U. S. New York Historical society i am thrilled to welcome you here to the auditorium. This Evenings Program is presented in conjunction with our exhibition of 1945 vietnam war that i hope you have had a chance to see but if not it is on view through april 22 so i hope you will return during using them hours to see that. Our story is a lecture on leadership and to create this series five years ago as a permanent way to honor too great americans including David Petraeus who want a history maker award in 2013 i would like to thank mr. Herzog from the new York Historical and general petraeus for his leadership and for the generous participation over the past four years when this illustrious lecture series. [applause] i would like to thank and recognize our trustees and the chair for all she has done on behalf of this Great Institution and also the chair susan. Also migrate colleague for the programs he will hear tonight at the close but this Evenings Program program will last about an hour including question and answer session the q a will be conducted through the written notecards you should have received one from one of our colleagues when you enter the auditorium this evening if not they will be around to distribute them they will be collected with your questions later in the evening. So we are thrilled to welcome back max boot one of americas military historians and Foreign Policy analyst. First i should have said there will be a book signing following the program and we are thrilled to welcome him back to the new York Historical society. The senior fellow of National Security studies at the council of formulations and a regular contributor to usa today or the New York Times or other publications the author of several widely acclaimed books of military history structured on the u. S. State department and many military institutions and commander from iraq and afghanistan in his book the road not taken it is an honor to welcome general petraeus back to new York Historical society as moderator for this Evenings Program u. S. Army retired is currently a partner in the Global Investment firm kkr and chairman also the judge professor at university of Southern California and general petraeus served 37 years in the u. S. Army including a commander of Coalition Forces in iraq and afghanistan and commander of u. S. Central command. Following his retirement he served as the director of the cia during which time to play a central role in the important achievements with the global war on terror. So now help me to welcome to make sure anything that makes noise is switched off so please join me to welcome general petraeus and max boot. [applause] thank you very much it is wonderful to be back it is wonderful to be on stage for someone i have such high regard and admiration and a special treat when someone you have such high regard writes about somebody for whom you have such high regard and that is of course Edward Lansdale that we have studied over the years a somewhat tragic figure in that he had great achievements in one arena with brilliant advice and another that unfortunately was disregarded. Max is everything that said about him as a distinguished caller and a brilliant thinker and observer and a miracle writer someone i have had enormous regard for over the years with advice and counsel that i sought those commands from the greater middle east and director of the cia one of those rare individuals whose every essay i read is an admirable individual is not one to leave something left unsaid. That is a virtue in contemporary time. So it is a privilege and especially tonight to be the interviewer as opposed to the interviewee with psalm role reversal. Now i can get some revenge. No enhanced interrogation techniques. [laughter] i have long stood against them for a variety of Different Reasons thanks for being here tonight hopefully that deep freeze evaded just in time. Also it is truly a privilege to be on the stage in the new York Historical society one of the top two centers a Critical Mass of this extraordinary city the other is on the other side of the park wonderful to do this in the presence of herzog ian five and reinvigorate to sustain that wonderful organization that tries to help us not only record and remember history that is hugely important when society wants to consign the past two history so again it is great to be back here to roger and susan and the only person that i know with two phds from stanford and then also for your leadership of this organization i want to applaud all of you upfront for all you have done. Thank you. Congratulations a Long Time Coming we have been looking forward to this over a year it is truly a monumental achievement but that doubles as a paperweight and a barbell. But to the degree of the challenges and the tragedy of vietnam and i would contend of contemporary situations similar in the minds so the road not taken was selected best book of the month and this is the easing of the day when it was first actually on sale in bookstores and online. A lot of great reviews about this it was described as a fascinating portrait of lansdale the maverick in the mold much more of the biography and begs comparison with monumental narratives and also adding the best and the brightest to give a compelling look on that vietnam tragedy to show by no means that inevitable result of forces from the military leaders. And i will draw max out on that to some degree i wrote about that actually with a riveting description at the time of lansdale one of the most significant figures. Post world war ii philippines and vietnam and is here with his wife and daughter so welcome to each of you. [applause] we get to talk about lansdale with him in attendance and the road not taken not only tells Edward Lansdale story with verbal but also situates in the constant phone in the context to offer lessons to the present day so lets get started. How and when did you become the focus . Thank you very much for joining this event and volunteering. I wanted to do this. Hopefully not in the spirit of revenge. That comes later. It is a good question how i got interested i wrote about him will little bit in my previous book with a history of guerrilla warfare with my editor who said you should make a whole book about lansdale i was reluctant because i said what more is there to say and he had that intuition and heater and out to be dead right because i was lucky enough to acquire a vast trove of material the previous riders he was legendary and was written about by everybody from Graham Greene to about him. Even with his biography but none of those had access to all of the documentation i could get my hands on some of that was due to the generosity of the lansdale family who willingly shared with me the correspondence between their parents and his first wife and also lucky enough to meet the grandchildren of his second wife who clothes, closure ears also his mistress who was the second wife and they shared that correspondence over the years i think am the first person to read both sets of correspondence and also a vast amount of newly declassified information which your former agency of the cia is slow about releasing that a lot of this that i am the first historian whose had a chance to look at it so if you want to know how to win an election there is no better source than the topsecret report that lansdale wrote said how he got him elected president so there is a lot of new information giving the most complete and accurate and indepth picture we have ever had of lansdale. It is wonderful. There is a lot more to say. Also he turned out to be a pivotal figure not just the story of lansdale but using his life to tell the story of involvement in vietnam he turned out to be a wonderful character because in the beginning creating South Vietnam and was there as everything was going south with the tet offensive. I cannot think of anybody else like him either John Paul Van did not start until the early 60s lansdale was on the ground floor may be a little bit of an exaggeration but the creator of South Vietnam. Upfront broad questions then we will start back at the beginning. So just in the general sense how do you describe when people tell me say tell me about Edward Lansdale. A wonderfully engaging and eccentric character who had a passion for american democracy who loves psychological operations but above all he had a passion for helping his asian friends in the philippines and South Vietnam to achieve a measure of independence and autonomy and selfworth with his ideas is caricature but he was much more complex mortgage more in tune to the local society then made out to be by those bureaucratic rivals with a hostile journalist. And he believed in governanc governance. Absolutely. This is not new for you because you literally wrote the man on counterinsurgency but remember in the early 1950s a lot of these ideas were bold and fresh and he was one of the pioneers of Counter Insurgency that he understood what you acted upon that you cannot just be the insurgency just by killing them you have to out govern them this is what he said the communist have an idea we cannot bomb an idea into in oblivion we have to operate a better idea so now Robert Mcnamara and others thought he was an idiot because they didnt understand that mathematical precision of the Fighter Pilot but hindsight it was obvious he understood a lot more of his detractors. But during the surge may be the second of the biggest big ideas which you contributed to overtime you cannot kill or capture your way out you have to reconcile while going after some of those. It is interesting how that jumped off the page so you noted at some point he isnt mentored in the counterinsurgency field manual not that he was not known but not as significant as now he will be as a result. He did not set down his ideas he was more a practitioner. And not quite as good at selfpromotion. Although he had his moments. Again, the title of the road not taken we will come back to this because it is a big deal do you really believe certainly prior to the 1963q and which the president was displaced and killed the course may have been altered . Things worked out pretty disastrously when lansdale advice was disregarded because he told the Kennedy Administration please dont over 31 overthrow him. Yes we need to sideline his conspiratorial brother and in the unfortunate constitution but lansdale said there is no alternative and i know all the generals but the Kennedy Administration ignored him sponsoring the core mode the coup 1963 the very day that lansdale was retiring from the air force and the results are catastrophic as what he warned about because South Vietnam after the disintegrated with 12 after another and it became so dire Lyndon Johnson felt he had no choice but to send american combat troops in to rescue and that was the last thing lansdale ever wanted to see he didnt want to see half a million troops in the jungle and all the horrors that, this massive military intervention he said the vietnamese we had to help them but he wanted to be helpful in a much more modest way as advisors not a central role. There is a chance that teen lansdale advice was followed things could have worked out quite differently not just me who say that but johnsons National Security advisor later said it was a tragedy his advice was disregarded. You cant say the war would have been one you cannot prove that but one thing you could say for sure is we would not have lost in that catastrophic fashion that we did losing 50000 of americans and vietnamese in this terrible tragedy from the 60s. With catastrophic repercussions at home. So talk about his upbringing, goes to ucla but doesnt graduate. He was from a modest background and is not part of the postwar elite didnt go to harvard or a wall street law firm or kkr a much more modest upbringing his father was the Automotive Executive whose fortunes went up and down but he grew up in detroit but mostly in california he acquired a great california infrared to become a general always wanted people to kick back and get rid of protocol so he was kind of Silicon Valley with that either does decades before and also it was at a time of terrible racial prejudice also against Asian Americans when we excluded chinese immigrants especially in california there was horrible prejudice that the ten was never affected with that he saw them to be fully equal to americans or anybody else. That was one of the keys to his success going to the philippines in 19454 South Vietnam he didnt think he was surrounded by lesser beings that meeting these wonderful people who are friends and colleagues and this was very rare for westerners to do. He genuinely liked them. It is fair to say he wept and iced empathy and emotional intelligence. He goes to ucla and goes into advertising. He hopes to be a playwright to move to new york and it didnt work out he did meet helen the woman he would marry then got into advertising had a successful career going when the japanese attack on pearl harbor happened and he was eager to enlist although in his late knees could not get into the army so went to the civilian Intelligence Agency so worked for the oss. Part of the Defense Department a forerunner to the caa funded by wild bill donovan. And lansdale shared some characteristics because they were both mavericks constantly at war with whatever bureaucracy and ultimately it is a sign they were born rebels. But the inability to enjoy that infighting and prevail does have an influence. He cant get into the army but does not deploy through the oss. He interviews travelers to gain information where allied troops and is quite successful eventually he gets into the army and by happenstance in the fall of 1945 he gets to point to the philippines and spends the next several years there and then transferring from an Intelligence Officer to Public Affairs but really doing a job that it is not in the normal rv chain of command like a Cultural Affairs ambassador because primarily not enough soldiers or diplomats do but he tried to learn about the people he was surrounded by the course part of that is the fact he met this filipino lady she struck up a romance and she became in a way, his cultural and geographical guide because there was a budding communist insurgency at the time known as the hoke rebellion and she happened to be from that same area of the province where the hooks were from sociability so she better lee one dash literally led him in and then the romance was struck up and she became his interlocutor. And does become the second wife. Eventually. Came to the United States and became a second wife and they lived basically happily ever after until his own demise in 1987. He becomes a pivotal figure in the philippines, does two tours. The total years would be what . It was about seven years or so. Think about the number of years he spent deployed. There was an element of hardship for the family because he was deployed much of their childhood and it is to the credit of she like a lot of military wives helped the family together and had to be a single parent and raised the kids pretty well as you can see here. To be a colonel in the air force. By the way, his father retired with two stars. I dont know how in the world this ever happened. Never has a lien air force assignment that i dont detect any your book. So those were the days. And it is interesting. The most unusual is the guidy that goes to the three stars director of the cia, one of the greatest linguists of all time he was basically the translator for the president of the United States of france, italy, russia, a whole bunch of different languages and he was an infantry officer. They could never happen today. The system would not permit it and in some ways i think it was a tribute to the system. The second assignment his personal assistance to the minister of defense in the philippines. Im not aware of any kind of assignments like that these da days. That was the making of the landfill legend. Remember what the situation looked like there was a fear that communism was on the march. This was the mccarthy era when the korean war was racing, they had fallen to the communists had acquired a nuclear bomb. There was a feeling that we are losing the battle especially in asia and then here was this burgeoning communist and the rebellion that seemed to be on the verge of taking over. There was actually talk about sending multiple versions to the philippines but instead of doing that, the operations chief but eventually folded into the cia instead of sending whole divisions have a handful of assistants and their job was basically a rescue from communism and how are they going to do that . They did that by latching onto this young defense minister because he perceived that he was going to turn the philippines around. He was honest and effective and wanted to do the right thing but didnt know what it was essentially he befriended him. They were actually roommates for a while and together under their guidance. Counterinsurgency to do things like issue orders to the army. Yoyoure going to alienate the population. If you win the confidence of the people, they will then rat out insurgent