The Road Not Taken is an impressive work, an epic and elegant biography based on voluminous archival sources. It belongs to a genre of books that takes a seemingly obscure hero and uses his story as a vehicle to capture a whole era ... Mr. 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. In Mr. Boot’s judgment, the American war there 'would have been more humane and less costly' if McNamara, Westmoreland and other American officials had taken his advice. The Road Not Taken gives a vivid portrait of a remarkable man and intelligently challenges the lazy assumption that failed wars are destined to fail or that failure, if it comes, cannot be saved from the worst possible outcome.
There are several outstanding books combined into one here ... Boot has provided the first thorough biography of Edward Lansdale. Secondarily, this is a superb history of the Vietnam conflict and includes fascinating military detail and a firm grasp of both American and Vietnamese politics ... This important book—substantially enhanced by excerpts from Lansdale’s own writing and augmented by outstanding maps—deserves to be read alongside Neil Sheehan’s award-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988).
...judicious and absorbing, if not fully convincing ... There is power in Boot’s conclusion that Lansdale 'never wanted to see half a million American troops thrashing around Vietnam, suffering and inflicting heavy casualties. His approach, successful or not, would have been more humane and less costly.' In this sense, the Lansdale way was indeed 'the road not taken.' Whether that road would have led to the destination he so wanted to reach, however, is doubtful. As much as this irrepressible Cold Warrior might have thought otherwise, Vietnam for the United States was destined to be what it had always been: a riddle beyond American solution.
The Road Not Taken is comprehensively researched and insightfully written – Boot is, as always, an extremely talented writer – and it implicitly believes whole-heartedly in that X Factor, and in 'Lansdalism' as a foreign policy. Boot made extensive use of previously untapped material provided by Lansdale's family, and perhaps not unconnectedly, his book about Lansdale dismisses even the notion of, for instance, death squads and orchestrated campaigns of terror for terror's sake ... Readers of the Pentagon Papers might come to a less qualified verdict about how dirty Lansdale's hands were in Vietnam and elsewhere. Boot's book isn't strictly hagiography; he can sometimes be as tough a critic of Lansdale as many of Lansdale's contemporary critics were – the word 'delusion' makes more than one appearance. But The Road Not Taken makes no secret of its belief in its hero and his faith in the importance of 'hearts and minds.'”
Lansdale, who coupled his cloak-and-dagger gambits with nation-building operations — what today is called ‘soft power’ — is now the subject of a capacious biography by the war historian Max Boot … While parts of this book might work as a star vehicle for Tom Hanks or Matt Damon, there is perhaps not quite enough here to justify the 600-plus page length. Boot is a conservative who is comfortable with heterodox views — he recently published an apologia for being a beneficiary of white male privilege — and I would have liked to see more of his own analysis of how Lansdale’s precepts have been adopted or ignored in subsequent US military interventions.
Boot’s mesmerizing, complex biography and cultural history not only recovers Lansdale and his foreign policy strategies but also illustrates the ways that those strategies might be effective in dealing with various military conflicts today.
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 cinematic avatar, looms over or lurks behind some of the crucial moments in U.S. foreign policy in the decades following World War II, culminating in its greatest disaster … Boot’s long history of right-leaning politics and his book’s title aroused apprehension, in this reviewer at least, that The Road Not Taken might be less a work of historical scholarship than a partisan polemic arguing that the U.S. military plunge into Vietnam was proper, necessary and/or winnable, and could have preserved an anti-communist bastion in Saigon were it not for nefarious Democrats (and inept military commanders) who botched and ultimately sabotaged the American effort … It also seems likely that Lansdale’s ‘road not taken’ would have ultimately led, in Vietnam, to a similar destination. No sale.
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 cinematic avatar, looms over or lurks behind some of the crucial moments in U.S. foreign policy in the decades following World War II, culminating in its greatest disaster ...The closest Boot comes to charting an alternate history is when he faults Washington for withdrawing Lansdale from Saigon in late 1956...but it also seems likely that Lansdale’s ‘road not taken’ would have ultimately led, in Vietnam, to a similar destination. No sale.
Like Lansdale, Boot understands the role of nation-building in such struggles as Iraq and Afghanistan, and he takes to heart Lansdale’s pointed lesson in shunning vast compounds of invading foreigners that 'overwhelm the recipients' of American aid, as happened in Vietnam and beyond. Controversial in some of its conclusions, perhaps, as Lansdale’s arguments were in their day, and essential reading for students of military policy and the Vietnam conflict.
Boot outshines everything ever written about the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale (1908–1987) in this exhaustive, fact-filled, and analytical biography ... This is a detailed, warts-and-all examination of Lansdale’s complex professional and personal lives.
