17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

(Apparently, when Dooley boasted that the honor was fitting recognition of his heroism in the refugee camps, Lansdale invited him to compare the text of Diem’s citation with other documents produced on his U.S. government-issue typewriter: the script was identical.)20 The irony is that Dooley already believed that he was on a secret mission in Haiphong—

gathering medical intelligence about epidemiological conditions in North

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Vietnam ahead of possible American troop deployments there—when his most valuable function, as far as SMM was concerned, was simply as a front man for Passage to Freedom.21 His biographer, James T. Fisher, even speculates that Dooley had been “loaned” by the Navy to Lansdale and was stationed in the northern port for precisely this purpose.22

It also seems likely that Lansdale was behind the next twist in Dooley’s improbable career: his debut as a best-selling author. There were already hints of the storyteller who would captivate American readers in the ship-board lectures about Passage to Freedom that Dooley periodically gave to U.S. Navy “white-caps” while stationed in Vietnam; according to one officer present, his descriptions of Catholic torture victims drew sobs from even the most “grizzled old bosuns.”23 Dooley’s letters to his mother also sounded occasionally as if they were written with a larger audience in mind.24 However, his first attempt to record his Vietnamese experiences, a manuscript drafted in late 1954 under the unimaginative title “Passage to Freedom,” lacked the verve of his lectures, reading more like an official report to his commanding officers. It was at this point that William Lederer, a Navy public information officer and former submarine skipper, entered the picture, “to handle the polish and publication of the book” (as Dooley explained in a July 1955 letter home).25 Again, it seems unlikely that this was mere coincidence. Lederer knew Lansdale and shared his views on U.S. Cold War diplomacy.26 Indeed, the two men were good friends, having served together in the Philippines, where both displayed an attitude toward bureaucratic red tape that was “irreverent as hell.”27 (Lansdale’s portrait in Lederer and Burdick’s Ugly American as the motorcycle-riding, harmonica-playing, palm-reading “Ragtime Kid” Edwin B. Hillandale was wholly positive—unlike the Pyle character in Greene’s Quiet American. ) There is also evidence suggesting that Lederer was on loan from the Navy to the CIA in June 1955, when he made contact with Dooley: on May 11, 1955 (one day prior to the Lansdale-orchestrated award ceremony in Saigon), Allen Dulles wrote to Admiral Felix Stump, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, requesting that Lederer be made available for a “special assignment.”28

Whatever its inspiration, Lederer’s contribution to Dooley’s publishing success was crucial. In a series of lengthy meetings, the two thrashed out a new draft of “Passage to Freedom” with the more symbolically charged title Deliver Us from Evil. The lifeless prose of the original was replaced with

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an overwrought but compelling first-person narrative emphasizing the author’s moral growth from spoiled adolescent to selfless physician, the childlike gratitude of his patients, and the ghastliness of the injuries inflicted on the Vietminh’s torture victims.29 After helping rewrite the manuscript, Lederer then oversaw its publication, introducing Dooley to the owner of Reader’s Digest, DeWitt Wallace, who immediately offered to carry an abridged version in his magazine, then passed it along to Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, who likewise accepted it on the spot.30 Published in early 1956, Deliver Us from Evil enjoyed unanimous critical praise— The New Yorker, for example, described it as “a moving poem of the human spirit victorious”—and unprecedented sales, eventually going through twenty printings and translation into more languages than any previous book except for the Bible.31 It also helped transform popular attitudes toward the Cold War in Asia, “quite literally locat[ing]

Vietnam on the new world map for millions of Americans” and reducing the conflict there to a straightforward clash between good and evil.32 One historian has described Deliver Us from Evil as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Cold War.”33

It was at just this moment, with the Junior Chamber of Commerce voting him one of the “ten outstanding men of 1956,” that Dooley experienced the first major setback in his career. The young man’s brashness had already aroused the hostility of senior officers in the Navy and the CIA.