A. Dooley died of cancer on January 18, 1961—one day after
his 34th birthday and two days before the inauguration of America's
first Catholic president—a Gallup poll ranked him third among
the world's "most esteemed men," right behind Dwight Eisenhower
and the Pope. A typically effusive editorial tribute to the famed
"jungle doctor of Asia" proclaimed: "Tom Dooley is
survived by his mother, two brothers, and three billion members
of the human race who are infinitely richer for his example."
Monsignor George G. Gottwald, who delivered the eulogy at the Pontifical
Requiem Mass for Dooley, compared him to Christ, noting that "the
greatest life that was ever lived was 33 years. Dr. Dooley was 34."
Congress posthumously awarded Dooley the Medal of Honor, President
Kennedy gave him the Medal of Freedom, and a popular groundswell
built to have the doctor canonized. In all, the nationwide paroxysm
of grief that greeted news of Dooley's demise was a fitting response
to the death of the man whom many Americans had come to regard as
a modern-day saint.
Within a decade, however, Dooley was all but forgotten. His books,
which sold millions of copies during his lifetime, disappeared from
stores and gathered dust on library shelves. Hollywood studios had
plans to make a film of his life, but nothing came of them. Campaigns
to promote the cause of Dooley's sanctity in the Roman Catholic
Church fizzled. The maxim about all glory being fleeting is applicable
to the whole of modern American culture, but rarely more poignantly
than to Tom Dooley.
There are several reasons for Dooley's fall into obscurity. First
of all, he left no lasting monument to his life's work. The Medical
International Cooperation Organization (MEDICO) that he founded
proved dependent on Dooley's charisma for money; it collapsed within
a year of his passing. Another determinant was his sexuality—never
completely hidden but only a matter of public record after his death.
One of Dooley's classmates at Saint Louis University High School
recalls a teacher's lesson that "homosexuality is something
that only happens in hell," an indication of how gay men and
women were viewed by many Americans at mid-century, to say nothing
of the conservative Catholic circles from which Dooley drew his
staunchest support. Post-obit revelations that the wholesome "Dr.
Tom" was not only gay but promiscuously so undoubtedly contributed
to his erasure from collective memory.
But probably the most significant reason for Americans' amnesia
with regard to Dooley was the Vietnam War. No one played a larger
role than Dooley did in moving Vietnam to the forefront of public
concern in the United States. For millions of Americans, his 1956
book Deliver Us from Evil was their introduction to Vietnam.
Dooley's graphic accounts of communist atrocities against Christians
profoundly influenced American attitudes toward a country that few
policymakers would have been able to locate on a map at the onset
of the 1950s, but which had become the logical testing ground of
U.S. credibility in the Cold War as the following decade dawned.
Dooley, of course, did not "cause" the Vietnam War, but
he did influence the body of information that was available when
war began, and he—more than anyone else—managed to make
a large segment of the American public care passionately about preserving
South Vietnam from communist tyranny.
Dooley first traveled to Southeast Asia in 1954, assigned to the
U.S. Navy's program of aid in transporting North Vietnamese refugees.
The Geneva Accords sealed by the French and the communist Viet Minh
in July of that year had provisionally divided Vietnam at the 17th
parallel and specified that all Vietnamese who wished to relocate
either north or south would be permitted 300 days to do so. Almost
a million Northerners--nearly all of them Catholics from the Hanoi
Delta--chose to migrate below the parallel, and the United States
organized a task force of some 50 ships to help transport them.
Dooley, then a 26-year-old Navy lieutenant, was put in charge of
building refugee assembly camps in Hanoi and of providing their
medical services. He and his fellow officers waged a furious campaign
to stamp out contagious diseases before the hordes of exiles boarded
the Navy's vessels.
After returning to the United States, Dooley published an account
of his experiences, first in condensed form in Reader's Digest
and then as Deliver Us from Evil. It caused a sensation,
becoming the great early bestseller on Vietnam. Nothing until
The Pentagon Papers in the summer of 1971 received comparable
readership. Racist and sketchy in the extreme on the complexities
of Vietnamese culture and politics, Deliver Us from Evil
nonetheless retains a capacity to affect the reader on a visceral
level that gives some hint of how powerful its impact must have
been in 1956. Dooley's description of a Vietnamese teenager whose
legs were pounded by rifle butts—"the feet and ankles
felt like moist bags of marbles"—still provokes a shudder.
His purported quotation of a communist radio broadcast can still
rankle: "This is an American. His head is a blockhouse. His
beard is barbed wire. His eyes are bombs. His forehead is a nest
of artillery and his body is an airfield."
It was the atrocity stories in Deliver Us from Evil that
attracted the most attention and commentary. Dooley told of how
the Viet Minh jammed chopsticks into the ears of children to keep
them from hearing the Lord's Prayer, cut off the tongue of a religious
instructor whom they accused of preaching "heresy," and
pounded nails into the head of a Catholic priest—"a communist
version of the crown of thorns, once forced on the Saviour of whom
he preached." Catholic priests, Dooley wrote, were by far the
most frequent targets of Viet Minh terror. He claimed to have discovered
one priest whom the communists had left "a mass of blackened
flesh from the shoulders to the knees. The belly was hard and distended
and the scrotum swollen to the size of a football."
Critics accused Dooley of manufacturing his Vietnamese Grand Guignol
out of whole cloth, but these charges only became public decades
after his death. Six U.S. officials who were stationed in the Hanoi-Haiphong
area during Dooley's tour of duty submitted a lengthy, albeit secret,
exposé to the U.S. Information Agency in 1956 in which they
held that Deliver Us from Evil was "not the truth"
and that the accounts of Viet Minh atrocities were "nonfactual
and exaggerated." The report was declassified in the late 1980s.
William J. Lederer, author of the Cold War bestseller The Ugly
American and, as Dooley's mentor, the man who prevailed upon
Reader's Digest to publish Dooley's story, told the journalist
Diana Shaw in 1991 that the atrocities the doctor described "never
took place." Even more persuasive were statements by Norman
Baker, who served as a corpsman under Dooley's command in Vietnam
and who told Shaw that he never saw anything like the gruesome spectacles
detailed in Deliver Us from Evil.
Nonetheless, Dooley tapped into powerful emotional currents in 1950s
America, which was experiencing a massive religious revival inextricably
bound up with the anxieties of the Cold War. It was not difficult
for Americans at the time to believe that "godless" communists had
committed such fiendish acts, and Dooley's horror stories only confirmed
the widespread perception, memorably articulated by evangelist Billy
Graham, that communism was "inspired, directed, and motivated by
the devil himself, who has declared war on Almighty God."
Young, idealistic, and (conveniently) very handsome, Dooley became
a genuine superstar, commanding top-tier lecture fees and receiving
thousands of fan letters a day. The Navy doctor's Catholicism, which
might have limited his appeal in an earlier era, worked to his advantage
during the Eisenhower years, when—as Charles R. Morris, James
T. Fisher, Patrick Allitt, and other scholars have demonstrated—Catholicism
was synonymous with 100 percent Americanism. Dooley wisecracked
during a 1959 fund-raising tour for his clinic in Laos that he was
uniquely qualified to match wits with communist guerrillas "because
I was educated by the Jesuits," and his largely non-Catholic
audience roared its approval. For American Catholics, the 1950s
were halcyon days. Catholics' anti-communist credentials looked
impeccable in waging Cold War, and there was no more charismatic
Cold Warrior than "Dr. Tom."
Dooley's popularity was at its zenith when he died in a New York
hospital on the eve of Kennedy's Camelot. JFK capitalized on the
torrent of publicity attending the doctor's final days; in proposing
the creation of the Peace Corps, Kennedy cited "the selfless example
of Tom Dooley." Few would have argued in 1961 that Dooley's career
furnished a fitting example for energetic and idealistic Americans
Years later, with the United States mired in a seemingly unwinnable
conflict in Vietnam and the divisions in American society more pronounced
than at any time since the Civil War, matters looked different.
In a stinging 1969 article for the Catholic magazine The Critic,
Nicholas von Hoffman called Dooley "too preposterous a figure for
youth to identify with" and blamed the doctor's "ethnocentric fusion
of piety and patriotism" for helping to create "a climate of public
misunderstanding that made the war in Vietnam possible." Dooley,
von Hoffman charged, "contributed to the malformation of our knowledge
and moral judgments about Southeast Asia" by depicting the region's
conflicts in simple terms of good versus evil. Such "muddled, primitive
political thinking" had led to a war that ravaged America's spirit
and squandered the immense moral capital the United States had accumulated
by defeating the fascists in World War II. Von Hoffman predicted
that "eight years hence, Tom Dooley will appear so bizarre, . .
. so much a defunct social type, that no one will make the effort
to remember him."
This forecast proved accurate. None of the major histories of the
Vietnam War published from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s
mentions Dooley's name. But interest in Dooley has revived in recent
years among scholars seeking a fuller understanding of why the United
States expended so much blood and treasure in an area of such apparent
strategic and economic insignificance. Traditional balance-of-power
and materialist interpretations having failed to render the Vietnam
War intelligible, historians are now employing categories of analysis
traditionally consigned to "social history"—like
race and gender. The meteoric career of Tom Dooley suggests another
vital, hitherto unexplored dimension of America's longest and most
divisive war: religion.
Seth Jacobs, an assistant professor of history at Boston College,
teaches courses on the Vietnam War and the Cold War.
Photo: Tom Dooley in Vietnam, in an undated photo.