| Review of: | Edward Lansdale's Cold War by Jonathan Nashel |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Andrew J. Rotter |
| Reviewed in: | Diplomatic History |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 01, Pages 159-163 |
Book Review: The Sum of Our Hopes and Fears
Edward Geary Lansdale, like Walt Whitman, was large, containing multitudes. That Jonathan Nashel recognizes this is the greatest strength of his fine new book.
The authorized biography of Lansdale is Cecil Currey's
Nashel is hardly unsympathetic to Lansdale, though at times he seems appalled or amused by him. Each of his chapters treats a different facet of Lansdale's identity. Nashel first describes Lansdale as an advertising man, as indeed he was for a time during the 1930s and 1940s. Lansdale wrote ads for food products and blue jeans. He would later advertise democracy and modernity, and use an ad-man's images and slogans to undercut the appeal of the Huks in the Philippines and the Viet Minh in Vietnam. He communicated not only through language but by using gestures, friendly touches, and slaps on the back; he did not speak Tagalog or Vietnamese but never felt burdened by this, for he knew, he said, how to gain a man's confidence by acting confidential. As an advocate for consumerism, Lansdale sold Asians the American dream, or tried to. He was also, of course, a spy. The details of Lansdale's work for the CIA remain classified-when Lansdale's papers appeared at the Hoover Institution in the early 1980s, agents turned up and carted off to Washington all the documents that revealed his connection to the agency-and Lansdale appreciated what Nashel rightly terms "the power of secrets" (p. 77) to manipulate people. Lansdale's loathing of communism and his ad-man's understanding of the importance of communication made him the consummate secret agent, even as he enjoyed pretending that he was no such thing.
Lansdale was also, by turns, a historian and an anthropologist. Nashel goes too far, in my view, when he links Lansdale to the consensus historians Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz, and to the anti-racist anthropologists who followed Franz Boas-Lansdale read widely, but he was not an intellectual. Still, Nashel is persuasive in his description of Lansdale's efforts to teach Southeast Asians the lessons of the American past. Like the Americans, Filipinos and Vietnamese should have, thought Lansdale, a "usable" past, one filled with male heroes who were models of patriotism, fairness, loyalty, and self-sacrifice in the interest of creating a democratic polity. And, like twentieth-century anthropologists, Lansdale had a genuine fascination for others' cultures, taking numerous photographs, recording Filipino and Viet and tribal folksongs (which he liked to play for his colleagues, and copies of which he sent to two presidents), and working and living with apparent ease in remote rural villages. Like many anthropologists, he never understood that his presence among others might change their behavior, might leave them feeling uncomfortable or disempowered under his well-intentioned gaze.
Finally, Lansdale was a creature of Western popular culture. He has long been construed as a model for the disingenuous American agent Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's
The book is not perfect. As Nashel pulls evidence from his wide assortment of sources, erudition too often verges on indiscriminateness; the book frequently seems afflicted with ADHD. There are too many digressions, too many asides, too many learned references that subordinate Lansdale to some distant intellectual apparatus and leave the reader lost. C. Wright Mills, John Berger, and Jack Klugman all make an appearance in Chapter 2, but it is not at all clear what any one of them is doing there. The narrative keeps wandering off the point. Having evidently decided that most readers will know at least the broad outline of Lansdale's life and career, Nashel devotes scant attention to a baseline summary of these matters, instead plunging the reader pretty much straightaway into his analysis of Lansdale's various identities. This is a decision that, intentionally or not, reinforces Nashel's point: if he provides no linear description of Lansdale's life and times, it may seem as though no such description, no linearity, is possible. Still, it is disorienting not to be told much about Lansdale's teenage years or home life, and it would not have subverted Nashel's purpose to have included some more material on these.
We do learn that Lansdale came from a "fervently religious home," that his mother was a Christian Scientist and his father a Presbyterian (p. 26). These are matters of interest, at least to me. Nashel has something to say about the Catholicism of Ngo Dinh Diem, as many commentators do. I wish he had taken Lansdale's religion more seriously, and had tried to understand how religion might have shaped Lansdale's views about culture or the morality of paying off or assassinating the inconvenient rivals of his Asian champions. In some sense, the American Cold War was a crusade, an effort to stop from spreading an ideology that Americans regarded as not just draconian but godless, and therefore evil. Perhaps the Catholicism of the northern Vietnamese whose movement south Lansdale helped to organize in 1954-"The Virgin Mary Has Departed from the North," proclaimed fliers distributed to northern Catholics-was irrelevant to Lansdale, interested only in pursuing victory in the Cold War by any means necessary. More likely, the religious affiliation of these men and women resonated with him. If so, it would have been worth exploring how.
Most of all, and as the previous suggestion implies, the Cold War framework into which Nashel squeezes Lansdale seems inadequate to contain all of Lansdale's multitudes. Many of the molds Lansdale created for himself, or into which he fitted himself, were fashioned prior to the Cold War, or transcended that conflict. Advertising and anthropology were not Cold War inventions, however much they were shaped by Cold War thinking. If the Cold War was so important, to what extent did Lansdale's various identities contribute to the making of U.S. policy? This is a cultural explanation of a constructed man, but its conclusion seems fairly conventional, even reductionist: for all the men he was, Lansdale was motivated to act as he did because he considered himself a Cold Warrior, a supporter of American values as he configured them and an opponent of communism. He might have liked Vietnamese folksongs and playing his harmonica, and he might have practiced his confidence-man skills on Magsaysay and Diem. In the end, though, Lansdale's behavior seems just a means to an end, the same, conventional, anti-Communist end that everyone in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment sought.
None of this is to deny the freshness and intelligence of Nashel's achievement. Lansdale's story is well told here. As Nashel notes, Lansdale's narrative is all of ours, and a tragic one. Sensitive to the ways of others, capable of befriending them, able to set aside or truly to jettison racism and other forms of prejudice, Lansdale nevertheless failed to recognize the fatal flaw in his thinking: he simply assumed that everyone in the world wanted to be like him. Everyone wanted American-style democracy, and the material trappings of capitalist modernity. If he was friendly, and people liked him, they would understand his good intentions and follow his advice. This is an understandable way to think, so we can empathize with the man who worked so hard to make good his vision for Southeast Asia. We can also recognize, as Nashel does so insightfully here, that Lansdale got it wrong.
[1]Cecil B. Currey,
[2]Cecil B. Currey ("Cincinnatus"),
[3]Edward Lansdale,