times in the book, in no case as Lansdale’s employer or base of resources...

...Pragmatists, like Bundy, Taylor, and Kissinger do so through the deception of defining moral questions out of the proper realm of foreign policy-making the deaths and the hidden feelings that produce them irrelevant to the equations by which they calculate the national interest...

...But the careful consensus was that the United States must take up the challenge of warding off a Ho Chi Minh victory...

...Lansdale’s knowledge of the players and the bystanders-the French, the Americans, the local warlords who were beset with kaleidoscopic personal intrigue-helped him contour Diem’s strategy to fit both international politics and contending Vietnamese iealousies...

...Their free choice, not our nukes, would tell the tale...

...Lansdale became mysterious and controversial-two novels, The Quiet American and the Ugly American are modeled on his doings He helped move American military strategy from the conventional concerns of how you position your armored divisions, tanks, artillery, and nuclear weapons, to more political questions like where you put your psywar leaflets, why you need pacification teams, and how to win the hearts and minds of the people...

...Taylor’s disposition gives him a different perspective on Vietnam than Lansdale-despite the compatibility of their doctrines in the persecution of the war-and the gulf between them becomes increasingly revealing as the cost of the war rises...

...Lansdale was ardently anti-French, infuriated by the collaboration he detected between them and the selfish opponents of Diem, democracy’s best hope...

...Following the Philippine pattern, Lansdale formed an alliance with a strong leader-in this case President Diem-and helped him consolidate his power in the face of the challenge of local warlords, who were backed up by the French...

...He simply cannot accept or discuss the prospect of a communist South Vietnam, or even say the words...

...The Pentagon Papers hint that Lansdale was responsible for Lyndon Johnson’s statement that Diem was the “Churchill of Asia...

...Taylor, by then elevated to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so furious at this move that he pinpoints the authors of‘ the cable as the “anti-Diem clique” in the State Department, led by Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsrnan...

...In the book, he recalls that he was a dissenter from the general rush toward a big troop build-up but that he adapted to the new policy because his objections did not seem important enough...

...In judging Lansdale, it is important to recall that his bright zeal was as much admired against the gray background of the fifties as was Taylor’s alternative to the bomb...

...He wanted sustained pressure, not so much to cut off infiltration or change things in the South, but to weaken North Vietnam into giving up the war...

...Men like General Taylor had taken over...

...This barbarity and the crisis of the government got the computers running and the memos flying back in Washington, and in the midst of general indecision, a cable authorizing the instigation of some kind of coup went out to Ambassador Lodge...

...The general brands the maneuver as a bureaucratic “end run” by the perpetrators, who, on a Saturday when top officials were home in the suburbs, “drew up this cable, cleared it with Undersecretary George Ball on the golf course, and obtained a telephone clearance from President Kennedy in Hyannisport...

...According to Lansdale, the two of them sat talking in the palace during the crisis, trying to discover how good the President really had been...

...But these two books provide an excellent background for that determination, and they should make us think for some time before pulling the missionary’s trigger...

...Idealists like Dulles and Lansdale do so by readily assuming that it is no sin to kill in the name of goodnessDulles in wholesale fashion and Lansdale more se1eci:ively in the night...

...Taylor hardly conceals his scorn toward the Wise Men, who were neither willing to “bite the bullet” by continuing the effort nor to bite the olive branch of honest dovehood by accepting the consequences and implications of ceasing that effort...

...Mixing modern “psywar” (psychological warfare) techniques with James Bond derring-do and the kind of cultural savvy that later was coveted by exponents of foreign wars and foreign aid alike, Lansdale managed to position himself for exploits and lever-pulling in palaces and rice paddies, Asia’s smoke-filled rooms...

...General Taylor himself remains a hawk, after running through a final comparison of the costs and benefits for victory against withdrawal...

...For Taylor, on the other hand, the war is a responsibility, a matter of costs and benefits, a question that requires constant reexamination...

...It is not clear whether the judgment of where ideals de:stroy themselves will be made in the wake of the final withdrawal from Vietnam or perhaps in the wake of a decision by a new liberal idealist that we should instigate undercover operations to throw out the military and restore democracy in Guatemala...

...So the rationalist ignored his goals and the moralist ignored his means, and the two met in Vietnam...

...The disparity is highly ironic, since Lansdale was considered to be on the psychological wavelength of most Asians, whereas Taylor confessed his perplexity readily...

...Throughout his exploits, Lansdale’s zeal undoubtedly p1a:ys an important role...

...When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night...

...You could dream with Lansdale, who, like a Che Guevara with the ballot box, set out to fight the good fight against Mayor Daleys and Stalins and tyrants of any political stripe...

...Although he never comes right out to say so, Taylor’s unconscious test for a dove is that he must be willing to accept, or welcome, the reunification of Vietnam under Hanoi...

...Walt Rostow, who turned out to be the most missionary of the Kennedy advisors, proposed that Lansdale be sent back to Vietnam to aid Diem in a deteriorating situation and serve as head of a Vietnam study task force...

...Containment was seen as negative and withdrawn, whereas Lansdale was an internationalist who tried to show the world that we really had something to believe in...

...Slowly, painfully, he recounted to me his past actions that bore on the present crisis...

...In plotting the break from Bao Dai, Lansdale managed to squeeze in a few more civics lessons: “I ex:plained to Diem that the only acceptable, viable way to bring about the drastic change that he...

...The Missionary’s Trigger In the interim of the last 12 years, Taylor, the pragmatist, has helped kill far more people than Dulles did with his fearsome talk of the bomb...

...Apparently, the notion that the United States could in fact be charitable and idealistic while building a Madisonian government from a new client country’s rubble persisted strongly in him...

...Otherwise he is a hawk or a hypocrite...

...Already alarmed at Khrushchev’s speech proclaiming an open season for wars of national liberation, the President persuaded the general to become his military counselor (when Taylor turned down the top post at the CIA) to help the Administration enshrine flexible response as official dogma and to apply this wisdom in trouble spots like Southeast Asia...

...Others became semi-hawks, like President Nixon, arguing for a minimum-scale holding operation that promises slim chance of success but postpones the critical decision by bombing enough to prevent a major concentrated assault against Thieu’s government...

...General Minh’s Forehand When Taylor visited Saigon with Walt Rostow in the fall of 1961, he found the government’s plight desperate, but not hopeless, and he recommended to President Kennedy a beefing up of advisers in the slim hope of avoiding the “loss7’ of South Vietnam...

...Diem’s brother, Nhu, raided pagodas with his secret police apparatus, while Madame Nhu enjoyed self-immolations by Buddhist monks...

...But, according to the Pentagon Papers, Lansdale’s role was nixed by the State Department and the White House, and McNamara himself scratched out the “immediately” on his departure time for Saigon and scribbled in “when requested by the Ambassador,” who never did...

...And there would be :no cheating, said Lansdale, although he would allow Diem to print his name on the ballot in red, “the Asian color of happiness,” while Bao Dai’s would appear in sorrowful “black or blue or green...

...Edward Lansdale was a soldier in the spirit of the Peace Corps, and the sponsors of foreign aid and the Peace Corps led the nation in breaking out of its shell and learning to listen to other cultures...

...Few D-Day generals would assess their inspirational qualities like Taylor, who parachuted into France with his lOlst Airborne Division: “In my experience, the history books that depicted the role of the general as being that of galvanizing his men into action were all wrong...

...Taylor is a remarkably reflective man, whose instinct is to puncture the soaring ego with gentle, self-effacing wit...

...The Pentagon Papers conclude, “There is no documentary evidence to indicate that any of the other decision-making principals shared Ambassador Taylor’s reservations...

...Vietnam provided more of the same, as Lansdale arrived about the time of the Geneva Accords and the beginning of Ngo Dinh Diem’s presidency...

...When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity...

...The right way to thwart communism, we all felt, was to get some blood running through freedom’s veins-to use our resources with idealism and sensitivity so that other nations would see why they did not want to become like Czechoslovakia...

...Taylor retired from the Army in 1959 to write The Uncertain Trumpet and thereby take his case for flexible response to the public, where it was well-received because most people were chilled by so much talk about the bomb during the Eisenhower Administration...

...As a presidential counselor on the war, Taylor participated when the Wise Men-Acheson, Ball, Bundy, Dillon, Bradley, Clifford, Fortas, and so on-came to the White House on November 2 and told LBJ by consensus that he was on the right track, though a difficult one, and that he needed some better Vietnam PR...

...A powerful fear that nuclear vertigo might draw our leaders toward the button was activated, especially among liberals, and its nerve endings remained exposed until after the Goldwater-Johnson race in 1964...

...Lansdale sought out tyranny in the world and set up his covert psywar operations where he detected it...

...He was also there when LBJ reconvened the Wise Men after the Tet offensive, less than a week before the President announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection...

...Diem touched my knee with his hand, gesturing me to stay...

...It was a long process...

...Thus, he was the lone dissenter in the top councils of the government against the first major troop commitment under the new policy of flexible response...

...The Ugly American and the Flexible Response a review by Taylor Branch Two fathers of the Vietnam War published their memoirs in March...

...Some of this acquiescence in the memoirs, however, may stem from a desire to show loyalty to the Administration’s decision, for the Pentagon Papers show Taylor as much more strongly against the change...

...but Lansdale’s reputation had crested within the government, and he was not sent...

...With great personal energy, Magsaysay began to turn the tide against the Huks with a tightening of army discipline, a little land reform, and some widely publicized leadership...

...The twosome returned to Washington convinced that nothing was afoot, but soon learned that the CIA messages had taken hold after all (Minh was just not ready to talk...