by Max Boot
First published 2018
Edward Lansdale enters Vietnam as a CIA operative with a radical vision. While American generals favor massive troop deployments and napalm strikes, Lansdale champions a different approach: winning hearts and minds through diplomacy and trust. He had already proven this strategy worked in the Philippines. Now he faces the challenge of convincing a rigid military bureaucracy to abandon conventional warfare for his unconventional methods. Boot traces Lansdale's journey from the battle of Dien Bien Phu through America's chaotic evacuation in 1975. The author draws on extensive interviews and previously hidden documents, including personal love letters, to reveal how Lansdale's innovative policies were systematically undermined by elitist generals and establishment diplomats. This biography argues that Vietnam's outcome might have been different if America had embraced Lansdale's vision instead of crushing it under bureaucratic weight. The book reframes our understanding of the Vietnam conflict by focusing on the man who inspired Graham Greene's character in The Quiet American. Boot presents Lansdale as a complex figure whose bold ideas about counterinsurgency continue to influence American military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Genres: biography, history, 20th-century, non-fiction, military-history, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: bureaucracy, underdog
Setting: Vietnam, Philippines
Period: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s
768 pages · Hardcover · Liveright Publishing Corporation/W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.