Given the multifaceted nature of his short career, it is difficult to tell how Dooley’s reputation would have developed had he lived. What is clear, though, is that his untimely death did not enhance his image. In 1963, the threat of financial extinction forced MEDICO, his major concrete legacy, to merge with another relief organization, CARE. Shortly afterward, stories began to appear about his intelligence-gathering activities for the CIA (ironically, the most detailed information emerged in the course of an unsuccessful campaign to have him canonized) and, later, about his sexuality. Where Americans had previously seen a selfless Christian patriot, now they beheld a morally compromised and ethnocentric egotist whose grossly distorted portrayals of Southeast Asia had helped create (to quote journalist Nicholas von Hoffman) “a climate of public misunderstanding that made the war in Vietnam possible.”66
Meanwhile, the Vietnam Lobby that had sponsored Dooley also be-
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came the target of growing suspicion and criticism. Although the International Rescue Committee survived the U.S. disaster in Indochina intact, the American Friends of Vietnam, already weakened by the resignations of Joseph Buttinger and Iron Mike O’Daniel (the latter quit in 1963 after the organization eventually decided to renounce Diem, only weeks before the Vietnamese premier was murdered, with Kennedy administration connivance, in a palace coup), collapsed in 1965, thanks to hostile publicity resulting from the
As for Dooley himself, he remains too complex and ambiguous a figure on which to pronounce any final judgment, although with the sting having gone from the earliest revisionist denunciations of him, it would seem unjust not to acknowledge his extraordinary talents, the hardships he endured helping others, and the unforeseen nature of the massive attitudinal changes that occurred after his death, making actions that once seemed admirable (such as cooperating with the CIA) questionable, if not downright reprehensible.
Patrick J. Peyton had several things in common with Tom Dooley: both were Irish-American Catholics whose overseas missions attracted the secret patronage of the CIA. In other respects, however, the two men were very different. To begin with, Peyton’s upbringing in County Mayo, Ireland, was worlds removed from lace-curtain St. Louis, Missouri. Born the sixth of nine children into a deeply religious but poverty-stricken family, Peyton emigrated to the United States in 1928, at the age of nineteen, settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a janitor in St Joseph’s Cathedral. His interrupted schooling seemed to have wrecked childhood dreams of becoming a priest, but in 1929 that ambition was re-kindled when a mission band from the Holy Cross Congregation, a missionary and educational order whose roots could be traced to revolutionary France, came to Scranton. After returning to school and graduating
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magna cum laude from Notre Dame in 1937, Peyton entered Holy Cross College, a theologate of the Holy Cross Congregation associated with Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Shortly afterward, his hopes appeared to have been dashed again when he was diagnosed with an advanced case of tuberculosis and told that he would likely die unless he underwent radical surgery. Challenged by one of his Notre Dame professors to demonstrate his faith, Peyton prayed to the Virgin Mary—and his lungs began to clear. Having made a full recovery, which he later called “a miraculous healing,” he returned to his studies and became a priest in June 1941.67
If not as dramatic as Paul’s conversion on his way to Damascas, Peyton’s illness was certainly the turning point in his career, similar to the effect that Dooley’s experience in Haiphong had on the Catholic doctor.