Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American.

• Author: Geyer, Georgie Anne

LANSDALE'S LAMENT

Immediately after George Bush took over the presidency, it was duly announced that foreign policy experts at the State Department, the National Security Council, and elsewhere in the "respectable" corridors of power were busily studying four main areas as part of the new administration's "foreign policy" review: U.S.-Soviet relations, arms control negotiations, defense policy for the 1990s, and future requirements for conventional and nuclear forces. One could almost hear Edward Geary Lansdale turning over in his grave. He would be groaning helplessly at the same time that he would be shaking his head back and forth, all the while whispering to himself, "Will they never...never...never ever learn?" Then he would return once more to the eternally uneasy sleep of "those Americans who tried to do things differently."

Who was Lansdale? To Graham Greene, he was Alden Pyle, "The Quiet American," a classic American innocent, not in Paris but in the poisoned, unfinished trouble spots of the world, nothing more than a CIA agent with "an unmistakably young and unused face." To Jean Larteguy, he was Colonel Lionel Teryman, "Le Male Jaune," a tough, brutal new American midwest version of Lawrence of Arabia. To the American writers William Lederer and Eugene Barnum Hillandale, "The Ugly American," practically the only American who understood how to mold with original hands the real and fractious world of new decolonized countries. To his brother, Benjamin Carroll Lansdale, he was always a "revolutionary." Quixotically and finally, Oliver North, totally unlike Lansdale in any sense of realism or proportion, looked upon himself as "Lansdalian."

But perhaps former CIA Director William Colby characterized Lansdale best, if uncritically: "Lansdale helped and perhaps created the best president the Philippines ever had...turned American policy away from support of French colonial rule in Vietnam to support of a non-Communist nationalist leader...he preached for Americans to support those willing to fight for themselves...." He was "one of the greatest spies in history...the stuff of legends."

Edward Geary Lansdale was born in 1908 in Dayton, Ohio, emerging out of all the parts of America he was to fight to make understand. The American century was at the heady height of its beginning. The American mission was clarion clear, and the prototypical American military men of the time were rough-riding, hard-drinking men of utter assurance about America, men like Teddy Roosevelt. By the time Lansdale died in 1987, everything had changed. America's dynamic assurance had been savaged by wars that Americans just couldn't understand--different wars in unfinished countries like Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador.

Lansdale's saga is that he, almost alone in this period of tragedies for American president after American president, did understand. The lanky American kid from Dayton with the big nose and the advertising executive's mind saw that the weapons and techniques that American was using simply did not match the demands of these new and bedeviling worlds. Lansdale himself, when he was in Vietnam in the formative 1950s, said that he had the...