Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,023

This is the grave of Edward Lansdale.

Born in 1908 in Detroit, Landsale didn’t grow up super wealthy. He put himself through college, first at Michigan and then at UCLA, by selling magazines. He dropped out of UCLA before graduation after failing his foreign language classes and moved to San Francisco. He went into advertising and was a rising young executive when the U.S. joined World War II in 1941. Lansdale joined at was selected for the Military Intelligence Service and then the Office of Strategic Services. He rose rapidly and stayed in the military after the war, already a major. He was assigned to the Philippines and became a close military advisor to the government there, to the point that in 1950, president Elpido Quirino personally requested the U.S. send him Lansdale to help go after the communists in the nation’s south.

Lansdale was still in the Air Force but was basically assigned to the CIA by this time and he was aggressive. He basically managed Ramon Magsaysay’s 1953 presidential campaign. He brought sophisticated counterinsurgency methods to the Philippines. In fact, one can argue that no one was more important in developing the ideas of anti-insurgency programs than Lansdale. I can’t personally evaluate this claim, but historians have made this claim. This was the great era of CIA coups–Guatemala, Iran, Congo–and Lansdale was seen as a master of the form if he needed to be, hopefully before a coup was necessary. He became Allen Dulles’ personal favorite agent and Dulles then sent him to Vietnam as that nation was throwing off its colonial chains. But we couldn’t have that America-loving Ho Chi Minh lead Vietnam, he was also a socialist. So Dulles sent Lansdale to Vietnam to do what he did in the Philippines; literally, Dulles told him “do what you did in the Philippines.”

Lansdale had a plan for Vietnam. He described it: “Our psychological warfare must turn this war from a ‘colonial’ war in Communist terms to a civil war in our terms.” So Lansdale trained South Vietnamese forces and helped undermine the planned 1956 elections to unify the country, since of course there was no way Diem would win those elections. One of Lansdale’s early moves was to engage in campaigns to convince North Vietnamese Catholics to move to South Vietnam, saying that it was a Christian nation and dropping advertising leaflets by air over the North. It worked, but it’s hard for me to see what the point was, since that did was to solidify in the Vietnamese mind that the Christian minority was rich people in the Americans’ pocket. But then one reason Kennedy and Mike Mansfield and the Dulles brothers liked Diem anyway is that he was Catholic so he was “one of us,” It’s real wonder we lost the war to come.

Diem actually invited Lansdale to live in the presidential palace in Saigon and Lansdale again basically managed the guy, including stopping a coup attempt in 1954. Lansdale recruited Diem’s bodyguards. He ran a mini-empire from Saigon, with agents running through the nation. He recruited everyone from journalists to run stories about Diem to popular singers to record propaganda tunes about how awesome Diem was. Some of all this was of course not a bad thing, such as funding medical teams to go into the countryside. He was also a master of creating relationships with figures in these nations. Instead of acting like he was above these people, he actively sought friendships with them, hung out in the middle of Saigon, made himself the symbol of American soft power, all the while being involved in all sorts of awful things.

Now, none of this meant Lansdale bothered learning Vietnamese. No way. He thought that a total waste of time. His style instead was just being the smiling American getting by on his charm and a lot of American financial resources. He stated, “I like the Vietnamese people, hard working, full of poetry, music, and earthy good humor, they seemed to recognize this liking in me and responded. “I believe that the Americans at Concord Bridge or Valley Forge would have recognized them as kindred souls.” What’s really going on here is that Lansdale saw himself as T.E. Lawrence and Edward of Vietnam would talk of how great these people were, all the while doing everything possible to keep them under the thumb of the United States. His idea was that Americans had to teach these little people how to have big nationalism, stating, “The strongest control is one that is self-imposed; it is based upon mutual trust and the awakening of unselfish patriotism on ideals or principles we ourselves cherish . . . the foreign person or groups serve our own best national interests by serving their own highest national interests, which coincide with ours.

Now, Lansdale was not an idiot. In 1961, when Kennedy took over, Lansdale briefed Robert McNamara on what was going on in Vietnam. He told McNamara that this war was not an issue of weapons and technological superiority, but of ideas. McNamara, an arrogant son of a bitch if there was ever was one, completely blew off the guy who actually knew what he was talking about. Later, when Lansdale said the opinions of the Vietnamese people is how you could measure the progress of the war, McNamara again blew him off saying that numbers couldn’t measure that so he wasn’t going to worry about that. By this time, Lansdale was in Washington as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, but he was in Vietnam frequently. He was still defending Diem. When Lansdale told Kennedy he would not support the coup against Diem, McNamara started yelling at him that you don’t say no to the president.”

Now, Lansdale had another activity in these years other than Vietnam. He was part of the team to try and figure out how to get rid of Fidel Castro in Cuba and had some of the legendarily crazy assassination ideas that never worked. Later, he would be forced to testify before the Church Committee in 1975 over this nonsense. Lansdale finally left the Air Force in 1963, in which McNamara would not speak to him during the retirement ceremony. After that, he was back in Vietnam, working at the embassy in Saigon.

Lansdale came to believe that Graham Greene based The Quiet American on him, but that’s almost certainly not true. However, he probably was the military officer character in Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American. Seems right. Lansdale would later write his own memoirs as well.

Lansdale died in 1987. He was 79 years old.

Edward Lansdale is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved with Lansdale’s work in Vietnam, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Nolting is in Ivy, Virginia and Rufus Phillips is in Washington, D.C. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.