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In this ambitious biography of Edward Lansdale (1908–87), the man said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, bestselling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a ‘hearts and mind’ diplomacy, first in the Philippines and later in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and diplomats who favoured napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people.

Through dozens of interviews and access to documents that have never been seen before – including long-hidden love letters – Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish ‘T. E. Lawrence of Asia’ from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation from Saigon in 1975.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Lansdale arrives at Tam Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, August 29, 1965, to begin his second tour in Vietnam. His embassy rival, Philip Habib, is at left. (AP)

Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death in Saigon, June 11, 1963. One of the most famous and influential photographs in history, it helped to bring down Ngo Dinh Diem. (AP)

PROLOGUE

The Day of the Dead: Saigon, November 1–2, 1963

We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.

WHAT caused the tragedy of the Vietnam War? Historians can always point to deep forces to explain that defining event in twentieth-century American history: geography and demography and environment, ideology and economics and sociology, race and class and religion. Implicit is the assumption that whatever happened must have happened, that there was no conceivable alternative. Such a deterministic outlook is alluring but ultimately not compelling; it ignores the role of contingency and the impact of decisions made by human and hence fallible historical actors. At various points from 1954 to 1975—from the beginning of America’s predominant influence in Indochina to its apogee in the 1960s and its humiliating end—events might very well have taken a different course. There were many turning points along the way. One was especially significant.

When veterans and old-timers, former officials and retired reporters, analysts and historians try to explain how the United States became so deeply embroiled in Vietnam, they often point the finger of blame at one particular twenty-four-hour period: from midday on Friday, November 1, 1963, to midday on Saturday, November 2. What happened in those hours would wind up dashing a vision best enunciated by the American adviser and intelligence officer Edward Lansdale of how Communist advances might be resisted by building up a viable South Vietnamese state that could win the loyalty of its people. The events of November 1–2 opened a Pandora’s box of body counts, bombing runs, free-fire zones, and search-and-destroy missions that would lead ultimately to the destruction of South Vietnam along with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. It would maim the foreign-policy credibility of the Democratic Party, at least temporarily, and terminate the postwar consensus in American foreign policy. More important than anything, it would also lead to the destruction of countless lives, American and Vietnamese, both fighters and (in the case of the Vietnamese) bystanders.

As with many grand historical events that look inevitable only in retrospect, there was scant premonition of what was to come when dawn arrived in Saigon at 5:42 a.m. on November 1, 1963.1 It was a typically sultry fall morning, a half day off for Catholics to mark All Saints’ Day. But since only about 10 percent of South Vietnam’s population was Catholic, life for most went on as normal. This city of two million people, then still renowned as the “Paris of the Orient,” was, as usual, crowded, noisy, bustling, and odoriferous. Its streets were nearly impassable with the traffic of cars and trucks, ox carts, three-wheeled cyclopousses both pedaled and motorized, not to mention armored personnel carriers, jeeps, and other military vehicles. Pedestrians took their lives into their hands whenever they stepped off a sidewalk.

It was not just the traffic but also the sights and sounds that could be overwhelming for an outsider. A newly arrived American, a Navy nurse named Bobbi Hovis, noted that “a curious chorus of voices—high-pitched, strident, and overwhelming to the ear—was ever present, and the chanted, spoken, shaken, rattled and drummed sounds of Saigon identified a distinctive community of vendors.”2 She also identified the noisome odors of the city, much reduced in the modern megalopolis but then quite pungent—a mixture of the fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam and the smell of waste, human as well as animal. Given the “almost totally inadequate sanitation facilities,” it was common to see people urinating or defecating in the streets. “With the searing sun beating down upon the walls and sidewalks … ,” Hovis recalled years later, with an almost visible wrinkle of her nose, “much of Saigon took on the odor of an enormous outhouse.”3

Things were considerably more sedate and less miasmic behind the cream-colored stucco walls of the Gia Long Palace, formerly the residence of the French lieutenant governor of Cochin China (southern Vietnam), where servants bustled along the hushed hallways and French was still the language of choice. Here President Ngo Dinh Diem spent long hours over countless cigarettes and small cups of tea, regaling fidgety visitors with his worldview. Here, too, in a “long, high room full of books and mementoes, with a view over the garden,”4 his powerful counselor and brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, unfurled complex conspiracies to protect the embattled regime and strike at its critics. He was assisted in this task by his wife, the attractive and sharp-tongued Madame Nhu. Known as the Dragon Lady to her legions of unadmirers, she favored a beehive hairdo and served as official hostess for the unmarried president.

The very fact that the Ngos were in residence at the Gia Long Palace was a sign of the turmoil afflicting their increasingly isolated, family-dominated regime. (In addition to Ngo Dinh Nhu, two other brothers wielded considerable power: Ngo Dinh Thuc, the archbishop of Hue, and Ngo Dinh Can, the political boss of the central region.) The previous year, two disaffected air force pilots had bombed the Independence Palace, official residence of the presidents of South Vietnam. The entire left wing was demolished. Madame Nhu suffered minor injuries and three staff members were killed, but Diem emerged unscathed. A bomb had penetrated the very room where he was reading but failed to detonate, a piece of good fortune that the devoutly Catholic president ascribed to “divine intervention.” Subsequently he and his family were forced to relocate to the Gia Long Palace while the neo-Baroque Independence Palace was torn down and a new, modernist structure was built on the site.

Life had not gotten any easier for the Ngos in 1963. On May 6, the increasingly paranoid Diem had issued an edict banning the public display of religious flags, which, he feared, served to elevate the power of religious groups at the expense of the state. Following the orders of Diem’s overzealous brother, Archbishop Thuc, police in Hue began tearing down flags and banners that Buddhists were posting to celebrate the Buddha’s 2,527th birthday, Vesak Day. The Buddhists were understandably upset, given that just two days earlier Catholics had paraded with their own banners to honor Thuc’s twenty-five years as an archbishop. An angry crowd gathered outside the radio station in downtown Hue on the evening of May 8, 1963. One of their number pulled down the flag of the Republic of Vietnam from the rooftop and replaced it with a Buddhist flag. Other protesters prepared to storm the radio station to force it to play a special message in honor of Vesak. Soldiers and police arrived on the scene, and an angry confrontation ensued. Suddenly there was a loud explosion and gunshots that left nine protesters dead and fourteen wounded. The regime claimed a Communist bomb was responsible, but most observers blamed the security forces. The resulting revulsion against the increasingly authoritarian government was fomented by a minority of militant, urban-based Buddhist monks who accused Diem of anti-Buddhist bias even though the majority of his cabinet members, province chiefs, and generals were Buddhists or Confucians, not Catholics.

The confrontation took a horrifying turn for the worse on June 11. That morning, as a protest against the government, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist bonze known as Thich Quanc Duc sat down in the lotus position in the middle of a Saigon street while another monk poured gasoline over his head and saffron robe. Then Thich Quanc Duc lit a match and stoically burned to death, never crying out even as his skin blackened and peeled off. Watching this revolting and riveting spectacle was a throng of onlookers, including the Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne. Tipped off by press-savvy monks, Browne snapped an iconic image of this self-immolation that was transmitted around the world and convinced many, not least in the Kennedy administration, that Diem was locked in an unwinnable confrontation with his country’s Buddhist majority that would make it all the harder to resist Communist subversion. Rarely had a single photograph had such a catalyzing effect.

Diem tried to conciliate his Buddhist opponents by guaranteeing them freedom to practice their religion, but he was undermined by the obduracy of the Buddhist hard-liners and of his own brother and sister-in-law. Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife were convinced, wrongly, that the Buddhist movement was directed by Communist agents,5 and they were determined to crush the protests by force. Madame Nhu’s contemptuous references to the bonze’s “barbecue” only exacerbated the confrontation.6 Adopting the harder line urged by his brother, Diem dispatched his security forces to raid thirty pagodas—out of nearly five thousand in the entire country—that were centers of resistance to his rule. The raids, on the night of August 20–21, led to hundreds of arrests, and they sparked outrage in official American circles. The Kennedy administration, dominated by its own family nexus consisting of the president and the attorney general, wanted Diem to reconcile with the Buddhists, not to confront them—to release all political prisoners, not to round up more of them.

This was the post–World War II era in which the United States, newly emerged as a superpower and embroiled in a high-stakes Cold War, did not long tolerate trouble from small states, whether allies or enemies, without trying to change their leaders, preferably through the use of cloak-and-dagger covert action. The Eisenhower administration had notoriously connived at coups in both Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and, less successfully, in Congo, Iraq, and Indonesia. John F. Kennedy would try to topple Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Now many of the president’s aides had decided that, with his opposition to the Buddhist movement, Diem had made himself a liability in the struggle for freedom. Ironically, they placed their confidence in the South Vietnamese generals who thought that he had been too soft, rather than too hard, on the Buddhists.

LATE IN the day on Saturday, August 24, 1963, the newly arrived American ambassador in Saigon received an “eyes only” cable from Washington—one of the rare diplomatic messages that can change history. “The US Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands,” it said. “Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of all of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The cable concluded by granting the ambassador wide latitude to instigate a coup: “You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on actions you take to achieve our objectives.”7

This controversial communiqué had been instigated by an anti-Diem clique at the National Security Council and State Department while President Kennedy and other senior administration officials were away from Washington. On this lazy late-summer weekend, the president, reached at his retreat in Hyannis Port, approved the cable with little debate despite the earlier misgivings of the CIA director, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, who were out of touch and not consulted.

The cable’s message, however controversial and ultimately counterproductive, found a receptive audience in the stately personage of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a patrician New Englander who was a former senator, United Nations ambassador, and Republican vice presidential nominee. On August 22, just a day after the pagoda raids, he had landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport8 to assume the duties of American ambassador at the personal request of his fellow Bostonian (and old political rival) who now occupied the Oval Office. Lodge arrived with his own entourage of journalists and an anti-Diem bias that was only reinforced by the latest crackdown on Buddhist critics.

Far from querying this suggestion to overthrow an allied head of state, Lodge avidly embraced his new role as kingmaker. It was, in fact, a role that he had previously played in American politics as one of the Republican paladins who had persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower to seek the presidency in 1952. Lodge had then served as Ike’s campaign manager. Having successfully changed America’s course, Lodge thought it would be child’s play to do the same in the small country—a backward and primitive place, he clearly thought—where he was now posted as the representative of a superpower. Lodge’s “frequently pinched nostrils made it seem as if he were constantly smelling something rotten,” an American visitor later wrote, and Lodge did not hesitate to clean up the malodorous situation he had now discovered.9 He cabled back, “Believe that chances of Diem’s meeting our demands are virtually nil… . Therefore propose to go straight to general with our demands, without informing Diem.”10 The State Department assented to his suggestion. A few days later, he added, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: The overthrow of the Diem government.”11

Lodge was disappointed to learn, however, that for all his encouragement, the generals were not yet up to the job of toppling their head of state—they were too disorganized and too suspicious of one another to carry off the operation in August. And many of them were less enthusiastic about removing Diem than Lodge was. Failing to overthrow Diem, Lodge instead chose to freeze him out.

The two French-speaking mandarins, one from Boston, the other from Hue, had an initial meeting on August 26 at which they wore matching white sharkskin suits. The lanky American towered over the much shorter Vietnamese, symbolically replicating the unequal relationship between their two countries. This conversation was, by Lodge’s own account, fairly cordial, with the president engaged in a “remarkable discourse” lasting two hours “about his own family and extent to which Viet-Nam was an underdeveloped country.”12 Their next conversation, which occurred on September 9 and which would represent the last time the two men would speak privately for the next six weeks, was not so cordial. The ambassador presented a peremptory demand that the president remove his autocratic brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, from the country for at least the next few months and end all censorship of the press, an ultimatum that Diem unsurprisingly rejected. Lodge left fuming about Diem’s “medieval view of life” and his lack of interest in Lodge’s proposed changes.13 Thereafter, the two men did not speak, as Lodge pursued a “policy of silence” designed to cause the Ngo dynasty “a certain amount of apprehension” and possibly get them into “the mood to make a few concessions.”14

The silent treatment was interrupted only by a state dinner at Gia Long Palace on September 29 that Lodge attended along with two distinguished visitors, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Diem tried to warm up their frosty relationship by inviting the ambassador to spend the day and night of October 27 at the president’s villa in the cool mountain air of Dalat, in the Central Highlands.15 Diem thought this outing, which included “a sumptuous Vietnamese dinner,” signaled a rapprochement with Washington. He had no presentiment that at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, on his way to Diem’s villa, Lodge personally had given Lieutenant General Tran Van Don, a former army chief of staff, his go-ahead to prepare a coup against the president.16

Rather than engage with Diem, Lodge and his superiors in Washington preferred to punish him—and the rest of South Vietnam—by cutting off American economic, though not military, aid. This was seen by the South Vietnamese generals as the withdrawal of the “Mandate of Heaven” from Diem, and a sign that his continuance in office would endanger the American aid upon which the entire regime depended for its very survival.17 Most of President Kennedy’s senior advisers remained opposed to a coup—all but Secretary of State Dean Rusk—and the president himself remained skeptical. But not skeptical enough to override Lodge or even order him home. Not only was Lodge the “man on the spot,” but he was also a man with a political constituency, one that the president feared could be mobilized against him in 1964. The last thing that Kennedy wanted was to give Lodge cause to run against him as the Republican nominee for president. Lodge was simply too powerful to be fired. And he was too self-confident to be reined in; Henry Kissinger, then a young professor at Harvard, was not alone in thinking him “insufferably arrogant and not very bright.”18 So the ambassador, who was determined to oust Diem at all costs, had his way, notwithstanding the serious doubts in Washington about the course on which he was embarked.

Lodge and Diem met one final time, on the morning of November 1, when Lodge escorted Admiral Harry Felt, the visiting chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, to the Gia Long Palace. The two men, along with aides, saw Diem from 10 a.m. to 11:15. Diem then asked to speak to Lodge alone for twenty minutes. He delivered a conciliatory message that Lodge summed up as: “Tell us what you want and we’ll do it.”19

His entreaty came too late. The cable containing Diem’s offer was not dispatched to Washington until 3 p.m. on November 1, 1963. By that time an American-supported coup against Diem was already well under way—an event that would undo everything the Kennedy administration was trying to accomplish in Vietnam and thrust America deeper into the disorienting vortex of a grisly and seemingly interminable guerrilla war.

AT 12:30 p.m. that day, Navy nurse Bobbi Hovis wandered out of the U.S. Naval Station Hospital at 263 Tran Hung Dao in downtown Saigon. Normally this was siesta time in this tropical city, but the streets were abuzz with activity: “Only a hundred yards from me I saw a gun emplacement and barbed-wire barricades. Sandbags surrounded the emplacement, and I found myself staring into the barrels of guns pointing directly at me. Troops were working quickly setting up more concertinas, sandbags, and guns.”

The go signal had just been given to various military units commanded by officers who had vowed to overthrow Diem. Vietnamese marines were in the lead, supported by airborne and armored units. Almost the entire panoply of South Vietnam’s American-trained armed forces was arrayed against the president, save for the Special Forces and the palace guard. No sooner did the troops enter Saigon than they began attacking in the direction of the well-fortified presidential palace. Standing on a fourth-floor balcony at the hospital, Hovis “had an excellent view of a city about to explode”:

Swarms of bullets flew down the street. Everywhere I looked, I saw tree limbs snapping and flying in all directions. Lead was ricocheting off building walls. People were taking cover in doorways, while others braved exposed balconies and rooftops. If a volley came too close, they scrambled for cover. When the bullets moved out of their immediate range, once again heads popped up… .

The noise from the street fighting eventually gave way to the booming explosions of aircraft rockets. American-made T-28 fighter bombers moved in from the south, swooping low over the presidential palace. Green tracers fired from .50 caliber machine guns streaked the horizon. The palace responded with a return of antiaircraft fire, creating black smoke that arose in puffs and spread out against the deep blue sky… .

The scene was surrealistic, the illusion of relative safety totally shattered. This was something out of a movie or a book, I thought. It took a few moments for me to adjust to the reality.20

What made the unfolding scenario all the more bizarre, although Hovis did not know it at the time, was that the Diem brothers were convinced that the coup was their own handiwork. Too devious for his own good, Nhu had contrived a mock coup, code-named Operation Bravo, that was supposed to smoke out traitors in the ranks. It would then be suppressed by loyal army units that would affirm their loyalty to President Diem and bring him back by popular acclamation. The brothers thus were slow to understand that a real coup was under way, not a stage-managed replica.

When he finally understood that he was under all-out assault by his own army, Diem in desperation telephoned Lodge at 4:30 p.m., wanting to know where the United States stood. By his own account, Lodge smoothly deflected the question with the practiced ease of the veteran politician that he was: “I do not feel well informed to be able to tell you. I have heard the shooting but am not acquainted with all the facts. Also it is 5:30 a.m. in Washington and U.S. government cannot possibly have a view.” The short, frustrating phone call ended with the two men talking past each other.

Lodge’s final words were, “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.”

Lodge’s tone of puzzled innocence was, of course, exceedingly duplicitous. He had been involved every step of the way in encouraging the coup plotters, giving careful direction to the CIA agents who met with the disaffected generals. His chief liaison was Lucien Conein, a French-born CIA officer who had served behind Nazi lines in occupied France and had first come to Indochina in 1945. Conein was famous for his extensive gun collection and for his close contacts with all sorts of Vietnamese characters, ranging from generals to gangsters—categories that were not mutually exclusive. A fellow CIA officer wrote after first meeting him, “Conein impressed me as a dangerous man, a kind of John Dillinger on our side. There was a hint of barely restrained violence about him that his alert, blue eyes under bushy eyebrows, as well as his abrupt, blustery manner and short temper, did nothing to belie.”22

Conein had been intimately involved in coup plotting since a fateful July 4 meeting with Lieutenant General Tran Van Don. That meeting, like seemingly every other important gathering, had taken place in the Caravelle Hotel, the city’s most modern hostelry, opened in 1959 and boasting a top-of-the-line air-conditioning system, a backup generator, vast stretches of marble, and bulletproof glass along with a rooftop terrace bar where at night revelers could watch air strikes in the distance across the Saigon River—“like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights,” the journalist Michael Herr was to write.23 The Caravelle became a favorite watering spot for American war correspondents, diplomats, spies, and contractors as well as upper-class Vietnamese of all stripes. (In 1960 a group of anti-Diem activists issued an attack on the president that became known as the Caravelle Manifesto after the place where it was composed.) Subsequent meetings took place at a complicit dentist’s office, where both Conein and Don pretended to be patients.24

The generals harbored numerous grudges against Diem—but the president’s suppression of civil liberties was not one of them. Tran Van Don, for one, was aggrieved that Diem had delayed his formal promotion to lieutenant general until the day after a fellow coup plotter, Duong Van Minh, had been elevated to that rank, thereby vaulting “Big” Minh ahead of him in seniority. Because Diem did not fully trust him, Don was then relieved of his command of I Corps, an important combat command, and given a meaningless post in Saigon as “Commander of the Army,” without actual command authority.25 Another coup plotter, Brigadier General Ton That Dinh, the military governor of Saigon, was upset that the president had refused to appoint him interior minister, a post he coveted.26 The coup leader, Big Minh, so called because at six feet he was considerably taller than the average Vietnamese, was yet another spurned job seeker. A graduate of the French École Militaire and the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was described by one American reporter as a “heavy, fierce-looking soldier whose single tooth is a proud badge of the Japanese torture he suffered during World War II.”27 He took command of the conspiracy in large part because, despite his bravery in fighting for Diem against various internal enemies in 1955, the president had removed him from a combat command and made him head of a meaningless “Field Command,” which left him with far too much idle time on his hands. As Tran Van Don later acknowledged, “One of Ngo Dinh Diem’s greatest errors was to give some of his most efficient and highly regarded generals meaningless jobs. Not only did they become bitter, but they used their time to think, make plans, and perfect strategies.”28

As soon as the coup started, the generals got word to Lou Conein. The buccaneering CIA man strapped on a .38-caliber revolver and grabbed a brown bag filled with five million piastres (about seven thousand dollars). He then jumped into a jeep driven by a Vietnamese sergeant and raced off to the Joint General Staff Headquarters, leaving behind a U.S. Special Forces team to guard his family from potential retribution by Diem loyalists. Once at the military headquarters, Conein established a secure telephone line to the U.S. embassy, located six blocks from the Gia Long Palace, and spent the rest of the day and night providing play-by-play as the coup unfolded.

Half of the division commanders outside Saigon remained loyal to the president, but they could not move their units to the capital, because the rebels had cleverly blocked the roads and rivers or spirited away needed boats and trucks. The few senior officers who refused to join the uprising were summarily executed by the coup plotters. Few of the ordinary soldiers mobilized against the president knew that they were part of a coup; many were told they were safeguarding the president. The biggest obstacle to the rebels’ designs was Diem’s palace guard, fifteen hundred strong and armed with tanks, artillery, and machine guns. These men fought stubbornly to defend the palace while Diem and his brother sheltered in a bunker beneath the courtyard.

Diem tried phoning the generals, offering to negotiate reforms. He had said the same thing during the last army coup attempt, in 1960. Back then, he had used the delay to bring in loyal army units from outside Saigon to crush the uprising. This time the generals would not fall for the same ruse.

The battle for the palace raged all night beneath a full moon. The flash of guns and the pop of magnesium flares nearly turned darkness into daylight as rebels and loyalists clashed at point-blank range amid narrow alleys and streets. The close-quarters combat seesawed first one way, then the other. Finally, in the early morning hours, after 33 people had been killed and 236 wounded, the defenders waved a white flag. The rebels went inside, expecting to take the president and his brother into custody, only to find that they had disappeared. They had slipped out of the palace the previous night through an unguarded gate, then driven, in a commonplace Citroën 2CV instead of the presidential limousine, to a supporter’s house in Cholon, Saigon’s sprawling Chinatown. Nhu reportedly had suggested that they split up because the president would have a better chance of escaping without his widely loathed brother, who was seen as the regime’s Svengali. But Diem feared that Nhu, if caught by himself, would be executed on the spot. They had ruled together, Diem decided, and now they would flee together.

Around 6:45 a.m., Diem called Lodge to see whether the Americans might be able to do something to help him. Lodge held out the possibility of asylum abroad but refused to do anything to help Diem get there. Lodge’s aide, Major General John Michael Dunn, offered to go to Cholon himself to bring the Ngo brothers out. Lodge refused. “We can’t,” the ambassador said. “We just can’t get that involved.”29

Having nowhere else to turn, Diem called the general staff headquarters to tell the generals that he and his brother were at the caramel-colored Cha Tam Church in Cholon and that they were ready to surrender. At first, Diem demanded full military honors but then settled for a promise of safe passage to exile. Big Minh sent a convoy with American-made jeeps and an M-113 armored personnel carrier to bring the brothers back to headquarters. When the convoy returned at 11 a.m., it brought back both men—but they were no longer breathing.

Minh told Lou Conein that they had committed suicide. As a Catholic, Conein didn’t believe it.30 He immediately understood that they had been killed, and photographs of their corpses confirmed it. Both had been shot in the head with a pistol, and Nhu had also been stabbed multiple times with a bayonet. The tart-tongued Madame Nhu was lucky to escape a similar fate; she was traveling in Beverly Hills, California, with one of her daughters when her husband and brother-in-law were murdered.

The brothers’ killer was Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, a bodyguard to Big Minh and a “professional assassin who liked to keep a record of the people he killed by scratching a mark on his pistol for each victim.”31 Before the convoy left for the church, Minh had given a hand signal to Nhung, who had carried out his orders with ruthless efficiency. Neither the president nor his brother had any chance to defend himself; their hands were tied behind their backs when they were murdered. Big Minh had wanted to be sure that Diem would not stage a comeback. He got his wish—and the entire world would have to live with the consequences.

The Diem regime ended, along with the life of its leader and his brother, on the morning of November 2, 1963—All Souls’ Day. Or, as it is known in some Catholic cultures, the Day of the Dead.

WHEN WORD of Diem’s death reached Washington, President Kennedy was meeting with his senior advisers in the Cabinet Room. The Kennedys over time have acquired a reputation for cultivating a tough-guy persona, but there was nothing hard about the president’s reaction to this unexpected news. General Maxwell Taylor wrote, “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.”32 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara confirmed, “When President Kennedy received the news, he literally blanched. I had never seen him so moved.”33 Rather naïvely, Kennedy had not expected that a plot which he had sanctioned would lead to the death of a fellow Catholic president.

Two days later, Kennedy dictated for the record a short memo, not declassified until decades later, in which he confessed, “I was shocked by the death of Diem and Nhu.” Kennedy recalled meeting Diem years before in Washington and finding him to be an “extraordinary character.” Kennedy privately paid tribute to Diem for the way in which “he held his country together to maintain its independence under very adverse conditions.” Kennedy concluded that the “way he was killed” was “particularly abhorrent” and held himself responsible for the coup: “I feel we must bear a good deal of responsibility for it beginning with our cable of early August in which we suggested the coup.”34

Tragically, JFK was not to live long enough to see for himself the problems caused by Diem’s demise. He himself would be felled by an assassin’s bullet within three weeks. The new South Vietnamese government, run by a military junta chaired by Big Minh, lasted all of three months. On January 30, 1964, power was seized by another general, Nguyen Khanh, who had played only a minor role in the anti-Diem coup. He, in turn, was forced out the following year. Each time the top man changed, so too did many lower-level officials, including the important provincial and district governors. Prime ministers changed more often than the seasons. By the time that Henry Cabot Lodge returned to Vietnam in 1965 for his second tour as ambassador, he wrote, “I found the Saigon government in a state of grave instability and turmoil.”35 A small measure of calm was restored shortly thereafter with the ascension of yet another general, Nguyen Van Thieu, who had been part of the anti-Diem coup. At first ruling jointly with Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and then by himself, he would remain in power until 1975, shortly before the destruction of the Republic of Vietnam.

Long before then, South Vietnam’s political credibility and governmental effectiveness, already weakening in Diem’s final year, had suffered a blow from which it never recovered. The generals who succeeded Diem were just as authoritarian, unpopular, and aloof—and considerably more illegitimate, ineffective, and corrupt. None had much success in dealing with threats ranging from the Buddhists to the Communists. Within four months of Diem’s death, more Buddhists had self-immolated than during his entire nine-year reign, but with Diem gone these voluntary autos-da-fé were no longer headline news.36 The Communists also stepped up their offensive, with the number of attacks in the Mekong Delta soon reaching a new high. A leader of the National Liberation Front, the Communist front organization, called Diem’s death a “gift from Heaven for us.”37

With Communist infiltrations increasing, Diem’s emphasis on protecting the rural populace in “strategic hamlets”—a tried-and-true pacification tactic that had worked for the British from the time of the Boer War at the turn of the century to the Malayan “Emergency” in the early 1950s—was set aside in favor of conventional, big-unit operations. The burden of stopping the Communists shifted from the presidential palace in Saigon to the nearby U.S. embassy and the U.S. Military Assistance Command—Vietnam. As the authors of the Pentagon Papers later wrote, “Our complicity in [Diem’s] overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment in an essentially leaderless Vietnam.”38 With Communist forces on the offensive, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, reluctantly decided in 1965 he had no choice but to send American soldiers into combat. Within four years, half a million American troops were trapped in a quagmire. William Colby, a former CIA director and station chief in Saigon, was later to call Diem’s overthrow “the worst mistake of the Vietnam War,” a judgment shared by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,39 if resisted by other analysts who maintain that the tragedy of America’s defeat was inevitable whether Diem remained in power or not.

The course that the United States was now embarked on was not just a mistake; it was a catastrophe that would profoundly alter American foreign policy for decades to come, and it might conceivably have been avoided if only Washington policymakers had listened to the advice of a renowned counterinsurgency strategist who had been present at the creation of the state of South Vietnam. His guidance had been disregarded not only about the wisdom of the Diem coup itself but also, crucially, in the years immediately preceding and following that pivotal event. He had argued, in vain, the need to scale back the amount of firepower expended against the insurgents and to make Saigon’s government more accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to rule. Victory may have been out of America’s grasp in any case; North Vietnam was a formidable foe and South Vietnam a weak ally. But it is no exaggeration to suggest that the whole conflict, the worst military defeat in American history, might have taken a very different course—one that was less costly and potentially more successful—if the counsel of this CIA operative and Air Force officer had been followed.

Who was this singular visionary, this unhonored strategist, this sidelined adviser who wanted to follow, as Robert Frost put it, the road not taken?

INTRODUCTION

The Misunderstood Man

There are few individuals in my knowledge more damned and at the same time applauded… . History’s going to have to portray Lansdale’s real part.

THE legendary Edward Lansdale, a covert operative so influential that he was said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and for one of the main characters in The Ugly American, remains, even more than four decades after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, one of the most fascinating and mysterious, yet misunderstood, figures in post-1945 American foreign policy.

He was portrayed by David Halberstam in his 1969 classic, The Best and the Brightest, as a “particularly futile and failed figure”: a “classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for,” who “allegedly knew and loved Asians” but “talked vague platitudes one step away from the chamber of commerce.” In Halberstam’s telling, he was an expert on “how to fight guerrilla wars the right way” who became “part of a huge American mission which used bombing and artillery fire against Vietnamese villages.”2 Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 Vietnam: A History, drew Lansdale in equally unflattering hues as “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former advertising executive,” an ineffectual “romantic” who “overlooked the deeper dynamics of revolutionary upheavals” and who “seemed to be oblivious to the social and cultural complexities of Asia.”3 Tim Weiner, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2007 book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, was more scathing still, deriding Lansdale as a “Madison Avenue … con man” who dreamed up impractical schemes to overthrow Fidel Castro.4 By contrast, Neil Sheehan, in another Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), lauded Lansdale as a Machiavellian genius, a “legendary clandestine operative” who ruthlessly and effectively bulldozed opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to consolidate the nascent state of South Vietnam. Sheehan wrote with what some might consider flattering exaggeration: “South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale.”5

FILIPINOS
Oscar Arellano	Head of CIA-sponsored Operation Brotherhood in South Vietnam.
Patrocinio “Pat” Yapcinco Kelly	Lansdale’s guide to Huklandia; mistress; second wife.
Ramon “Monching” Magsaysay	Defense minister, 1950–53; president, 1953–57.
Manuel “Manny” Manahan	Newspaper publisher; Magsaysay aide.
Juan “Johnny” Orendain	American-educated lawyer.
Elpidio Quirino	President, 1948–53.
Carlos Romulo	Ambassador to Washington, 1952–53, 1955–62; presidential candidate, 1953.
Manuel Roxas	President, 1946–48.
Frisco “Johnny” San Juan	Head of the CIA-sponsored Freedom Company in South Vietnam; a leader in the CIA-sponsored National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) in the Philippines.
Luis Taruc	Huk military leader, 1942–53.
Napoleon “Poling” Valeriano	Philippine Army officer who worked with Lansdale in Vietnam in 1950s and 1960s.
VIETNAMESE
Bao Dai	Emperor of Vietnam, 1926–45; chief of state, 1949–55.
Bui Diem	South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, 1967–72.
Cao Van Vien	Chief of South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff, 1964–75.
Duong Van Duc	South Vietnamese officer who oversaw pacification of Ca Mau Peninsula, 1955.
Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”)	General who led anti-Diem coup in 1963.
Ho Chi Minh	Vietminh leader, 1941–54; North Vietnam leader, 1954–69.
Le Quang Vinh (“Ba Cut”)	Warlord of the Hoa Hao sect.
Le Van Vien (“Bay Vien”)	Leader of the Binh Xuyen criminal empire.
Le Duan	North Vietnamese leader, driving force behind the war against South Vietnam.
Le Van Kim	South Vietnamese officer, commanded pacification of Quang Ngai and Binh Dinh provinces, 1955.
Jean Leroy	French-Vietnamese Catholic warlord.
Ngo Dinh Diem	Prime minister and then president of South Vietnam, 1954–63.
Ngo Dinh Nhu	Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother and chief adviser.
Tran Le Xuan (“Madame Nhu”)	Wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu.
Nguyen Duc Thang	South Vietnamese general, minister of revolutionary development in the mid-1960s.
Nguyen Ngoc Tho	Vice president of South Vietnam, 1956–63; prime minister, 1963–64.
Nguyen Khanh	South Vietnamese general; president, 1964–65.
Nguyen Loc Hoa	“Fighting priest” who led the village of Binh Hung.
Nguyen Van Hinh	Chief of staff, South Vietnamese armed forces, 1952–54; pro-French.
Nguyen Van Thieu	South Vietnamese general; president, 1965–75.
Nguyen Van Vy	Nguyen Van Hinh’s successor as chief of staff; pro-French.
Nguyen Cao Ky	South Vietnamese air force commander; prime minister, 1965–67; vice president, 1967–71.
Pham Duy	Folk singer.
Pham Xuan An	North Vietnamese spy and Lansdale friend.
Pham Xuan Giai	South Vietnamese officer in charge of psychological warfare, 1950s.
Tran Van Don	South Vietnamese general; a leader of the 1963 anti-Diem coup.
Tran Van Soai (“Nam Lua”)	Hoa Hao warlord.
Trinh Minh Thé	Cao Dai warlord.
Vo Nguyen Giap	Vietminh, North Vietnamese military commander, 1945–75.
AMERICANS
George Aurell	Chief of the CIA’s Far East Division and CIA station chief in Manila, 1950s.
Charles T. R. “Bo” Bohannan	Intelligence officer who worked for Lansdale in both the Philippines and Vietnam.
McGeorge Bundy	National security adviser, 1961–66.
Ellsworth Bunker	Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1967–73.
Frank Church	Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired hearings on intelligence in 1975.
William Colby	CIA chief of station in Saigon, CORDS chief, and CIA director, 1973–76.
J. Lawton Collins	Army chief of staff; U.S. ambassador to Saigon, 1954–55.
Lucien “Luigi” Conein	CIA officer who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.
Myron Cowen	Ambassador to the Philippines, 1949–52.
Thomas Dooley (“Dr. America”)	Navy doctor who wrote the best seller Deliver Us from Evil, about the 1954–55 exodus of refugees from North Vietnam.
Michael J. Deutch	Engineer and economist; member of Lansdale’s Vietnam team in 1965–66.
Allen Dulles	CIA director, 1953–61.
Elbridge Durbrow	Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1957–61.
Daniel Ellsberg	Member of Lansdale’s team in Saigon, 1965–66; Pentagon Papers leaker.
Graves Erskine	Marine general; head of Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations, 1953–61.
Philip Habib	Chief of the political section, U.S. embassy in Saigon, 1965–66; later under secretary of state.
William King Harvey	Head of the CIA’s Task Force W (dealing with Cuba), 1961–62.
Donald Heath	Ambassador to Saigon, 1952–55.
Richard Helms	CIA officer; CIA director, 1966–73.
Gabriel L. Kaplan	CIA operative, member of Lansdale team in the Philippines, 1950s.
Sam Karrick	Army officer and Christian Science practitioner who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.
Helen Lansdale	Lansdale’s first wife.
Henry “Harry” Lansdale	Lansdale’s father.
Sarah “Sadie” Lansdale	Lansdale’s mother.
Edward “Ted” Lansdale	Lansdale’s older son.
Peter “Pete” Lansdale	Lansdale’s younger son.
William Lederer	Navy captain; coauthor of The Ugly American.
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.	U.S. ambassador to Saigon, 1963–64, 1965–67; also U.S. senator, UN ambassador, and Republican vice presidential nominee.
Robert McNamara	Secretary of Defense, 1961–68.
Hank Miller	U.S. Information Agency officer who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.
John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel	Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon, 1954–55.
Edward Philips	Lansdale’s grandfather.
Rufus “Rufe” Phillips III	CIA and USAID officer, Lansdale team member.
L. Fletcher Prouty	Former Lansdale aide at the Pentagon who later accused him of complicity in the JFK assassination.
Joseph Redick	CIA linguist who worked for Lansdale in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s.
G. Frederick Reinhardt	Ambassador to South Vietnam, 1955–57.
Walt Rostow	Senior JFK and LBJ national security official.
Robert Shaplen	New Yorker correspondent, Lansdale friend.
Howard R. Simpson	U.S. information officer in Saigon in the 1950s and 1960s.
Raymond Spruance	Admiral; U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, 1952–55.
David T. Sternberg	Disabled CIA officer who worked for Landsale in the Philippines.
Maxwell Taylor	Army chief of staff, JFK aide, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and ambassador to South Vietnam, 1964–65.
John Paul Vann	U.S. military adviser to the South Vietnamese army.
William C. Westmoreland	U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, 1964–68.
Samuel T. “Hanging Sam” Williams	Chief of Military Assistance Advisory Group—Vietnam, 1955–60.
Samuel V. Wilson	Lansdale aide at Pentagon; Special Forces officer.
Frank Wisner	Chief of Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–51; CIA deputy director for operations, 1951–59.
Barry Zorthian	Head of Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office in Saigon, 1964–68.

About The Road Not Taken

CONTENTS

MAPS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

PROLOGUE

The Day of the Dead: Saigon, November 1–2, 1963

INTRODUCTION

The Misunderstood Man