Research Catalog

Dr. America : the lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961

Title: Dr. America : the lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 / James T. Fisher.
Author: Fisher, James Terence.
Publication: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [1997], ©1997.

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Item details
Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	R722.32.D66 F57 1997	Off-site

Description

x, 304 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations; 25 cm.

Summary

This book chronicles the life of Tom Dooley, the American doctor whose much-publicized exploits in Vietnam and Laos during the 1950s helped lay the ideological groundwork for the U.S. military intervention a decade later.
The scion of an upper-middle-class St. Louis family, Dooley was an enormously complex and fascinating individual. He was a devoutly religious Roman Catholic as well as self-styled playboy socialite, a devoted physician to the poor and a tireless propagandist for the "Vietnam Lobby," a shameless self-promoter and a closeted homosexual, a victim of Navy persecution and a beneficiary of CIA support.
Dooley first gained notoriety as a young Navy doctor charged with overseeing the evacuation of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam in the wake of the 1954 Geneva Accords. His celebrity grew after his book Deliver Us from Evil, a fervently anticommunist account of his experiences, was serialized in Reader's Digest. By the end of the decade, as his name became associated (albeit mistakenly) with a ballad popularized by the Kingston Trio, he had achieved the status of "America's first pop star saint.".
In addition to exposing the roots of the Vietnam War, Dooley's story illuminates a broad range of developments in post-World War II United States culture - from the "Americanization" of Catholicism to the rise of the mass media.

Series Statement

Culture, politics, and the cold war

Uniform Title

Culture, politics, and the Cold War.

Alternative Title

Doctor America

Subject

Bibliography (note)

ISBN

1558490671 (alk. paper)

LCCN

96048652

OCLC

ocm35849153

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries