In Daniel Redmond’s oral history, (Patriots, p. 47-50) he invokes Thomas A. Dooley as the principal author of America's anti-communist sentiment toward Ho Chi Minh's national party. Dooley, a US navy doctor who wrote Deliver Us from Evil, believed the people of Vietnam were suffering under communism and it was the United States moral duty to assistance them in fighting the communist. Dooley, as a self proclaimed expert on Indochina, is readily sort after by the news media for his views. The relatively new phenomenon of television is helping spread anti-communism very quickly. News anchors are still journalist with trusted reputations for bring the truth to our living rooms. So, when an expert like Dooley comes along with very strong credentials Americans are eager to except his vision of the conflict in Vietnam as the truth. But, there are always two sides to a story and Daniel Redmond explains why he thought Dooley had got it all wrong.
“But, frankly, I thought Deliver Us from Evil was a piece of shit. When I read it I almost threw it across the room I was so mad. I kept finding inaccuracies and he really laid on the Communist stuff. Tom was given to exaggeration and to me it was symbolized by a picture in that book of a young Vietnamese guy on the street in Haiphong who was very deformed. The caption said he was the victim of Ho Chi Minh’s torturers. I used to see that guy every day. He was no more a victim of Communist torture than I was.”
A good post. There was a lot of Cold War propaganda that painted the communists as monsters and the South Vietnamese as valiant warriors for democracy. Communist propaganda was not any more accurate.
Posted by: A. Mattson | 09/24/2008 at 21:39