 this book talk. Great pleasure to introduce Max Booth, who has been here for previous book talks in our previous location. Max is a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, one of the country's leading experts on warfare. His last book, Invisible Armies, was a New York Times bestseller. And he is going to introduce some of the big themes and stories of this book. Right after somebody takes that call. Right after we hang up that call. And then we'll open it to a discussion. Glad to be at the New America. And happy to talk about my book, which is also a, I'm happy to say a New York Times bestseller in spite of not being attacked by President Trump. It achieved the honor all on its own. And the subject of my book is this man, Edward Lansdale, who is certainly one of the most unconventional generals in the history of the U.S. Air Force or probably any other military service as well. Somebody's really eager to call in and talk to us. I think we should take the call. Might be Trump. They're not going away. I mean, let's get them involved in the dialogue. Very insidious. It's a competing, it's a competing publisher calling us to sabotage my book talk. It's a part of the mouse. It's like a mirror. You've got to roll with the punches. There we go. Is that somebody calling in? Yes, but I don't, there's nobody invited to call in. Yeah, I'm just going to turn the sound off. Okay. Where was I? One more unconventional. Yes. Very unconventional presentation and a very unconventional subject. See, this thing is actually working now. It's muted as well as locked, I would say. This thing doesn't, I can't seem to control it from here though. Okay, maybe now it's working. Is it working? Use this. Why do you come up here then? That's a novel, that's a novel idea. I don't quite know what to do with this microphone. Is this working? Yeah, it's for the live stream. Okay. On with our show. Edward Lansdale, one of the more unconventional general officers in the history of the US Air Force or really any other military service. He was said to be the model for both the quiet American and the ugly American. He's been written about by every major author on the subject of the Vietnam War, sometimes in laudatory terms, sometimes not so laudatory. If you go online, you'll even see a burgeoning spirit industry, which fingers him as the mastermind of the John F. Kennedy assassination, based largely on, in fact, entirely on this photo, which taken in Dallas on November 22 1963, which shows somebody from the back walking by a pair of tramps and two police officers and based on this somewhat flimsy foundation, he has been widely accused of masterminding the murderer president. In fact, this was the basis of Oliver Stone's movie JFK. So there are obviously a lot of myths and legends about Ed Lansdale. And I would quote to you from the words of one of his bureaucratic rivals in the Pentagon in the early 60s, General Brute Krulak of the US Marine Corps said there are a few angels in my knowledge more damned than the same time applauded. History is going to have to portray Lansdale's real part. And well, that's where I come in, because I am the voice of history, having devoted the last five years of my life to studying the life and times of Ed Lansdale. So who was Ed Lansdale beyond the myths beyond the legends? Who was the real man? Well, he was born in 1908. I guess I don't actually have a laser pointer, but he is in the middle of this photo with his parents and his brothers. Born in 1908 in Detroit. He was not to the manner born. He was not one of the Ivy League and Wall Street aristocrats who created US foreign policy after World War Two. He was a middle class kid. His dad was an automotive executive at a time when the automobile industry was just starting. So a lot of his employers went out of business often while he was working for them. Lansdale born in Detroit, but most of his childhood in L.A. in California became a quintessential California and very laid back, very easygoing, hated bureaucracy, hated regimentation, hated neckties. In fact, a kind of a proto-silicon valley decades before the formation of Silicon Valley. A couple other points worth bringing up very briefly about his upbringing. One is that he was not a great citizen and his life should give hope to see students everywhere. But he was a great reader and loved reading about the founding, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. And those would be the ideals that would inspire him as an American envoy in Asia. Other point to mention briefly is that, let's see, is this thing going to turn? There it is. The other point to mention briefly is that he grew up at a time of virulent racism, especially in California against Asian Americans. And he was never contaminated by that kind of prejudice. He always treated everybody of whatever race or ethnicity as being entirely equal human beings. In part, I think, because he was kind of a minority himself, even though he was a white, middle-class American. His family were also Christian scientists. And this was a religious group that was very small and very frowned upon in his day. And so he had identified with outsiders and outcasts. This would also be one of the secrets of his success in Asia is that he would not condescend to the Asians that he met. He would treat them on an entirely equal level, which was pretty unusual for Westerners in those days. So, let's see, can I get this thing to turn? Maybe not. Okay, there we go. Lansdale graduated or did not graduate from UCLA. He actually dropped out a few credits shy of graduation in the early 30s at the height of the Great Depression and moved to New York, hoping to become a New Yorker writer or cartoonist. Did not quite make it and instead moved back to California and went into advertising. And this is him with his colleagues at an ad agency in San Francisco circa 1940. That's Lansdale in the middle with his head down, looking at some at an ad. And this is one of the ads that his ad agency did. He's actually a little hard to see there, but he's up in the upper left-hand corner. His life, like the life of the entire country, was upended on December 7th, 1941. He was eager to get into the fight, but found it hard to do so. He was overage and had some medical issues that made the army reluctant to take him back. So instead of joining the army, he joined the OSS, America's first civilian intelligence agency. He spent the war years stateside interviewing travelers about the strange and wondrous places from North Africa to the Pacific, where allied troops would shortly be lying in the course of doing that. He showed himself to be a very skilled listener, somebody who was very good at eliciting information from from the people that he met. Well, by the fall of 1945, as millions of American GIs were returning home from the war, Lansdale went abroad on his first permanent overseas deployment to the Philippines, where he was sent by by now he was an army intelligence officer and was shortly get into the Air Force. This is him in the middle on this leaky rice boat that he used to explore a bunch of the newly liberated Japanese islands. He was fascinated by everything that he found about him in the Philippines, the food, the culture, the economic conditions. He wanted to learn as much as he could and he was in especially fascinated by this burgeoning communist insurgency known as the Hook Rebellion. This is Lansdale in the middle of the picture back row with a bunch of captured hooks, H-U-K, the communist rebels who were challenging the Philippine government beginning in the mid 1940s and Lansdale was was trying to find out as much about them as he could. Now by this time, Lansdale was already married in 1933. He'd married this woman, Helen, who was a small town girl from upstate New York. But when he went to the Philippines in 1945, he met this woman, Pat Kelly, who was a very vivacious Filipina. Her last name came from her late husband who had died during the war who was of Irish Filipino ancestry. She was a single mother or working mother. She was a journalist and later would have a long career working for the US Information Agency in Manila. And she was initially of interest to Lansdale because she was from the same part of Luzon province as many of the of the Hook rebels. In fact, she had gone to high school with some of them. And so Lansdale enlisted her on these very dangerous forays into the back country of Luzon to meet of the hooks. And in the course of these adventures, a friendship developed in before long a romance. And Pat Kelly would become the great love of his life, something that was not generally known before I wrote this book. And I found out an awful lot about their relationship. Thanks to the next slide, which there it is. Thanks to the love letters that they shared with one another over the course of many years. And I got very lucky in the course of my research because I try down Pat Kelly's granddaughter who actually lives here in Northern Virginia. She invited me over to her house and said, Hey, would you be interested in these letters that I have in my basement? And I said, boy, would I. And so I got access to this last correspondence. And then I also met with Lansdale's boys who are now in their 60s and 70s living in Florida and New York. And they shared with me the letters that he wrote to their mother Helen. And so I'm the first person after Lansdale himself to have read both sets of letters often written simultaneously. And I also got access to a lot of newly declassified documents. And so this this gave me a vantage point into Lansdale's life that nobody else has ever had before, at least no writer has ever had before. Very, very interesting. I mean, I learned things about him. For example, the importance of Pat Kelly for him, not only personally, but also professionally, because he was incredibly important in serving as an entry point for him into Philippine culture and really understanding the Philippines in a way that it's very hard for outsiders to do. And of course, during my research, I also learned of some of the more awkward episodes in Lansdale's life. For example, what happened in 1947 when his wife Helen and boys Ted and Pete came to live with him in Manila at the same time that he was still, of course, seeing Pat Kelly. And this became one of the more audacious covert operations in the secret agent's life to to juggle these two women simultaneously. He actually asked his wife for divorce, which she did not grant. And they stayed married, but he would spend most of the next decade in Asia. And so she became in effect a single mother living here in Washington, actually over on MacArthur Boulevard, appropriately enough, raising their two sons. Now this initial Lansdale deployment to the Philippines from 1945 to 1948 was very important, because it set the stage for what happened next. This the Philippines would become the site of his first great success, which began in 1950 at a very dark time for the United States. The Korean War was raging. The Communists had just taken power in China. The Soviet Union had just acquired the atomic bomb. McCarthyism was on the upsurge in this town. And there were great fears in Washington that the Philippines was going to be the next country to fall to the Communists and led by this man, Louis Taruk, who was the leader of the hooks. Well, there were no troops this bear to send to the Philippines. Otherwise, they might have been dispatched because of course of the Korean War. And so instead of sending troops, the decision was made at the CIA to send Ed Lansdale and a small team of cooperatives. And their mission was nothing less than to defeat the hook rebellion. This is Lansdale in his bungalow in Manila in 1950. That's him at the head of the table. On the right is his good friend, Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker, sitting at the other end of the table. His back to us is Bo Bohan and his very eccentric deputy and anthropologist and to the left of them, to our left, are a bunch of the Filipinos with whom he worked. And this was very emblematic of the Lansdale approach. He was very casual, very laid back. He didn't believe in informal meetings with agendas and protocol. He believed in these coffee clutches, kind of brainstorming around the table in a very informal manner and thus generating the ideas that would actually defeat the hook rebellion. The most important thing that he did was to meet and cultivate this man, Ramon Magsai-Sai, who was then the newly appointed defense minister of the Philippines, a former guerrilla fighter against the Japanese, an honest, well-meaning guy, but he didn't really know how to defeat the hook rebellion. And so Lansdale, in effect, became his one-man brain trust. And Lansdale and Magsai-Sai traveled across the Philippines together. And together they developed what would today be called counterinsurgency doctrine. Lansdale's essential insight was that the way to defeat the insurgents was by using less force rather than more. He understood that it was counterproductive for the Philippine army to be bomb barrios with artillery, which wound up killing a lot of civilians and creating more enemies than it eliminated. And so he counseled the Philippine army to be more restrained in the application of violence, to treat the population better and treat them as brothers. And once the people would trust the army, they would then rat out the insurgents in their midst to the military forces. This is basically coin 101, but at the time the word counterinsurgency did not exist, and Lansdale was a pioneer in this approach. Now remember, of course, that he was also a former ad man, and so he loves psychological warfare, which is the military version of advertising. And he knew a lot about the folklore of the Philippines, and he knew about these legends about the aswang, these vampires that said to hunt the Philippine countryside. And so he decided to mobilize the aswang against the hooks. And he did this by having a Philippine army unit puncture a couple of holes into the neck of a of a dead hook fighter, and then spread the tale that he had been killed by one of these aswang vampires, thereby putting the fear of the supernatural into into the enemy fighters. This became a big part of the legend. But I don't want to suggest that he defeated the hooks through these kinds of dirty tricks or psychological gambits. He really did it by focusing on politics because he understood that the hooks basic appeal was in their slogan, which was bullets, not ballots. And why bullets, not ballots, because people could not trust the ballots. The elections were rigged. And so Lansdale understood he had to give the people confidence in their political system, which he did by enlisting Filipino civic organizations to safeguard the balloting. But his masterpiece was getting Magsaysay elected president of the Philippines in 1953. Lansdale on behalf of CIA became Magsaysay's virtual campaign manager. He, for example, came up with this campaign slogan, which was Magsaysay is my guy. And so Magsaysay became known throughout the Philippines as the guy. And so thanks to Lansdale's expert political advice and Magsaysay's own accomplishments and personality, he was elected in the landslide. And this is him getting inaugurated as president at the end of 1953. And this was the death blow for the hooks, because seeing that you had this honest reformer in office, they decided there was no point in continuing the struggle anymore. They could seek redress of their grievances through the political process. And so when Lansdale returned home, he became the fair haired boy of Alan Dulles, the CIA director. That's Dulles on the far left, Lansdale next to him. By this point, Lansdale had acquired a new nickname. He became known as Lanslide Lansdale for his achievement in the Philippines. And this became quite important when a crisis in another Southeast Asian country erupted in 1954. And that was the year of the French defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. This was a photo, by the way, that I took at the very interesting museum that now sits at Dien Bien Phu. So if you happen to find yourselves in Northern Vietnam, I would recommend checking it out. There was, of course, great panic in Washington in 1954 about the fall of the French Empire and the possibility that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would take over all of Indochina. You then had the Geneva conference, which split Vietnam into two. You had created Northern Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, but South Vietnam was supposed to be a non-communist state, but nobody quite knew how do you create this non-communist state out of nothing. And that's Alan Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, were talking about these problems, not far from here. They decided, well, why don't we send Ed Lansdale out to the Vietnam and see what he can do. And so it was in the summer of 1954 that Ed Lansdale arrived in Saigon. And his marching orders from Alan Dulles were quite literally, do what you did in the Philippines. And he did. The first thing that he did was to find a new protégé to cultivate this. He had cultivated Magsai Sai in the Philippines. He cultivated Ngo Dinh Diem, who's in the center of this photo, this Catholic Confucian Mandarin, who was just appointed Prime Minister of the new state of South Vietnam. Very few people imagine that Diem would last nine weeks, much less nine years in power. The fact that he managed to accumulate power and to stay in office owes a lot to the guidance that he received from Ed Lansdale. And Ed Lansdale cultivated him very carefully. That's that's Magsai, sorry, that's Diem on the right side of the photo. And that's Lansdale in the middle. Now there were some, it was much harder to cultivate Diem than it had been with Magsai Sai for various issues, including the fact that Diem and Lansdale literally did not speak the same language. Because although Lansdale had a real talent for cultivating foreign leaders, he was a typical American in that he only spoke English. And this was not so much open to Philippines where the elite spoke English. It was a bigger problem in Vietnam, where they spoke Vietnamese or French. And so he had to work through a translator. But even working through a translator, he cultivated a very close relationship with Diem. And how did he do it? Very simple. He listened rather than lectured. Instead of laying down the law, as Americans are what to do, he showed great patience and hearing Diem out. So it's not easy to do because Diem was a notorious windbag who was fainting for going on for hour after hour and boring the pants off of most of his American interlocutors. But Lansdale was made of sterner stuff and probably had a stronger bladder because he would sit there hour after hour listening to Diem drone on. And at the end of that time, he would say, well, that's fascinating, Mr. Prime Minister. If I understand what you're saying, it's X, Y and Z. And then he would rephrase what Diem had told him, putting across his own ideas as if Diem had thought of him himself. Very effective method of operating, by the way, I'd recommend it. It works with bosses. It works with spouses. It definitely works with foreign heads of state. And so that was method by which Lansdale won Diem's confidence and enlisted his support to carry out his full pacification agenda for South Vietnam, which included Operation Passage to Freedom, enlisting the U.S. Navy to move 900,000 refugees from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, thereby greatly strengthening the state of South Vietnam. And of course, Lansdale being Lansdale, he had to be a psychological warfare component to this. For example, hiring a soothsayer to predict bad fortune for North Vietnam and good fortune for South Vietnam. He brought over Filipino doctors and nurses to provide free medical care in South Vietnam to get people to support the government. This was done under the auspices of an supposedly independent Filipino organization called Operation Brotherhood. But of course, it was all sponsored and paid for by Lansdale and the CIA. Now, not everybody in the U.S. government fully approved or approved at all of what Lansdale was doing. And among the skeptics, whoops, was his own boss, General Lightning Joe Collins, one of the great heroes of World War II, four star general who had fought in both the Pacific and European theaters of operation, former Army Chief of Staff who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Saigon by his friend President Eisenhower. And, you know, Collins was a great conventional general, but he did not have the mindset for counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia. And so he and Lansdale clashed from the very start. Their very first country team meeting, Collins was going on about his plans to reduce the size of the South Vietnamese Army because he thought it was too expensive. Well, Lansdale descended. He said, no, we need a substantial army because it's the only part of the government that works. And the Vietnamese communists are going to pull out of a bunch of areas on the countryside. So we have to provide some governance to them and the army is the only instrument of the state that can actually do that. Plus, there's all these independent sect armies running around. You can't have private armies. You have to have a unified force. So you have to demobilize the militia fighters and incorporate them into the army. Well, Collins listened to Lansdale a little better than said, you know, I am here as the personal representative of the present United States. And I've heard enough, have a seat. Well, at this point, most colonels, when told to have a seat by a four star general, would indeed have a seat. But Lansdale was not your average colonel. He was an Confederate maverick and troublemaker. So instead of sitting down, he stood up and said, well, sir, you may be here as the representative of the president of the United States. But I'm convinced that the people of the United States could hear what you have to say. They would disagree with you. And on behalf of the people of the United States, I'm walking out on you. And out he walked out the door. Now don't try this at home. Most people will not survive this kind of insubordination. The fact that Lansdale did manage to get away with it is a sign that he had a patron, more powerful than a four star general, because he had the full support of Alan Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, who were the king makers in Washington in the 1950s. And their support enabled him to run rough shot of General Collins, which became of great importance in the spring of 1955, during the pivotal episode in the ZM's consolidation of power, the battle of Saigon, when ZM sent the South Vietnamese Army into the streets of Saigon to battle these sect militia forces. And it was a real street fight for and touch and go for a while. And General Collins wanted to abandon ZM, so Lansdale went over his head straight to Alan Dulles. And Alan Dulles got President Eisenhower to overrule his ambassador. Thus, ZM maintained US support and able to consolidate power in South Vietnam. So by the end of 1956, ZM appeared to be firmly entrenched in power. Here he is touring a area of the province as pacified at Lansdale's direction. Lansdale finally left Vietnam at the end of 1956. We turned to Washington to a senior policy post at the Pentagon. And the general feeling at the time was that ZM, like Magsai Sai, was this great nationalist hero in Asia, this bulwark against communist expansionism. And of course, among those in the know with this with the very up level security clearance, they knew who was or they knew who was truly responsible for DM success. And that was, of course, Colonel Lansdale. And here he is getting a medal from Vice President Nixon as his wife Helen looks on by the late 1950s. Lansdale was becoming one of the least secret agents on the planet. He was actually pretty famous. He was said to be the model of Grand Greens, the quiet American. He was definitely the model for one of the main positive characters in the ugly American. And he was acquiring all sorts of nicknames like the American James Bond and the T Lawrence of Asia, as well as, of course, landslide Lansdale. When the Kennedy administration came into power, they were quite enamored of of Lansdale. But ultimately, Lansdale's legend would prove his undoing because the Kennedy's, in fact, came to entrap him with the task that he could not possibly accomplish. And that was to deal with their top level of the overthrow of Fidel Castro. The Kennedy administration had begun with the catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs, and the Kennedys were determined to avenge this debacle, this insult by getting rid of Castro, whether killing him, overthrowing him, they didn't care. They just wanted him gone. But they had no confidence in the CIA, which had botched the Bay of Pigs and which Lansdale had opposed. And so instead of entrusting the agency to get rid of Castro, they decided to entrust the American James Bond. And so at the end of 1961, Lansdale became operations director of Operation Mongoose, this interagency effort to topple Castro. Well, he very quickly determined the only way you're going to get rid of Castro in short order was with an American military invasion. But the Kennedy did not want to invade Cuba. They wanted some kind of covert action gimmick that would enable them to get rid of Castro at no risk to themselves. And so Lansdale would spend much of 1962 trying to provide that covert action gimmick. And the result was, I'll show you the result if the slide will turn. There it is. This was one of the results. This was Gusano Libra, the mascot of the Cuban rebellion as concocted by the artist at the CIA. And this is free warm because Castro called his enemies worms. And so this was an attempt to turn that moniker against him. And this is a propaganda leaflet showing free warm sabotaging power lines in Cuba. Well, you have to admit this is undoubtedly the cutest mascot that any insurgency has ever had. But it was not very successful. The only thing that Operation Mongoose achieved was to generate the intelligence that alerted policymakers in Washington that Nikita Khrushchev was emplacing nuclear missiles into Cuba. After the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, Operation Mongoose was disbanded and Lansdale lost the favor of the candidates and was left essentially defenseless before his many bureaucratic enemies of whom the most important was his own boss, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Now McNamara and Lansdale were like oil and water. McNamara, of course, came over to the Pentagon from having run the Ford Motor Company, graduate of the Harvard Business School. And in all fairness, I should mention also of my alma mater, UC Berkeley, a guy who was enamored of numbers of systems analysis, brilliant on some level. Lansdale, on the other hand, of course, was not so academically accomplished UCLA dropout, but he had spent some years in Southeast Asia. And so when McNamara took office at the beginning of 1961, Lansdale sought to begin his education in the kind of war that was just beginning in South Vietnam. Lansdale had just returned from South Vietnam. He brought some captured weaponry with them from the Viet Cong, some rusty rifles and pistols and spears and so forth, all caked in mud and blood and walked into McNamara's office and dumped these weapons on McNamara's immaculate desk. And he said, Mr. Secretary, these are the weapons that are being used by our enemies in Vietnam. They're not very sophisticated and the people using them, you wouldn't recognize them as soldiers, but they think of themselves that way. And they are in fact licking the troops on our side who are armed with all the best equipment that the U.S. Army can provide because they have the power of an ideal. They have the power of an idea. And the only way we're going to defeat them is if we give the troops on our side, the South Vietnamese, the power of an even greater ideal. We're not going to bomb this revolution into oblivion. Well, in hindsight, pretty wise advice, but McNamara was invincibly murdered in his ignorance and arrogance and ignored what Lansdale had to say. And so as the situation in South Vietnam, we reached a crisis point in 1963, Lansdale was entirely sidelined from U.S. policymaking. And 1963 was the year of the Buddhist crisis. You had the militant Buddhists rising up against the M. You had Buddhist monks sitting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon. This convinced the Kennedy administration that the only way to stop communism in, uh, in Indochina was to overthrow the M because they thought that GM had lost the support of the population. Now, Lansdale argued in Vangun against this. He said, I know GM, I know the generals and GM is imperfect, but he's the least bad alternative that we have. And I can work with them. Uh, the generals, on the other hand, uh, are going to be far more corrupt, less legitimate, less so, please don't overthrow GM. Well, they didn't listen to him. And at the beginning of November 1963, GM was in fact overthrown and killed along with his brother on the very same day when Lansdale was being retired from the Pentagon as a two star general. And the consequences of the coup were every bit as disastrous as Lansdale had predicted. The Viet Cong stepped up their infiltrations. South Vietnam all but disintegrated. You had military coup following military coup. And so that by 19 C five, Lyndon Johnson decided he had no choice but to bond North Vietnam and to send American combat troops into South Vietnam in order to preserve its independence. This was the last thing that Lansdale ever wanted to see. He wanted to save South Vietnam, but he thought that the South Vietnamese should be on the front line themselves, that we could provide advice and support, but we should not be doing the fighting for them. He was ignored. He went back to Vietnam in 1965 to try to help working at the US Embassy. That's him in the middle arriving at Saigon at the airport. He went to work for this man, Henry Cabot Lodge, the US ambassador in Saigon. It was not a have relationship because Lodge had also been the ambassador in 1963, who had overseen the overthrow and murder of Lansdale's friend, Ngo Dinh Siam. Now in the past in the 1950s, Lansdale had no problem running rough shot over mere ambassadors. He did not have quite that same power in the 1960s. The problem was that he no longer had patrons as powerful as the Dulles brothers in Washington. And there we go. His chief patron in the 1960s was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, whom you can see on the left, this photo. Humphrey was quite taken with Lansdale, but he was almost powerless to affect President Johnson's calculations in the Vietnam War. Lansdale also tried to cultivate local protégés, and he tried to work with Wing Cal Key, seen on the right of this photo, this very flashy Air Force Vice Marshal, who was Prime Minister and then Vice President of South Vietnam, but Key lost a power struggle with WinVan2, another general who became the dominant strongman of the military junta. And so in the mid 1960s, Lansdale lacked both a powerful patern Washington and a powerful protégé on the ground in South Vietnam. And so he became largely a spectator as the American War effort careened along its intentional course. General William Westmoreland genuinely thought that he could kill the Viet Cong faster than they could be replaced. Lansdale consistently argued against this illusion. He said the only way you're going to win is by creating a stable, legitimate and popular government in South Vietnam that the people can support. He was ignored. Finally, the wisdom of his insights became undeniable after the Ted Offensive, which broke out 50 years ago. Lansdale had warned against it that an offensive was coming. And he very quickly saw that while Westmoreland was claiming it was a great victory, it was in fact a crippling psychological blow that destroyed American popular support for the war effort. So when he went home from Vietnam for the final time in the summer of 1968, he was feeling very much dejected, defeated and demoralized because he understood that the war was being lost. And he was not terribly surprised when in 1975 North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam and very quickly destroyed the husk of a state. Now the question I raise in my book, the road not taken, is what would have happened if Lansdale had been listened to? What if his road had been the one that we had taken? Well, I certainly can't sit here today and say that we would have necessarily prevailed that South Vietnam would still exist because no matter what we did, North Vietnam was going to be a formidable adversary with more will to win than the United States had. But at the very least what I can say with some certitude is that if Lansdale had been listened to, we would not have lost 58,000 Americans in the jungles of Vietnam. We would not have had millions of Vietnamese killed in the crossfire because he never wanted to see this conventional big unit war in the first. And so I think this was a tragedy of history that he was ignored. And if something that he himself felt very keenly to the end of his days, he was torched by the might of might have been and what ifs of his career. While his professional life obviously did not have a very happy ending, he did find some personal happiness. After his first wife died in 1972, Pat Kelly who was still unmarried and had just retired from the U.S. Embassy in Manila moved to Washington and the two old lovebirds married on July 4th of 1973. This is them in the kitchen of their house in northern Virginia. And they lived happily ever after until Lansdale's own death from natural causes in 1987. And it was a very moving experience for me to visit his grave at Arlington National Cemetery because after five years of studying the guy, it felt like I really knew him. In fact, probably more in some ways than I know my own father, which may be a commentary on my relationship with my father, but also a relationship on my commentary on my in-depth study of Ed Lansdale. And so, you know, I tried to tell his story and to do justice to it and it took directions I did not fully expect. I mean, I knew this was going to be the story of the Vietnam War, but it was also developed as an adventure story, a spy story and most surprising of all a romance and a very touching romance between Ed Lansdale and Pat Kelly. The final point that I would make is I think this story, while intrinsically interesting and I hope a good read, also I think has some relevance for the present day because we are engaged in another great counter-insurgency today, this time not against Islam, not against communist insurgents as in Lansdale, but against Islamist insurgents. And how are we going to win the war on terror? Well, I would submit probably not with mass numbers of American ground troops. We've been there, done that, tried it, didn't like it very much, probably not going to do it again any time soon. So if we're not going to win American ground troops, how are we going to win? Well, I think if we do win, it will be with American advisors, with relatively small teams of diplomatic, military and intelligence personnel working with frontline states, in fact, much as they did recently to fight ISIS. And if you think about advisors, I think you have to think about Ed Lansdale, who is one of the most storied and successful advisors of the 20th century, right up there with T. Lawrence. I think he's got a lot of lessons to teach that are not positive. I mean, he did a lot of things wrong too. And so what I try to do in the book is to present the good and the bad of Ed Lansdale in a way that hopefully will be engaged in readers. And I think hopefully it will be of some use as we think about the future of American strategy. So thank you for having me here to talk about it, Peter. Max, thanks for a brilliant presentation of the book. I mean, and picking up your last point. I mean, all the things that Lansdale did in the Philippines and the Vietnam are all the things that U.S. government officials don't do, essentially. So I mean, you worked for General McChrystal when doing the assessment in Afghanistan and probably that the nearest American to get to Karzai was probably General McChrystal, but he didn't get anywhere close to him in the way that Lansdale got close to Ziam and other people. So I mean, because what you're in a sense that one of the big takeaways here is if you're going to do this, you're probably going to have to spend several years in the country that would pick your country. You probably aren't going to be your family really at all, all your children or your wife. It's going to be hard. You could develop a new family, though. You could. And of course, you know, the other, you know, one of the, as we've discussed, you know, John Paul Vann, who was another person who kind of understood perhaps how to conduct a war in Vietnam all had a sort of separate family and is a similar figure, I think, to Lansdale. But the question is, you know, we just don't do this sort of thing. I mean, I kind of think it was was Ryan Crocker close to Maliki, who is close to a body. I mean, we just as a country, we just don't seem to do this very well. And hopefully your book will, you know, remind people that it's really, you know, it's going to be a long process. Yeah, I know, I think it is, it is something we don't do well. And I think we've paid a price for it, because if you look at our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, we've killed a lot of insurgents in both places and yet struggled to achieve our political objectives. And one of, there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that we fundamentally screwed up our relationships with Hamid Karzai and Nuri Amaliki and got into, became locked into very adversarial confrontations with our own allies much as we did with ZM in the early 1960s after Lansdale departed from Vietnam. And so in both cases, it would have been nice if there had been somebody like in Ed Lansdale who was this very trusted interlocutor who could deal with them very gently and persuasively. I, you know, I think with Karzai, actually, I think probably the closest we had that was, was probably Zal Khalilzai who was there for a while. But then, of course, he moved on and nobody really replaced him. I don't think we ever really had that with Maliki. And so, I, you know, I think we could use today kind of an army of Ed Lansdale's. I mean, it's kind of interesting that the actual army, not the metaphorical army, the actual U.S. Army is standing up something called SFABs, the Security Force Assistance Brigades, the first units dedicated to the advisory mission, which is a great initiative on General Milley's part. And I think long overdue because military advisors have been kind of the bastard stepchildren of the armed forces. So that's great recognition that we need military advisors. But my question is, who is providing political advisory work? And in fact, the political advisory mission is ultimately more important because you can teach an army to march and shoot straight and call in airstrikes and all that kind of good stuff. But it really doesn't matter that much if they're working on behalf of a dysfunctional government. And we saw that in the case of Iraq, where the Iraqi army was pretty decent up until 2011, but very quickly fell apart for lack of political leadership thereafter. And so who in the U.S. government really focused on the political advisory mission? Really hard to see. I mean, occasionally the State Department does it, but it's not really their core view of what they do and their capacity has been devastated under Secretary Tillerson. So, you know, I think that this is a capacity which is really MIA in the U.S. government. And Nadia Shadler, who's a deputy national security advisor, has just written a book kind of basically with a theory. Actually, if you're going to have one of these long term presences, it's actually the military that has the capacity and the ability to do this. And she goes back, you know, for the last 100 years and looks at the various American kind of enterprises. And would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I think de facto, I think, yes, the military winds up doing it. I mean, this was, I was, you know, at the Army War College in Carlisle, PA recently. I was at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning. I was at the Naval Prosgraduate School in Monterey. And in all those places when, you know, people asked me for advice that would be of use to them. The advice I gave them was focus on politics. It's not, you're not going to achieve your mission with a narrowly military and especially not a narrowly military-netic focus. You have to focus on achieving a viable political instate. And, you know, as I said to them, I mean, this is going to make you guys uncomfortable because the military thinks of itself as being apart from politics. And of course, it should remain apart from politics in the domestic context, except of course, when their generals are serving in the most senior policy positions in the government. But aside from that, it should generally stay aloof from politics. But in a foreign context, the military doesn't really have the luxury of saying, we don't, that's outside of our lane. Let somebody else do it because looking at it for somebody else to do it, they're going to be waiting a long time. Now that said, I think it would be nice if we would develop more of a civilian capacity to do this. And there are, I would add, I mean, there are sort of headlands there like figures that I have met in my travels and I'm sure you've met too in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm thinking, for example, of Carter Malkazian, this history PhD, who worked with the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, learned Pashto became very close to some of these tribes or Sarah Chase, who was this former NPR reporter who lived in Kandahar and then became an advisor to US commanders in Kabul. Moskai, who was this British woman who became advisor to General Odierno in Iraq. So these people do exist, but we don't really cultivate them and it's often very hard for them to have an impact on a policy debate in Washington, which is something that lands they'll struggle with as well. And I mean, in his case, he often sabotaged himself because one of his paradoxes is that he was very good at cultivating foreign leaders, but he often alienated his own leaders. And his tendency to make more bureaucratic enemies than he could handle ultimately meant that he did not have the influence that he might otherwise have enjoyed. If you have a question, just grab the mic and hit it so it turns green. Dan Roper with the Association of the United States Army and I was the director of the Army's Counter-Insurgency Center from 2007 to 2011. And you already nailed the main point on the civil-mil collaboration and the constant yin-yang, the tension between, OK, if the military is doing it because there aren't civilians there, sometimes there's a perception that, OK, it's mission creep and the military is trying to grow into it when the military and generally desperately wants to be out of it. And again, how do we find the mechanism and the Security Force Assistance Brigade is a visible thing that exists. It doesn't, now it's not getting invented to meet the patch chart. So what were the leverage points to try to do what you just said, to try to get the civilian capacity not built into it because then they'll think the military is trying to take state or AID and they don't, but they have to represent it. And my concern is now there's a visible US Army formation, a conventional formation. And does that preclude the circumstances of somebody like Lansdale being the unique voice whispering in the decisive person's ear? Is there some other mechanism other than that? Because that's baby steps that we should have taken 17 years ago and we're just getting around to it now. No, better late than never. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I don't have the answers, but I think we can, I mean, it would be nice if there were some creative thinking about this, about, you know, maybe there's some way to use, I haven't really thought about this, but maybe there's some way to use the kind of the SFAB construct and make it more than strictly an Army thing, more than a military thing, to work in civilians, whether from other government agencies or from outside the government to use that kind of support infrastructure to make use of them as well. I mean, another idea that I've heard Bannead about, for example, is, you know, maybe in some of the COCOMs, the ones that don't have major wars like CENTCOM, like, so for example, Southcom, maybe that should be commanded by a civilian rather than a military general and maybe the general should be the deputy and the civilian should be in charge. But I mean, basically ways to, you know, try to think about how to use the military backbone because they have the infrastructure and the capacity to try to get more civilians involved at a practical and useful level, just on the assumption that the State Department is just never gonna have the resources to mirror what the military is doing. So I think these are all things that are worth thinking about. Of course, as we're thinking about them, we can acknowledge the fact that, you know, the State Department is losing a generation of talent right now, and we're all, is through the floor there. And so it's very hard to, you know, assert enough power in the current climate. Yeah, it's part of the problem that the United States has a problem about thinking of itself as an empire. And therefore, even though that we have, you know, obviously, Lansdale was sort of, I mean, Philippines was part of the American empire, and that we won't do the things that are required if to run empire, i.e., live places, learn languages, these kinds of things. It's part of it, it's sort of ideological problem where we're gonna be in a place for six months because we're not occupying power. Then we find that we're in Afghanistan 17 years later. I mean, is part of this just the way that we can self-conceptualize why we constantly get this, you know, with some honorable exceptions, we usually get this wrong in some shape or form. Yeah, no, I mean, I've written for a while that I think we're, you know, kind of an empire in denial, not a traditional empire, but kind of a liberal empire. And, or, you know, alternatively, you can put it, another way to put it is to say we're a nation builder in denial, a country that never wants to engage in nation building, and you kind of wonder how things might have turned out differently in Afghanistan. If we hadn't come in there with the mindset that we were gonna leave in six months, if we, in fact, in 2001, 2002, people actually had the mindset, oh, we're gonna be here 20 years from now, let's figure out how to make things so that they'll work 20 years from now. That was never our mindset. And so it makes it very hard to achieve long-term results when you have a very short-term mindset. And this is a, you know, a bipartisan affliction because probably one of the very few things that Barack Obama and Donald Trump would agree on is that nation building begins at home. They're both very hostile to the idea of nation building, which has gotten about odor, I think, because it's associated with the invasion of Iraq. The irony, of course, is that the invasion of Iraq turned into a disaster in large part because we didn't do any preparation for nation building. But, you know, the kind of nation building that I have in mind has been involved hundreds of thousands of troops. It's really one-sale-type missions with fairly small advisory teams, which has been successful in places like El Salvador and more recently in Columbia. And I think it's a model that can work, but it really depends on having people who know the local culture of the local people and who don't rotate in and out every six months who really can build relationships and sustain relationships of trust, which is very hard to do with the personnel and bureaucratic policies of the U.S. government. Marvin Ott, Johns Hopkins, Wilson Center, formerly U.S. government defense CIA and various other poor call. One quick comment and then a question. The comment just apropos the civilian military sharing of the burden and division of labor and so on. I think all the points that have been made are right on the money. I really like the empire in denial, I think that's a great phrase. It does strike me, I spent the last 20 years before retiring a professor at the National War College. And so it became deeply steeped in that curriculum. And as you know, I mean, this is a civilian military enterprise and there was a consistent effort to instill in the uniform services exactly the kind of sort of governance, civilian part of the burden. So there's a real effort to sensitize and even educate the military in that mode. And I'll just note among the students I had in Semminar was one Jim Mattis and Colonel Mattis Marine Corps and I took him on a trip to Southeast Asia. He's a guy who got it and he's not alone. I mean, it's a minority, but there's a distinct sort of stream of folks that come out of the war college and other JME institutions that get that. So that's the comment. The quick, the sort of basically a question. Back to the history of Vietnam. I was in Vietnam in the early 60s. It was on the desk when Zem Koo occurs. At the time, I thought I was steeped in sort of the counterinsurgency romance and lore and Green Berets and JFK and all that. And I was, and we talked with Roger Hillsman. He was assistant secretary. I was convinced that Zem, you just couldn't do it. I mean, as Hillsman said, can you win with Zem? Big question. And I thought the answer was no. So I take your point about the 58,000 casualties, all of that, but I just wonder, you know, with the best will in the world, land sale was all these skills, whether Zem was a hopeless case. Well, that's, I mean, what you're saying was certainly the conventional wisdom at the time and the press corps and obviously within the government. That's why the decision was made to back this military coup and it has remained largely, I would say kind of the received interpretation. I mean, if you watch the Ken Burns Vietnam series, it has Neil Sheehan talking about Zem and various others talking about how he'd lost popular support and legitimacy by 1963. But there's a paradox here because if Zem was such a terrible and unpopular ruler, why is it that once he was overthrown, the situation actually got worse rather than better? And that's something that, what? Well, that's right. Well, that's exactly, and I think in hindsight, it's pretty obvious that you could do worse than Zem, that he was actually, as Lansdale said in 63, the best alternative that we had, that we didn't have anybody better and certainly the generals were not gonna be better. Lansdale was convinced and a lot of other people were convinced too. I mean, Rostow subsequently said that our last chance to avoid Americanizing the war in Vietnam was to send at Lansdale over there in 1963 because he thought that Lansdale was the only person who could have pushed us aside, no didn't knew Zem's spiritual fascist brother and convinced Zem to conciliate the Buddhists into acting the less authoritarian to high-handed fashion because Zem trusted Lansdale and he didn't really trust any other Americans. But Lansdale could not get over there in 63 because by that point he had too many bureaucratic enemies at the State Department, at DOD, at the CIA. He did not have a lot of friends in government by that point and so he was blocked from going over there and Zem was overthrown and again, it made the situation much worse and in addition to destabilizing South Vietnam, it also Americanized the war because it kind of gave us ownership of the situation in South Vietnam because we'd overthrown their ruler and so we took responsibility for the fate of South Vietnam and that's what set us on the path to half a million troops. Jeff Stein, who was an intelligence officer in Vietnam back in today. Yeah, thanks. Nice to meet you. Yeah, good to see you. Max, finally. Yeah, enjoy reading your writing. I love your book. I think you've got a lot of really salient points but I'm very skeptical about this idea of what we've talked about in the last few minutes about turning armed forces into advisors and so on. It prompted me to recall what Bob Kaiser who became managing editor of the Washington Post but in 1968 and 69 he was a correspondent in Vietnam for the Post and when I was doing my own Vietnam book, he gave me his diary with very generous thing and one of his entries was we have advisors at every level in Vietnam and when we are the ones that are the advisors. You know, I spent a year in language school before I went to Vietnam and then I worked as a case officer living on the economy for a year and I maybe began to understand Vietnam at the end of my year. So the idea that you can take sort of ordinary like infantry officers and troops, psychological warfare people, language training and of course Pashto in other languages like that extraordinarily difficult. I mean, Vietnamese was pretty difficult but anyway, early when Pashto just bang off my ear they don't go in. I'm just really skeptical about this idea of turning troops into advisors, overnight advisors and telling who are they gonna advise and what are they gonna tell? The ordinary Afghan village tribal leaders so what have they got to tell them? Well, I mean, I think your skepticism was well warranted and of course, part of the reason why Landstay was effective was because he was not just there for a one year tour. I mean, he spent something like six years in Vietnam so he really got the lay of the land even though I mean, he was handicapped by not having the language capability but he became friends with a wide variety of Vietnamese and kind of integrated into Vietnamese society greater than most folks do in the course of a one year deployment. Like you say, we've got fair changes and so on. Right, there are some people who do this kind of thing today who are typically outside of the normal military structure but even with the military advisors I would say they can be pretty darn useful even if they're not doing advising per se. My model here is the 1972 Easter offensive where we had only a few, as you know, we'd taken out our combat troops by that point, we had a few thousand advisors and they actually performed a very important role because when you think about the Arvin, the army that are public of Vietnam, as you, I mean, I don't have to tell you, you were there, I wasn't, but they had some good troops who were certainly willing to fight for the state of South Vietnam. I think a lot of problems like with any other military force, I mean, as the old saying goes, they're no bad soldiers, only bad officers. Their problems had to do with kind of the corruption, favoritism and all these other problems within the officer corps, much like in Iraq or Afghanistan or what have you and I think the few thousand American advisors performed a vital role in 1972, which was that basically provided the leadership that the Arvin needed and often did not get from their own officers and so you had people like John Paul Vann directing the defense of the Central Highlands and doing it very effectively, calling it, of course, they also had American air power and so that's another thing, just like today in Afghanistan or Iraq, advisors are the key links that allow the use of American air power but do it very effectively and so that relatively small number of advisors actually I think saved South Vietnam in 1972 and potentially if we had kept the advisors and kept the air power might have been able to save South Vietnam in 1975 but there was that overriding weakness within the South Vietnamese government of their aloofness, corruption, aptitude and so forth and these were all things that they had identified in the 60s and said we need to want it, we was trying to promote more reformist generals who would be more honest and less corrupt and he just got no traction in either Saigon or Washington because nobody on our side cared about that kind of stuff. They thought that we would just use mass of firepower and blast the insurgents into oblivion but he was very well with the long-term fate of this country would be with this kind of illegitimate, corrupt, aloof military dictatorship and that ultimately proved part of their undoing, I would say. I have one more question and then Max will sign books. John Vrolick, we separated a Marine Infantry Officer. To what extent do you think the US can avoid the negative connotations or contamination even of a political advisor to a candidate? Certainly Max Sase was successful but the US didn't have quite the same flavor of US influence or US imperialism. I spent three months in Vietnam back in 2007 working for the State Department much of the communist propaganda still refers to DM and so forth as the running dogs and so forth of the Americans and that was a big selling point there but especially if we think today in an Islamic society to what extent does having a US political advisor necessarily just immediately lose that candidate their legitimacy and if we keep that in mind is it worth having covert political advisors and is that a workable solution as you see it? Well, I mean those are all legitimate issues and those were even issues in the Philippines in the early 50s where Max Sase's political opponents tried to paint him as the lackey of Washington who was being manipulated by his American advisor Colonel Anstale. Max didn't actually work so well in the Philippines because Filipinos at least at that time were pretty pro-American and so Max Sase basically said, yeah, the Americans support me, that's great and that actually didn't hurt him, it helped him. Obviously in other parts of the world it's a greater issue and it has to be managed sensitively and there is, I mean obviously there is a lot of anti-Americanism out there and probably a lot more now than there was prior to November of 2016 and so that doesn't help the cause because if you're an American envoy you're associated with the President of the United States which is a pretty heavy rock to carry in your ruck. I don't think it's a mission impossible, I think it has to be managed because even though obviously there is resentment and anybody who's seen as kind of the client of the United States is going to, there's gonna be some backlash and resentment but there is also some positive connotations with that, there's also a number of power that we have had where people gain strength from their association with us and often in fact play on their client relationship with us to manipulate local politics in their favor, kind of using our power to vanquish local rivals and so and I think we're kind of treated with a mixture of resentment and admiration and there's all this complex mix of emotions but in most countries it's not like anybody who's associated with the Americans, that's the kiss of death, it's, I think it's a much more complex issue and we certainly have representation in all these countries, we have military missions in all these countries and so it's not really a question whether we have diplomats and military personnel and intelligence officers, I mean we got all that stuff, the question is how are they conducting themselves? What are they doing? And it's kind of interesting in the case of Vietnam because Lansdale was on loan to the CIA, he was a very unconventional CIA guy who didn't really believe in agency tradecraft and the agency didn't really believe in what he was doing so as soon as he left Vietnam at the end of 56, the CIA kind of went back to business as usual, there was nobody who replaced them as an advisor to ZM because nobody at Lang, well it wasn't Langley at that time, they were actually headquartered in town here but nobody in the CIA thought that was an important function to perform and instead they went back to their comfort zone which was hiring a cleaning woman in the presidential palace to steal the president's waste paper basket and take the contents of the station for analysis. Now Lansdale thought this was ridiculous because he didn't need to steal ZM's trash to figure out what he was doing, he would just go see ZM and he was friends with ZM and ZM would tell him what was going on and so he had this different, he didn't really believe in his controlled Asian relationships, he just believed in friendship and empathy and winning people over and I have to believe that's still not impossible but that's kind of not our mindset, we have a different approach to things. One more quick quick, do you think force protection which is basically trumps everything else for the State Department and the US military now sort of damages the ability to do the things that Lansdale did? You know when you use that word you have to pay a royalty to the Trump Organization now, a little known law that was just passed. Yeah, force protection I would say is probably a greater impediment today than it was in Lansdale State because as those of you who are in Vietnam can attest force protection rules were a lot looser then than they are now but again, I mean you can finesse these things, you can still operate and lots of people in Afghanistan and Iraq have ignored the very strict force protection requirements. Thank you Max, I was pretty good. Thank you. Thank you, we share an agent.