Opinion: Why presidents should listen to troublemakers and truth tellers
From left: Edward G. Lansdale in 1963; Richard Holbrooke in 2010. By Max Boot Max Boot Columnist covering national security Email Bio Follow Columnist May 14 at 2:16 PM Reading George Packer’s sprawling, mesmerizing biography “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century,” I felt a shock of recognition. Not just because I knew Holbrooke and could so readily recognize him in Packer’s novelistic portrait.
There were, to be sure, many differences between them. Lansdale was never as ambitious or egotistical as Holbrooke, who once told a girlfriend, “I’m going to be the next Henry Kissinger.” Nor was he a social climber like Holbrooke, who cultivated powerful older men such as W. Averell Harriman and romanced successful women such as TV journalist Diane Sawyer. Lansdale’s ambition was to advance the cause of democracy in Asia, not himself. He even hesitated to accept an offer from President John F.
The similarities were not coincidental. Holbrooke’s first job as a tyro diplomat in 1963 was working in Saigon for the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Rural Affairs. Its head was Rufus Phillips, a courtly Virginian, late of Yale University and the CIA, who was a protege of Lansdale’s. He taught the young Holbrooke the tenets of “Lansdalism”: To win a war among the people, you had to win over the people rather than blow them to smithereens.
That Holbrooke ended his career working for the secretary of state, rather than being secretary of state himself, was a source of endless frustration to him. So, too, was the fact that his advice was constantly ignored. Lansdale suffered a similar, agonizing fate: He was sidelined from Vietnam policy in the Kennedy administration as the United States was drawing closer to a quagmire that he saw more clearly than most.
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