He also had a secret: in an age of institutionalized homophobia, when sexual “deviancy” was equated with political subversion, not only was he homosexual, he was also, in the words of James Fisher, “one of the great underground sex symbols of his era—a figure well-known in sophisticated gay circles as far-flung as Hollywood, Washington DC, and the capitals of Southeast Asia.”34 The Office of Naval Intelligence had launched an investigation of Dooley’s private life in 1955. While he was on the road promoting his book early the following year, his telephone calls were bugged, his luggage opened, and his movements scrutinized by spy cameras. Eventually a Marine Corps colonel, William Corson, confronted Dooley with the ONI’s evidence of “dishonorable conduct” (which was considerable).
The Navy doctor, apparently relieved, agreed to resign on the spot, “for the good of the service.” In July, he received a general discharge under less than honorable conditions (later changed to an honorable discharge), but without any of the usual attendant publicity.35
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Dooley’s departure from the Navy might have been hushed up successfully, but it still left him jobless. Enter another ostensibly private player in Cold War Asian politics with hidden official ties: the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC was a very different organization from Dooley’s previous employer. Created by prominent American left-liberals in the 1930s to aid socialists in Nazi Germany (Jay Lovestone was a founding member), by the 1950s it had grown into one of the largest and most prestigious refugee relief organizations in the western world, its attention now focused chiefly on anticommunist exiles from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. At first, the IRC’s involvement in Asia was tentative and halting: in 1951, for example, it resisted urging from U.S. government officials to assume responsibility for the relief of Chinese intellectuals stranded in Hong Kong and Macao.36 In 1954, however, the IRC did heed calls from Harold Stassen of the Foreign Operations Administration (a successor agency to the Marshall Plan’s Economic Cooperation Administration) to intervene in the Vietnamese refugee crisis, dispatching Joseph Buttinger, an émigré Austrian socialist, to Saigon. There Buttinger helped set up several relief programs, including popular cultural associations to host intellectuals displaced from the North, Operation Brotherhood (which the International Rescue Committee cosponsored with the Jaycees), and a local IRC office.
More important, though, was what Buttinger did on his return to the United States. Having become a devoted friend of Diem during his time in Vietnam, he now set about promoting the virtues of the Catholic premier to the American public, giving newspaper interviews, writing articles for such publications as the
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toward non-communist leftists, who appear mistakenly to have perceived Diem as a fellow liberal anticommunist.)39 It would be an exaggeration to say that the “Vietnam Lobby,” as it was christened in a later, hostile