Adorably sweet and noble, a saint-Not according to that LA Times article about him linked above
Excerpts-
He liked to tell people that his middle initial A stood for Anheuser, and that he was a scion of the brewing family. In fact, the A stood for Anthony, and his father was a railroad foundryman, a hard drinker who hoped that his namesake would become a prizefighter.
He was brilliant but had no discipline, attending--but not graduating from--Notre Dame, then staying at the bottom of his class at St. Louis University Medical School, which admitted him on a special waiver. He would have flunked out of medical school if the dean, Melvin Casberg, had not been a family friend, and willing to press the administration board to let Dooley stay.
In Dooley, the Navy found a media magnet. He was not only handsome and eloquent but also confident that vanquishing communism in Asia was a matter of showing people the benefits of the American way of life, and he could express this in a spirited, captivating and infectious way.
The Navy granted him a leave to write his book. Dooley, an ambitious dreamer, soon had visions of parlaying any resulting publicity into a position as Navy surgeon general.
The Navy was prepared to distinguish his accounts with an official imprimatur. But they were not prepared to deal with the discovery that he was a homosexual. That discovery, and the Navy’s threats to expose or censure him, would turn Dooley into a frightened pawn of U.S. policy-makers who were laying the groundwork for U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Together, the Navy and Tom Dooley would create a great American hero--and a great American deception.
FROM THE OUTSET, DOOLEY’S ambition made him a man who was eager to please. And while he may have set out to meticulously record his experiences in “Deliver Us From Evil,” he was encouraged throughout the writing process to make his story more dramatic, something he was happy to do.
The atrocities, he wrote, “seemed almost to have a religious significance. I was accustomed by now to patching up emasculated men and women whose breasts had been mutilated and even little children without fingers or hands. But more and more I was learning that these punishments were linked to the refugees’ belief in God.”
Dooley provided a compelling catalogue of horrors. But, as U.S. officials knew early on, the horrors were completely unsubstantiated. None of Dooley’s correspondence, official or personal, describes the atrocities, that, in his book, he attributes to the communists. There are no corroborating accounts in the war diaries kept by Navy commanders nor in anything Dooley wrote during the operation.
The many letters he had mailed home from Haiphong describe dismal conditions to be expected as a consequence of a protracted war--squalor, disease and battle-related injuries. But there was no mention of atrocities, says Lederer, who now lives in Peacham, Vt., because “those things never happened. "
Perhaps more understandable was the way he exaggerated his own importance in the relief effort--so much so that when his book came out, he became known as “Dr. America.”
Onetime Voice of America reporter Ann Miller of Fountain Valley was one of 50 civil servants who sent a letter to Dooley’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, protesting Dooley’s egocentric account, saying “he exaggerated his role in the refugee camps at the expense of the people who were working with him, many of whom did just as much, if not more, than he did.”
etc etc
