American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Read Online Free Page A

his initial drafts, Dooley got essential support from William Lederer, a writer and former navy officer with close contacts to the CIA and Reader’s Digest
.
Lederer persuaded a group of
Reader’s Digest
editors to listen to Dooley’s stories. Captivated by his accounts, they proceeded to whip his manuscript into a publishable Cold War parable of good versus evil.
    Deliver Us From Evil
first appeared as a condensation in
Reader’s Digest
, which was then the nation’s largest-circulation magazine, with five million American subscribers. The
Digest
also helped Dooley secure a contract for a longer edition of the book with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. In multiple printings it sold more than a million copies. While now gathering dust in libraries and used-book stores,
Deliver Us From Evil
was one of the most widely read books about Vietnam ever written. And many who did not read the book nevertheless knew about Tom Dooley because he was a master of TV-age communication and self-promotion.
    There were, for starters, the hundreds of speeches. Describing a talk to high school students, Dooley writes: “I gave them the whole sordid story of the refugee camps, the Communist atrocities, the ‘Passage to Freedom,’ and the perilous future of southern Viet Nam. I talked for an hour—you can see I was getting to be quite a windbag—and you could have heard a pin drop.” That was only the beginning. By the end of 1956, Dooley had returned to Southeast Asia, this time as a civilian doctor, to offer medical care from small, modest clinics in the remote, rural countryside of Laos. From Laos, Dooley taped weekly radio broadcasts that reached tens of millions of listeners throughout the American Midwest. And by 1959 he had written two more best-selling books about his experiences. His fame soared. Americans began to think of him as a “jungle doctor” like the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the Franco-German physician whose work in French Equatorial Africa earned him the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
    As lofty as his reputation became, Dooley was not a remote figure. He often returned to the United States for promotional tours, giving speeches and appearing on TV shows like What’s My Line
?
,
This Is Your Life
, and Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show
. Charismatic, handsome, and articulate, Dooley knew how to blend irreverence and religiosity, pop culture and piety, self-deprecation and admonition. He could be charming and funny even when his subjects were troubling. While
Deliver Us From Evil
tells an exodus story of slavery to freedom in which Dooley is a kind of Moses, the doctor’s persona was more like that of a happy-go-lucky pied piper than the scary, serious Moses played by Charlton Heston in
The Ten Commandments
, a hugely popular film that appeared in 1956, the same year
Deliver Us From Evil
was published.
    By the end of the 1950s, Dooley was, in effect, America’s poster boy for foreign service, just the kind of figure Senator John Kennedy had in mind when he proposed the Peace Corps during his 1960 presidential bid. The idea had been percolating for years (and even proposed in Congress), but Kennedy had not yet endorsed it. He and some of his aides worried that Republican candidate Richard Nixon might attack the plan as a naive and ineffectual approach to the Cold War.
    On October 13, 1960, JFK squared off with Nixon in their third of four televised debates. As usual, they argued about who would be a tougher and more effective opponent of Communism. Much of the debate focused on the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, a few miles off the coast of China. Would the United States defend the islands in the event of a Red Chinese attack? Nixon said yes. Kennedy said yes too (but only if the attack included a direct threat to Taiwan). In those early Cold War years, Americans were learning that any spot on the globe, no matter how obscure or previously unknown, might suddenly be proclaimed crucial to national security.
    Though their