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Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley,
1927-1961, by James T .Fisher, University of
Massachusetts Press, 1997 304 pages
 ractically
everybody in my generation has a Tom Dooley anecdote. My
brother-in-law, for example, told me that his decision to
become a physician "was greatly influenced" by the Jungle
Doctor. "Whatever happened to him," he added, alluding to
that brief period (1955-1960) when Dooley became a legend
in a corner of the world known as Southeast Asia, and
then seemed to disappear.
On June 5, 1960, Dr. Tom Dooley received an honorary
doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, upstaging
such eminences on the podium as Giovanni Cardinal
Montini, Archbishop of Milan (three years away from
becoming Pope Paul VI), and President Dwight D.
Eisenhower. "Where's Tom Dooley," said Eisenhower to
Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame, "I want to
talk to him." They did talk. All through lunch Dooley
told Eisenhower about his MEDICO operation in Laos. Six
months later, on January 18, 1961, he would die in a
hospital bed in New York City, the victim of cancer.
Kneeling alone by his bedside, praying the rosary, was
Teresa Gallagher, a girl from Queens, unmarried, a
secretary at Metropolitan Life Insurance, Dooley's
confidant and volunteer secretary.
My own remembrance of Dooley was bound up with Junior
year of high school, 1964. I had just transferred to the
Catholic school in the city from the public school in the
suburbs. Sister Mary Magdalene, my homeroom teacher, a
tall woman, lean and taught with high cheek bones and a
reddened face that flashed out from her starched mantle,
adored Tom Dooley. He was, she told those of us in Room
317, the Catholic model whom we should emulate. In my
mind, now, it's hard to separate Dooley from Sister Mary
Magdalene. Her presentation of him to the class always
had an underlying aspect of nervous anxiety. This
agitated enthusiasm made Dooley difficult to approach,
giving him a higher than thou quality. As I grew older
and lived through the upheavals of post conciliar
Catholicism, I looked back on those days in Room 317 and
wondered if the frenetic action-apostolate that Sister
Mary Magdalene espoused, didn't also contain a certain
disease, a presentiment of trouble underneath.
Dr. America has helped to shed light on the cause of
my vague feelings of disturbance in Room 317. It has also
revealed a great deal about Tom Dooley that very few of
us could know in 1964, things that would have rung with a
hard dissonance when compared to the hagiographic
portrait that was then drawn of the Doctor in Catholic
circles. This book also confirms his many admirable
qualities, ones that Sister Mary Magdalene was not slow
to point out to her charges in Room 317.
Tom Dooley was, in the words of James T. Fisher "a
complex individual who persisted in the effort to
reconcile wildly conflicting impulses, for the sake of
his audience as well as for himself." He had a
devotional side, including frequent Mass attendance,
recitation of the rosary, and a devotion to the Little
Flower. On the other hand , he was an active homosexual,
who, according to classmate Michael Harrington never
attempted to hide his same-sex orientation. Even after
cancer surgery in 1960, Dooley resorted to the 2nd floor
of Bangkok's Erawan Hotel, a "central preserve of his gay
life in Southeast Asia." While his memory is enshrined at
Notre Dame with a plaque of one of his letters to Father
Hesburgh at the Grotto, he left the University without
receiving a degree, and was restive of school authority
while there. A charismatic speaker, who could bring any
audience to tears with his uncanny ability to portray the
suffering Vietnamese and Laotian people, he traveled
first-class and ran up a lavish tab at the Waldorf when
he was in town.
While Dooley attained to an iconic status not only
among American Catholics, but the wider society as well,
he was also an instrument in the hands of the (so called)
Vietnam Lobby, a group of public relations executives,
former socialists turned anti- communist, shadowy
military figures and CIA operatives. These folks, none of
whom were Catholic, ardently desired a Catholic figure
who might be a bridge from American non-sectarian
anti-communism to the fiercely Catholic leader in South
Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. Indeed, if this book has a
sub-plot, it centers on the creation of Dr. Tom Dooley by
a coalition of secular humanitarians and Madison Avenue
types ("Ivy Leaguers", to borrow a pejorative from
Senator McCarthy), for the purpose of exporting a vision
of a pluralistic democracy (unfreighted with any
religious baggage) to a corner of the world known as
Indochina. And if this sub-plot has an underlying theme,
it is that these same anti- communist liberals were also
an anti-Catholic elite who found themselves in the queer
position of defending an intransigently Catholic
president in South Vietnam. While most of the radical
liberals of the 60's (the New Left) thought the Vietnam
War was a product of the machinations of the State
Department and Cardinal Spellman, Fisher shows how
Dooley's handlers-recondite names like, Leo Cherne,
Joseph Buttinger, Harold Oram, and Angier Biddle
Duke-were themselves on the anti-Catholic side of the
ethno- religious wars of the late '50s.
Dooley almost lost a medical career entirely.
Graduating near the bottom of his class at St. Louis
University Medical School he was forced to repeat his
senior year. Even worse, he was deemed too immature to
begin a residency and was required to extend his
internship an additional six months. Impulsive and
rebellious, habitually late or absent from class, Tom was
far likelier to be found at the Bridlespur Hunt Club than
in the amphitheater of the medical school; horses, not
cadavers were what people remember about him during these
years. Still, through some powerful pleading from two St.
Louis physicians, Tom obtained an appointment in April,
1953 to the Navy Medical College as a lieutenant. He was
about to walk on to the world stage.
Dooley's assignment on the USS Montague brought him
to Vietnam in the late summer of 1954. The French had
been defeated by the communist Viet Minh at the battle of
Dien Bien Phu earlier in the Spring. The protocols at
Geneva in July of 1954 allowed the transfer of
inhabitants of North and South Vietnam who desired to
relocate to one sector or the other. This window would
remain open until May of 1955. Thus commenced the flight
of refugees from North Vietnam to South Vietnam known as
Operation Passage to Freedom. Arriving on the USS
Montague, Lieutenant Dooley was assigned to act as an
interpreter between the French, on whose vessels the
Catholic and anti-communist refugees from the North were
being delivered, and the Americans who were providing the
LSM's, landing craft which would ferry the refugees to
safe harbor in the South. Although the United States
refused to sign the Geneva accords of 1954, there was a
strong desire on the part of Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles to cooperate in the refugee effort and
demonstrate to the world the resolve of America to stop
the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
Although Dooley was strongly anti-communist, with a
view that linked the political liberation of Catholics in
North Vietnam with a Catholic philosophy which saw the
destructive implications of dialectical materialism, he
also realized the opportunities for self-promotion which
the refugee operation would afford him. To Fisher, the
Dooley of Operation Passage to Freedom was a person
determined to recoup his reputation after the medical
school debacle. No sooner is he involved in boarding the
refugees onto the LSM's than he found time to send
letters to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat recounting as
newsworthy the refugee operation. In letters home to his
mother he also confides that he is an operative of the US
Navy, sent to help set up an epidemiological laboratory
for the study of various indigenous parasites and
bacteria.
Yet Dooley's own efforts to enhance his image were
outdone by others who found him terribly useful to their
purposes. There was Lt. Col. Edward Lansdale, an
iconoclast and a loner, who was given a wide berth by
C.I.A. regulars, yet was specifically requested by Allen
Dulles, CIA Director, to be the man on the ground who
could help Diem. A former ad executive from San
Francisco, Lansdale was in South Vietnam awaiting Diem's
arrival. Yet he needed a way of making the authoritarian
Diem palatable to a stateside audience that had grown
weary of the protracted involvement of America in the
Korean conflict. In Dr. Tom Dooley, Lansdale found the
kind of young go-getter, who could be a conduit between
the Catholic refugees in the North and the wise-cracking
American journalists both in Vietnam and back home who
could see a human interest story when it came their
way.
There also was the International Rescue Committee
(IRC) and the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), two
organizations described by James Fisher as made up of
"leftist entrepreneurs bent on expanding their markets
abroad in the immediate post-McCarthy era." Imbued with a
"messianic liberalism," the two groups had interlocking
memberships, and were made up in many instances of former
socialists who had shed their anti-fascist orientation
and now turned anti-communist. Harold Oram, for example,
was head of the American Friends of Vietnam, an
organization that boasted John F. Kennedy and Mike
Mansfield, two notable Catholic democrats. Yet Oram did
publicity work for Planned Parenthood and hired Peter
White, grandson of the renowned New York architect,
Stanford White, to work on the Diem account. Peter White
and his wife, both Catholics, had a large family and were
part of the Catholic intellectual revival of the post war
years. Their friends included the writers Sally and
Robert Fitzgerald, and Edward Rice, founding editor of
Jubilee, a Catholic monthly of high church graphics and
literary and theological brightness.
White also tried to deliver the liberals of
Commonweal to Diem's cause, but many of them were in
full-flight from the specter of Joe McCarthy and his
perceived American Catholic power base. Writing in
Commonweal in 1954, James O'Gara warned that "the hard
core of Catholic support for McCarthy...has the same
emotional roots as support for Father Coughlin in the
thirties." Catholic liberals of the period were also
alarmed about outbreaks of anti- Semitism coming from the
Right. But Fisher concludes "that the McCarthyites
reserved their greatest scorn not for Jews but the Anglo
elites...the East Coast aristocrats who populated the
IRC." According to Fisher, "the culture wars of the
period were fought primarily between Catholics and a
rather loosely defined coalition of liberal Protestants,
Jews, and assorted secularists who saw the growing
Catholic population as a threat to their cherished
notions about a wall separating church and state...since
the Church appeared monolithic in its authority,
Catholicism was generally equated with what would only
later be tagged the 'religious right'."
In Dooley, Leo Cherne, director of the IRC and Harold
Oram saw a Catholic superstar who appeared to combine on
the one hand, a devotional Catholicism which linked him
to traditional sources of Catholic piety yet also
reflected a "newer" Catholic internationalist spirit.
While anti-communist, Dooley would have the theological
tint of a low-key ecumenist who could speak across the
cultural divide.
The refugee operation in Vietnam was recounted in
Dooley's first book, Deliver Us From Evil. In Fisher's
view, the book was nothing less than a propaganda piece
"pure and simple." Although there is evidence to show
that the editors at Reader's Digest Condensed Books
sought to shape the book and Operation Passage to Freedom
as the story of "one lone American doctor," it is not
clear who may have been directing the book deal
initially. Lansdale had gotten the National Order of
Vietnam for Dooley, presented to him by Diem in May of
1956, and Lansdale's friend, William Lederer, co-author
ofThe Ugly American, received a note from DeWitt Wallace
thanking him for steering Dooley to the Digest. Even at
the time of the book's publication, however, FBI files
disclose that individuals who had worked with Dooley
complained that he had minimized the help that the French
had given in the operation, and that the book was a
product of self-aggrandizement.
Dooley's Navy career came to an end on March 28,
1956. Under investigation for homosexual activity by the
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), he was forced to
resign. Reports of his homosexuality had been circulating
since the summer of 1954; it was rumored that he had
seduced the son of an admiral during a stay at Yokosuka,
Japan, just before shipping out to Vietnam. The ONI probe
began in January, 1956. By March of that year, they had
compiled a convincing dossier on Dooley, including sex
acts with informants, and were about to proceed against
him when he abruptly resigned. Admirers of Dooley have
suggested that he may have had "tendencies" yet sought to
live chastely. Even Randy Shilts, who outed Dooley in a
book in 1989 on homosexuals in the military, believed
that Dooley led a deliberately closeted life because he
adhered strictly to the teachings of the Church. Yet both
of these views are wrong. Fisher states: "he (Dooley) was
in fact an extraordinarily active gay man who was
considered one of the great sex symbols of his era —
a figure well-known in sophisticated gay circles as
far-flung as Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and the
capitals of Southeast Asia."
Working in Bethesda, Maryland as a hospital intern in
1952, Dooley was picked up by a German airline steward
who took him to the home of one of the leading Washington
homosexuals. Dooley quickly became a favorite of the
group which included theater people and musicians. Rock
Hudson's future manager was among them. Dooley was
described within gay circles as "mesmerizing" and "one of
the most charming people you would ever want to meet."
The topic of Dooley's homosexuality remained hidden from
public scrutiny; this was the mid 1950s after all. Yet,
Fisher quotes one unnamed source as saying that Dooley
told him that the Catholic Church's teaching on
homosexuality "was simply wrong." Another source revealed
that Dooley regarded his homosexuality "as a gift," that
homosexual relations were, for him, a way to elevate the
gray existence of those not so blessed with charm and
good looks. Toward the end of his life, Dooley's appeals
for support in his clinics in Laos contained what Fisher
calls a "homoeroticized mysticism." And the Doctor's
recruitment of young men, especially at Notre Dame, make
us wonder about the roots of what will later be termed
"the homosexual network" in the Catholic Church in
America.
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The
topic of Dooley's homosexuality remained hidden
from public scrutiny; this was the mid 1950s
after all. Yet, Fisher quotes one unnamed source
as saying that Dooley told him that the Catholic
Church's teaching on homosexuality "was simply
wrong."
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As Dooley's naval career was self-destructing, his new
role of Jungle Doctor was about to take off. The presses
were rolling out the pages of Deliver Us From Evil just
as the ONI was tightening its investigation. Within three
weeks after his resignation from the Navy, Dooley
announced to a reporter who had questioned him about his
Navy status, "next September under the auspices of the
International Rescue Committee I'm returning for six
months to Laos....Walt Disney has given me a little movie
projector....we're going to take lots of white sailor
hats, baseballs, ball-point pens... and Sears Roebuck
catalogs to show these people a little bit of what
America is like."
Leo Cherne admired Dooley. Unlike William J. Casey,
Cherne's Irish Catholic protege, Dooley had a
cosmopolitan flair. Cherne and Dooley had classical music
in common. Dooley could entertain on the piano-a poor
man's George Shearing-and weave popular melodies and
classical motifs together. His suits were European cut.
Cherne told Casey biographer, Joseph E. Persico, that his
understudy was "to the right of Attila the Hun...one
hundred per cent for Franco and one hundred per cent
against the Loyalists. To understand this you had to
understand his Catholicism." In Dooley, Cherne found no
vestiges of the ethno-religious conflicts of the 1930s
that sometimes marked relations between the Irish and the
Jews in New York. Dooley was a new kind of Catholic, and
not unlike Cherne, looking to "win acclaim with cultural
and political elites." Both men felt themselves to be
deserving of "insider" status. Cherne would accomplish
this as a seasoned pro within the sector of humanitarian
aid projects, while Dooley would do this by his "pretty
brilliance" as Catholic folk hero.
Dooley's homosexuality was known to the IRC. Angier
Biddle Duke had been informed by Admiral Burke about the
ONI investigation but was assured that "it won't be a
problem for you." Based on Dooley's habits, one wonders
why the Admiral had such confidence; nevertheless, other
things worried Duke, in particular Dooley's spending
habits and carelessness with receipts. When Duke
attempted to caution Tom about the need to curtail
excessive spending, which would threaten the tax-exempt
status of the IRC, Dooley retorted with
"chickenshit."
Yet among Catholics, who had been inspired by
Deliver Us From Evil, Dooley's charismatic power
was intense. Sixth graders at Our Lady of Victory Academy
in Tarrytown, New York wrote to Dooley to tell him that
they were going "to adopt" a child from Southeast Asia
and name him "Thomas Anthony." A third grader penned,
simply: "You are just like Jesus." Placing his life
within a gospel context, a nun from Tulsa, Oklahoma said
that, "You can be certain that when you reach the end of
the road you will hear the words of welcome from Our
Divine Savior Himself, 'Come you blessed one and possess
the kingdom of heaven...'" Sister M. Madeleva Wolff of
Saint Mary's at Notre Dame wrote to Teresa Gallagher to
say that Dooley had spent his finest hours by bearing the
suffering "in his members" (referring to the cancer,
which finally killed him).
From 1956 through 1959, the IRC funded MEDICO,
Dooley's clinic operations in Laos. MEDICO was never
simply Dooley's private apostolate. Through its board and
its connections with Washington foreign aid sources and
later with the CIA, it was bigger than Dooley. Yet it
also relied on Dooley's star-power. During sorties back
to the States he undertook fabulously successful
fundraising events. In Boston, Billy Sullivan, new owner
of the fledgling Patriots football club, presented Dooley
with a sterling silver tray. "Let's fill it," he
challenged the audience, and people rushed up to litter
the tray with bills of large denominations. On November
16, 1959, Dooley gave a memorable address at Hollywood
High School, sponsored by Immaculate Heart College in Los
Angeles. The audience was overwhelmingly Catholic,
including the actresses, Jeannette MacDonald and Eleanor
Powell, both known for their commitment to Catholic
causes. "We are not interested in conversions," said
Dooley, casting an eye toward the president of IHM. "I
have no desire, dear Sister, to make any of my happy
little Buddhist monks into mackerel-snapping Irish
Catholics." The audience roared in shock and delight,
evidently aware, as Fisher correctly observes, that they
were also praying at the end of Mass for the conversion
of Russia and "the pagans" in communist dominated
countries in Asia.
Dooley's ability to combine cold war piety, yet also
catch the wave of what would become post-conciliar
religious indifferentism was a high-wire act in 1959. At
the outset of the address at Hollywood High School, he
had begun with imprecations to "the glory of God and St.
Therese," yet, as Fisher suggests, his audience was also
ready for "another message," one that would be fixed on
his star-power, while putting in low-key any
missiological responsibilities to the non-Christian
world. Here, Dooley presages a theme which would recur
throughout the '60s and '70s in Catholic circles; the
triumph of an active life, unhinged from doctrinal and
spiritual fonts. Surely, Dooley could not be labelled an
"activist apostate," as many of his co-religionists would
be in the late '60s; his faith, although warring was not
yet his persona as a celebrity quite possibly served to
fill a vacuum where the security of belief ought to have
been.
In 1959, Dooley underwent surgery for malignant
melanoma. A mole had been removed from his chest in 1957,
but by 1959 the cancer had metastasized. By this time the
IRC had decided to part company with MEDICO, a decision
motivated as much by internal problems within its
membership, as by Dooley's unpredictability. Yet Tom's
faithful, led by Teresa Gallagher (now being paid by Met
Life to be Dooley's secretary) and Paul Hellmuth, a
Catholic and Boston lawyer from the prestigious firm of
Hale and Doer, sought to help him to continue the work,
relying on providence and the charisma of the now-ailing
doctor. Dooley died on January 18, 1961 at Memorial
Hospital in New York. Cardinal Spellman had visited him
the day before, leaving with tears in his eyes. Kennedy
would shortly sound the call for The Peace Corps and
invoke Dooley's memory.
In 1970, a priest began a movement to press for his
canonization. It never achieved lift off. No doubt it
would have given work to any number of Devils Advocates.
Of course, the stalled canonization movement was in many
respects a tribute to the Church, that in the matter of
saint-making things proceed quietly, not by the engine of
Madison Avenue. Not that this dead end would, itself,
deny the good that Dr. Tom Dooley did. He was genuinely
loved by the Laotian people, who dubbed him Thanh Mo
America, Dr. America. And this love was definitely
returned by Dooley. For all his vainglory, and
self-centeredness, he did set personal high standards for
MEDICO physicians, and sought to make of his Operation
Laos, a people to people project. He serves, in a strange
way, as a morality tale about the Catholic self-promoter.
Having given a thousand performances before audiences all
over the world, he died having failed to achieve any
lasting, personal intimacy with others. His iconic role
was a substitute for the homelier task of real
friendship. Today, we see many lesser Catholic
self-promoters, who can only dream about the corridors of
power that Dooley travelled. Presidents, future popes,
and premiers wanted to talk to Tom Dooley. Yet if the
Jungle Doctor is today reduced to the marginalia
of history (not to slight this excellent biography),
where will those lesser promoters be remembered?
The book sheds much light on the interstices between
the humanitarian lobbyists and their organizations and
the State Department and foreign service professionals
that Dooley reserved his special ire. Fisher provides
some needed revisionist history on the origins of U.S.
involvement in South Vietnam and the sponsorship of Ngo
Dinh Diem. Taking issue with the New Left variant, that
the war was the product of the machinations of Cardinal
Spellman and the U.S. foreign policy elites, Fisher
reveals the web of old left anti-communists, themselves
anti- Catholic in many respects, who attempted to build
an ecumenical coalition to support the Catholic president
of what they hoped would become a secular, pluralist,
democracy in Southeast Asia. The question in all of this
remains: were Catholics duped by the anti- communist
agenda of people like Leo Cherne and Angier Biddle Duke?
Was Vietnam a staging ground, not for a Christian
confrontation with Communism but for the implementation
of a pluralist democracy by foreign aid elites with
impeccable liberal and socialist pedigrees?
In Fisher's telling it, what might be called the
"Catholic interest" was bent to serve the coalition of
New Leader-type liberals. Dooley's non-denominational
appeal was central in advancing this agenda, since the
kind of power base that Leo Cherne wanted to establish
would hardly have occurred if a markedly Catholic
presence obtained.
Reviewed by James Sullivan
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