"The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam"
Join Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, Max Boot, in discussion of his new book on America's role in the Vietnam War.
Thursday, February 8, 201812:00 PM
UCLA Bunche Hall
Room 6275
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Watch an interview titled "Max Boot: Trump 'making me feel like a foreigner' in my own country" between Mr. Boot and CNN Correspondent Fareed Zakaria here:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/03/us/max-boot-foreigner-gps-cnntv/index.html
ABOUT THE BOOK - The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War.
In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908– 1987), the man said to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a “hearts and mind” diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America’s giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals and blueblood diplomats who favored troop build-ups and napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people. Through dozens of interviews and access to neverbefore-seen documents—including long-hidden love letters—Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of the roguish “T. E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975. Bringing a tragic complexity to this so-called “ugly American,” this “engrossing biography” (Karl Marlantes) rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened. With reverberations that continue to play out in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken is a biography of profound historical consequence.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
MAX BOOT is a military historian and foreign-policy analyst who has been called one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Mr. Boot is the author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, which has been called a “superb history of the Vietnam conflict” (Booklist), “essential reading” (Kirkus), a “brilliant biography” (General David Petraeus), “engrossing” (Karl Marlantes), and a “probing, timely study of wrong turns in the American conduct of the Vietnam War” (Kirkus, starred review). The Road Not Taken was published by Norton/Liveright on January 8, 2018.
Mr. Boot’s three previous books were all widely acclaimed: the New York Times bestseller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present (W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright, 2013), War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (Gotham Books, 2006), and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books, 2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history and has been placed on U.S. Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy professional reading lists.
Mr. Boot has served as an advisor to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also a senior foreign policy advisor to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2007–2008, a defense policy advisor to Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2011–2012, and the head of the Counterterrorism Working Group for Marco Rubio’s campaign in 2015–2016.
Mr. Boot is a frequent public speaker and guest on radio and television news programs, both at home and abroad. He has lectured on behalf of the U.S. State Department and at many military institutions, including the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air War Colleges, the Australian Defense College, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, West Point, and the Naval Academy.
In 2004, he was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of “the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy.” In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, given annually to a writer who exhibits “love of country and its democratic institutions” and “bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism.”
Mr. Boot holds a bachelor’s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in history from Yale University. He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives in the New York area.
Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, Department of History