his old St. Louis school. “I really felt he was like a Pied Piper, and they would all have followed him out of the front door if we had not directed them elsewhere!”58
Dazzling though public performances of the Dooley persona undoubtedly were, behind the scenes serious difficulties were emerging. Fears that the cause of his “resignation” from the Navy might be exposed, perhaps as a result of a deliberate leak by enemies in the CIA, constantly haunted Dooley. His health took a sudden turn for the worse in August 1959, when a lump in his chest was diagnosed as malignant melanoma, an especially aggressive form of cancer. Meanwhile, organizational problems threatened to wreck Dooley’s plans to extend his overseas medical empire. A personal rift between him and Peter Comanduras, the man brought in to run MEDICO while Dr. America was in the field practicing, drained the venture of valuable energy and goodwill. The IRC, too, was proving a less than ideal sponsor, partly because it demanded constant public endorsement from Dooley in return for its patronage, and partly because the Vietnam Lobby had begun to argue internally over the question of support for the increasingly autocratic Diem, with leftists such as Norman Thomas quitting the American Friends of Vietnam in protest and even true believers such as Buttinger starting to entertain doubts.59 Edward Lansdale was disgusted by this wavering, describing the non-communist left intellectuals around the AFV (and, by implication, the IRC) as “a group of dilettantes” and “Madison Avenue eggheads.”60 By 1960, the IRC had severed its ties with MEDICO and withdrawn from its other Asian commitments, which were now turned over to the care of the Asia Foundation.61
At this point, there appeared in Dooley’s life the last in a line of patrons with covert connections to the CIA. Paul Hellmuth was a Catholic lawyer from Boston who acted as sole trustee of the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, and was cotrustee of the Independence Foundation, two of the Agency’s main conduits to the National Student Association. He also helped create, and later ran, Anderson Security, a CIA front company with ties to the Nixon administration that specialized in debugging offices and shredding sensitive documents. It was in the fall of 1959 that Hellmuth became Dooley’s attorney and, in short order, most trusted confidant. While it seems reasonable to assume that, in doing so, he was acting at the behest of the CIA, it is only fair to note also that he was sincerely impressed by his new charge’s ability to inspire humanitarianism in others, even proposing a program he called “The Transmigration of
C AT H O L I C S
181
Dooleyites” to send young American aid workers abroad in a scheme similar to the Peace Corps created by the Kennedy administration.62 Whatever his motivation, Hellmuth proved a most dedicated manager of the young medic’s affairs, arranging everything from the supply of office furni-ture for MEDICO to the purchase of personal gifts on his behalf.63 “All we had to do was indicate a need, and somehow he found a way to fill it,” remembered one of Dooley’s assistants, Teresa Gallagher.64 A sort of lay priest in his private life, Hellmuth also brought about a closer relationship between the jungle doctor and the influential president of Notre Dame, Father Theodore Hesburgh, who in June 1960 presided over a graduation ceremony at which Dooley received a honorary doctorate from his alma mater, stealing the show from other honorees such as President Eisenhower and Cardinal Montini, the future Pope Paul VI.
Hellmuth, though, was powerless in the face of Dooley’s cancer, which by December 1960 had spread to every part of his body. The doctor confronted his illness with typical bravado, continuing to work furiously hard and even agreeing to the filming of a CBS documentary,