Could American War in Vietnam Have Turned Out Differently?

Haunting alternative histories

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago. Several videos and books still claim that the war was a failure of American strategy rather than an inevitable victory for the North Vietnamese. The Alternate History Hub on YouTube tackled the subject in 2014. That video has attracted more than 7,000 comments.

The most convincing and disturbing thesis is by historian Max Boot’s “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (2017). It profiled the CIA operative who was so successful in thwarting a leftist revolt in the Philippines and who was an early architect of Vietnam policy. Landsdale was a constructive, benign adviser to South Vietnamese President Diem, Boot contends. But he was shifted to the Cuban crisis in 1956, and then returned to Vietnam after that fiasco — takeover by the communist revolutionary Fidel Castro — to salvage Vietnam.

If the US had followed Lansdale’s early Vietnam strategy, Vietnam’s course might have been different, Boot wrote. Without Lansdale’s influence, Diem became paranoid and reactionary, and set his country to become, within a decade, “a failing state kept alive only with heavy infusions of American blood.”

Boot’s book stirred new debate. Lansdale, a legendary CIA operative, was central