
March 1, 2018
Heather Hurlburt reviewed Max Boot's latest book in Washington Monthly and outlined what we can learn today from the life of Vietnam-era Major General Edward Lansdale.
Boot marshals sharp, devastating anecdotes to show how Lansdale’s ideas were dismissed or misunderstood by his contemporaries. He also honestly situates Lansdale amid the racial prejudice of his colleagues, who close the Manila embassy coffee shop to Filipinos and cause his lover to fear for her acceptance in the United States. And this work is unlike any piece of military history I know in cataloging its protagonists’ sexual misdeeds. Nearly every other significant figure in U.S. security policy history seems to be a “womanizer” or a “serial womanizer,” or “boasted of ‘having’ a woman every day.” At first, this information feels like sensationalization. Does it matter that Allen Dulles “tortured” his wife with stories of the beautiful women he met (and slept with) overseas? That Pentagon Papers author Daniel Ellsberg “passed around the RAND office nude photos of the women he had slept with”?
Boot never editorializes directly, but his narrative makes a strong case that it does matter. Every generation produces soldiers and diplomats who, like Lansdale, evangelize on the importance of understanding and respecting the local cultures of nations America is trying to “protect,” “save,” or “build.” But the stories this volume tells about voluntary isolation and lack of knowledge, vision, or respect for anything outside U.S. security culture, in all its violent, self-reinforcing whiteness and maleness, have a terrible timelessness to them. It would be wonderful to report that the general progress in race and gender relations and cultural sensitivity since Lansdale’s day has produced a generation of American soldiers and diplomats who are reliably culturally appropriate and well informed. But it hasn’t.
This is one of several ways that the weight of the history Boot recounts undermines the hopes he brings to the telling. Lansdale’s career arc is, in some ways, the inverse of the growth of U.S. Cold War bureaucracy. His Philippine success came in a country where America had forty years of experience as the colonial power, separated by an ocean from communist foes, and at a time when nascent intelligence institutions allowed a lone operator lots of leeway. None of those conditions applied in Vietnam; still less do they apply in Iraq or Afghanistan—nor, with the advent of 24/7 connectivity with an ever-larger security bureaucracy in Washington, will they ever again.
Lansdale himself perfectly exemplifies the core contradictions of the American nation-building project. He sees everything he does as pointed toward democratic institutions and the superiority of representative government—yet his achievements come by hand-selecting personalities and installing them by subverting the rules of democratic governance. While his bureaucratic opponents tend to be skeptical of even the outer forms of representative government in the midst of insurgency, neither he nor they appear to have the plans or the patience to let real local institutions flourish. He castigates his opponents for their failure to perceive the role played by nationalism—but the essence of his successful operations is to reshape governments toward serving American aspirations.
One is left, then, to ponder a set of questions Boot does not raise. Why does the American system make it so difficult for the Lansdales to be heard? Why do Americans of various political persuasions charge abroad on values and ideology and wind up betting the house on personalities, from Diem to Hamid Karzai? What are the realistic limits of partnership between a people trying to gain its freedom and a powerful state? I would have liked to read a book that began with those questions and confronted Lansdale—or, for that matter, David Petraeus or the current national security adviser, H. R. McMaster—through them. Perhaps one day Boot will write that book. For now, we are in his debt for writing a book about another time that challenges us to raise those questions in ours.