Dr. America.

Dr. America The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 James T. Fisher University of Massachusetts Press, $29.95, 293 pp.

I am perhaps uniquely ill-qualified to review Dr. America, for I know the author, but not the subject. Knowing the author is a matter of pleasurable coincidence: My time teaching at Yale overlapped with Jim Fisher's. Not knowing the subject, Dr. Tom Dooley, seems to be a consequence of my age (though I'm happy to admit ignorance as well). As an informal poll of friends and acquaintances taught me, for general readers under the age of forty, familiarity with the "myth" upon which Fisher's analysis depends is not a given. My husband, four years older than I, recalls the potted hagiography of Dr. Dooley in CCD materials; but even in a Catholic hospital, according to a medical informant, young physicians may not know of the once famous "jungle doctor."

Fully to enjoy Fisher's detailed biography of the "lives" of Dr. Dooley, one must know at the outset what I had to construct for myself as I went along. So, for the benefit of readers who know the late 1950s only through history books, movies, and "Happy Days" episodes: The myth of Dr. Tom Dooley celebrates a charismatic, selfless young physician who cared for Indochinese refugees and Lao villagers before tragically and prematurely dying of malignant melanoma. This Dr. Dooley published three popular narratives about his experiences (Deliver Us from Evil, The Edge of Tomorrow, and The Night They Burned the Mountain), espoused a pragmatic anticommunism, and raised a huge amount of money and popular support for relief organizations. In the Saint Louis area (Dooley's home), one might have heard him on the radio; on television he must have been hard to miss. Handsome, lively, Catholic, and above all American, Dooley represented the opposite of Lederer and Burdick's Ugly American. Two overlapping cults--one secular, one Catholic--grew up around the man Lao villagers called "Dr. America."

But what is a hero without detractors? If Fisher assumes that we all know the first Dr. Dooley, he also hopes that we are aware of the debunked and discredited Dooley. That charming, red-blooded American who frequently remarked that he enjoyed pinching the bottoms of young ladies was, in fact, a promiscuous homosexual. His resignation from the Navy was prompted by an investigation of his indiscretions. His writings, his book tours, and even the relief organizations he served as a glamorous spokesperson were entangled with CIA operations. He was a compulsive liar. And even his medical work has been questioned.

Though Fisher has local quibbles with the elements of these two myths--Tom Dooley, secular saint, and Tom Dooley, sinister self-promotor--the virtue of his study lies in its willingness to live with a complicated Dr. Dooley who was both admirable and distasteful. Rather than proffering the two versions and assuring us that the real Tom Dooley lies somewhere in between, Fisher takes Dooley's unceasing storytelling (some would call it lying) and presents us a "shape-shifter" who could be any number of Dooleys for any number of occasions. Along the way, Fisher fills in the contexts for each of the prominent versions of Dooley, which makes the book a rich experience for readers interested in cold-war America, intelligence history, 1950s' Catholicism, the roots of widespread American interest in Vietnam, and the entanglement of pop culture (TV, Reader's Digest) and foreign policy. Though it seems ludicrous to me that "the rakish Irishman" Tom Dooley could really have prepared Americans to elect John F. Kennedy, as Fisher suggests at the end of his book, it is surely the case that the ideal of service embodied by Dooley inspired Kennedy in the founding of the Peace Corps. So what if he was really a weirdo obsessed with performing "emergency circumcisions"; an exploiter who, to make an impression on visitors, was ready to trot out a Lao villager who had been mauled by a bear; and a jerk who was prone to embarrassing waitresses by announcing that he could tell they were menstruating? Yuck!

Though Fisher suppresses none of the unflattering details, and is prepared to make grand claims for Dooley's significance, it is striking that, in this exhaustively researched and densely informative book, he does not comment on the area where one might expect Dooley to have had a lasting legacy: medicine. Perhaps because Dooley barely escaped medical school with a degree, after repeating his final year, Fisher regards the medical man as the most vulnerable of the many Dr. Dooleys he scrutinizes. But surely this Dooley matters: He inspired doctors to seek alternatives to a Park Avenue practice, a legacy which is effective today whether young physicians know him or not. Ill-prepared as I was to appreciate Fisher's complication of Dooley's character, I did not find Dr. America an easy read. But the story caught me in chapter 2, when Dooley finds his vocation(s) in Indochina. Commonweal readers who remember Tom Dooley may find this study engrossing from the start.

Suzanne Keen teaches English at Washington & Lee University.