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Liaison and Legacy: Edward Geary Lansdale, A Colloquium at IWP

Lansdale Symposium - Introduction by Amb. Aldona Wos

IWP has released papers from a colloquium titled “Liaison & Legacy: Edward Geary Lansdale,” focusing on the late U.S. military intelligence officer, advisor, and expert on irregular warfare who practiced his craft in the Philippines and Vietnam. The colloquium was held on June 5, 2024 at IWP.

About Edward Lansdale

Diplomat, spy, and Air Force officer, Edward Lansdale was a brilliant talent who also showed remarkable human qualities and adaptivity in his work. Yet he is largely forgotten these days, even among our military officers and public diplomacy staffs. The apparent disinterest extends even to many academics studying psychological warfare and countering guerrillas; once Lansdale was famous for both.   

California-raised, this future public servant did not finish at university. He hunted about for satisfying work in advertising—something that would be of great help later in public diplomacy. Inspired by World War Two to join the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, he also served the Army, transferred to the new U.S. Air Force when that came to be after the war, and moved sideways into the new Central Intelligence Agency. But nothing defined his life better than one word: originality.  

The two main phases in Lansdale’s overseas service unfolded between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, and they overlapped. He mastered the intricacies of post-WWII Philippine politics and military operations, playing a central role as that country grappled with and thoroughly defeated communist “Hukbalahap” insurgents.  American authorities then asked him to deploy those skills in a yet-more troubled country, South Vietnam, undermined by insurgency and main-force northern army units commanded from Hanoi. In Vietnam, his years of hard work had less good effect. In one sense that is no surprise; to this day, Americans remains befuddled by the character and outcome of that long war.

Lansdale’s empathy with top foreign leaders in these two countries, his instinctive and deep understanding of human psychology generally, and his many thousands of personal and professional relationships fascinated novelists, journalists of the day, and serious thinkers about military affairs. Fears, celebrity, suspicions, and legends cloaked the enterprising patriot, who remained amazingly steady, purposeful, and kindly despite it all.   

Several IWP faculty knew this fellow as a mentor.  Others at the colloquium worked with his team on economic development and related efforts.  Although Edward Geary Lansdale passed away in 1987, his friendships, oral advice in meetings, abundant public speech texts, and published writings proved the sparkle and the profundity of the man. So, we resolved to stage a colloquium of those who knew him, as well as younger scholars who study his efforts, to recover some of the Lansdale lessons and to learn from his example. Even the failings may be instructive.

Lansdale deserves a small place in curricula at the Foreign Service Institute, in faculty development clinics at such liaison shops as our Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and the East-West Institute, and in international studies and foreign policy classes of civilian universities. For decades, Lansdale was studied in our war colleges, but no more. At some moments, we at The Institute of World Politics can be amazed at how this man has been forgotten—especially given his dazzling success as a tutor to the new Republic of the Philippines.

Colloquium Schedule and Selected Papers

Greeting

Amb. Aldona Wos, President, IWP
A medical doctor and the former U.S. Ambassador to Estonia, Aldona Wos is also a board member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Long a trustee of The Institute of World Politics, she became President in 2022.

Panel One:  Knowing Lansdale

Intros and Remarks by Dr. John Lenczowski, Chancellor, IWP
After serving the Reagan Administration–on the National Security Council and at the Department of State–Dr. Lenczowski founded IWP in 1990. His book Full Spectrum Diplomacy & Grand Strategy is about the culture of U.S. foreign policymaking.

Mr. Mike Benge, USAID in South Vietnam
Living in country, and mastering two of the Vietnamese languages, Mr. Benge served with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the CORDS program (Civil Operations & Rural Development).

Mr. Donald Bishop, USAF & Marine Corps University
Mr. Bishop was in the Air Force in Vietnam and went on to a Foreign Service career specializing in public affairs and public diplomacy. He is a distinguished fellow with the Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare at Marine Corps University.

Dr. Jack Tierney, IWP, author
A foreign affairs expert on IWP’s faculty for 3 decades, Dr. Tierney has written on Lansdale and other American counterinsurgents, especially in his 2006 book Chasing Ghosts.  His new volume is The Past as Prologue.

Panel Two:  The Philippines, 1940s and 1950s

Intros & Remarks by Dr. Christopher C. Harmon, IWP
An author and editor, Prof. Harmon has held three academic chairs at Marine Corps University and conducted a counterterrorism program focused on Asia. At IWP, his courses include Maoist Revolutionary War Outside China, and Military Strategy.

Dr. Jason S. Ridler, Johns Hopkins University and author
Jason Ridler has published essays on the senior Lansdale aide Charles Bohannan, as in the 2018 book Mavericks of War.  Dr. Ridler teaches writing and serves as an adjunct professor for Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Thomas A. Marks, Lansdale Chair at CISA/National Defense University
Via field work and extensive published research, this Army and intelligence veteran became a world expert on the thinking and strategies of people’s war adherents globally.  He has also worked in the Charles Bohannan papers.

Prof. Al Santoli, IWP, oral historian
A decorated Vietnam infantry and special operations veteran, Al Santoli was mentored by Gen. Lansdale and his team. Resulting interviews appeared in his three oral histories of the Vietnam era, while the expertise in American citizen diplomacy has served Prof. Santoli in over two decades of peace building in the Philippines: Muslim Mindanao; Luzon; and the Visayas.

Panel Three:  Work in Two Vietnam Wars

Intros and Remarks by Dr. James Robbins, Dean, IWP
Before becoming IWP’s Academic Dean, Dr. Robbins taught at Marine Corps University and ran programs at National Defense University and Trinity College.       His many books include This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive.

Mr. V. Lani Elliott, Joint Economic Office, U.S. Mission, Saigon  
Mr. Elliott went to Vietnam as an economist to do rural development, paid by USAID, 1967-1972. He holds two master’s degrees and is Professor Emeritus at the National Intelligence University in Maryland.

Mr. Bruce Kinsey, CORDS
Mr. Kinsey was on CORDS teams in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta from 1968 to 1970, where his mentor was Rufus Phillips, a Lansdale protégé. Kinsey’s pacification work continued in posts in Saigon and the State Department. Now completing a book on the pacification programs, he is at the center of a wide circle of such veterans.

Prof. Al Santoli, author, To Bear Any Burden
Please see above.

Lessons Learned from Edward Lansdale

  • Respect the people you have come out to help. 
  • Listen; beware of always being on “transmit.” 
  • Cultural intelligence and the “human terrain” in modern people’s wars matter most.  A foreigner must study, closely.  Military operations must be designed to avoid undue human damage.  
  • Counter-narrative is important, yet we did not get that done in Vietnam. 
  • “Civic action” by troops, domestic or foreign, is essential for the content (and the optics) of counterinsurgency.  Lansdale wrote of inventing the term “civic action” in the Philippines.
  • Psychological operations are science and art. The U.S. and foreign partners need instruction in “psy war,” and we need schools that teach it, in order to see pay-offs.   
  • Troop numbers in people’s wars are not the essential answer. Lansdale succeeded beyond dreams in the Philippines with a few Americans, all non-shooters. He saw more American failures than successes in Vietnam where the U.S. sent in hundreds of thousands of GIs.    
  • Like Lawrence of Arabia in another era, Ed Lansdale urged American liaisons and combatants to understand the population and help them do what they wanted, knowing this would also aid U.S. objectives. He worked to see indigenous actors taking initiative, and he was always uneasy in moments when Americans appeared to be in charge or seemed to want to take control.
  • His range of foreign “assets” ran as high as presidents in palaces (Ramon Magsaysay; Ngo Dinh Diem) and as low as the foot soldiers with whom he would share his modest meals in the field. In the two wars, virtually no one else had his unofficial access to leaders, and no one else made such multitudes of foreign friends.
  • Foreign liaison work requires drive and persistence, and also patience.  This is because some others in existing bureaucracies invariably oppose a given idea or line of action. For example, Lansdale had more “purchase” with President Diem than he had with President Johnson, or Secretary McNamara, or opponents in the U.S. State Department.  
  • Focus in; work hard. Lansdale was pleasant to be around, but his work was incessant, even in casual settings. In fact, many of his team’s best ideas arose in informal chats and mixed company.
  • Though highly accomplished, Lansdale was little concerned with his legacy. He was more concerned with doing the right and purposeful things that could get the people in the region what they really needed.

Recommended Publications

Anon. “An American Officer” [Edward G. Lansdale], “The Report the President Wanted Published” [about Bin Hung village, Vietnam], Saturday Evening Post (20 May, 1962). 

Currey, Cecil B.  Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).  

Greenberg, Maj. Lawrence M., USA, The Hukbalahap Insurrection: Case Study of a Successful Anti-Insurgency Operation in the Philippines, 1946-1955 (Wash., D.C.: U. S. Army Center of Military History, 1987).

Lansdale, Edward G.  In the Midst of Wars: An American Mission in Southeast Asia (NY: Harper & Row, 1972).  

Lembke, Maj. Andrew W., USA. Lansdale, Magsaysay, America, and the Philippines (Ft. Leavenworth, KA: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2013). 

Phillips, Rufus.  Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2009).  

Ridler, Jason S.  “The Ad Man and the Wolf,” ch. 6 in Mavericks of War (Guilford, CN: Stackpole Books, 2018).   

Santoli, Al.  To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians (NY: E. P. Dutton, 1985).  

Tierney, John J. Jr.  “Foreign Frontiers: Expansion, Insurrection, and Counterinsurgency,” Part II of Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History (Wash., D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006).