594BOOK REVIEWS Suzanne Rini is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer who was working on another book about Rice at the same time I was. Her manuscript focused exclusively on his role in expelling the left from the labor movement, and in her portrait Rice was a scoundrel. She has complained to me that Rice intervened to forestall her attempts to find a publisher. To my knowledge, her work remains unpublished today. Now McCollester's effort, the friendliest one so far, has emerged with a long list of financial contributors to the publication project. Thus scholarship on Rice's life seems to have succeeded in proportion as it tells the story in terms flattering to its subject. Television viewers may be reminded of the plight ofthe show "Nothing Sacred," which has created a firestorm of criticism from the Catholic hierarchy and some laity, by depicting life in an American Catholic parish in ways that are sometimes irreverent and unflattering. In biography, there will always be a tension between the search for heroes and the quest for accuracy. Where does scholarship on the life of Charles Owen Rice go from here? Deeper, I hope. None of us who has attempted so far to tell the story of Rice's life has been a professional historian (McCollester was trained as a philosopher, I as a political scientist). But Rice's importance to the history of his time and place merits the attentions of such a professional. I hope he receives them. Patrick J. McGeever Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley 1927-1961. By James T. Fisher. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 304. $25.95.) Thomas Anthony Dooley, III, interrupted studies at the University of Notre Dame to serve briefly as a Navy hospital corpsman and in 1953 graduated in medicine at Saint Louis University. After internship in Navy hospitals and "special duty" in southeastAsia, ostensibly to collect epidemiologic data, he resigned from the Navy in March, 1956, to avoid court martial for buggery. Immediately transfigured into a "Jungle Doctor," he was carefully packaged as ? celebrity hook into the Irish Catholic subculture. This book tells little about his medical practice, which approximated that of the medics who did the work during the five years when Dooley wrote three best-selling books, toured the United States to raise money, collected honorary degrees from Holy Cross and Notre Dame, and relaxed in homosexual purlieux from Bangkok to Manhattan. This jungle surgeon confined himself to emergency circumcisions although acute balanoposthitis has, at least since the Civil War, been treated by a simple incision through the dorsal foreskin and, anyhow,Asians typically have short foreskins. BOOK REVIEWS595 What little medical assistance he founded did not survive his well-publicized death from melanoma. The author misses an essential point: Dooley's flaw was not his tedious homosexual promiscuity. His lying, egocentricity, manipulativeness, and lack of close human relationships document a profound psychopathic character disorder . Charming, pretty, and sexually available, he simply had no sense ofright and wrong. Psychological rationalization of unacceptable behavior not very uncommonly assumes a super-righteous, sometimes super-patriotic, facade that can end in fantasy. Dooley's fair-haired status among parochial sectarians protected him from the less forgiving conservative Protestant establishment that he so much resented. Morally rootless, Dooley served a bizarre confederacy ranging from the messianic liberal left through public relations firms and the Vietnam lobby to Cardinal Spellman, all eager to involve the United States in Southeast Asia. He gladly proved useful to Diem's handlers. His stateside public persona—"Blessed Thomas of Laos"—precluded control and his role in getting at least Irish Catholics (and, therefore, Democrats) to support the American disaster in Vietnam remains murky. He certainly helped to focus Catholic hatred on Asian communists, but the State Department and CIA loathed and mistrusted him. The author hints at but does not document some vast gay network involving the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Catholic Church; nudges and winks are not scholarship. Balance required more attention to what other superpatriots contributed to anticommunist hatred, and why. This book required tighter editing than it got, and it is not clear what it...
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Sep 15, 2023
Ahmed Keirallah Hussein 
Open Access
