How the U.S. Navy Sold the Vietnam War
Dr. Tom Dooley. (YouTube screen shot)
Dr. Tom Dooley, whose best-selling book "Deliver Us From Evil" helped create
a favorable climate of opinion for U.S. intervention in South Vietnam, has
long been linked to legendary CIA officer Edward G. Lansdale and his black
operations in Vietnam between 1954 and 1955. But the real story about
Dooley's influential book, which has finally emerged from more recent
scholarly research, is that it was engineered by an official of the U.S.
Navy's Pacific Command, Capt. William Lederer.
Lederer is best known as the co-author, with Eugene Burdick, of the 1958
novel "The Ugly American," which was turned into a 1963 movie starring
Marlon Brando. Far more important, however, is the fact that from 1951
through 1957 Capt. Lederer was on the staff of the commander in chief of the
U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), Adm. Felix Stump.
The Pacific Command was intensely interested in Dooley, because the U.S.
Navy had the greatest stake of all the military services in the outcome of
the conflict between the communists and U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes
in Vietnam and China during the mid-1950s. And the Pacific Command was
directly involved in the military planning for war in both cases.
Adm. Arthur Radford, the former CINCPAC and then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, led the senior officials pressing President Dwight D.
Eisenhower to approve a massive U.S. airstrike against the Viet Minh at Dien
Bien Phu in April 1954. And between 1954 and 1955, Adm. Stump called for
increasing the size of the Nationalist Chinese raids on the Chinese mainland
from offshore islands. He also pushed for a U.S. attack on the mainland,
including the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend those same
offshore islands.
Capt. Lederer met Dooley in Haiphong, Vietnam, in 1954 after the Navy
launched "Operation Passage to Freedom" to help transport more than 300,000
Vietnamese civilians, soldiers and members of the French Army from the
French-controlled North to Saigon. A CIA psychological warfare team led by
Lansdale had slipped into Hanoi and Haiphong to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh
government takeover and to spread propaganda to provoke fear among Catholics
and other residents.
The key tactic of the Lansdale team was to print a series of "black
propaganda" leaflets-designed to appear as though they came from the Viet
Minh-to frighten residents of the North into leaving for South Vietnam. The
most dramatic such deception involved spreading the rumor that the U.S.
military was going to bomb Hanoi, a story that was further promoted by
leaflets showing concentric circles of destruction of the city by an atomic
bomb.
Lt. Tom Dooley, a young Irish Catholic Navy doctor, was "loaned" by the U.S.
Navy to Lansdale for the operation, although Dooley apparently thought the
team's function was to gather intelligence. Dooley's job was ostensibly to
manage medical supplies needed for the movement of North Vietnamese to the
South, but in fact Dooley functioned as the team's propagandist, briefing
visiting news media and sending out out reports through Catholic media in
the United States that supported the CIA's anti-Viet Minh mission.
Lederer quickly recognized Dooley as a potentially valuable propaganda asset
because of his connection with Vietnamese Catholics and his penchant for
telling tales of Viet Minh atrocities. It was Lederer who suggested that
Dooley write a book about his experiences with North Vietnamese refugees who
wanted to move to the South. The Navy gave him a leave of absence to write
it, and Lederer became Dooley's handler for the project. Dooley was a
charismatic public speaker but needed Lederer's help with writing. Lederer
also introduced Dooley to Reader's Digest-by far the most popular magazine
in America, with 20 million readers. Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke
officially embraced the book and even wrote the introduction to it.
Reader's Digest published a highly condensed 27-page version of the book in
its April 1956 edition, and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy immediately published
the full-length version. It became a runaway bestseller, going through
twelve printings.
The book;s constantly reiterated theme of Dooley's book "Deliver Us From
Evil" was that the Ho Chi Minh government was determined to suppress the
Catholic faith in Vietnam and used torture and other atrocities to terrorize
Catholics into submission. That was a grotesque distortion of actual Viet
Minh policy. The Ho Chi Minh government had worked hard from the beginning
of the war to ensure that there was no interference with Catholics' exercise
of their faith, even establishing severe legal penalties on any infringement
of that freedom.
But Dooley's book was full of lurid descriptions of North Vietnamese
Communist atrocities against Catholics that Dooley claimed to have known
about from treating the victims. It told of the Viet Minh having partially
torn off the ears of several teenagers with pliers and left them
dangling-supposedly as punishment for their having listened to the Lord's
Prayer.
And he described the Viet Minh taking seven youths out of their classroom
and forcing wooden chopsticks through their eardrums. The children, he
wrote, had been accused of "treason" for having attended a religious class
at night. As for the teacher, Dooley claimed the Viet Minh had used pliers
to pull out his tongue, as punishment for having taught the religious class.
But it was widely recognized within the U.S. government that these stories
were false. Six U.S. Information Agency officials who had been in North
Vietnam during that period, as well as former Navy corpsmen who had worked
in the Haiphong camp with Dooley, all said they had never heard of any such
events. And in 1992 Lederer himself, who had made 25 fact-finding trips to
Vietnam since 1951, told an interviewer, "[T]hose things never happened. . I
traveled all over the country and never saw anything like them."
Many years later, in an interview with scholar Edward Palm, Lederer
disclaimed any significant influence on the content or tone of Dooley's
book, even though Dooley had credited Lederer with helping put the book in
final form. Lederer also told Palm he didn't remember any such stories
appearing in the first draft of the book he read.
But Palm, who obtained the first draft of the manuscript from Dooley's
papers, confirmed to this writer that the first draft did contain those
stories of atrocities. And Palm's monograph documented the fact that the
last draft chapter was dated the end of July 1955 and that communications
from both men at the time indicated that Lederer had met repeatedly with
Dooley during June and July to help him finish the draft.
Palm also quoted from Dooley's first draft to show that it concluded with a
call for Americans to be ready for a U.S. war against communism. If
negotiations with the Soviet Union failed to bring "lasting peace," Dooley's
draft warned, "Communism will have to be fought with arms . it must be
annihilated.." Dooley concluded, "[T]here can be no concessions, no
compromise and no coexistence."
Palm pointed out that the published version of the book dropped that rabidly
warlike rhetoric and instead introduced a new character named "Ensign Potts"
to represent the view that America must be ready to fight a war to destroy
communism. The role of the "Potts" character was to be converted to Dooley's
argument that service to the ordinary Vietnamese would be the most effective
way to prevail in the Cold War-after Dooley's tearful recounting of the
story of the Viet Minh puncturing the Catholic youths' ears with chopsticks,
reduced "Potts" to tears as well.
Lederer and Burdick popularized the idea that personal kindness to the
people of Southeast Asia from American could help defeat Communism in "The
Ugly American" and that same idea infused Lederer's own March 1955 Reader's
Digest article on the interactions between U.S. sailors and Vietnamese
aboard a U.S. Navy ship. Lederer told Palm in a 1996 interview that he had
suggested that Dooley model his book on that article.
Palm wrote that he didn't believes Lederer's personal preference was to
promote a U.S. war in Vietnam. But Lederer had obviously approved Dooley's
portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as an alien horde terrorizing the
Catholics. Catholics were the fastest-growing religious denomination in
America from 1940 to 1960, during which time their numbers doubled, and
Dooley's message was an obvious way of mobilizing American Catholics to
support Adm. Stump and the Navy's agenda for Vietnam.
Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, who was detailed to the CIA during much of
his career and knew Dooley during the writing of his book, told fellow
former Marine Edward Palm in a 1997 telephone interview, "Dooley was
programmed toward a particular end." He did not say specifically what that
end was, but he appeared to mean building popular support for U.S.
intervention in Vietnam.
While on a nationwide book tour, Dooley was one of the featured speakers at
the first conference of The American Friends of Vietnam-later known as the
"Vietnam Lobby"-in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1956. The meeting was held
at a crucial moment in U.S. Vietnam policy. Eisenhower was still supporting
the election for a government throughout Vietnam as called for by the 1954
Geneva Agreement, with strict conditions for a free vote. Meanwhile,
hardliners in the administration were pushing for opposing that election
outright on the ground that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win it, regardless
of conditions.
Dooley's contribution was to describe "Communism" as an "evil, driving,
malicious ogre" and recount the "hideous atrocities that we witnessed in our
camps every single day." And he retold the story of the Viet Minh punishing
the schoolchildren by puncturing their eardrums.
A few weeks after the meeting, Eisenhower reversed his previous position of
supporting the all-Vietnamese Vietnamese, opening the path to deeper U.S.
political and military intervention in Vietnam.
Dooley had just learned that his secret life as a gay man in the Navy had
been discovered by Naval intelligence, and he was forced to quietly resign.
At Lansdale's suggestion, Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee
helped Dooley establish a primitive medical clinic near the Chinese border
in northern Laos. But Dooley had to agree to cooperate with CIA in Laos by
allowing it to smuggle arms into the site of the clinic to eventually be
distributed to local anti-Communist militiamen.
The Dooley Clinic in Laos helped make him a hugely popular celebrity, with
two more best-selling books, feature stories in popular magazines and
network television appearances. By the time Dooley died of cancer in 1961, a
Gallup Poll found that Americans viewed him as the third most admired person
in the world, after Eisenhower and the pope. But his role in the larger
tragedy of U.S. war in Indochina was to serve as the instrument of a highly
successful campaign by the U.S. Navy to create the first false propaganda
narrative of the conflict-one that has endured for most of Dooley's fans for
decades.
But Dooley's popularity and saintly image increased the power of his tales
of Viet Minh atrocities against Catholics that represented the first major
false U.S. propaganda narrative of the Vietnam conflict-one that helped
build public support for the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam that
began under President John F Kennedy in 1962.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist, historian and
author who has covered U.S. wars and interventions in Iraq, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen and Syria since 2004 and was the 2012.
Gareth Porter
