70 The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018
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ECAUSE the Vietnam war was the first
that the United States unequivocally
lost, American treatments of it are often
couched as might-have-beens. Liberals
look for moments when America might
have avoided the war; conservatives
search for ways that it could have been
won. The latter temptation grew after the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, when
America again became mired in guerrilla
conflicts. In the late 2000s, neo-conserva-
tive authors began arguing that America
could have triumphed in Vietnam (and, by
extension, could win in Afghanistan and
Iraq) by committing to so-called “counter-
insurgency” strategies, which involve po-
litical nation-building rather than relying
solely on firepower. Practitioners of coun-
ter-insurgency (including H.R. McMaster,
who later became Donald Trump’s nation-
al-security adviser) rose to the top of
America’s security hierarchy.
Max Boot, a journalist turned foreign-
policy scholar, supported winning both
Iraq and Afghanistan with counter-insur-
gency strategies. (In 2001 he wrote that “Af-
ghanistan and other troubled lands” need-
ed “the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-con-
fident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith
helmets”.) His new book is a biography of
Edward Lansdale, a legendary CIA officerand paired military offensives with politi-
cal campaigns to divide the communists
and buck up trust in the government.
In 1954, Lansdale shifted his attention to
Vietnam, where France was losing its war
against Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerril-
las. As a CIA liaison officer in Saigon, he
developed a close relationship with Ngo
Dinh Diem (pictured), the nationalist Cath-
olic chosen to lead South Vietnam once the
French left and the communiststook over
the north. Lansdale and hisdozen-odd ad-
visers played a crucial role in stabilising
the rickety new state. They arranged for
American ships to evacuate hundreds of
thousands of Catholics from the north to
the south, and helped Diem win the sup-
port of sectarian militias and crush a heavi-
ly armed mafia, the Binh Xuyen. By now
Lansdale was seen by the American public
as a wizard of democratic nation-building,
lionised in “The Ugly American”, a politi-
cal novel about American diplomacy that
came out in 1958. (Contrary to rumour, he
was not the model for Graham Greene’s
“Quiet American”.)
Mr Boot argues that things soured in
Vietnam after Lansdale returned to Ameri-
ca in late 1956. He understood that fighting
insurgencies was fundamentally a politi-
cal task, one of building a coherent govern-
ment that commands popular assent. Yet
as communist insurgents returned to
South Vietnam in the early 1960s (aided by
Diem’s increasing authoritarianism),
American advisers grew frustrated, and
President John Kennedy approved a coup
in November 1963. The coup leaders unex-
pectedly killed Diem; Lansdale was aghast
(as was Kennedy). The government rapidly
disintegrated in a series of coups by squab-
bling generals, and in 1965 America had toand pioneer of counter-insurgency think-
ing. As its title suggests, itis another entry
in the Vietnam what-if genre. Yet Mr Boot’s
views have evolved. Once a staunch con-
servative, his attitudes on social issues of
race and gender have moved in a liberal di-
rection. One question hanging over his
book is whether his attitude towards mili-
tary intervention has mellowed, too.
Lansdale was an advertising executive
from California who joined the OSS (the
precursor of the CIA) during the second
world war. In the Philippines in the early
1950s he helped defeat a communist insur-
gency by arranging for an honest Filipino
congressman, Ramon Magsaysay, to be-
come defence secretary, and successfully
managing his campaign for president. He
acquired a deep understanding of local
society by convening a team of creative
military officers and politicians (and by
launching a long-term extramarital affair
with a Filipino widow, Pat Kelly, whom he
would eventually marry). Lansdale per-
suaded the army to stop alienating peas-
ants with bloody, heavy-handed tactics,The Vietnam warWishful thinking
Nearly half a century afterthe conflict in South-East Asia ended, American writers
are still fighting the Vietnam warBooks and arts
Also in this section71 Giorgio Vasari and art history
71 Esther Kinsky’s fiction
72 Johnson: Pronouns on the move
73 Leonard Bernstein at 100The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale
and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.
By Max Boot. Liveright; 768 pages; $35.
Head of Zeus; £30