In the Midst of Wars: An American's mission to Southeast Asia Book

Edward Geary Lansdale truly became a legend in his own time. His mission to the Philippines in the early 1950s resulted in the defeat of the communist-led Hukbalahap movement and the subsequent election of Ramon Magsaysay, arguably the most popular president that the people of the Philippines have known. In 1954, Lansdale was sent to Vietnam where he hoped to repeat the program of counterinsurgency that was so successful in the Philippines. His ideas of land redistribution, grassroots village democracy, and elimination of corruption in the South Vietnamese government and army were gradually superseded by massive air and ground operations. When Lansdale returned to the United States for duty in Washington, he never ceased to promote the advancement of deomocratic ideology as the key tool to "win the hearts and minds of the people of Asia." This book is history as Edward Lansdale saw it. Lansdale became romanticized in The Quiet American by Graham Greene, The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, and Le Mal Jaune by Jean Larteguy. His biographer, Cecil Currey (Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American), considers Lansdale an all-too-human figure who was a maverick military thinker and a skeptic about conventional U.S. policy in Asia.Read More