Good evening everyone and welcome to the New York Historical society. I am Louise Mirrer the ceo and im thrilled to welcome all of you two are beautiful auditorium. This Evenings Program is presented in conjunction with our exhibition vietnam war in 1945 to 1975 which i hope you had a chance to say but if not it is on view through april 22, so i hope you will return during regular museum hours to see it. Our program Edward Lansdale and the american tragedy in vietnam is the petraeus lecture on leadership. We created the series five years ago as a permanent way to honor two great americans roger hertog and David Petraeus who both won our history maker awarded 2013 that like to thank mr. Hertog for his incredible leadership and support and now as chair and marriages of New York Historical and general petraeus for his leadership and for his generous participation over the past four years and this illustrious lecture series. Thanks so much to both of you. [applause] i would like to thank and recognize some trustees who were in the audience this evening. Our chair pam, i would like to thank pam pam for all shes done on behalf of this Great Institution institution. Thank you so much, pam. [applause] and also the chair of her chairmans counsel susan. Ive lost sight of susan but thank you. [applause] and of course i always like to thank my colleague for Public Programs from whom youll hear at the close of tonights program. The Savings Program will last about an hour and it will include a question and answer session. The q a will be conducted via written note cards. You should have received one from one of our colleagues when you entered the auditorium this evening. If not there are colleagues around the auditorium to distribute them. No cards will be collected for your questions later on in the evening. Okay, so we are thrilled to welcome back max boot one of americas leading military historians and foreignpolicy analyst. I should have said first there will be a book signing with max boot following the program and i will say it again we are thrilled to welcome them back to the New York Historical society. Heres the dean j. Kirkpatrick fellow National Securities studies at the council on Foreign Relations in a regular contributor to usa today, the news york times and many other publications. He is the author of several widely acclaimed books of military history. He is lectured on behalf of the u. S. State department and many military institutions and he is Vice Commander in iraq and afghanistan. His new book is the road not taken Edward Lansdale and the american tragedy in vietnam. Its an honor for us to welcome general david h. Petraeus back to the New York Historical society is moderator for this Evenings Program. General petraeus u. S. Army retired a partner in the Global Investment firm kkr and chairman of the kkr global institute. He is also a judge at the university of southern california. General petraeus served 37 years in the u. S. Army including as commander of Coalition Forces in iraq and afghanistan and is commander of the u. S. Central command. Following his retirement from the armed forces he served as the director of the cia during which time the agency played a central role in a number of important achievements in the global war on terror. And now as you help me to welcome our speaker tonight i ask that you make sure that anything makes noise like a cell phone is switched off. Now please join me in welcoming general petraeus and max boot. [applause] thank you very much. It is wonderful to be back. Its particularly wonderful to to be onstage with someone for whom i have such high regard respect and admiration and a special treat when someone for whom you have such regard writes about somebody for whom you have such regard and that is coors Edwards Lansdale someone many of the studied over the years, a somewhat tragic figure in certain respects and that he had great achievements in one arena and brilliant advice and another that was unfortunately largely disregarded. Max is everything that the community said about him. Hes truly a distinguished scholar, brilliant thinker of forthright observer and a lyrical writer, someone i have had enormous regard for over the years. His counsel i saw during iraq and afghanistan didnt as the director of the cia. He is one of those rare individuals whose every essay i read with keen interest noting of coors he is one of the most admiral individuals who does not leave some things left unsaid. That is the quality of virtue. Its really a privilege and especially tonight to be the interviewer as opposed to the interviewee. A role reversal. A good chance to get revenge on some questions ive asked you over the years. As you know i have long stood against them for a variety of different reasons. Thanks to all of you for being here tonight. Thankfully the deep freeze is a good time to come here without too many layers. Again its also a privilege to be on an incomparable stage at the New York Historical society one of the top two 10 centers of Critical Mass in this extraordinary city. The other one being on the other side of the park. Its wonderful to do this in the presence of roger hertog and susan who have done so much to revive reinvigorated and sustain a wonderful organization that strives to help us not only record and remember history but to learn from it as well. Again that is hugely important at a time when some elements of society seem to want to consign the past to the ashes of history history. Again its great to be back here here. To roger and susan and society. The only person i know what to ph. D. s from stanford, not just one and then also thanks for your leadership in this Great Organization. I also want to applaud all of you upfront for all you have done. [applause] max, congratulations. This is but a Long Time Coming and we have been looking forward to this for well over a year and its truly a monumental achievement. Think god for eu readers nowadays. It doubles as a barbell. It does. A paperweight and they barbell. Its about Edward Lansdale and not just about him but the challenges of the tragedy in vietnam and i would contend situations that are similar in the minds of some of us. The road not taken was selected as an amazon book of the month before was even available and i think this is the evening of the day in which was first actually on sale in bookstores and on line. A lot of great reviews about this. The incomparable phil caputo describes fascinating portrait of Edwards Lansdale and much more than a biography. Compare zannino do with monumental narratives like the bright shining light and also added the best and brightest giving us a compelling look back on the get tragedy and importantly showing it is by no means the inevitable result of forces beyond their political and military leaders. I wrote about it actually. Brilliant biography of the riveting description of the times of Edward Lansdale one of the most significant years in the postworld war ii philippines and in vietnam and by the way his son ed is here with his wife and daughter. Welcome to each of you. [applause] we go to talk about ed lansdale with ed lansdale and attendance. We do and is a noted the road not taken tells not only Edward Lansdales story but also situates wonderfully in the context of this tumultuous experience and does indeed offer lessons for the present day. Lets get started. Howard when did you become focusing on this individual . First i want to say thank you for doing this event and volunteering to do it. Im hoping it was not in the spirit of revenge for all of our conversations in the past. Its a good question in terms of how i got interested when i wrote about ed lansdale in my previous book and it was really my editor who said you know you want to make a whole book about ed lansdale and initially i was reluctant. What more is there to say and he turned out to be dead right because i was lucky enough to acquire a vast trove of material that previous writers and thereve been a lot of writers about ed lansdale. He was a legendary covert operator that has been written about by everybody from the ugly american to david halberstam. Everybody on vietnam has written about him. Sessile curry in the 1980s but none of those folks have access to all of the documentation that i was able to get my hands on and some of that was due to the generosity of the lansdale family who willingly shared with me the correspondence between their parents, between ed lansdale in his first wife helen. I was also lucky enough to meet the grandchildren of his second wife pat and kelly to close your ears but pat kelly who was his longtime mistress b. Before coming in second wife after they does the ed lansdales mother and they shared correspondence over the years. I think im the first person to read the correspondence after atlanta himself and theres a vast amount of newly declassified information which your former agency the cia is slow about releasing. What that means to a lot of this as im the first historian whos had a chance to look at it. For example if you want to know how to win an election theres no better source. Theres no better source about how he got elected president in 1953 and im one of the first historian to get a chance to read that. Theres a lot of information in the gives the most complete accurate picture about lansdale that we have ever had. And its a wonderful one. Obviously your publisher editor is correct. He turned out to be a very pivotal figure and its not just the story of ed lansdale although it is the story story of ed lansdale but using his life to tell the story about vietnam he turned out to be a wonderful character. He was there in the beginning. He was there as everything was going south in the tet offensive. I cant think of anyone else like him or other figures. John paul vann didnt start until the early 60s. Lansdale was there and neal sheehan called it a little bit of exaggeration but basically the creator of that of South Vietnam. I think theres a lot to that and we will get into that. Two questions very broad upfront and then we will start back. Just in a general sense how do you describe, tell me about Edward Lansdale in two or three sentences or less. He was a wonderfully in aging and eccentric character who had a passion for american democracy who loved psychological operations in sometimes engaging in tricks but above all i think he had a passion for helping his asian friends in the philippines and south it on to achieve a measure of independence and autonomy and so forth. I think his ideas have often been caricatured but in fact i think he was a much more complex person who is much more in tune with local society that he has sometimes been made out to be by the your credit rivals and hostile journalists. And Good Governance he called it. This is not a new insight for you of course because you literally wrote the manual on counterinsurgency but you have to remember in the early 1950s a lot of these ideas were old and fresh and lansdale was one of the pioneers of counterinsurgency. He really understood the basic truths in iraq and elsewhere. You cant eat an insurgency just by joining an insurgent. This is what lansdale said time and again. The communists have an idea and we cant bomb an idea into oblivion. We have to offer another idea. Of course when he said that people like Robert Mcnamara and others thought he was an idiot. They didnt understand the mathematical precision of american firepower but in hindsight its obvious that lansdale understood a lot more than they did. Probably the second of the biggest big ideas which you attribute it to overtime was you cannot kill or capture your way out of an industrial insurgency. You have to reconcile. Its interesting how that jumped off the page. You noted at some point in their that he is a figure that was not mentioned. Not that he was foreign to us or unknown to us but not significant when we are doing the manual as he will be as a result. He did not set down in his ideas and influential or matt like other theorists did. He was more of a practitioner rather than a writer. And not quite as good at self promotion. Although he had his moments and selfpromotion. There are a few of those. The title, the road not taken and well come back to this because this is a pretty big deal, do you really believe if it advised had been followed in the earlier years of vietnam and certainly prior to the 1963 coup in which the president was displaced and killed that the course of vietnam might be different . What we can say with confidence is its disregarded. He told the kennedy administration. Yes he is an unfortunate confrontation. Lansdale said i know all the general speier at a sponsored the coup that overthrew them on november of 1963 the very day that lansdale was retiring from the air force and the results were every bit as catastrophic. You had one military coup after the other in the situation in 1965 Lyndon Johnson felt they had no choice but to send american combat troops into south yet mount a rescue it. That was the last thing that ed lansdale wanted to see. He never wanted to see troops crashing around the jungle with free fire zones and all the horrors that came with this massive military intervention. He wanted them to help them in the most more modest ways of risers on the sidelines. There is a chance that if the lansdale philosophy would have been followed things could work out differently. It was a tragedy that lansdales advice was disregarded. You cant through that but one thing you can say for sure is we would not have lost in the catastrophic way and this terrible tragedy that unfolded in the mid1960s. Could have catastrophic repercussions at home as well. Lets go back to the beginning and talk a bit about his up ringing and where he was born and went to school. He was from a fairly modest background. He was not part of the postwar elite that ran American Foreign policy. He was from a much more modest upbringing. His father was a not a motive executive whose fortunes went up and down and sometimes the family did well and sometimes they werent. Mainly in california and he acquired this informality and became a general but always wore a necktie and noise wanted to get rid of stuff. He had that Silicon Valley ethos before the formation of Silicon Valley and the other think. This was a time when we excluded chinese immigrants especially in california. Lansdale never was effective. He sighed as being fully equal. And that was one of the keys to success his success. When he went to the philippines in 1945 he thought he was meeting these wonderful people who became his friends and colleagues and comrades and he treated them in the sequel fashion that was very where most days. I think its fair to say he really weaponized empathy and Emotional Intelligence as a weapon of war. And you cant take that. Rotc. He goes and advertising. He hopes to be a new yorker cartoonist or playwright in new york. It didnt work out and he did meet helen the woman he would marry betty got into it advertising and had a successful ad career in San Francisco when pearl harbor happened december 7, 1941 and he was eager to enlist even though by that point he was in his late 30s. He couldnt get into the army right away so he got into the oss the civilian Intelligence Agency and worked for the oss in the United States. Which was part of the Defense Department at the time. For civilian intelligence. Wild bill donovan. A great character and lansdale shared characteristics because they were both mavericks who were constantly at war with whatever bureaucracy they happen to be in. It was a sign that they were born rebels. We will come back to lansdales inability to really join bureaucratic infighting and to prevail in it as well. So he cant get in the army and goes into oss but he doesnt deploy. He stays in the u. S. And interviews travelers and gave them information about where allies of the landing. During the war he gets into the army and just by happenstance in the fall of 1945 as the wars ending he gets deployed to the philippines and spends the next several years there eventually transferring to the air force as a Public Affairs officer but really i would say it really is not in the normal army chain of command which in some ways he was a goodwill ambassador. He was a Cultural Affairs ambassadors because what he is doing primarily and this is something that not enough soldiers or diplomats or others who deployed abroad he was trying to learn about the people that he was surrounded by and of course part of that learning process was the fact that he met the filipino lady with whom he struck up a romance and she became in a way his cultural guide. There was a insurgency known as the hook rebellion where a lot of the folks were from three she literally guided him into the areas where the insurgents were active because she wanted to learn about them in the course of these trips a tremendous romance was struck up and lifelong romance. She became kind of his interlocutor. And does become his second wife after helen passed. Eventually. Decades later. Im sure its not entirely comfortable for the family because he came back and asked his wife helen for a divorce. She refused him a minute eventually broke off and towards the end he and helen reconciled and had some happy years together but finally at the end of the day helen died in 1972 and within a year pat kelly was a retired grandmother who would never married p. She was a war widow and came to the United States and married ed and became his second wife. They lived basically happily ever after. He becomes a pivotal figure. He does to tours and total years years. It was a long time. Think about the number of years he spent deployed. I dont want to speak for his son here that there was an element of hardship for the family because he was deployed for much of their childhood and is to the credit of helen and his mother that she like a lot of military wives held the family together. She had to be basically a single parent and raise the kids pretty well as you can see here. A colonel in the air force. Exactly in this father retired with two stores two stars. How does it happen a guy thats nonaviator never has a lien air force assignment. He never fired a gun in anger basically. Those were the days. The most unusual as the guy that wrote the three stars Deputy Director of the cia one of the great linguists of all times. He basically was the translator for the president of the United States with france italy and russia and a whole bunch of different languages. He was an infantry officer who never commanded above the platoon level. But they could never happen today. The system would not permit it and again in some ways i think it was a tribute to the system. You can have someone like Edward Lansdale because his second assignment is personal assistant to the minister of defense of the philippines. Im not aware of any kind of assignment like that these days so tell us about that which is really pivotal for the philippines. You have to understand what the situation look like in the 1950s. There was fear in washington that communism was on the march. This was the mccarthy era at the time when the korean war was was russia acquired a nuclear bomb. There was a feeling that we were losing this battle and here was this burgeoning hook rebellion that seemed to be on this verge of taking over manila which was a longtime u. S. Ally but at that point we are so committed to the korean war there were no troops to spare. We talk about sending multiple Army Divisions to the philippines which is something they contemplated but instead of doing that what happened was frank wisner who was the operations chief of a topsecret outfit that eventually folded into the cia instead of sending whole divisions to the philippines sent ed lansdale and a handful of assistance in their job was to rescue the philippines from communism and how were they going to do it . Ed lansdale said by latching onto this young defense minister because he perceived he was the guy who is going to turn the philippines around and he was not corrupt. He was effective and wanted to do the right thing but he didnt quite know what the right thing was that essentially lansdale befriended him and he became a brother. They were roommates for a while and together under lansdales guidance developed a counterinsurgency. Lansdale convinced him that he didnt need much convincing to do things like ordering the army army, dont use artillery when you are chasing after insurgents because you were just going to alienate the population. Dont steal from the population. Act as brothers to the people and if you do that you win the confidence of the people. They will rat out the insurgency but first you have to win their confidence. These are in some ways. Basic insights. They were codified in your counterinsurgency field manual but they were alleged very ideas and early 1950s and lansdale really push them through. He did it in a very unobtrusive fashion so he did not feel like he was being dictated to. He felt like he was getting advice from someone who was like a brother to him which was a very effective way of operating. Usually works in an to have a partner of that caliber. He also cultivated him and made him much more successful than he had been hitherto. Up to and including really becoming this Covert Campaign manager to get him elected president of the philippines. Tell us about that. Tell us what he does. Hed did everything from composing Campaign Song and creating a campaign stolen slogan. He said all sorts of things including creating filipino civic organizations to prevent the other party from stealing the election because there was a lot of elect coral pride working with journalists. Pretty much everything you would expect the Campaign Manager to do he was doing even though he was on the cia payroll. Even at the time this is controversial within the agency and within the state department and the u. S. Government because a lot of people werent sure that a cia officer should be getting this involved in the politics of another country. Lansdales retort was very interesting. He was one of the First Americans to read and interested the way the communist acquired power was political. They had a political strategy to win support and lansdale said you cant just fight the common us militarily. You have to offer them a better alternative and in the philippines the hook slogan was bombs, not valid because elections were so crooked and rigged that nobody had any confidence in the outset of an election. Lansdale turned around because he or bennett election fraud. It wasnt fraud. I would say was advertising basically. He wasnt stuffing ballot boxes and as a result that basically defeated the whole rebellion because he turned the slogan around and now the slogan became ballots, not bullets because the people realize they could effect political change at the ballot box and they no longer had to fight with the gun. Thats a call of the air out of the hook rebellion. This became dramatically familiar to what wed did in the surge. This urge the matters is the surge of ideas. I just want to dwell on these a bet. Being courteous and polite to the population within which you are engaging the enemy. When it becomes lethal and avoiding indiscriminate violence violence. He gave filipino insurgents cheap cameras in part just to get actual advert reporting. We used to call that a rocky mass or afghan mass. He didnt have any body counts. Think about how that becomes a metric for vietnam and how different that was the statistical reductions of war. Together they developed as you mentioned now populationcentric counterinsurgency with a very modest u. S. Commitment. At the end of the day how many troops are actually on the ground in the philippines . Maybe a few dozen. The core of it was basically lansdale and 10 assistance and that was it. Keeping in mind again that you dont always get the luck of those individuals. They also have made their own luck by pushing them forward. Mr. Maliki was not the easiest individuals to work with but by god we did together and ryan crocker and others. So again a very, very important achievement here and he gets elected. Hes the president sadly for only a few years. E. Diaz in a plane accident tragically. By the way the aircraft is being piloted by the chief of staff of the air force as i recall the guy who knew fighters really well. Of course we talked about pat kelly and what transpired there. How does he end up over in vietnam . He have this single success in the philippines where he in fact basically masterminded the hook rebellion. He was all this with the flavor of the month and eisenhower demonstrations and became allen dulles the cia director and ron who masterminded the election. Then in 1954 you have the situation where the french were being seated. There is a geneva conference with the north under communist control and the question was how would you have a viable noncommunist state in South Vietnam and basically the consensus within the eisenhower demonstrations was okay we dont want to send of a lot of american troops so lets get add lansdale do in vietnam would have been the philippines. Those were literally his marching orders from allen dulles. Citi having gone over there, he said you cant have these white faces trying to win the war in vietnam and the french as long as they were fighting would never prevail because they would never defeat nationalism and he knew that if french warfare was new. So ultimately around six or seven years in vietnam. This first tour and then comes home and goes back four or five years later. Lets talk about the first tour in the strategy and tactics, his relationship with the ambassador and the american diplomats at that time. Justice is latched on in the philippines in South Vietnam he latched on to the appointed Prime Minister and at that point in the summer of 1954 few people thought it would last weeks much less nine years. He faces huge away huge array of adversaries not only con is that local religious sects who had tens of thousands of armaments and had the support of the french. Nobody thought that it would last long and in among his critics was the u. S. Ambassador of fourstar general who was a personal friend of president eisenhower. Lansdale who was a mere colonel working for the ca was not afraid to stand up to this fourstar general and in a meeting lightning joe collins said he wanted to reduce the size of the South Vietnamese army that we are helping to support the lansdale thought this was the dumbest idea manageable. He said you need a large army to pacify the countryside. The communist fighters are pulling out and he needed somebody to have an administrative governance in those areas and there was no civilian capacity. You had to absorb all these arms are unique or larger army for governing purposes. He thought collins didnt understand what was actually going on. A stereotypical starchy fourstar general, not like you. Not a man of small ego. He fought successfully in europe and then he transfers to the pacific. Spin a key was the only u. S. General to have fought in both. And then korea after ridgway. And he was a personal friend of eisenhower. He tried to shut lands of them say im here as a representative american president. My decision is final and lansdale gets up and says well sir i am here as a personal representative of the American People and i think if the American People heard what you were saying they would disagree with you and he walked out of the room. And this is my point. He makes it to two stars and this is really quite remarkable. It would never happen today. In the mid50s i was not the easiest subordinate at the time but i made sure i had the president and my corner when i was. He writes in national counterinsurgency strategy. Characterize that for us. You all for all these areas and add lansdale is the first counterinsurgency chief and writes the strategy for how they Vietnamese Army is going to go into basically a lot of it had to do his civic action which was a term that had to do with winning over the people. For example creating something called operation brotherhood which was an independent organization in reality, dont tell anybody funded by the cia but an independent organization that brought over filipino doctors and nurses to provide medical care in these newly liberated areas to win over the people. This is counterinsurgency 101. He was pioneering peace efforts to win over the population and to win their support for the regime. He pushed them out to go out among the people normally a very reclusive ruler. He really tried to push for more democracy and more Representative Government in order to create a more legitimate than stable space in saigon. Really the antithesis of what ultimately becomes the u. S. Effort, huge battles. It wasnt firepower. It proved to be quite disastrous. He writes this and he promotes this. He supports it. Its his version now of this partner in the philippines not quite the same level but not without talent. He comes back to washington and he briefs the newlyinstalled secretary of defense Robert Mcnamara. You described this is quite a new just a moment. This is a chew clash with Robert Mcnamara who is a Business School graduate with an accounting background and former ceo of the ford Quarter Company believed it could reduce all the dash of war and peace to a mathematical equation. Ed landfill walks in and puts down a load of these weapons very basic spears and swords and says, and puts them down on mcnamaras desk and says mr. Secretary you need to understand these are the people we are fighting and they wear pajamas. They dont look like the kind of soldiers that you would recognize and they are facing a South Vietnamese army which looks like this and has the same equipment. These ragtag guerrilla fighters are soldiers and you need to understand they have this powerful idea behind them and they wont be defeated simply buy american firepower. Mcnamara takes one look at them and is immediately his assessment is this guys an idiot and why is he cluttering up i guess . Get out of here, thank you very much. It of course in hindsight we know perfectly well that mcnamara did not know what he was doing. He is now sort of shunted into the strange operation where this. Its so tragic actually in the long run. During that time hes overthrown. By the early 60s land still have an outside representation because it associated with the quiet american as well as the ugly american and although he is substantively he was quite famous. He was known by some of the americans and by others of the american james bond and the kennedys were very smitten by him. After the failure of the bay of pigs they were still determined to get rid of castro and they said okay we needed outsider somebody with different ideas to take over this operation. Lets get add lansdale. It never occurred to them to say what does add lansdale know about this kind of operation that basically they put them in charge of what became known as the Operation Task force to get rid of castro. It was a failure. It didnt achieve results. Lansdale said if youre going to get rid of castrating up to use American Military force. They didnt want to do that. They want a quick solution so all these crazy ideas came up including lansdale was firing star shells in the air and combining that with the rumor campaign. God was displeased with fidel castro. This actually happened but its not half as crazy as some of the ideas that the cia folks had like feeding castro drugs that would make his beard fall out because his beard was supposedly the source of his power. They were basically all sorts of crazy ideas circulating. The kennedys and in particular Bobby Kennedy was saying we need action, went to get rid of them so this was the result. Basically to make a long story short the operation failed. The only good thing that did wasnt it produce intelligence which allowed us to find out that the soviets are putting Nuclear Missiles into cuba but after the cuban missile crisis it was disbanded and lansdale was shunted aside. He was basically left vulnerable to his bureaucratic adversaries like Robert Mcnamara and by the end of 1963 he was retired. This was really a tragedy because this was the height of the crisis in South Vietnam to crisis between kennedy which led to the overthrow about the consequences we discussed earlier ended in hindsight a lot of people like Lyndon Johnsons National Security adviser later said the only way this crisis could the then averted is if add lansdale would have been sent to saigon and move in a more central direction and to guide him in the 1950s. To push them aside but it never happened because there was too much bureaucratic opposition. They made too many bureaucratic enemies. The oneman that might conceivably have averted this dire crisis was sidelined at retired. Although the he was sent back as she noted 1965 and those three more years. Tell us about how his team is regarded by other americans. This was a tremendously frustrating period. He went back and 65 because he wanted to help the went for work for henry a watch who was the very man who would mastermind the coup. It was not a positive relationship from the start and basically in the 65 to 60 period when lansdale was there he was sidelined because the big green machine really took over westmoreland and the offensive line of the military and westmoreland generally thought he could kill the vietcong faster than they could be her place that he would reach a crossover point so called where he would eliminate the vietcong faster than they could be replaced. Lansdale understood this as hubris and tried to put a brave front in the public but in private in the letters that i read he was in despair. He understood the war was being lost and he thought it was a tragedy that these poor vietnamese rice farmers who were in the middle of this war they were caught in the middle they were being polarized buy american artillery and airpower because they were mistaken for the vietcong. They said you cant win a war this way. You arent going to win bike killing the people on your own side but westmoreland and johnson and the others ignored him. His greatest champion by the way was Hubert Humphrey who is the Vice President. He was wellintentioned but Hubert Humphrey anybody knows he history of the Johnson Administration had no impact. He was sidelined by Lyndon Johnson. And if the 50s land still had the dulles brothers around American Farm policy whereas in the 60s his champion was Hubert Humphrey who was as powerful as he was sent as a result he had no power to know what the american war machine was doing in vietnam. He left the tet offensive very dejected and that moralized because he understood contrary to what the generals were saying the tet offensive was not the victory even though we killed a lot more of the enemy than they kill our troops. It was a huge psychological blow to South Vietnam and the United States and lansdale understood that. He understood that the war was being lost in the felt, he just felt horrible because he felt he had some good ideas that could help us do better but he had lost this bureaucratic battle. One of the questions from the audience hear talks about the tet offensive and of course preceded by this massive overlap of up to over 500,000 troops on the ground seemingly doing well. The light at the end of the tunnel. Yes. With all of our intelligence on the ground how did we miss the sign of the tet offensive coming . There were certainly signed but its like the attack on pearl harbor. You could see them in hindsight but at the time there was a lot of white noise. For example the widespread view within the military command was that these indications of the tet offensive were just a ruse that took us away from caisson which was being attacked by north vietnamese troops at that time. Lets not really interested him. He said thats what we need to understand. For people like westmore and all that was irrelevant because all that mattered was putting warheads on four heads basically. At one of the big strategic lessons i said we should learn from our experiences is that you should understand a country before you abated. We should have known that going in. Lets get to some of the questions from the floor and others. I wanted to ask, you read hr mcmasters spoke on the performance of senior military leaders of vietnam, the biggest title, the dereliction of duty, how would you characterize your assessment . Is it the same or different, how would you characterize his and yours. It will be interesting to see what hr mcmaster thinks of giving advice to a president based on his current job he has a different perspective than he had when he was a young army officer. Think it was a good book. I would dissent from some of his views. The part of his thesis was that Lyndon Johnson should have listened to the joint chiefs. But the joint chiefs had a different outlook, they said theres not enough firepower they wanted more bombs the more conventional forces. I think Lyndon Johnson was right to be skeptical that applying more conventional firepower would achieve a different landscape. They were neither heart they did not want to abandon South Vietnam, at the same time they thought the way were going about it was long way. I thought the way the military establishment was going about it was the wrong approach. Generals are often accused of refighting the last word. How did the experience of the korean war affected. It didnt have an impact on landfill because they didnt fight in korea. World war ii followed by the korean war, all the generals we sent to command in vietnam from the 50s on where were veterans of world war ii, none had experience fighting insurgents. Hell brought a relentlessly conventional mindset. Abrams is the first guy smart enough to understand to a more of the same is likely to achieve better results. By that point he was appointed and 68 it was too late as we had lost public support of the war. Because we had all these generals would basically design the army took fight a conventional adversary. He was saying no we cant create this mirrorimage force, we will be fighting tanks, will be fighting communist insurgents. He tried to mold them to be a counterinsurgency force but he was overworld the decision was made to provide heavy weaponry and create a smallscale version of the army. I often ponder this question, how to someone think outside the box survive let alone succeed in a bureaucracy that doesnt appreciate such thinking. You might be in a better place to answer that. For those who dont know the u. S. Army culture, the fact that general patrice is a phd from princeton its rare. I was told i was committing professional suicide. Quite frankly if i look at your career i would say you would not have risen to the top of fourstar command were not for the dire situation we found ourselves in an iraq because things at that point were getting desperate enough they were ready to throughout the playbook and try a new approach was somebody with different ideas. I think it did not rise to fourstar rank. When navigating the bureaucratic currents. She did pretty well but one of his achilles heels was well he was adept at winning over 4 liters his not so adept at winning over his own leaders. The great hero, retired general sam former director of the daa. You had conversations. He roast a threestar rank and had tremendous admiration. But he said his undoing was that he treated the bureaucracy as an enemy. In so doing, he made it one. So how do you survive is an outofthebox thinker. I think leaders have to preserve and protect the class. You have to promote them and its very publicly known. I went back and sat on one Promotion Board my entire life it happened to be when i was commanding the search which is not normally the position your selected too. But when he originally asked me to he said are you crazy frankly this was hr mcmaster have been passed over toys for brigadier general. I was back and no one ever said that to me but it was clear that we needed to ensure he was going to be on that list but was made the president of the board even though there was a very interesting process. In a sense, were making sure someone set outside the box was given an opportunity. In the midst of worse he came out in 1972 and pull punches in it. He did not want to be very forthcoming in his memory. In part because his wife helen was still a live you wanna he did not want to review how much he had done because he wanted filipinos to make credit for what they hadnt done. Heres this big white man deflating all of these asians. He wanted to put them forward as representatives of the society. By that point you have the release of the pentagon papers that when dan ellsberg, by the way if youve seen the post the very first line spoken in the movie hes out in the boonies in vietnam told in a machine gun with the marines in one says to the other whose the long hair. The answers thats ellsberg he worked for the embassy. But then. Worshiped him. And he still does. He said he was a real of winston. When ellsberg revealed the pentagon papers that was a painful episode because among those revealed were operation reports that he will for the cia. For the fact that operation is not a Single Organization it was created and funded by advanced of the cia i met expose some of his friends to danger and retribution. That added to some of the agony. Such an honorable man that after the revelation he refused to admit he worked for the cia. When the memoir came out it was laughed at by critics who knew he wasnt telling the truth. He felt like he had taken a note to protect the secrets of the cia and he was like a federal. I can sense the president of this Great Organization is about to come up on the stage. Before she does that i want to get to what you think we should take from your book. Theres three words there quite brilliant wetlands still experienced in what others have experienced with you out there helping us from time to time. It is where, mike, and listen. That is the distillation of the methodology. So Many Americans going to a foreign country you dont know or dont understand. Who people say these are demands if you want to something that is can happen. Right now are cutting aid to pakistan. That was not the approach at all. His methodology was to first learn. To understand the people understand their culture and what theyre about understand their aspirations and what theyre about us people. Then like them. Identify people you like and cultivate them. Dont lecture them, learn to like them. Finally, listen. Thats really the secret sauces that he would listen instead of lecture. It is not always easy because sam became notorious for hours on monologue. Theyre trying to strangle themselves to get out of his office wherein the agony of him going on and on. But here and sit there for hour after hour listening to him going on. Then he would say thats fascinating if i understand what youre saying, its x, y, and z. Then he very subtly erased phrase what he was saying to get across to his own ideas as if there his own. Its a very subtle method of operating. It sounds very simple, but very few advisors employ that. If they did and learn from him there be much more effective. I cannot agree more. I think we learn the same in her years over iraq and afghanistan the me and as i see getting the microphone, i want to congratulate you on an extraordinary book about an extraordinary american. A book that establishes you more than never this is a monumental achievement. You quote Edward Lansdales eula just concluded his remarks by saying we shall not see his like again but his ideas shall never die. I think with your book that you make that latter observation, well done and congratulations. [applause] thank you general betray us, thank you for promoting me to president. That said, i am ditto gregory Vice President of programs and i do love my job. I do want to thank you both for being here. Theyve been here many times before they help you return many times again. When anyone who doesnt yet have a pressure to please pick one up. Next will be returning to talk and then in the spring a program on north korea with colleagues who are wonderful and max is wonderful. And thank you, i hope you enjoyed the program as we did. And stay for the book signing. Thank you,. [inaudible]