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 r