Boot’s full-bodied biography does not ignore Lansdale’s failures and shortcomings-not least his difficult relations with his family-but it properly concentrates on his ideas and his attempts to apply them in Southeast Asia. ![]() The Road Not Taken is an impressive work, an epic and elegant biography based on voluminous archival sources. ![]() One of the Best Biographies of the Year (Amazon) Lawrence of Asia,” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Through dozens of interviews and access to never-before-seen documents-including long-hidden love letters-Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and crashing fall of the roguish “T.E. Lansdale advocated a visionary policy that, contends Boot, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and patrician diplomats who favored troop buildups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, presents a groundbreaking biography of Edward Lansdale, the legendary covert operative-the purported model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American-who pioneered a “hearts and minds” approach to wars in the Philippines and Vietnam. Amazon has selected the biography as one of its Best Books of January 2018 and has said it "reads like a novel."īoot, the Jeane J. The Vietnam War “might have taken a very different course-one that was less costly and potentially more successful-if the counsel of this CIA operative and Air Force officer had been followed,” writes Max Boot in The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.
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