Edward Lansdale's Cold War

Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

by Jonathan Nashel

The man widely believed to have been the model for Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American , Edward G. Lansdale (1908–1987) was a Cold War celebrity. A former advertising executive turned undercover CIA agent, he was credited during the 1950s with almost single-handedly preventing a communist takeover of the Philippines and with helping to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the American-backed government of South Vietnam. Adding to his notoriety, during the Kennedy administration Lansdale was put in charge of Operation Mongoose, the covert plot to overthrow the government of Cuba's Fidel Castro by assassination or other means.

In this book, Jonathan Nashel reexamines Lansdale's role as an agent of American Cold War foreign policy and takes into account both his actual activities and the myths that grew to surround him. In contrast to previous portraits, which tend to depict Lansdale either as the incarnation of U.S. imperialist ambitions or as a farsighted patriot dedicated to the spread of democracy abroad, Nashel offers a more complex and nuanced interpretation. At times we see Lansdale as the arrogant "ugly American," full of confidence that he has every right to make the world in his own image and utterly blind to his own cultural condescension. This is the Lansdale who would use any conceivable gimmick to serve U.S. aims, from rigging elections to sugaring communist gas tanks. Elsewhere, however, he seems genuinely respectful of the cultures he encounters, open to differences and new possibilities, and willing to tailor American interests to Third World needs.

Rather than attempting to reconcile these apparently contradictory images of Lansdale, Nashel explores the ways in which they reflected a broader tension within the culture of Cold War America. The result is less a conventional biography than an analysis of the world in which Lansdale operated and the particular historical forces that shaped him―from the imperatives of anticommunist ideology and the assumptions of modernization theory to the techniques of advertising and the insights of anthropology.

Genres: History, American History

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Benjamin Wetmore · Rating 1 out of 5]

horrible. The author has such a disdain for the subject that he struggles to criticize even the minor things by Lansdale. it comes across as moral preening to present morally righteous anti-US narratives despite the evidence. The author brings in every cultural detritus in order to malign Lansdale and yet there's no consistent argument. A mess of a book.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Nashel's critique of Edward Lansdale's "nation-building" strategy still resonates in the post-Cold War world and its 9/11 offshoot. One can still sense the general's ghost hovering in the "democratization" rhetoric employed by US NGOs from Latin America to East Europe, floating beside the American groundboots tromping Somalia and Kosovo in wars of "humanitarian intervention." His spirit echoes more loudly in the post 9/11 world, in nation-building projects on a scale unseen since his own beloved South Vietnam. His words filled the scripts of Paul Bremer and George W. Bush in "explaining" the goals of conquest in Kabul and Baghdad. But with one important revision: rather than inspiring said natives to love America and its values, it was assumed "they hate us for our freedom" and must be ruled accordingly. The same mission bankruptcy that took so long to manifest itself in Vietnam merged with 9/11 nation-crunching from the start.

Other biographers - notably Max Boot - lament that Lansdale's methods were shunted aside in Vietnam, insisting that the war would have been "winnable" had Lansdale been retained and heeded in Saigon like the sage philosopher he imagined himself to be. I think Nashel demolishes that conceit. Lyndon Johnson's boots-on-ground strategy emerged precisely because of Lansdale's Kennedy-era, square-jawed naivite: that one can manipulate foreign leaders and their peoples to spout our ideas like little kids reciting first-grade primers. Lansdale's project was unmistakably colonial and its bankruptcy inevitable, for the good general forgot the key ingredient of universal values: they can be absorbed by another only as his own, relevant to his experience and history; not merely translated and transplanted with military backup. That is why "democratization" and "nation-building" have again failed so dismally.

I will take issue with one statement by Nashel regarding the efficacy of Lansdale's terrorism-and-sabotage "Operation Mongoose" against revolutionary Cuba. Nashel asserts (p. 75) that this "more than any other U.S. action" led Premier N. S. Khrushchev to place Soviet missiles on said island, "to protect" it from such US covert actions. Nashel's reference for this is the 1989 conference in Cuba on the Missile Crisis, where Lansdale's missive is quoted stating October, 1962, to be the target date for Castro's removal. Yet the missiles were cleared for placement in July, and exposed by U2 overflights that had nothing to do with Lansdale's timetables. Nashel's source admits (p. 239, note) that the Cubans "seemed unaware" of Lansdale's intentions. In fact, Khrushchev and Castro were not so much worried about US covert actions as a full-scale invasion, compensating for the Bay of Pigs failure. It was *this* US action, and the fear of a second attempt, responsible for October's 13 Days.

Nashel also explores the artistic ramifications of Lansdale-ism, his character serving as protagonist for two political novels and the films made from them (with Graham Green's novel-to-film turned inside-out by Lansdale's personal approval.) But, whether one judges Lansdale's intentions as "good" or otherwise, they certainly paved the way for the disillusioned hell of My Lai in their unsustainably blinkered view of other lands through the prism of American schoolbook civics. And at least culturally Lansdale-ism did triumph over the Vietnam Syndrome: in Free America one can boldly produce any number of books and films on Communist "killing fields" in Cambodia; but is obliged to tread on tiptoe around "ugly" Americans in the general's once-beloved, satellite Republic of South Vietnam.

[Phil Teves · Rating 1 out of 5]

Total garbage. Just a hit piece on an incredibly honourable man. Not worth the paper it’s printed on. Author’s an asshole.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but also frustrating. Lansdale was the model for the "ugly American," which was actually a term of approbation in the 1958 bestseller--meant foreign-aid types who got out and got their hands dirty as opposed to sitting around the compound and complaining about the natives. But he wasn't the model for Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" in Graham Greene's novel. He was, if anything, a typical early-CIA type: an adman who used persuasion, both direct and indirect, to sell Filipinos (successfully), South Vietnamese (sort of successfully, if one considers the existence of South Vietnam something to celebrate), and Cubans (not at all successfully) on the greatness of the American way. He was a folklorist and madman (he originated the Christ-opposes-Fidel idea that was supposed to overthrow him, among many other zany ideas) who also spent a whole lot of time doing nobody-knows-what in various countries. (Cambodian President Sihanouk made several spy thrillers where he defeated a character named "Lansdale," believing Lansdale had been behind, or connected with--prepositions are important, but hard to choose, here--several coup attempts.) So he was a fascinating guy, and this new diplomatic history (old diplomatic history plus cultural history and bits of lit crit, which I often enjoy) strains mightily to figure out what it all means. But so much of Lansdale still seems to be under wraps that we get three chapters that are more or less the same, silly connections of Lansdale's historical understandings to those of the 1950s consensus historians (as if; I mean, surely he went East with pretty much the same unthinking sense that the American way was the best way that most other agents of empire did, which makes him neither more nor less culpable than they are), and finally an attempt to both minimize Lansdale's inflated rep (Nashel keeps asserting that he did not, could not, have done all that he and his willing conspirators in the press claimed or hinted at) and maximize it (a closing section considers how badly things are going in the Philippines now, which is apparently Lansdale's fault). A frustrating book, all in all, not least given the amount of time the author appears to have spent fighting through all of this material.

[Eleanore · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. A "cultural approach" cannot be a substitute for a basic understanding of the institutional history of US government and its departments. Despite having access to Lansdale's papers, this book is misleading and manages to make an interesting subject fairly inane.