Design and the Prospects of a Design Ethic

Abstract : Neil Sheehan, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, tells a remarkable side story of Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale's quest illustrates the paradoxes of studying history. Lansdale, equipped with a positivist philosophy that still dominates thinking today in military circles, sought to apply strategies and lessons he learned while helping Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay fight an insurgency in 1952 and 1953 and apply them to Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in Vietnam in 1955 into the early 1960s. Lansdale, an US Army major general and later a senior CIA official, exemplifies the problem of iatrogenesis-intervening with good intentions when presumably applying professional learnedness while unintentionally causing more harm than good. Sheehan concludes: Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Philippines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth. Lansdale assumed, as much as his superiors did, that his experience in the Philippines applied in Vietnam. It did not.1 In retrospect, Sheehan speculates that Lansdale,, who apparently had a positivist view of knowledge about countering insurgencies, that may have, iatrogenically, contributed to starting a second war of independence in Vietnam that, by 1975, was a debacle for the United States.