In addition to salvaging Greene’s novel for the western cause in the Cold War, the Vietnam Lobby helped Lansdale rehabilitate Tom Dooley, turning him from (in the words of his biographer) “potential sex criminal to secular saint.”52 This act was not entirely disinterested: as a well-known Catholic, Dooley was capable of giving the Jewish and “WASP-ish” liberal intellectuals of the IRC and AFV an appeal to heartland conservatives they would otherwise have lacked. Judging by the audiences who flocked to Dooley’s speaking engagements during the promotional tour for
as his new patron, Dooley now settled into a routine of long spells in the Laotian jungle treating hill tribespeople, most of whom had not seen a westerner, let alone a doctor, before, punctuated by frenetic fund-raising tours in the United States. So effective was he as a front man for the International Rescue Committee that, unlike the Navy, the IRC was prepared to turn a blind eye to his sexuality, even paying the bills for his assignations at the Waldorf-Astoria, his favorite New York hotel.53
It is clear now that Dooley’s hospital operated in part as a military intelligence-gathering operation: whenever the doctor returned to the United States, he was debriefed by CIA officers eager for information about communist troop movements and popular attitudes in Laos.54 However, as with Passage to Freedom, it would be simplistic to reduce Dooley’s role to mere espionage. Lansdale was again in the background, helping the medic and his team of corpsmen get established in Vang Vieng, first by in-
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tervening in Saigon through Anne Miller, the wife of his friend, information officer Hank Miller, “to straighten out their personal affairs” (Dooley
“had homosexual tendencies and his team got mad at him personally,”
Lansdale explained later, “and there were fights and I had to straighten that out”), then by delegating his deputy in charge of Operation Brotherhood, Rufus Phillips, to arrange strategic support for the new clinic.55
“Operation Laos” had two main psy-war targets. One was ordinary Laotians: as Dooley explained in a frank and revealing prospectus for the IRC, his aim was not only to provide medical care but also to “illustrate to these people some of the nature, principles, and achievements of America, and especially to show them that we are anxious to help them on a person-to-person basis, at the grass-root level of diplomacy.” Medicine was in this sense merely an “instrument” for demonstrating the benefits of “democratic ideals” to Asians, along with other American artifacts that Dooley intended to show the villagers, such as baseball, a Sears Roebuck catalog, and Disney cartoons (it was perhaps not coincidental that Lansdale had earlier made similar use of Disney in the Philippines).56 The fact that Dooley became known in Laos as “Thanh Mo America,” or “Dr. America,” suggests that this objective was at least partly accomplished.
Although not stated in the prospectus, the other intended audience for Operation Laos was back home in the United States. Shortly after his arrival in Vang Vieng, Dooley began recording weekly commentaries that were shipped to St. Louis and broadcast by CBS radio station KMOX.
Entitled
who was ready to do a needed job in a foreign land for nothing more than prayerful thanks”—the radio series cemented Dooley’s crossover reputation as both Catholic folk hero and exemplary young American.57 The image was a carefully constructed one, but it drew energy from the same spontaneous sense of internationalist idealism that animated the student activists of Gloria Steinem’s Independent Research Service. “The children were electrified!” recalled a Sacred Heart nun about Dooley’s visit to
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