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. 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 , but Diem was dead. 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 , 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. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in Reception of the book was not kind.
From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. 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 , were he and Pat married. But it is expansive and detailed, it is well written, and it sheds light on a good deal about U.
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. 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.
It was a war with too many variables for a single strategic choice to have tipped the balance. Everyone knew that he was C.
He had faith in his own good motives. 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. And why should we read it? In many ways, Lansdale was a throwback. He operated in the spirit of the old O. 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. He made his own rules. That is exactly what his C. 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. They did not even find him entertaining. They looked on him as a harebrained troglodyte.
Boot thinks he did, and one purpose of his book is to revive Lansdale as a pioneer of counter-insurgency theory. It was a search-and-destroy mission that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai, in 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. 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.
Although the title has come to refer to vulgar American tourists, that was not the intention. He just happens to be ugly. 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 and , 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 He managed, more or less by accident, to be sitting in the first tank to enter the courtyard of the Presidential Palace.
Like 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. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. March 29, AM. VOA News. VOA News Subscribe. More US Stories. The Day in Photos. November 11, All About America. Only the Americans have been defeated.
As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! In March of , Dr. Charles David Keeling begins regularly measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i.
Over the ensuing years, his research will reveal what is now known as the Keeling Curve: a graph of continuously-taken The unmanned U. Mariner 10 had visited the planet Venus William L. Calley is found guilty of premeditated murder at My Lai by a U.
Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4, a cluster of hamlets in Quang In the next few months, five more bombs were found at landmark sites around New York, including the public library.
Authorities realized that this new Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. In one of the most sensational trials in American history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. The husband and wife were later sentenced to death and were executed in
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