The Road Not Taken Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam [Hardcover]

In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908 1987), the man said to be the fictional model for Graham GreenesJudicious and absorbing&Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, brings solid credentials to this enterprise&Here he draws on a range of material, official and personal&What emerges is a picture of a man who from an early point possessed an unusual ability to relate to other people, a stereotypically American can-do optimism, an impatience with bureaucracy and a fascination with psychological warfare.Superb biography.'The Road Not Taken'& is expansive and detailed, it is well written,and it sheds light on a good deal about U.S. covert activities inpostwar Southeast Asia&.. [Boot] believes that Lansdale's approach wasthe wiser one, but he is cautious in his analysis of what went wrong&A lot of his book is committed to restoring a sense of proportion tohis subject's image as a political Svengali, or Lawrence of Asia. A brilliant, extremely well-written book about a forgotten figure who was one of the most extraordinary and utterly unorthodox espionage agents in history.Edward Lansdale is probably the greatest cold warrior that most Americans have never heard of. Max Boot has written a fascinating account of how this California college humorist, frat boy and advertising executive evolved into a counterinsurgency expert before the term was even coined&. Max Boot has become one of the master chroniclers of American counterinsurgency efforts, and his biography of Mr. Lansdale is a tribute to a guy who recognized the threat of insurgency in a post-World War II environment where most American leaders saw only brute force as a solution to any political-military problem&. This book should be read in Baghdad and Kabul, not only by Americans, but by local leaders.Max Boot capably and readably tracks the fascinating but ultimately depressing trajectory of this shadowy figure, who, as a murky undercover operative and a literary and cineml³!