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Q. What went wrong in Vietnam? What would you have done differently?A. Several reviews of the new book by Max Boot’s “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam”. New York Times Obituary of Maj Gen Lansdale and excerpts.What Went Wrong in VietnamIn Lansdale’s counter-insurgency approach, soldiers were fighters but also salesmen. Illustration by Bill BraggFor almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it.We got nothing for pretty much everything we tried in Vietnam, and it’s hard to pick out a moment in those thirty years when anti-Communist forces were on a sustainable track to prevailing. Political and military leaders misunderstood the enemy’s motives; they misread conditions on the ground; they tried to beat unconventional fighters with conventional tactics; they massacred civilians. They pursued strategies that seemed designed to produce neither a victory nor a settlement, only what Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers but once a passionate supporter of American intervention, called “the stalemate machine.”Could the United States have found a strategic through line to the outcome we wanted? Could we have adopted a different strategy that would have yielded a secure non-Communist South Vietnam? Max Boot’s “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” (Liveright) is an argument that there was a winning strategy—or, at least, a strategy with better odds than the one we followed.There were two major wars against the Communists in Vietnam. The first was an anticolonial war between Communist nationalists and France, which, except for a period during the Second World War, when the Japanese took over, had ruled the country since the eighteen-eighties. That war lasted from 1946 to 1954, when the French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu and negotiated a settlement, the Geneva Accords, that partitioned the country at the seventeenth parallel. The United States had funded France’s military failure to the tune of about $2.5 billion.The second war was a civil war between the two zones created at Geneva: North Vietnam, governed by Vietnamese Communists, and South Vietnam, backed by American aid and, eventually, by American troops. That war lasted from 1954 (or 1955 or 1959, depending on your definition of an “act of war”) to 1975, when Communist forces entered Saigon and unified the country. The second war is the Vietnam War, “our” war.The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking.By 1963, however, “peaceful coexistence” was the policy of the American and Soviet governments, Korea had effectively been partitioned, and the Sino-Soviet split made the threat of a global Communist movement seem no longer a pressing concern. And yet that was when the United States embarked on a policy of military escalation. There were sixteen thousand American advisers in South Vietnam in 1963; during the next ten years, some three million American soldiers would serve there.Historians argue about whether a given battle was a success or a failure, but, over-all, the military mission was catastrophic on many levels. The average age of American G.I.s in Vietnam was about twenty-two. By 1971, thousands of them were on opium or heroin, and more than three hundred incidents of fragging—officers wounded or killed by their own troops—were reported. Half a million Vietnam veterans would suffer from P.T.S.D., a higher proportion than for the Second World War.People sometimes assume that Western opinion leaders turned against the war only after U.S. marines waded ashore at Da Nang, in 1965, and the body counts began to rise. That’s not the case. As Fredrik Logevall points out in his study of American decision-making, “Choosing War” (1999), the United States was warned repeatedly about the folly of involvement.Intervention in Southeast Asia would be “an entanglement without end,” France’s President, Charles de Gaulle, speaking from his own nation’s long experience in Indochina, told President Kennedy. The United States, he said, would find itself in a “bottomless military and political swamp.” Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, told Kennedy that sending in American troops would be a disastrous decision. Walter Lippmann, the dean of American political commentators back when political commentary had such titles, warned, in 1963, “The price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war is higher than American vital interests can justify.”De Gaulle and Nehru had reasons of their own for wanting the United States to keep out of Southeast Asia. But Kennedy himself was keenly aware of the risks of entrapment, and so was his successor. “There ain’t no daylight in Vietnam, there’s not a bit,” Lyndon Johnson said in 1965. “The more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare, the more people you make mad.” Three years later, he was forced to withdraw from his reelection campaign, his political career destroyed by his inability to end the war. The first time someone claimed to see a “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam was in 1953. People were still using that expression in 1967. By then, American public opinion and much of the media were antiwar. Yet we continued to send men to fight there for six more years.Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood. In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam. It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia.American Presidents were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and independent South Vietnam, yet the gap between that aspiration and the reality of the military and political situation in-country was unbridgeable. They could see the problem, but they could not solve it. Political terms are short, and so politics is short-term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to those Presidents, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics—the fear of being blamed by voters for losing Southeast Asia to Communism. If Southeast Asia was going to be lost to Communism, they preferred that it be on another President’s head. It was a costly calculation.There were some American officials, even some diplomats and generals, who believed in the mission but saw that the strategy wasn’t working and had an idea why. One of these was John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who was assigned to a South Vietnamese commander in 1962, at a time when Americans restricted themselves to an advisory role. It seemed to Vann that South Vietnamese officers were trying to keep their troops out of combat. They would call in air strikes whenever they could, which raised body counts but killed civilians or drove them to the Vietcong. Vann cultivated some young American journalists—among them David Halberstam, of the New York Times,and Neil Sheehan, of United Press International, who had just arrived in Vietnam—to get out his story that the war was not going well.Vann didn’t want the United States to withdraw. He wanted the United States to win. He was all about killing the enemy. But his efforts to persuade his superiors in Vietnam and Washington failed, and he resigned from the Army in 1963. He returned to Vietnam as a civilian in 1965, and was killed there, in a helicopter crash, in 1972. In 1988, Sheehan published a book about him, “A Bright Shining Lie,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and is a classic of Vietnam literature.“The Road Not Taken” is the story of another military figure sympathetic to the mission and critical of the strategy, Major General Edward Lansdale, and Boot says that his intention is to do for Lansdale what Sheehan “so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann.” Boot’s task is tougher. Sheehan was in Vietnam, and he knew Vann and the people Vann worked with. He also knew some secrets about Vann’s private life. Boot did not know Lansdale, who died in 1987, but he interviewed people who did; he read formerly classified documents; and he had access to Lansdale’s personal correspondence, including letters to his longtime Filipina mistress, Patrocinio (Pat) Yapcinco Kelly.Edward Lansdale - WikipediaLansdale was at various times an officer in the Army and the Air Force, but those jobs were usually covers. For much of his career, he worked for the C.I.A. He was brought up in California. He attended U.C.L.A. but failed to graduate, and then got married and went into advertising, where he had some success. In 1942, with the United States at war with the Axis powers, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the nation’s first civilian intelligence service and the precursor of the C.I.A. During the war, Lansdale worked Stateside, but in 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender, he was sent to the Philippines.It was there that he had the first of his professional triumphs. He ran covert operations to help the Philippine government defeat a small-scale Communist uprising, and he supervised the candidacy of a Filipino politician named Ramon Magsaysay and got him elected President, in 1953. To assist in that effort, Lansdale created an outfit called the National Movement for Free Elections. It was funded by the C.I.A.This was Lansdale’s modus operandi. He was a fabricator of fronts, the man behind the curtain. He manipulated events—through payoffs, propaganda, and sometimes more nefarious means—to insure that indigenous politicians friendly to the United States would be “freely” elected. Internal opposition to these leaders could then be characterized as “an insurgency” (in Vietnam, it would be termed “aggression”), a situation that called for the United States to intervene in order to save democracy. Magsaysay’s speeches as a Presidential candidate, for example, were written by a C.I.A. agent. (The Soviets, of course, operated in exactly the same way, through fronts and election-fixing. The Cold War was a looking-glass war.)In 1954, fresh from his success with Magsaysay, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam by the director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, with instructions to do there what he had done in the Philippines: see to the establishment of a pro-Western government and assist it in finding ways to check Communist encroachment. (The Communists in question were, of course, Vietnamese opposed to a government put in place and propped up by foreign powers.)As Boot explains, Vietnam was a different level of the game. The Philippines was a former American colony. Almost all Filipinos were Christians. They liked Americans and had fought with them in the war against Japan. English was the language used by the government. The Vietnamese, by contrast, had had almost no experience with Americans and were proud of their two-thousand-year history of resistance to foreign invaders, from the Chinese and the Mongols to the French and the Japanese. There were more than a million Vietnamese Catholics, but, in a population of twenty-five million, eighty per cent practiced some form of Buddhism.The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after 1954 were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.In 1954, Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Vietnam, was a popular figure. He was a Communist, but he was a Communist because he was a nationalist. Twice he had appealed to American Presidents to support his independence movement—to Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, and Truman at the end of the Second—and twice he had been ignored. Only the Communists, he had concluded, were truly committed to the principle of self-determination in Asia. The Geneva Accords called for a national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956; that election was not held, but many people in the American government thought that Ho would have won.Lansdale knew neither French nor Vietnamese. For that matter, he couldn’t even speak Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. (In the Philippines, he is said to have sometimes communicated by charades, or by drawing pictures in the sand.) Yet, as he had done in the Philippines, he managed to get close to a local political figure and become his consigliere. In the Philippines, Lansdale could choose the politician he wanted to work with; in Vietnam, he had to play the card he was dealt. The card’s name was Ngo Dinh Diem.PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM AND PRESIDENT OF PHILIPPINES MAGSAYSAYDiem was the personification of the paradoxes of American designs in Southeast Asia. “A curious blend of heroism mixed with a narrowness of view and of egotism . . . a messiah without a message” is how one American diplomat described him. He was a devout Catholic who hated the Communists. One of his brothers had been killed in 1945 by the Vietminh—the Communist-dominated nationalist party. During the war with France, he had spent two years in the United States, where he impressed a number of American politicians, including the young John F. Kennedy. In 1954, the year of the French defeat, he was appointed Prime Minister by the Emperor, Bao Dai, a French puppet who lived luxuriously in Europe and did not speak Vietnamese well.Diem was a workaholic who could hold forth for hours before journalists and other visitors to the Presidential Palace. A two-hour Diem monologue was considered a quickie, and he didn’t like to be interrupted. But Diem did not see himself as a Western puppet. He was a genuine nationalist—on paper, the plausible leader of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam.On the other hand, Diem was no champion of representative democracy. His political philosophy was a not entirely intelligible blend of personalism (a quasi-spiritual French school of thought), Confucianism, and authoritarianism. He aspired to be a benevolent autocrat, but he had little understanding of the condition Vietnamese society was in after seventy years of colonial rule.The French had replaced the Confucian educational system and had tried to manufacture a new national identity: Franco-Vietnamese. They were only partly successful. It was not obvious how Diem and the Americans were supposed to forge a nation from the fractured society the French left behind. Diem’s idea was to create a cult of himself and the nation. “A sacred respect is due to the person of the sovereign,” he claimed. “He is the mediator between the people and heaven.” He had altars featuring his picture put up in the streets, and a hymn praising him was sung along with the national anthem.This ambition may have been naïve. What made it poisonous was nepotism. Diem was deeply loyal to and dependent on his family, and his family were an unloved bunch. One of his brothers was the Catholic bishop of the coastal city of Hue. Another was the boss—the warlord, really—of central Vietnam. A third brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, lived in the Presidential Palace with his wife, Tran Le Xuan, a woman known to the press, and thus to the world, as the Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu. She operated as Diem’s hostess (he was celibate) and was free with her usually inflammatory political opinions. American officials in Saigon prayed that the Nhus would somehow disappear, but they were the only people Diem trusted.#OnThisDay Dec. 31, 1954, S Vietnam's Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem released a "pacification" blueprint to take control of his country from departing Viet Minh fighters. The secret ghostwriter? CIA operative Edward Lansdale. #RoadNotTaken https://t.co/946QzoJ5vm pic.twitter.com/FbpqcDd0iz— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) December 31, 2017Nhu ran the underside of the Diem regime. He created a shadowy political party, the Can Lao, whose members swore loyalty to Diem, and he made membership a prerequisite for career advancement. According to Frances FitzGerald’s book “Fire in the Lake” (1972), he funded the party by means of piracy, extortion, opium trading, and currency-exchange manipulation. He also created a series of secret-police and intelligence organizations. Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment. Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam.The United States had declined to be a signatory to the Geneva Accords—which had, after all, effectively created a new Communist state—but Lansdale’s arrival in Saigon on the eve of Diem’s official appointment was a signal that we intended to supervise the outcome. And the American government was always prepared to swap out South Vietnamese leaders when one seemed to falter—a privilege we bought with enormous amounts of aid, some $1.5 billion between 1955 and 1961. It is to Lansdale’s credit that Diem survived as long as he did.After landing in Saigon and setting up a front, the Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale began sending infiltrators into North Vietnam (violating a promise that the United States had made about respecting the ceasefire agreed to at Geneva, though the North Vietnamese were violating the accord, too). The agents were instructed to carry out sabotage and other subversive activities, standard C.I.A. procedure around the world. But almost every agent the agency sent in underground somewhere was captured, tortured, and killed, usually quickly, and this is what happened to most of Lansdale’s agents. People survive in totalitarian regimes by becoming informers, and those regimes were often tipped off by double agents.The Geneva Accords provided for a three-hundred-day grace period before the partition in order to allow Vietnamese to move from North to South or vice versa, and Lansdale, using American ships and an airline secretly owned by the C.I.A., arranged for some nine hundred thousand Vietnamese, most of them Catholics and many of them people who had collaborated with the French, to emigrate below the seventeenth parallel. (A much smaller number immigrated to the North.) These émigrés provided Diem with a political base.Lansdale’s most important accomplishment was helping Diem win the so-called battle of the sects. The French defeat had left a power vacuum, and groups besides the Vietminh were jockeying for turf. In 1955, three of them united in opposition to Diem: the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, religious sects, and the Binh Xuyen, an organized-crime society with a private army of ten thousand men.Diem neutralized the religious sects by the expedient of having Lansdale use C.I.A. funds to buy them off. Boot says the amount may have been as high as twelve million dollars, which would be a hundred million dollars today. But the Binh Xuyen, which controlled the Saigon police, remained a threat. Worried that Diem was not strong enough to hold the country together, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sent cables to the American embassies in Saigon and Paris authorizing officials to find a replacement. Lansdale warned Diem that U.S. support was waning, prompting him to launch an attack on the Binh Xuyen. The Binh Xuyen was routed, and Dulles countermanded his order.The Unquiet AmericanTo secure his winnings, Diem called for a referendum to determine whether he or Bao Dai, the former Emperor, should be head of state. Diem won, supposedly with 98.2 per cent of the vote. He carried Saigon with 605,025 votes out of 450,000 registered voters. Lansdale’s main contribution to the campaign was to suggest that the ballots for Diem be printed in red (considered a lucky color) and the ballots for Bao Dai in green (a color associated with cuckolds). Boot does not mention that this simplified Nhu’s instructions to his poll watchers: he told them to throw out all the green ballots.With Diem’s consolidation of authority, Boot says, Lansdale reached “the apogee of his power and influence.” In 1956, he left Southeast Asia and took a position in the Pentagon helping to develop special forces like the Navy seals and the Green Berets. He enjoyed a brief resurgence with Kennedy’s election, in 1960. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, but he was not locked into a Cold War mentality. He liked outside-the-box types, and he liked Lansdale and even considered appointing him Ambassador to South Vietnam. But the State Department and the Pentagon did not like outside-the-box types and they certainly did not like Lansdale, who remained in the States and was assigned to head Operation Mongoose, charged with devising methods for overthrowing Fidel Castro.Lansdale does not seem to have been directly involved in the notoriously wacko assassination plots against Castro (the poisoned cigar and so on), but Boot suggests that he knew of such plans and would not have objected to them. He did come up with a scheme for an American submarine to surface off the Cuban coast and fire explosives into the sky. Rumors, introduced inside Cuba by C.I.A. agents, that Castro was doomed would lead Cubans to interpret the lights in the sky as a sign of divine disapproval of the regime.In the mid-seventies, in a statement to a congressional committee, Lansdale denied proposing the scheme (Boot says he lied), but it was consistent with his usual strategy, which, in the case of Cuba, was to fund an indigenous opposition movement whose suppression would give the United States an excuse to send in troops. A lot of brainpower was wasted on those anti-Castro schemes. Castro would run Cuba for another forty-five years. The country is now ruled by his brother.Lansdale was reassigned to Vietnam in 1965, but Diem was dead. He had been deposed in 1963, in a coup d’état to which the American government had given its approval. He and Nhu were assassinated shortly after they surrendered. (Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, and escaped retribution.) There were celebrations in the streets of Saigon, but the event marked the beginning of a series of coups and government by generals in South Vietnam. Short of withdrawal, the United States now had no choice but to take over the war.By 1965, therefore, when Lansdale arrived for his second tour of duty, the American military was fully in charge. It had little interest in the sort of covert operations Lansdale specialized in. The strategy now was “attrition”: kill as many of the enemy as possible. “Life is cheap in the Orient,” as General William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces, explained to the filmmaker Peter Davis—who, in his documentary “Hearts and Minds” (1974), juxtaposed the remark with scenes of Vietnamese mourning their dead, imagery already familiar from photographs published and broadcast around the world. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in 1968.In 1972, he published a memoir, “In the Midst of Wars,” in which he was obliged to recirculate a lot of cover stories—which is to say, fabrications—about his career. Reception of the book was not kind.Lansdale’s private life turns out to have been a little sad. From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. “I’m just not a whole person away from you,” a typical letter to Pat reads, “and cannot understand why God brought us together when I had previous obligations unless He meant us for each other.” But Lansdale’s wife would not give him a divorce, and he reconciled himself to trying to keep the marriage alive. He suffered for many years from longing and remorse. When Lansdale was with his wife, Pat dated other men. There appear to have been no significant dalliances on his part. Only after his wife died, in 1973, were he and Pat married.“The Road Not Taken” is not the first book devoted to Edward Lansdale, and it is not quite of the calibre of “A Bright Shining Lie,” in part because Boot can’t provide the ground-level reporting that Sheehan could. But it is expansive and detailed, it is well written, and it sheds light on a good deal about U.S. covert activities in postwar Southeast Asia.Boot is a military historian, a columnist, and a foreign-policy adviser who has worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. He has been highly critical of Donald Trump, and describes his social views as liberal, but he has been a proponent of American “leadership,” a term that usually connotes interventionism.One might therefore have expected his book to adopt a revisionist line on Vietnam—to argue, for example, that the antiwar media misrepresented the military situation and made it politically impossible for us to prosecute the war to the fullest of our capabilities. He clearly wants to suggest that the war was winnable, and he believes that Lansdale’s approach was the wiser one, but he is cautious in his analysis of what went wrong. It was a war with too many variables for a single strategic choice to have tipped the balance.Interestingly, and despite some prefatory claims to the contrary, “The Road Not Taken” does not really transform the standard picture of Lansdale. Everyone knew that he was C.I.A., and that he combined an affable and artless personality with a talent for dirty tricks. Boot’s Lansdale is not much different from the one FitzGerald sketched in “Fire in the Lake,” back in 1972. “Lansdale was in many respects a remarkable man,” she wrote:He had faith in his own good motives. No theorist, he was rather an enthusiast, a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for “the little guy” and the proper counterinsurgency skills. He had a great talent for practical politics and for personal involvement in what to most Americans would seem the most distinctly foreign of affairs.If anything, Boot tries to moderate some of Lansdale’s received reputation. Sheehan, in “A Bright Shining Lie,” called South Vietnam “the creation of Edward Lansdale.” Boot thinks this is an exaggeration, and a lot of his book is committed to restoring a sense of proportion to his subject’s image as a political Svengali, or “Lawrence of Asia.” So why did he write “The Road Not Taken”? And why should we read it?In many ways, Lansdale was a throwback. He operated in the spirit of the old O.S.S. He treated all conditions as wartime conditions, and so did not scruple to use whatever means necessary—from bribes and misinformation to black ops—to achieve ends favorable to the interests of the United States. Like the man who created the O.S.S., General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, he was a backslapper who prized informality and was indifferent to such bureaucratic punctilio as “the chain of command.” He was a freelancer. He made his own rules.That is exactly what his C.I.A. masters wanted him to do. And it is why, after the American military took charge in Vietnam and bureaucratic punctilio was back in style, his influence waned and he was put on the shelf. Techno-strategists like Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, had no use for Lansdale. They did not even find him entertaining. They looked on him as a harebrained troglodyte.Still, McNamara’s strategy failed. Did Lansdale know something that McNamara and the rest of Kennedy and Johnson’s “best and brightest” did not? Boot thinks he did, and one purpose of his book is to revive Lansdale as a pioneer of counter-insurgency theory.Lansdale was a proponent of the “hearts and minds” approach. He believed in the use of subterfuge and force, but he rejected “search and destroy” tactics—invading villages and hunting out the enemy, as American forces did repeatedly in South Vietnam. It was a search-and-destroy mission that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai, in 1968.Tactics like this, Lansdale saw, only alienated the population, and he advocated what he called “civic action,” which he defined, in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1964, as “an extension of military courtesy, in which the soldier citizen becomes the brotherly protector of the civilian citizen.” In other words, soldiers are fighters, but they are also salesmen. They need to sell the benefits of the regime they are fighting for, and to do so by demonstrating, concretely, their commitment to the lives of the people. This is what Lansdale believed that the Vietcong were doing, and what the Philippine rebels, who called themselves the Hukbalahap, had done. They understood the Maoist notion that the people are the water, and the soldiers must live among them as the fish.As Boot notes, Lansdale was by no means the only person who believed that the way to beat the Vietcong was to play their game by embedding anti-Communist forces, trained by American advisers, in the villages. This happened to be the theme of “The Ugly American,” by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, which was published in 1958 and spent an astonishing seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller list. Lederer and Lansdale were friends, and Lansdale appears in the book as a character named Colonel Hillandale, who entertains locals with his harmonica (as Lansdale was known to do).“The Ugly American” was intended—and was received by many—as a primer on counter-insurgency for battlegrounds like Vietnam. Although the title has come to refer to vulgar American tourists, that was not the intention. In the book, the “ugly American” is the hero, a man who works side by side with the locals to help improve rice production. He just happens to be ugly.Boot, oddly, doesn’t mention it, but the United States was engaged in civic action in South Vietnam from the beginning of the Diem regime. Through the Agency for International Development, we had been providing agricultural, educational, infrastructural, and medical assistance. There was graft, but there were also results. Rice production doubled between 1954 and 1959, and production of livestock tripled. We gave far more in military aid, but that is because our policy was to enable South Vietnam to defend itself.In the pursuit of civic action, though, there was always the practical question of just how South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers were supposed to insinuate themselves into villages in the countryside. It was universally understood, long before the marines arrived, that in the countryside the night belonged to the Vietcong. No one wanted to be out after sunset away from a fortified position. John Paul Vann was notorious for riding his jeep at night along country roads. People didn’t do that.What was crucially missing for a counter-insurgency program to work, as Lansdale pointed out, was a government to which the population could feel loyalty. Despite all his exertions as the Wizard of Saigon, pulling Diem’s strings from behind the curtain, he could not make Diem into a nationalist hero like Ho. As many historians do, Boot believes that the Diem coup was the key event in the war, that it put the United States on a path of intervention from which there was no escape and no return. “How different history might have been,” he speculates, “if Lansdale or a Lansdale-like figure had remained close enough to Diem to exercise a benign influence and offset the paranoid counsel of his brother.” But Boot also recognizes that events may have been beyond Lansdale’s or Diem’s control. “Perhaps Lansdale’s achievements could not have lasted in any case,” he says.Probably not. Lansdale was writing on water. The Vietnam he imagined was a Western fantasy. Although the best and the brightest in Washington shunned and ignored him, Lansdale shared their world view, the world view that defined the Cold War. He was a liberal internationalist. He believed that if you scratched a Vietnamese or a Filipino you found a James Madison under the skin.Some Vietnam reporters who were contemporaries of Lansdale’s, like Stanley Karnow, who covered the war for a number of news organizations, and the Times correspondent A. J. Langguth, assumed that the artlessness and the harmonica playing were an act, that Lansdale was a deeply canny operative who hid his real nature from everyone. Boot’s book suggests the opposite. His Lansdale is a very simple man. Unquestioned faith in his own motives is what allowed him to manipulate others for what he knew would be their own ultimate good. He was not the first American to think that way, and he will not be the last.The English writer James Fenton was in Saigon, working as a journalist, when Vietcong troops arrived there in 1975. He managed, more or less by accident, to be sitting in the first tank to enter the courtyard of the Presidential Palace. Fenton described the experience in a memorable article, “The Fall of Saigon,” published in Granta in 1985.The Vietnam War in pictures: the 35th anniversary of the fall of SaigonLike many Westerners of his education and generation, Fenton had hoped for a Vietcong victory, and he was impressed by the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army when they marched into the city. But he stayed around long enough to see the shape that the postwar era would take. The Vietnamese Communists did what totalitarian regimes do: they took over the schools and universities, they shut down the free press, they pursued programs of enforced relocation and reëducation. Many South Vietnamese disappeared.Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and Ho’s body, like Lenin’s, was installed in a mausoleum for public viewing. Agriculture was collectivized and a five-year plan of modernization was instituted. The results were calamitous. During the next ten years, many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the country, most of them by launching boats into the South China Sea. Two hundred thousand more are estimated to have died trying. “We had been seduced by Ho,” Fenton concluded. What he and his friends had refused to realize, he wrote, was that “the victory of the Vietnamese was a victory for Stalinism.” By 1975, though, most Americans and Europeans had stopped caring what happened in Southeast Asia.Then, around 1986, the screw of history took another turn. Like many other Communist states at the time, Vietnam introduced market reforms. The economy responded, and soon Western powers found a reason to be interested in Southeast Asia all over again: cheap labor. Vietnam is now a major exporter of finished goods. It is a safe bet that somewhere in your house you have a pair of sneakers or a piece of electronic equipment stamped with the words “Made in Vietnam.” ♦Louis Menand, a staff writer since 2001, was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016.Edward Lansdale and America’s Vietnam DemonsMax Boot’s newest book chronicles the life and impact of Edward Lansdale, the famous American advisor and CIA officer sometimes hailed as the “Lawrence of Asia.” A near-legend alternately seen as a kingmaker or an oddball, Lansdale helped trailblaze one American approach to fighting communist insurgents during the early days of the Cold War — an approach that was soon scorned by policymakers at the top. Deeply researched and evenhanded, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam is a superb scholarly achievement.Boot, a historian and columnist for Foreign Policy, comes at Lansdale having already written two major books on small wars and counterinsurgency, a solid foundation that he takes to a new level here with rigorous research and dogged investigation into little-known corners of Lansdale’s life. He taps the most up-to-date scholarly sources, such as Lien-Hang Nguyen’s Hanoi’s War and Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War, and his own primary research is most impressive. He conducted more than 20 interviews with people who knew Lansdale and visited more than 30 archives, including in the Philippines and Vietnam. He makes use of the most recently declassified material. And Boot is the first author to gain access to the letters Lansdale wrote to his wife and his Filipina lover (and future second wife), which reveal copious details about his thinking and motivation.The thrust of Boot’s argument is that the United States missed an opportunity for a less traumatic outcome in Vietnam, and again in today’s long wars, by neglecting Lansdale’s example. Eschewing Lansdale’s deep local knowledge, trust with leaders, and skepticism of the value of large numbers of troops on the ground is, for Boot, the “road not taken.”The argument is relevant both for America’s revisiting of Vietnam and for how it handles strategy today. Boot’s takeaway is that skilled advisors with a bias toward democratic reforms could have yielded better results not only in Vietnam but also in America’s more recent wars.Edward Lansdale was a California advertising man who joined the fledgling Office of Strategic Services during the World War II, later going on to become a CIA officer and U.S. Air Force major general. He played a pivotal role on the Cold War battlefields of the Philippines and Vietnam, skillfully advising Philippine and South Vietnamese leaders wrestling with communist insurgencies. In his Vietnam masterpiece, A Bright Shining Lie, reporter Neil Sheehan called Lansdale a “legendary clandestine operative.” (For years, Lansdale was also rumored to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, though Greene denied it, having written the book before Lansdale arrived in Vietnam.)Lansdale’s greatest achievements — and the ones that point most clearly to the path that Boot thinks should have been taken — were helping then-Philippine Defense Minister Ramon Magsaysay defeat the Hukbalahap insurgency in the Philippines and then engineering Magsaysay’s 1953 presidential election. Lansdale then moved to Vietnam and deftly outmaneuvered the 1955 attempt to overthrow the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. While critical of his many failings — detractors for years have suggested Lansdale was naive and morally corrupt — Boot makes clear that Lansdale had a unique gift for working with Filipinos and the South Vietnamese. He was the advisor par excellence.Just what made Lansdale such a storied advisor lies at the heart of Boot’s book — and of the idea that his playbook could be applicable today. Lansdale had an intimate knowledge of the society, culture, politics, and history of the countries in which he worked.He learned by leaving the bubble and taking the time and trouble to meet with as many people from diverse backgrounds as possible, in barrios, villages, and the countryside. In his first stint in the Philippines, for instance, Lansdale would head out nearly every weekend and crisscross the countryside, learning what locals cared about. In South Vietnam, he set out into the rural strongholds of the paramilitary religious sects, gaining a firsthand knowledge of leaders who would later try to overthrow the regime. That contrasts with the all-too-cloistered existence U.S. officials and officers often find themselves in while on assignment. And he put in the time: two deployments to the Philippines totaling almost seven years, and two deployments to South Vietnam for a total of more than five years. The total outstrips most Americans’ time on the ground in the recent wars.Lansdale also had a unique ability to build trust, which underpinned the willingness of Philippine and South Vietnamese leaders to listen to his advice. Boot doesn’t shy away from the fact that Lansdale passed cash to his partners, such as during Magsaysay’s 1953 campaign for president. But money is not the whole story. Shared experience, patience, and genuine care for the well-being of his local partners mattered just as much. Lansdale and Magsaysay sometimes lived together and often traveled together, occasionally bouncing or flying recklessly through combat zones side by side.The Innovative CIA Agent Who Brokered a Truce in Vietnam (thedailybeast.com)“Comrades are listened to, when they share risk,” Lansdale later advised. With Diem, a much less charismatic partner, Lansdale had another weapon: the patience to simply listen to the long-winded leader and his ideas for hours on end. (Other Americans loathed Diem’s diatribes.) Probably as important, at a time when the French and other Americans were trying to undercut Diem, Lansdale had no intention to harm or remove him. There is no trust if a partner thinks an advisor is out to get him.Remarkably, Lansdale spoke no foreign languages. It takes effort, but language itself builds trust. I cannot count the number of times an Afghan has told me how happy he was that I came to a meeting alone so that he could talk freely. America’s advisors and diplomats should seek to outdo Lansdale in that regard.Boot argues that Lansdale’s talents as an advisor gave a better understanding of how to achieve progress in Vietnam than U.S. commanders in the field or senior leaders in Washington did. By ignoring Lansdale’s advice, Boot maintains, the United States lost opportunities to set the war on a less painful course: The decisions to build a conventional-style South Vietnamese army, to deploy large numbers of U.S. forces, and to forgo democracy all ran contrary to his counsel. Most egregiously, in 1963, Washington decided to overthrow Diem, a nationalist if flawed leader. Lansdale had warned that years of political chaos would follow, as indeed they did.Lansdale was onto something. For all his flaws, Diem probably would have led a more stable, tougher government than the ones that followed his. In this environment, the United States may have been less compelled to deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines. “At the very least the war’s loss would have been less painful all around if Lansdale’s advice had been heeded,” Boot writes. “He had never wanted to see half a million American troops thrashing around Vietnam, suffering and inflicting heavy casualties. His approach, successful or not, would have been more humane and less costly.”Boot’s broader message is that skilled, locally savvy advisors could have yielded better results not just in Vietnam — but also in America’s more recent wars. A major shortcoming in Iraq and Afghanistan was the lack of on-the-ground leaders with Lansdale’s level of local knowledge and people skills, Boot contends. In his view, there was no Lansdale-like rapport with national leaders. In sharp contrast to Lansdale’s privileged ties to Magsaysay and Diem, the United States had poor relationships with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and it could not dissuade them from bad decisions that ended up fueling support for insurgents and terrorists.Based on my experiences as a civilian advisor in Afghanistan, I am inclined to agree that America did not always have the right people in place, with the best knowledge of the country and rapport, and those gifted with those characteristics — Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for example — were around all too briefly. As in Vietnam, most leaders came and went on one-year tours. Those who learned among the people, as Lansdale had, were usually deemed too junior or unconventional to play a high-level role.The mistakes U.S. leaders made, especially early on, were glaring. In Iraq, the United States de-Baathified the government, dissolved the army, and allowed sectarian strife to smother democracy. In Afghanistan, the United States rejected negotiations with the Taliban, built an army too slowly, permitted excesses by warlords, and caused too many civilian casualties. Washington misunderstood the Afghan people, the deep roots the Taliban had planted in society, and the likelihood they would sprout again.The United States seemed deaf at times to local concerns, especially when it came to Karzai. Few Americans were willing to sympathize with Karzai or look out from his point of view. Critics seemed oblivious to popular support for Karzai and how much he hewed to traditional Afghan themes of independence and sovereignty. Over time, Karzai became increasingly resentful of Americans and resistant to sound advice. U.S. leaders did not listen to him, so he did not listen to them. It recalls Lansdale’s advice to President John F. Kennedy about Diem: “If the next American official to talk to President Diem would have the good sense to see him as a human being who has been through a lot of hell for years — and not as an opponent to be beaten to his knees — we would start regaining our influence with him in a healthy way.”To his credit, Boot does not argue that Lansdale could have definitively turned around Vietnam, nor that following his model could have done the same in Iraq or Afghanistan. He acknowledges that larger factors were and are at play. In all three countries, the governments were beset by a degree of corruption and strong-arm tactics that even a good leader was unlikely to overcome. To take one example: In Iraq, more was going on than simply inaction by Maliki or the United States. Sectarian fears and friction inexorably drove Sunnis and Shiites apart — and drove Shiite politicians like Maliki to ill-advised lengths. Even Lansdale would have been hard-pressed to get Maliki to swim against that tide for long. Nor could good advisors much affect the cross-border safe havens of North Vietnam and Pakistan that endowed insurgents in South Vietnam and Afghanistan with an enduring strength and resilience.Finally, I would underscore how in all three countries the adversaries were determined to fight foreign occupation. The United States should be mindful of how nationalism can inspire men and women to resist occupation and how an American presence — even if necessary — can discredit the very governments it’s trying to help. “Nationalism,” Samuel Huntington wrote, “is the cement of the revolutionary alliance and the engine of the revolutionary movement.”Lansdale himself would probably argue that the Philippines and Magsaysay prove that decisive turnarounds are in fact possible. Yet the Philippines was a special case. Unlike Vietnam or Afghanistan, it was an archipelago physically isolated from communist supply and safe havens. And Lansdale got lucky with Magsaysay, a tireless former elected official, defense minister, and anti-Japanese guerrilla leader with a strong sympathy for the average Filipino and Philippine soldier. On top of everything else, we should remember that the U.S. military stayed in the Philippines for decades.Lansdale’s love of the Philippines and Vietnam clouded his objectivity. He understandably wanted to save his Vietnamese friends from abandonment and death — a feeling familiar to many who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps he should have recognized his bias and held back from claiming the Vietnam War could be won. His road not taken was a better option. But withdrawal may have been the best.An advisor cannot change the world. Lansdale’s tragedy is partly that he thought he could. Advisors can make a big difference. A well-placed one can prevent devastating failures and seize opportunities.They can help boost military effectiveness. But creating a state that can stand on its own and provide long-term stability without U.S. presence is something entirely different. One of Boot’s most telling passages is this:The post-1953 tribulations of the Philippines showed how difficult it was to fundamentally transform a country, any country, whose social and political contours had been shaped by myriad factors over the course of a long history, like rocks formed by the accumulation of sediment over the millennia. Lansdale could accelerate and guide political change in the short term. Making that change last was a much more difficult proposition.Lasting solutions to the intractable problems of failed states are, in my view, outside the power of an advisor and usually outside the power of the United States itself. The best U.S. leaders and policymakers should expect is that if they stay, they can manage problems and prevent outright failure or collapse. What advisors, even ones as gifted as Lansdale, are unlikely to provide is decisive success or a clear path out.This article originally appeared in the January 2018 issue of FP magazine.Carter Malkasian is the author of Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State.Ed Lansdale's Black Warfare in 1950s VietnamColonel Edward Lansdale, chief of the CIA's Saigon Military Mission, meets with Ngo Dinh Diem after the CIA entered Vietnam in 1954 to help the pro-Western Vietnamese wage political-psychological warfare. (Douglas Pike Photo Collection, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech Univ.)Meet the Mild-Mannered Spy Who Made Himself the 'American James Bond'The legend of Lawrence of Arabia was concocted single-handedly by the American impresario Lowell Thomas, who in 1919 premiered a lecture and slide show on Col. T.E. Lawrence’s exploits that played to packed houses in New York and London and beyond. The legend of Edward Lansdale — the former ad man-turned-CIA officer who became known as the “American James Bond” and the “T.E. Lawrence of Asia” — had more authors, but perhaps the most important (and inadvertent) was the eminent English writer Graham Greene.But Lansdale had a hand, too. In fact, one of Lansdale’s stealthiest and most successful covert ops would be to subvert Greene’s intent, turning his anti-American novel into a pro-American movie — and thereby securing his own reputation.In December 1955, Greene published The Quiet American, a novel featuring a character named Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, who was an American intelligence operative, a supporter of Vietnamese warlord Trinh Minh The’s, the owner of a black dog, and an enthusiast for promoting a “third force” — that is, a democratic alternative to communism and colonialism.It was an almost exact replica of Col. Lansdale, who since coming to Saigon in the summer of 1954, fresh off his success in masterminding the defeat of a communist insurgency (the Huk Rebellion) in the Philippines, had become the least secretive secret agent in town. He had become well known for championing newly appointed Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem as an alternative to both the French and the communist Vietminh and for working with Trinh Minh The, whom the French reviled as a terrorist for his attacks on French troops and civilians, to bring him over to Diem’s side. Lansdale even had a black poodle named Pierre who accompanied him everywhere, and he took a soft-spoken approach to dealing with Filipinos and Vietnamese — he preferred to listen rather than lecture. In other words, he really was the “quiet American.”For understandable reasons, the widespread assumption, held not least by Lansdale himself, was that he was the model for the protagonist, who was hardly painted in flattering hues: Greene depicted Pyle as a naive young interloper who supplied Trinh Minh The with explosives that maimed innocent Vietnamese (something that neither Lansdale nor any other CIA officer did in real life). “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused,” sighs Thomas Fowler, the world-weary English correspondent who is the novel’s narrator. In retribution, he would arrange for Pyle to be murdered by the Vietminh.Lansdale first heard of the new book at a diplomatic party early in 1956. As he reported to his wife, Helen, in a previously undisclosed letter:At the reception, the Embassy staff were teasing me about my love life. Seems that Graham Greene has written a new novel, supposedly based upon me. Called the “Quiet Man” or maybe it’s the “Quiet American.” Anyhow, a naïve American, me, makes friends with a murderous Vietnamese called General The (Trinh Minh The, I suppose) who fools him and leads him astray, but the American finally wakes up and finds he has been sucked in by a very despicable guy. Meanwhile the story says he has had a wild love life, I presume due to General The. Sounds as though the French propagandists are really able to sell a bill of goods to the British, since the French peddled stories that I was very naïve and The sold me a bill.By mid-February, Lansdale had managed to get his hands on a copy and decided that “the book has about everything wrong politically.” It was also wrong in details such as Greene’s inaccurate description of plastic explosives. “However,” he continued, “I like the way the fellow writes.… Trouble is, it will fill a lot of Americans with quite a false picture of things here, and follows the French propaganda line quite faithfully, despite its being critical of the French.”Lansdale remembered seeing the English novelist only once, in 1954, when Greene was sitting on the terrace of the colonial-era Continental Hotel, a favorite haunt of expatriates in Saigon, along with a large number of French officers who began to boo Lansdale when they saw him. Lansdale was with two of his friends, the husband and wife New York Times correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Peggy Durdin. The latter stuck her tongue out at the crowd on the terrace and said, “But we love him,” and turned around and gave Lansdale a “big hug and kiss.” In an anecdote a bit too good to be true, Lansdale recalled saying, “Well, I’m going to get written up someplace as a dirty dog. Thanks a lot!”In truth, Greene always denied that he modeled Pyle on Lansdale. “Pyle was a younger, more innocent, and more idealistic member of the CIA,” he wrote. “I would never have chosen Colonel Lansdale, as he then was, to represent the danger of innocence.” The novelist claimed that his inspiration was Leo Hochstetter, a young American economic aid official with whom he had shared a room one night while visiting the Vietnamese countryside. According to Greene, Hochstetter, who was assumed by the French to “belong to the CIA,” lectured him on the “long drive back to Saigon on the necessity of finding a ‘third force in Vietnam.’” Greene’s denials are buttressed by the fact that while he worked on The Quiet American between March 1952 and June 1955, he completed a draft before Lansdale arrived in Vietnam for good in June 1954. That makes it unlikely that Lansdale was the model for Pyle, as generations of writers have assumed, but The Quiet American’s success only added to Lansdale’s luster by association.If The Quiet American, the novel, was anti-American, the movie version, which came out in 1958, was very different.In the movie, Trinh Minh The is not really responsible for the terrorist bombings in Saigon — the Vietminh are. Trinh Minh The, along with the Alden Pyle character (played rather woodenly by war hero Audie Murphy), is framed by the Communists. Thomas Fowler (the veteran English actor Michael Redgrave) sets up Pyle to be killed by the Vietminh not because of his revulsion at Pyle’s complicity in terrorism but because he is a Communist dupe who is intensely jealous of Pyle for stealing his Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong — played, bizarrely, by the Italian actress Giorgia Moll. The cinematic version ends with Inspector Vigot (Claude Dauphin), the detective investigating Pyle’s murder, telling Fowler that he has been “used” and “childishly manipulated” by the Communists: “If you will pardon my attempt at colloquial English, Mr. Fowler, they have made a bloody fool of you.”This was a neat inversion of Greene’s plot, one that infuriated the author, who later decried the “treachery” of the film’s writer and director, Joseph Mankiewicz. (The second movie version of The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, would be more faithful to the novel, but Greene would not live to see its release in 2002.) What Greene may not have realized was that Lansdale had taken a considerable hand in altering the movie’s political message to make it pro-American.Lansdale met Mankiewicz when the filmmaker arrived in Saigon at the end of January 1956 to research the script. The product of a leading Hollywood family (his older brother, Herman, was the screenwriter of Citizen Kane), Mankiewicz had won Oscars as the director and writer of A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). More recently he had directed Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar (1953) and Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Richard Burton, who later worked with him on Cleopatra (1963), wrote that Mankiewicz was himself a quiet American — an “Oxford don manqué,” with an “ever-present pipe” and a “way of making considered statements with his twinkling eyes peering through a miasma of tobacco smoke.”With a talent for witty, ribald tales, Mankiewicz was just the sort of person who would have gotten along well with a CIA operative who had once dreamed of becoming a New Yorker cartoonist. Over dinner at Lansdale’s Rue Duy Tan house, Mankiewicz said he had bought film rights to The Quiet American “to prevent the British or French from making an anti-U.S. movie.” Lansdale helped him craft an alternative storyline. A few weeks later, Lansdale wrote to his wife, “Seems that Mankiewicz liked the plot twist for ‘The Quiet American’ that we discussed.… Quite a change in the French propaganda!” A month later, Lansdale sent Mankiewicz a follow-up letter urging him to “go right ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all.”A liberal anti-communist, Mankiewicz took Lansdale’s advice and produced a film that Greene did not recognize. He was able to win permission from Diem to film in Vietnam — the first Western moviemaker granted that privilege — thanks to Lansdale’s intervention. In October 1957, when the film was ready for viewing, Lansdale wrote to Diem that “Mr. Mankiewicz’s ‘treatment’ of the story” was “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair” — “I feel that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown.” Lansdale arranged a screening of the film in Washington, inviting representatives from “practically all [U.S. government] departments, agencies, and services concerned with psychological, political, and security affairs.” “They all seemed to enjoy it as much as I did,” Lansdale wrote to his old friend Gen. John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, a former head of the military assistance group in Saigon who was now retired from the U.S. Army and chairman of a new lobby group, the American Friends of Vietnam, which had been formed to support the Diem regime. On Jan. 22, 1958, the American Friends of Vietnam, whose ranks came to include prominent politicians, academics, and journalists, sponsored a “world premiere” screening of The Quiet American in Washington. Tout le monde of “Washington’s society” turned out “in all its glitter,” wrote the pro-Diem Times of Viet Nam.Lansdale’s handling of The Quiet American was as deft a propaganda coup as any American operative had ever pulled off.And it was entirely in keeping with Lansdale’s method of operating. Ever since his prewar days in the advertising industry in California, he had a talent for “pay ops,” such as spreading rumors in the Philippines that a vampire, known as an aswang, was targeting Huk rebels — a charade made more convincing after a Philippine army unit left puncture marks in the neck of a dead guerrilla. In Vietnam, he had already orchestrated a virtuoso campaign to convince nearly a million refugees to flee North Vietnam by such steps as hiring a soothsayer to predict good fortune for South Vietnam and bad luck for the North. The difference this time was that he was not just shaping South Vietnam’s reputation but his own. The problem that Lansdale would face in the future is that he would have trouble living up to his own legend — and dealing with all the animosity his growing fame aroused among his bureaucratic rivals.This excerpt is adapted from Max Boot’s new book The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”EDWARD LANSDALE DIES AT 79; ADVISER ON GUERRILLA WARFAREEdward G. Lansdale, an Air Force officer whose influential theories of counterinsurgent warfare proved successful in the Philippines after World War II but failed to bring victory in South Vietnam, died yesterday at his home in McLean, Va. He was 79 years old and had a heart ailment.A dashing Californian, Mr. Lansdale is widely thought to have been the model for characters in two novels involving guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia: ''The Quiet American'' by Graham Greene and ''The Ugly American'' by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer. He retired from the Air Force as a major general in 1963.As an adviser in the newly independent Philippines in the late 1940's and early 1950's the future general came to wield great influence in operations by the Philippine leader Ramon Magsaysay against the Communist-dominated Hukbalahap rebellion. Under the leadership of Mr. Magsaysay, who was elected President while the struggle was going on, the operations succeeded.It was in the Philippines that General Lansdale framed his basic theory, that Communist revolution was best confronted by democratic revolution. He came to advocate a four-sided campaign, with social, economic and political aspects as well as purely military operations. He put much emphasis on what came to be called civic-action programs to undermine Filipinos' backing for the Huks.Looking back on what he learned in Asia, he once said: ''The Communists strive to split the people away from the Government and gain control over a decisive number of the population. The sure defense against this strategy is to have the citizenry and the Government so closely bound together that they are unsplittable.''With that victory behind him, General Lansdale initially commanded great respect in the 1960's as an adviser to South Vietnamese and United States military leaders, and to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.But his efforts to generate popular support for the embattled Saigon Government, at a time when the United States military role in Vietnam remained limited, failed to forestall an escalation of the insurgency to full-scale conventional warfare.Intellectual DirectionEarly in the war, General Lansdale was considered to be the individual who provided the intellectual direction to the counterinsurgency and nation-building efforts. But he became less significant when the conflict left the counterinsurgency phase and became a more conventional war.Edward G. Lansdale was born Feb. 6, 1908, in Detroit, the son of Henry Lansdale and the former Sarah Frances Phillips. He attended the University of California at Los Angeles and later became an advertising executive.He joined the Army as a captain in 1943 and rose to major by 1947, when he left the Army. During World War II he also served in the Office of Strategic Services. He joined the Air Force as a captain the same year.After the Philippines victory, by then an Air Force Colonel, he went to Vietnam in 1954 as a Central Intelligence Agency operative and helped in setting up the South Vietnamese Government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was overthrown and killed in a coup in 1963.In that era he also championed the idea of forming and deploying a counterinsurgency force, rather than conventional armed forces, in opposing insurgents in South Vietnam.Early in his Vietnam service, Colonel Lansdale was head of a team of agents that carried out undercover operations against North Vietnam. The team turned in a vivid report of its actions shortly before pulling out of Hanoi in October 1954 after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The team's report, later included among the Pentagon Papers, said it ''spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses,'' and ''in taking actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad.'''Dizzy and Weak-Kneed'''The team had a bad moment when contaminating the oil,'' it went on. ''They had to work quickly at night in an enclosed storage room. Fumes from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. Dizzy and weak-kneed, they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and completed the job.''He was posted to the Pentagon in 1956 and there, by some accounts, assisted in the formation of the Special Forces, which had the special patronage of President Kennedy.After retiring from the Air Force, Mr. Lansdale served from 1965 to 1968 as a special assistant to Ambassador Lodge and as a United States representative to a committee of the South Vietnamese Government intended to win support in the countryside for the Government. His activities were varied, ranging from liaison functions between the United States Embassy and Vietnamese leaders to efforts at what was called ''rural reconstruction'' as a way of turning the tide against the insurgents.With advice from General Lansdale, South Vietnam's Premier, Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, declared early in 1966 that his Government would concentrate on a ''rural reconstruction'' program to pacify the countryside, putting thousands of newly trained ''cadres'' into the field to attempt to reassert Government control, enhance the peasants' life and extirpate the Vietcong.He also served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency's undercover operations in Indochina.In a 1977 book, ''In the Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia,'' General Lansdale argued that the United States could still prevail in remote third-world nations by exporting ''the American way'' through a blend of economic aid and efforts at ''winning the hearts and the minds of the people.''Stanley Karnow, in his 1983 book ''Vietnam: a History,'' said that in the novel ''The Ugly American'' General Lansdale was glorified as Col. Edwin Hillendale, ''who captured 'hearts and minds' with his harmonica.'' Mr. Karnow also said that in ''The Quiet American'' General Lansdale was depicted as Alden Pyle, ''the naive U.S. official who believed that Vietnamese peasants instilled with the precepts of town hall democracy would resist Communism.''General Lansdale said that in 1961 he was told by the Kennedy Administration to draft a contingency plan to overthrow President Fidel Castro of Cuba. But he said years later that the idea had not been viable because it depended on recruiting Cuban exiles to generate an uprising in Cuba, and he had not formed that team.General Lansdale's first wife, the former Helen Batcheller, died in 1972. He is survived by his second wife, the former Patrocinio Yapcinco; by two sons by his first marriage, Edward, of Garden City, L.I., and Peter, of Oakton, Va., and five grandchildren.Edward Lansdale: An American Folk Hero?Down in the dark, dank, windowless caverns of The Foreign Service Institute—a subterranean parking garage near the Key Bridge in Arlington, Virginia—where we were supposed to be learning an Asian language, the name “Lansdale” was votive, although we weren’t sure why. John F. Kennedy, president a little over a year, had clearly conveyed to us that an unprecedented threat to the nation had risen as Communist forces, inspired, supported, and directed by Moscow and Beijing, were carrying out a new form of warfare in “the Third World”: guerilla insurgencies breaking every tenet of the established laws of war.Also in the FSI garage were some of President Kennedy’s favored Green Berets, hunched around a sand table blocking the way to the language labs, exchanging tactical schemes. In the larger context of that time, we knew only two things: Something bad was getting worse in South Vietnam, and we, the U.S., didn’t know what to do about it. Theories abounded; none persuaded. It was evident that the end of colonial rule in Southeast Asia was being followed not by a decline in Communist attacks, but by the redirection of the guerilla insurgencies toward destroying the new national governments taking over from the departed European powers.This challenge appeared to have been successfully met in two nations of the region, by two unique individuals. There was Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson of Great Britain who had devised anti-Communist counterinsurgency measures for Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first Prime Minister of the new Federation of Malaya. And there was Colonel Edward Geary Lansdale of the US Air Force, seconded to the CIA, who helped elect and then closely advised Filipino president Ramon Magsaysay to put down the Communist Hukbalahap guerilla war in Luzon. Sir Robert was the epitome of the British empire’s soldier-scholar. Colonel Lansdale inscrutably kept a low profile while at the same time embodying the phrase “a legend in his own time.”Herodotus, in his History, delineated a nation by the story that its people tell themselves about themselves. In a similar way, Lansdale deliberately created a story of himself in the American narrative. Photographs of Lansdale standing in a hip-shot slouch near, but not too close, to an Asian leader recall “Major Flip Corkin” of the Second World War’s United States Army Air Corps (later to be the USAF). Slender and cool-looking, he projected an intrepid yet easy resolve in the midst of impending chaos, his officer’s cap slightly rumpled in that casual American-at-war way made famous by MacArthur, with his uniform studiously worn in less than regulation style. As the public knew, Lansdale played the harmonica, another aspect of his American folk image, a military version of Huck Finn or Johnny Appleseed. Major Flip Corkin was the cartoon creation of Milton Caniff’s comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates.” As there was a real American officer, Lt. Colonel Phil Cochran, behind the cartoon folk hero Flip Corkin, the real Ed Lansdale played a “Terry and the Pirates” role at that fraught yet romantic moment when the mysterious Orient was transforming itself into modern Asia.The boundaries between life and art, between facts and literature, are permeable and poorly defended, a good thing overall. In 1955, Graham Greene’s famous and politically influential novel The Quiet American cemented the “Legend of Lansdale” in the public imagination.In Saigon during the Vietnam War, I worked as a Foreign Service Officer and lived at 47 Phan Than Gian in an old French-style villa, built by the puppet emperor Bao Dai for one of his mistresses, near the Dakao Bridge over the arroyo that marked the city’s edge. I had, of course, read The Quiet American, and knew that in the novel, the Dakao Bridge was where the body of Alden Pyle, shot by the communist Viet Minh, precursors of the Viet Cong, had been dumped to die in the slimy ooze beneath the span.Chief of U.S. mission in 1955 was Gen. John O'Daniel, left. Ambassador Frederick Reinhardt is seated next to President Ngo Dinh Diem. Col. Edward Lansdale, center, doffs his cap. (Francois Sully from Black Star) The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam WarThe Quiet American was the novel of the Vietnam era. Set in 1951, a decade before the United States became seriously involved in the war, the main character Alden Pyle, everyone claimed, must have been modeled on Lansdale, the lone American operative whose disavowable anti-Communist gambits were starting to gain fame in 1951. Scathingly and relentlessly anti-American, the novel seemed prescient to the journalists who were dazzled by it in the 1960s. To them, Greene’s depiction of a fatuously harmful American involvement in Vietnam was as prophetic as had been Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in foreseeing the terror and military takeover of the French Revolution that were yet to come when Burke wrote. Greene’s other main character, Thomas Fowler, a cynical, seen-everything, soulless Englishman, is the antithesis of what the fresh-faced superficial Pyle represents.Vietnam was a journalist’s war. It was in the mid-1960s that American reporters suddenly began to “see through” the policy’s deceptive mask and turn against the war. They were a flock of Fowlers, seeing the foul side of everything. Time magazine’s Saigon bureau chief, H. D. S. (David) Greenway compared a journalist’s typewriter to the marshal’s baton that Napoleon said every corporal should carry in his knapsack. With The Quiet American as talisman, a reporter could dream of following the path of Time’s David Halberstam, whose exposés of American misdeeds would make him first in the line of stars featured in the media for opposing their country’s conduct in the world. “Many passages some of us can quote to this day,” Halberstam said about The Quiet American; “It was our Bible.”Greene claimed his book was mostly reportage. Indeed, it delivers the vivid reality of sights, sounds, and smells of war. The book conveys an eerie sense of place, from “The Continental Shelf,” the terrace at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, where I recall reporters in tailored bush jackets eyed aviator-sunglassed CIA “Air America” pilots sipping their Ban-Me-Ba (“33”) French beer while watching the shoeshine boys and bar girls on the sidewalks that ringed the unwalled platform—to the lonely watch tower on the Saigon-Tayninh road, which Pyle and Fowler, searching for safety, decide to climb as night falls and the Viet Minh come out—a decision that dooms the frightened Vietnamese government soldiers assigned to the tower.In The Quiet American, art imitates life, and then life imitates art. The novel’s most significant moment is the meeting of Alden Pyle and Thomas Fowler in the Saigon apartment where Fowler lives with Phuong, the girl who Alden had first met, with Fowler, on the Continental Shelf. Later, when the three had gone to the casino, the Grande Monde in Cholon, Alden dances with her, sparking romantic feelings.The episode is sprinkled with hints that lead the reader to make a connection to Longfellow’s narrative poem about Plymouth colony, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” John Alden, the main figure in the poem, was the first of the Mayflower’s passengers to set foot on Plymouth Rock, the “original” American. Alden Pyle is the original American idealist, come to a strange land to pacify and civilize it; he is John Alden in Saigon. Thomas Fowler has been to many a war, a hard-eyed and all-too-experienced man. We can envision the “fowling-piece on Miles Standish’s shoulder.” The scene is a remake of Longfellow’s most famous story, but with the roles and characters tellingly reversed.Pyle (“Call me Alden,” he says to Fowler, who refuses to do so) announces that he is in love with Phuong and that as a younger, more upstanding, and more promising man in every way, he is the husband Phuong deserves. To add to his case, Pyle reminds Fowler that Fowler cannot marry the girl because his wife back in England will not give him a divorce.Alden speaks no Vietnamese, and his French is rudimentary. So he asks Fowler to speak for him as intermediary and translator. Fowler, outraged, nonetheless accepts the role Alden has put upon him. Alden insists that he himself must say the words in French, “Will you marry me?” But what Alden actually says is “Will you come away avec moi?” She says no.In Greene’s novel, everything is reversed, out of joint. In Longfellow’s poem, every character is admirable: Priscilla is the virtuous yet witty embodiment of Puritan culture; John Alden is the civilizer and good friend; Miles Standish, the honest, sturdy, simple soldier. In Greene’s portrayal, the encroaching militarism that early New England avoided has emerged in contemporary America. Alden, in his sophomorically idealistic fervor to establish a “Third Force” to save Vietnam from both Communism and colonialism, provides explosives to a Vietnamese General who employs them in a terrorist attack that kills only civilians. Fowler decides that Alden must be stopped and contrives a scenario in which he is murdered by the Viet Minh at the Dakao Bridge.Greene’s novel condemns the entire modern world as represented by the United States. From his Catholic angle of vision, it all went downhill with the Reformation, which produced the Puritan Revolution in England that, in turn, gave birth to Puritan New England, the source of all that has gone wrong in America and across the world wherever America has gone.Greene vigorously denied that he modeled Alden Pyle on Lansdale, and chronologies of the novel’s publication and Lansdale’s activities reveal that Greene was telling the truth. Yet, the fictional Alden became inextricably inhabited by the actual Colonel Lansdale. Pyle’s desire to find an Asian leader to advise and a “Third Way” movement between Communism and autocracy are paralleled by Lansdale’s own fixation on General Thé, a “Third Way” candidate, and President Ngo Dien Diem as the Magsaysay-like bulwark against Communism in South Vietnam.Lansdale read Greene’s The Quiet American and met Joseph Mankiewicz in Saigon where the Hollywood producer had come seeking context for a film based on the novel. In a long letter to Mankiewicz, Lansdale produced details on the political-military situation. As would later be said, “It is obvious that Colonel Lansdale [had] a noticeable effect on the final version of the movie.” It would be a case of literature influencing life and then life—Lansdale’s life—inhabiting the fictional life of Alden Pyle to retell the novel with Lansdale as Alden should have been portrayed by Greene. Lansdale would then recommend the film to Ngo Dinh Diem and to the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Vietnam as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair.” The outcome displayed Lansdale’s near-magical persuasiveness as the novel’s bitter anti-Americanism was turned into a pro-American story.Foreign policy lessons from psy-ops pioneer Edward Lansdale (Financial Times)The Lansdale myth was further enhanced in the same year, 1958, that the film was released, by the best-selling novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The title at first was assumed to be anti-American, but soon was understood as ironic praise for a selfless patriot who served the people of a struggling Asian land in ways that turned the typically heavy-handed American approach into one that could “win hearts and minds.” The novel was an undisguised effort to refute Greene’s The Quiet American, by portraying the heroic and harmonica-playing Colonel Hillandale as a one-man solution to stopping the Communist threat.“Winning hearts and minds,” a call heard from the very outset of the American role in Vietnam, has been given a renaissance by Max Boot’s new book, The Road Not Taken: Edward G. Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. Boot concludes that the twenty-first century’s war on terror can be won by turning for inspiration to “Lansdale’s Cold War era ‘friendly persuasion’: ground troops aren’t the answer. America needs a new generation of advisers who practice patience and build trust with friendly but weak regimes.”But in retrospect, the slogan “hearts and minds” was a deep-rooted misreading of the challenge presented in Vietnam, going even beyond the claimed moral equivalence of Communism and freedom to proclaim a benevolent contest for the votes of a Third World. This knowingly denied the Cold War’s core significance. The Vietnam War in the South was a terror-using guerrilla insurgency waged by the Soviet- and Mao-supported Viet Cong threat. After repeated U.S. tactical wrongdoing, it was finally won in the early 1970s by giving the South Vietnamese people a secure territory and land reform free from murderous purges. The people themselves did the rest, demonstrating their intense desire not to live under Communist control. Thwarted in their drive to impose Marxist ideology on the South, Hanoi launched a massive conventional military invasion across three international boundaries of the Republic of Vietnam. After the U.S. Congress refused to further supply and support the South, the fall of Saigon to North Vietnam’s T-54 tanks in 1975, and the huge flight of refugees into the sea in hopes of rescue by the U.S. Navy, should have disproved the “hearts and minds” explanation once and for all.In Boot’s book, Lansdale’s life and modes of operation are told in immense detail, with analysis and insight by the author, but his “hearts and minds” summation is too one-dimensional for such a strange and complex story. It is hard to dismiss the conclusion of the vastly experienced foreign correspondent Stanley Karnow—who watched Lansdale closely in both the Philippines and Vietnam—that Lansdale was simply an ad agency man who, “beneath his homey, gee-whizz veneer,” was “a devious self-promoter who invented ‘psychological warfare’ techniques borrowed from advertising gimmicks” to yield achievements that redounded to his credit.From the early 1950s, when Lansdale first took up the challenge of counter-insurgency, to well into the twenty-first century, a large body of knowledge and intellectual debate has accumulated around the task of defeating radical uprisings. This may be understood by reference to Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, published in 1832, and its concept of “The Center of Gravity,” that area of the enemy’s fundamental vulnerability that, if exploited, would cause his collapse. Clausewitz proclaimed there were four such crucial vulnerabilities: the enemy’s territory, capital city, army, and alliances. During the American Civil War, the North’s quandary was which one of these vulnerabilities should be the main thrust of its strategy against the Confederacy. The problem presented by radical guerilla terrorist warfare is that Al-Qaeda and the like do not possess any of these Center of Gravity vulnerabilities. When the Islamist movement calling itself the Islamic State and Caliphate (ISIS) adopted Clausewitz’s “Center of Gravity” doctrine and seized territory with something like an army, they were defeated, having abandoned the advantages of insurgency.What then is the Center of Gravity of an insurgent enemy? The experiences drawn from the many firefights, terrorist acts, and political struggles over the last half of the twentieth and now in the twenty-first century leads to the conclusion that Sir Robert Thompson’s doctrines employed in ending the Malayan Emergency have been the most effective. Something like “winning hearts and minds” is included in Sir Robert’s formula, but far more than that concept is involved. Thompson’s main points include at a minimum:—provide security for the people; i.e. clear, hold, and build;—produce political-economic change for the people, not the elite, i.e. land reform;—possess and have the will to use main, major force against enemy concentrations of power;—understand and respect the culture of the people; provide an ethical-moral example;—don't set deadlines; convince the people that you will serve their aspirations for a better life for as long as it takes.Much on this roster was put into effect in South Vietnam 1969–1972 by the “One War” team of General Creighton Abrams and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, a new tactical approach that defeated the Viet Cong in those years, leaving Hanoi with no choice but to launch massive conventional military attacks across South Vietnam’s international borders in 1972 and 1975.In contrast, Colonel Lansdale’s prescriptions—searching for a leader to instruct; forming a “Third Force;” and conveying a kindly understanding of the needs of a people facing a Communist takeover—are examples of what not to do. Still, Boot has nonetheless painted an unforgettable portrait of a unique American character, and that’s enough.

Well, if we include Truman in that since he was President in the closing months of WWII and afterwards, he would be out since, in addition to WWII, there was also the Korean War. Next was President Eisenhower.Not much happened militarily under “Ike”. The Korean War was over, However, the peace negotiations had stalled, so Ike went to Panmunjom to get it back on track (an Armistice was signed in July 1953). There was an uneasy calm in Europe. The French were getting their butts kicked in some backwater colony named Vietnam (toward the end of his administration, Eisenhower did, however, send some US military “advisers”, however, they were non-combatants). McCarthyism was on its last legs, while the Civil Rights movement was just starting to gain momentum.After Ike came John F Kennedy. Things didn’t go to well for ole “Bedroom Jack”. First, there was Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, then the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. There was the Berlin Crisis in 1961, and the building of the infamous wall (and site for one of his greatest speeches). Also in 1962, Kennedy increased the number of US military advisers. He also gave approval for the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem along with the coup by General Minh with CIA support. The CIA was also involved with overthrow of several governments in Latin America and the Middle East; some of which included the assassination of their respective presidents.As an aside, Kennedy appears to have intended on pulling out the majority military advisers out of Vietnam as soon as the 1964 election was over. He went as far as to say “it’s their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it”. However, he was not opposed to sending equipment and providing other military and economic support.Following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Lyndon B Johnson became President. Johnson was and will always be remembered for Vietnam. He was the president who continually escalated out involvement, following the alleged “Gulf of Tonkin” incident which we now know was largely faked. The US presence peaked at 550,000 by 1968.Nevertheless, it resulted in our direct military involvement. During the course of the war, approximately 58, 318 US service men and women were killed.153,303 were wounded (around 30% died of their wounds) and 1589 missing in action.We also dispatched US Marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965 in support of a coup. There was also the USS Pueblo matter in 1968 in which US naval intelligence gather ship was captured by the North Koreans. There was also the US Liberty incident in 1967. A US intelligence ship stationed in a war zone between Israel and Egypt, it was accidentally attacked, killing or wounding 205 personnel.Also under the Johnson Administration, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, as was the Anti-War Movement. Protests abound, including draft card burnings. occupying campus administrative offices, and sit-ins. Some peaceful, but a lot of them not. There was the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Hippies, the Yippies, the Gray Panthers, and the SLA. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered within weeks of each other. There was also the murder of students at Kent State University and the Chicago Police Riots in 1968.Richard M Nixon was next. Ole “Tricky Dick” was elected on the promise of end the war in Vietnam. However, while he did begin a reduction of troops, he also increased the scope of the war outside of Vietnam’s borders. He also began transferring more and more responsibility to the South Vietnamese under a program known as “Vietnamization”, which included the reduction of American presence in SE Asia in general.Ultimately the war ended and a Peace Treaty was signed in Paris in January 1973 which ended America’s military involvement in Vietnam’s Civil War. Troops were withdrawn at an increased pace with the last US personnel gone on April 29, 1975. The South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell the following day. Nixon also removed the US Dollar from the gold standard.Gerald Ford is best known for being the first president not elected. He was appointed VP after Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resigned, and then became president after Nixon resigned. He also pardoned Nixon of any crimes incurred in office and a general pardon of all Vietnam Era draft dodgers and deserters. Also there was the victory of the Communists in Vietnam, the bail out of New York in 1975, and the “Mayaguez” incident that year where Cambodian gunboats seized a US merchant ship. While the vessel and its 39 member crew were rescued, 41 Americans were killed.The peanut farmer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter was the next US President. Viewed as largely ineffective, Carter officially pardoned all draft dodgers in 1977. He also deregulated cargo and commercial airlines, the trucking industry, and the production of natural gas. Under Carter, there was the Three Mile Island incident, resulting in the emergency shutdown of the nuclear reactor amid concerns of possible radioactive leakage. The result was stricter controls on nuclear plants. He also banned the dumping of raw sewage in the ocean and restrictions on strip mining. There was also the Oil Embargo, which created a severe gas crisis in the US.Carter was responsible for the Camp David Accords of 1978, breaking peace between Egypt and Israel, along with establishing formal diplomatic relations with China while ending them with long time ally Taiwan. In 1979, US Ambassador Adolph Dubs was murdered in Afghanistan. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet Union invaded the country amid a coup.Most importantly was the Iranian Hostage Crisis in which around 60 (later reduced to 52) US government personnel were taken hostage by the new Islamic government following the overthrow of the Shah, who had been installed by the CIA decades earlier. Per Carter’s authorization, a rescue was attempted. However, it failed when two of the three helicopters collided, killed eight servicemen. After 444 days, the hostages were released just as Ronald Reagan became the next US President.“The Gipper”, Ronald Reagan was a popular president, starting with release of the hostages, for which Carter deserves the credit. To cope with a slow economy, Reagan introduced “Reaganomics” and the notion of “trickle down” economics. He established a free trade agreement between the US and Canada, along with legislation to keep Social Security solvent until at least 2050. However, there were a number of terrorist attacks under Reagan resulting in the deaths of numerous Americans.In April 1983, the US Embassy in Beirut was bombed by Muslim terrorists, killed 16 Americans and dozens of other nationals. In October, terrorists drove a bomb laden truck into a US Marine barracks killing 241. A second bomb at French compound killed 50. In June 1985, Muslim hijackers seized a TWA jetliner with 153 passengers, including 104 Americans. They murdered one US Navy diver. In October, the PLO hijacked the passenger ship “Achille Lauro”. They murdered one elderly wheelchair bound American.In December 1985, PLO terrorists attacked air terminals in Rome and Vienna, murdering 20 including a total of five Americans (of which one was an 11 year old girl). In April 1986, a West Berlin Disco was bombed, killing one US serviceman and injuring 60. Plus there was the bombing of PanAm over Lockerby Scotland, killing all 259 passengers plus several residents on the ground.In January 1983, Iraqi ships attacked the “USS Stark”, killing 37 crew members. In October 1987, Iranians attacked a US oil tanker, blinding its captain and killing 17 crew members. In July 1988, an Iran airliner was shot down, killing all 290 passengers. In October 1983, the US invaded the island of Grenada. No Americans were killed and only a few were moderately injured. Meanwhile, the US was engaged in a covert war in Nicaragua to overthrow the Marxist Sandinistas.We’re getting into more modern presidents at this point, starting with George H W Bush. As is well already well known, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded the nation of Kuwait, which it had long claimed to be a “breakaway” province (unlikely). This had an immediate affect on world oil and gas prices.As a result, Bush coordinated an international coalition to rescue Exxon and BP…err…I mean the Kuwaiti People amid promises of “reform” by Kuwaiti royal family (which never happened). This was the Persian Gulf War, which lasted from 1990 to 1991. The invasion and liberation were a total success.Bush also oversaw the fall of the Sandinistas with the help of the CIA (as an aside, Bush was the former director of the CIA). There was also the invasion of Panama and capture of President Noriega, whom the CIA had previously helped into power years earlier. Bush also sent US troops, along with aid, to Somalia.This ultimately resulted in a clash between US/NATO troops and Somali warlords and led to the “Battle of Mogadishu” in 1993, made famous by the movie “Black Hawk Down”, which was based to several incidents involving the downing of US helicopters and subsequent killing 19 US soldiers, the wounding of 73 others, along with 1 Pakistani killed and 2 wounded and 1 Malaysian killed with 7 wounded.Next was Bill Clinton. The threat of US forces were used to end dictatorship on the island of Haiti. Meanwhile, US warplanes were sent to Bosnia as part of a NATO effort to end fighting and ongoing genocide being committed by neighboring Serbia. George W Bush was the next President.Under Bush II, the worse attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor occurs, 9/11/2001. Four hijacked planes were used. The World Trade Towers are hit and destroyed; the Pentagon is attack, and another attack is foiled by passengers on board, resulting in the airliner crashing in a Pennsylvania field (it was believed that the plane was headed for the White House). Total dead was just over 3000 people.As a result, the US targets Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, and the Taliban in Afghanistan (which had previously, with US support, had defeated the Soviet puppet government). By the following year, the Taliban Government was destroyed and Al Qaeda was severely damaged.In September 2002, following Saddam Hussein's repeated violations of the coalition imposed “No Fly Zone” and attacks on the Kurdish People, the US gears up for an invasion of Iraq. On March 13, 2003, Bush declares war on Iraq and the second Gulf War is underway. In the interim, a second space shuttle explodes. This time it’s the Columbia (a earlier one, Challenger, had exploded under the Reagan Administration). The crews were all killed.Following the defeat of Saddam, US and coalition forces attempt to form a new government amid growing Shiite and Sunni tensions. As a result, homegrown terrorists cells begin to form. Meanwhile, Saddam and others are captured and put on trial. Saddam and some of his officials are hanged while others have been shot and killed (including his two sons). In 2007, the US attacks Al Qaeda forces in Somalia as Al Qaeda leaders are systematically tracked and killed.In 2008, Barack Obama is elected President. The most significant event in his administration militarily is the killing of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011 in a Pakistani compound near a military school (Pakistan was supposedly an ally in the hunt for Bin Laden). Later, in October, Obama declares the war is over and US troops will be coming home. US troops, however, remain.Meanwhile, Obama attempted to justify a invasion of Syria, which was engaged in Civil War between Iranian supported factions, ISIS/ISIL which is a splinter group of Al Qaeda determined to create a Islamic State in Syria, and Syrian Nationals (as an aside, the US regarded ISIS in Syria as “freedom fighters” while terrorists elsewhere likely due to the fact that Syria is Russia’s ally in the region). This doesn’t fly with the American People, and no invasion takes place.Lastly we come to “The Donald”. So far, President Trump hasn’t had to deal with any new military issues. US troops remain in Iraq. North Korean continues to saber-rattle and the Iranians continue to threaten Israel. Meanwhile, internal and external forces have been trying to rekindle a new Cold War with Russia, including long discredited charges of Russian involvement in Trump’s election.So, if I had to pick a president whose administration was the most “peaceful”, it would have to be President Eisenhower. I think the world was needing a break at the that point. WWII was just a decade earlier and we just finished the Korean War. Eisenhower represented something of a breather for the world and sense of stability. I’ve provided a link below for you so you can see the actual numbers for yourself.United States military casualties of war - Wikipedia

Evil Spirits, Kundalini, Yoga, and Occult MysticismArticle IndexEVIL SPIRITS, KUNDALINI, YOGA, AND OCCULT MYSTICISMMANY WAYS DECEPTIONSERPENT RISINGKUNDALINI SONGSALL PAGESEvil spirits such as Kundalini, Yoga, and occult mysticism are dangerous spirits entering Christian churches in North America. These spirits are prophetic, offer visions, dreams, and feelings of peace. They can even look like the Holy Spirit. Only the most discerning are seeing it.A COUNTERFEIT SPIRITTraveling has provided me an opportunity to experience many things while seeing the ministry of the Holy Spirit in lots of different circumstances. I've seen some things recently that look like the Holy Spirit but are not. There is a counterfeit Holy Spirit entering Christian churches. One of my first experiences was in a particular church service. The minister was preaching, praying, and prophesying. It looked like the Holy Spirit, and His nine gifts of the Holy Spirit was moving, but something was wrong.There was a clash in my spirit, and I just couldn't enter into the service. My spirit was not in agreement. I even felt like my spirit was warring against something unseen. It didn't make sense to my head because everything looked right. As the service progressed I stayed in prayer then suddenly I saw it, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes, and I saw another spirit on this preacher. It was one of the highest occult spirits I have ever seen. It was a serpent looking reptile curled around this man's spine and laying across his shoulders. It was difficult to see because it camouflaged itself becoming transparent at times.Later I asked the intercessors with me if they had a witness to what we saw and heard. Like me, they confirmed that the preaching was good, but something was wrong. They just didn't know what it was. I told them what the Lord showed me. This person is a popular Christian speaker, writer, and television guest in America. I was very grieved in my spirit after this experience. This man was not flowing in the Holy Ghost but another spirit. I believe the name of this counterfeit Holy Ghost is Kundalini. Kundalini is a New Age serpent spirit.SHARPEN YOUR SPIRITUAL DISCERNMENTLet's explore this spirit, where it came from and how it entered America. Please ask the Holy Spirit to help you see its deception. Don't just take my word for what's happening, pray and do your own research. Later, I'm going to let you hear an audio of this spirits' operation in a Christian church. It might even be in yours.COMING TO AMERICASatchidananda opening the 3 day Music and Alternatives festival.The Kundalini spirit gained access to the Western world from India through New Age teaching. It is popularly known as Yoga. Don't for a minute think that Yoga is harmless. Yoga is an inherent part of Hindu philosophy which teaches man and nature are one with divinity. By the time you finish reading this material, you will see it for what it is, a destructive, demonic spirit. Although Kundalini Yoga is popular every Christian needs to understand that Yoga is a forbidden practice. Scripture declares, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me"(Exodus 20:3). Kundalini is an anti-Christ spiritual counterfeit of the Holy Ghost. My prayer is that all Christ's Holy Ghost filled intercessors across America will see what I saw. To bind this serpent spirit, cast it out, and for every Bible preacher and teacher to discern this spirit and close the church doors to its occult operations.AQUARIUSBack in 1967 the musical "Hair," opened with the song "Aquarius" with the memorable line, "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius." This song swept the country and ushered in an awareness of the Aquarian age concept. The song also defined the dawning of a "New Age" with the lyrics, "When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars; then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars."WOODSTOCKWoodstock, NYThe Woodstock concert in New York in 1969 drew over 500,000 youth across America and was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music". New Age Yoga teacher Yogiraj Sri Swami Satchidananda opened the festival with prayer. His real name is C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder, an Indian "Yoga teacher, and spiritual master." He was also the author of many spiritualists’ books on "Hatha Yoga" and influenced many including the popular artist, Peter Max.HOLLYWOOD'S SHIRLEY MACLAINEVeteran actress turned New Age teacher, Shirley Maclaine, came along in the early 70's teaching reincarnation, trans-channeling, and transcendental meditation. She writes, "When I walked across Spain on the pilgrimage called the "Santiago de Compostela Camino," I encountered myself in a former life. I discovered a part of me that lead to a greater understanding of myself." One of the common themes amongst New Age teachers is the focus on self. Maclaine later wrote "Out On A Limb" a popular book outlining her New Age awakening. Christians know there is no such thing as reincarnation. Scripture says,"It is appointed unto men once to die but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27).THE BEATLESThe Beatles at RishikeshThe Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. When they arrived in America at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, they were greeted by an estimated three thousand fans. They gave their first live US television performance two days later on "The Ed Sullivan Show", watched by approximately 74 million viewers. There is no question that the Beatles influenced a generation of America's youth.The Beatles were also drawn into the New Age. In 1968, they traveled to Rishikesh, India, attending an advanced transcendental meditation training session at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that they later adopted as their guru. This event drew worldwide attention and is credited with introducing the West to Indian spirituality. While there they wrote many songs later recorded on "The Beatles White Album" and "Abbey Road." Guitarist George Harrison wrote "My Sweet Lord" in 1970 a song about the Hindu god Krishna. John Lennon later wrote songs like "Imagine" released in 1971. The lyrics were anti-Christ saying, "Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try....." We saw the Beatles transform music with a new sound and introduce a new spirit into the country. Harmless child’s stuff? Hardly. [Watch the Video.]Later came Oprah Winfrey whom America wrongfully thought was a Christian.She is a New Age proponent and host of the highest-rated talk show in television history as seen by 15 million viewers daily in 132 countries. Winfrey started her own New Age church because she believes in a mystical New Age god calling it a force. She said, “…the force, I call it God.”Trusting in the spiritual self (Yoga beliefs) is nothing more than a perverted form of religious humanism cloaked in spiritualism. Oprah often weaves Bible verses in her teachings but clearly holds to a misdirected view of God. If God does not direct a person through His Word, then the only thing left are humanistic inner voices, twisted antinomian mysticism, or familiar spirits to provide guidance.MANY WAYS TO GODOn one program with New Age authors Betty Eadie, Sophy Burnham, and Dannion Brinkley, Winfrey alluded to the book “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn, saying, “One of the biggest mistakes humans make is to believe that there is only one way. There are many diverse paths leading to what you call God.” A Christian in the audience corrected her saying that Jesus was the only way to God. The panel was upset. Oprah responded, “There couldn't possibly be only one way. Does God care about your heart or whether you called His Son Jesus?” The point is that man can’t save himself; he needs a savior. Only Christ can fill that role. He is King of kings and Lord of lords.Scripture confirms that Oprah is wrong, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).YOGI BHAJANOthers say Yogi Bhajan, whose full name was Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, brought Kundalini Yoga to America after visiting California in 1969.Harbhajan Singh KhalsaHe declared, "I did not come to collect students but train teachers" and "seeing God in all" as the theme of his Kundalini Research Institute. "In the spring of 1969, soon after Singh had begun teaching in Los Angeles, a hit medley "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" was topping the music charts and being played everywhere. The performers, "The 5th Dimension", happened to be signed to a record label owned by one of his students (and his green card sponsor), musician and entrepreneur Johnny Rivers." Rivers wrote the songs "Secret Agent Man," "Memphis" and "Baby I Need Your Lovin." The LA Times said, "His students flocked to him. Women so adored him; it became an honor just to wash his feet. Men longed for his approval. They trusted him to arrange their marriages and select their careers." There are many other guru's "god men" involved in bringing demonic Hindu spiritualism into North America, but this is good for an introduction to false Christ Yoga origins.SPIRITUAL CONDITIONINGYoga is conditioning a new generation and becoming acceptable, offered as a means for weight loss, mental clarity, physical fitness and a harmless path to inner peace and harmony. Even schools are buying Yoga mats, promoting "Yoga Ed" and exposing our nations' children to its demonic deception. Today everything is acceptable in the public square except Christianity. Yes, Yoga is demonic teaching that is sweeping the country. Unlike Yoga teaching, man is not and can never be God. Nor can man save himself from the penalty for sin. Scripture declares, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23). Yes, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). To find one's inner god-self is finding nothing.TRANSCENDINGA common trait among competitive Yoga schools is the focus on transcending to a higher state of being or consciousness. Within the teachings, they have many "ways of transcending." These various ways are simply different steps to oneness with Brahman the Absolute One. That's why there are many different Yoga schools within Yoga.The term “Yoga” comes from one of two roots "ruj," meaning to be yoked together, and "yuja" meaning concentration. The question that comes to mind is, "What is a Yoga disciple yoking themselves with?" Most schools of Yoga teach a joining together with the "supreme self" and entering an esoteric condition through self-transcendence. On the surface, we see Yoga as the worship of self. In other words, you are god and only need to discover it through various methods from using energy from crystals, meditation, breathing exercises, chanting, or even certain dance movements.MUSIC, DRUMS, DANCE AND THE SERPENT SPIRITDrums and dance are used to awaken the Kundalini spirit. The caption on this video says, "We have come to dance awake our prayers." Prayers are not awakened, they are answered. The Christian prays to the Father in the name of Jesus. Scripture declares, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you" (John 15:16).SERPENT RISINGIn this video, they ask the question, "Where are our drums? The reply is, "We are not supposed to play our drums anymore. They have been broken. The people that brought us here don't like the drums. They know the drums give us strength, so they have forbidden us to play."THE CHAKRAChakra means "wheel, spinning, rotating, vibrating, or turning." In Yoga, they are known as "energy or force centers" capable of receiving and transmitting energy.There are seven chakra energy centers known as the root, belly, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. Every chakra has its own image. The dance movements help tap into the energy in the seven charkas as the Kundalini spirit rises along the spine. During the dance, the Kundalini rises from chakra to chakra causing various levels of self-realization while obtaining and releasing various spiritual (occult) powers known as siddhis. These siddhis powers include physical healings, clairvoyance, levitation, magic, spiritual experiences and power for the control of self, others, and the forces of nature. The Yoga dance progresses until the serpent spirit reaches the crown of the head resulting in a union (Yoga) with the self-divine. This is the Yoga goal, oneness with the universe.WAKING KUNDALINIThis is Lara's Yoginis dance instruction. Again, this dance is used to awaken the Kundalini serpent and encourage it to rise along the chakras.The use of multiple drums as lead instruments, combined with the chakra dance has found its way in some Christian churches. Is any of this taking place in your church? Those in the dance ministry need to guard themselves against chakra dancing. Yes, David danced before the Lord and dance is a form of worship. Just make sure your dance is to and for the glory of God. Not only has the Kundalini dance come into some churches but also civic clubs, schools, hospitals, and fitness centers. Universities and colleges even offer courses in the study of Yoga.THE CHAKRA DANCEThis video "Dance the Chakras Yoga Workout" is for sale on Amazon.KING OF YOGA, KUNDALINI YOGAThe "king of Yoga" schools is Kundalini Yoga. Kundalini also means "serpent power," leads to self-awareness and self-knowledge elations. The following video is a New Age conference showing a Yoga gathering with music and dance.KUNDALINI SONGSListen to the words of this Kundalini Yoga song only afteryou plead the blood of Jesus over your mind. Do not sing it! Remember the purpose of Yoga is to unite with the self-god. The words to the song are: "I am the light of the soul. I am bountiful. I am beautiful. I am rich; I am, I am." The Christian knows there is only one "I Am that I Am." His name is Christ the only begotten Son of the Living God.This song wrongly declares that the singer is the I Am. Repeating this song over and over is a form of chanting used to connect and release the energy of the seven chakras.ENTER APOSTACYPsychologist Helen Schucman wrote "The Course in Miracles" in 1965. She said the material came from an "inner voice." The book is full of demonic Gnostic heresies weaved in Christian terminology. The course teaches such things as, "The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. God's Name is holy but no holier than yours. To call upon His Name is to call upon your own. I am in charge of the process of atonement." This demonic "you are god" teaching is consistent within New Age circles. The course on miracles aired on Oprah and Friends XM Radio throughout 2008.THE SERPENT RISESYoga teaches the coiled serpent is located in the spine and through chanting, will awaken the serpent, (Kundalini awakening), traveling up the spine until entering an esoteric state (becoming one with the god self). In that state of union with the self, some see visions, hear voices, prophesy and are overcome by a sense of spiritual awareness. Paul Hood shares his Kundalini awakening as "a sense of energy rising from the base of my spine. "He also describes a "feeling of oneness with everything." [Listen Here.]TRANS MUSICDance and “trans music” is a common introduction to Kundalini Yoga. I first heard this music back in 1994 in Amsterdam. It was common in house parties. Today it draws crowds in concerts of over 50,000 youth in Europe. Today trans music and dance parties are common along with the drug ecstasy to enhance the experience. This is the annual Sunburn Festival held at Candolim beach, Goa, India. It draws around 5,000 people.Its purpose is to entertain and promote a sense of oneness and harmony. Notice the use of trans music and the kundalini dance.KUNDALINI IN CHRISTIAN CHURCHESThis audio is taken from a Christian church worship service full of young people. You should pay close attention to what you hear. The pastor is well known having hundreds of ministry connections across America and Canada and has influenced thousands of Christians. The preaching has just ended, and a crowd is gathered at the front. You can hear drums, music, counterfeit tongues, ambiguous (uncertain) prayer, the laying on of hands is taking place, and a girl just finished prophesying. She now appears to be in a spellbound condition. Let me ask some questions. Does your spirit bear witness to what you hear as Christian altar ministry? Do you think the Holy Spirit is in this service or is the atmosphere more conducive to the manifestation of the Kundalini spirit? Have you experienced a church service like this?PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF THE KUNDALINI SPIRITThe Kundalini spirit does not lead people to Christ. It is New Age eastern mysticism. According to Wikipedia, these are the physical effects of the Kundalini spirit on people:Physical effects are believed to be a sign of Kundalini awakening by some but described as unwanted side effects pointing to a problem rather than progress by others. Some of the more common signs and symptoms of an awakened Kundalini include:Involuntary jerks, tremors, shaking, itching, tingling, and crawling sensations, especially in the arms and legs.Energy rushes or feelings of electricity circulating the body.Intense heat (sweating) or cold, especially as energy is experienced passing through the chakras.Spontaneous pranayama (rapid breathing or hyperventilation), asanas (positions), mudras (hand movements) and bandhas (stiffening of the muscles).Visions or sounds at times associated with a particular chakra (mystic visions and prophecy).Diminished sexual desire or a state of constant orgasm.Emotional purging in which particular emotions become dominant (uncontrollable) for short periods of time.DepressionPressure inside the skull and headacheBliss, feelings of infinite love and universal connectedness, transcendent awareness.A FALSE PEACEAs you can see some of the effects like feelings of peace, visions and prophecy can lead the practitioner to think they have encountered the Holy Spirit. Just because a person experiences something supernatural does not mean their experience was from the Holy Spirit. Another effect not listed is demon possession.As Holy Spirit filled leaders in the Church of Christ, we need to obey the Scripture that declares, "Beloved, believe not every spirit but try the spirits whether they are of God because many false prophets are gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). We must be ever watchful servants of the Lord in our ministries both feeding and protecting the sheep.OCCULT SPIRITAs already said, a dangerous occult spirit is entering Christian churches across America. I ask Christ's ministers and prayer warriors to stand with me against this spirit. Like thousands of you, we believe in the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Kundalini spirit is not the Holy Spirit. Prophets get up on the wall, watch, pray, signal, and warn. Let's close the door to this evil spirit operating in our churches.Deceptive occult powers are entering our churches. Never have we needed spiritual discernment like we do today. Spiritual warriors like you let nothing stop them from taking action to achieve greater levels of spiritual discernment. That’s why I put together the Spiritual Discernment teachings.The Holy Spirit told me “people can’t come out of what they can’t see.” Take action and order today. Spiritual discernment belongs to you. So let’s get going right now.Your partner,(c) Apostle Jonas Clarkwww.jonasclark.comSTAY INFORMEDGET THE FREE JONAS CLARK REVOLUTIONARY REVIEWNameEmailxM5ILOsHLnwRECENT ARTICLESComing Out Of Darkness14 Things A Man NeedsHome life and Men's Changing RoleToxic MasculinityAdam, Eve, And Spiritual DeathMOST POPULAR ARTICLESFamily Curses and Generational Curses 7 SignsSpiritual Discernment And Prayer Against Witchcraft Spirit AttacksSoul Ties And Jezebel's Seducing SpiritIs the Jezebel Spirit Sleeping with Someone You Know?Loneliness, Witchcraft, And Jezebel SpiritOFFICE HOURS27 W Hallandale Bch Blvd. Hallandale, Fla 33009Mon-Thursday from 9 AM - 5 PMPhone: +1 954-456-4420Call Toll Free: 1-800-943-6490QUICK LINKSHomeAboutTerms of UsePrivacy PolicySitemapMake a DonationPeriscopeFacebookTwitterYouTubeCopyright ©2019 Jonas Clark. All Rights Reserved.