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The Ugly American was a best-selling novel (four million copies) later adapted into a less successful homonymous film (1963), starring Marlon Brando and directed by George Englund.58 Lederer and Burdick’s work is essentially a polemical argument worked up into fiction. “This book is written as fiction; but it is based on fact,” the authors claim in an introductory note, a statement that might apply to almost any work of fiction, although it usually means to signal the present work’s serious intentions. The authors were Asian experts rather than professional writers of fiction. When the book was published, Lederer had been special assistant to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, while Burdick was an academic specialist in Southeast Asia at the University of California, Berkeley.59 Despite these impressive credentials, their novel is at the same time politically naïve and a true reflection of Cold War thinking. Jim Neilson claims that the authors evidently held “the belief that simple American know-how can overcome revolutionary political movements that arose from dire socioeconomic problems and the cruel legacy of colonialism.”60

As a literary effort, The Ugly American is far inferior to Greene’s novel or, for that matter, all the other novels discussed in this chapter, but as a cultural document it is revealing of the political climate of the period on which it had considerable influence. John Kennedy, planning to run for the presidency on an anti-Communist foreign policy platform, was one of four senators who gave copies of the novel to their colleagues, evidently to alert them to the dangers of Communism in Asia and the hitherto inadequate efforts of the US government to stem the red tide.61 Lt. Col. John Vann, a later adventurer in Vietnam both as soldier and civilian—he is the subject of Neil Sheehan’s biography-history of the war, A Bright Shining Lie (1988)—read and approved of the novel. Vann also said that he hoped to emulate Landsdale, who had arrived in Vietnam eight years earlier, in his own work there. Vann believed that Landsdale, unlike the inept “ugly Americans” of the novel, really “understood” Asians.

According to Sheehan, The Ugly American, whose title is an obvious play on Greene’s (and possibly meant to “correct” Greene’s view of Vietnam), “was accepted well into the 1960s as an example of serious political thought,” an assessment reflected in the novel’s reception, both popular and critical.62 The historian Joseph Buttinger was one of the few critics who—in a detailed, fifty-page review in Dissent (Summer 1959 issue)—discussed the book’s inanity, distortions, and falsehoods.63 Neilson thinks that Buttinger went to such lengths because he believed that the novel had too much influence on contemporary foreign policy debates. Schulzinger has made an even greater claim for the book’s influence on foreign policy: “as political propaganda setting the stage for a war, The Ugly American had an impact similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the years before the American Civil War.”64 Like Stowe, Lederer and Burdick seem certain that God was on their side, and, as a corollary, the enemy (Communism) was both godless and ruinous.

The nearly plotless novel (if it can be called that) consists of a collection of stories that are little more than fictional portraits of Americans in “Sarkhan” (Vietnam) and other Asian countries. The Americans are divided into two types: the dedicated and effective representatives of their nation, and the reprehensible “ugly Americans” who seem to be, in the view of the authors, most of the people actually over there in some official capacity—hence, the need for this alarmist tract. The characters belonging to the dedicated group are given individual portraits, but they all turn out to comprise a recognizable if idealized American type, both idealistic and pragmatic, genuinely interested in helping Asians as well as improving the image of their own country abroad. They are all democratic, can-do, plain-spoken men (and one woman) who heartily dislike politicians, officials, and bureaucrats, both American and Asian, regarding them as ignorant, interfering, and indifferent to the lives of native peoples. These “good” Americans invariably learn to speak the native language, take an interest in the national culture and local customs, get out into the countryside to see how people really live, establish warm relationships with them, and, in turn, earn their respect. They tend to distrust large and expensive projects but possess some practical skill that will be useful in improving the everyday lives of the “Sarkhanese” with whom they come in daily contact. As if all this were not enough, none of them have a profit motive but are selfless in sharing their gifts.

The first of these, John Colvin, was an OSS agent in Sarkhan during World War II, when he learned to love the country. He returns after the war to teach the Sarkhanese how to breed cattle, drink milk, make powdered milk, and make use of the by-products of stock-breeding, after which he will sell out his share and leave the country. Framed by a former Sarkhanese comrade who has gone over to the Communists, Colvin is deported. Another example is Homer Atkins, who is “ugly” only in the sense that he is physically homely. An engineer, he builds a simple pump to get water up to higher ground for irrigation, and he democratically shares his idea with the local mechanic of a poor village. Together they work out the technical problem of an apparatus that will use only local, inexpensive materials. Quite soon, the village begins to look like a model enterprising American town, with everyone building or selling the new pump, but Atkins declines to patent his invention. His wife, Emma, who is also homely and good, sets out to correct the bent backs of the old villagers, who have become deformed by using short-handled brooms but have accepted this painful condition as their fate (the immovable Asian mind). Emma, who “was not bound by centuries of tradition,” convinces the villagers to use a long-handled substitute, whereupon the old folks begin to stand up straight, and the grateful villagers build a shrine in honor of the American couple. This condescending, “colonialist” attitude of the authors to native intelligence seems to be invisible to them throughout; their whole approach to winning Asian hearts and minds is absurdly simplistic. The complete trust of the authors in “Yankee ingenuity” does not allow them to suspect, in Neilson’s formulation, that “elite ownership of land, lack of access to education, a corrupt and repressive political system, and a nearly feudal class division are not obstacles to capitalist victory.”65

One character, Tom Knox, exemplifies how a “good” American can become corrupted and turned into an “ugly” one. An Iowa poultry farmer, Knox is sent to Cambodia as an agricultural expert. He is friendly, serious, non-bureaucratic, and bent on raising the protein level of poor villagers by improving their poultry stock and increasing the egg output. Balked by bureaucrats and politicians with their own priorities, he threatens to return to the US and campaign to congressmen for his simple scheme of improving Sarkhanese daily life at low cost. His fatal flaw of a fascination for the exotic, however, is exploited by evil French and Cambodian diplomats, because their respective governments are more interested in capital-intensive projects like roads and mechanized farms. Knox is bought off by a lavish round-the-world trip, in the course of which he rather improbably forgets his protest and gives into the luxury of seeing the exotic sights.

Knox’s upper-echelon counterpart is Senator Brown, the tough old head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who goes to “Vietnam” (i.e. not Sarkhan) as part of his Asian fact-finding mission, on which he will base his recommendations for the year’s overseas funding. Despite his determination to talk to ordinary people and low-ranking technicians and to bypass the bureaucrats to find out what is really going on, the embassy staff is ready for him, with an exhausting program of long walks and heavy dinners with plenty of wine to slow him down and dull his wits, as well as factual presentations prepared by the staff to misrepresent the actual situation, including photographs of Communist atrocities, and a translator who has been instructed by the ambassador to mistranslate hostile or inappropriate interviewees. All of this is designed to convince the well-meaning senator that the French are winning the war and therefore deserve more US aid.

Other “good” Americans are actually fighting the Communists for Asian hearts and minds, although they too are not being heeded. Father John X. Finian, a Jesuit priest, becomes an anti-Communist missionary in Burma, where he cultivates a small group of nine men and manages to convince them, as he manipulates them, that they are making their own decisions in choosing American over Communist aid. The group’s main triumph is spreading misinformation on the radio after planting a spy at a meeting of the local Communists to discredit them in the eyes of the villagers.

Another eager warrior, Major James (Tex) Wolchek, a veteran paratrooper of World War II and Korea, is ready to drop into Dien Bien Phu with a group of Legionnaires when the news arrives that it has fallen to the Vietminh. Tex accompanies the French on military operations and sees that although they are doing everything right according to the conventional rules of war, they are still losing. The Communists are “fighting by a different rule book,” he points out to the French commander, Major Monet, and this is not a mere metaphor, for the “book” is Mao’s manual on guerrilla warfare, which Tex has read. He acquires a clandestine copy, and he, Monet, and the American Ambassador MacWhite read it aloud together and work out a plan of operation for an attack on a village (although it is unlikely that the two officers would accept the civilian MacWhite on equal terms relating to a military op) in which they presumably turn Mao’s tactics against the Communists and defeat them.

It is absurd to suggest that the French lost the war because they did not read Mao. In fact, they did read him, but, like the Americans who replaced them, they did not seem to realize that the Vietnamese Communists never stressed military action without political motivation, even to their soldiers. In any case, the confused narrative of the battle suggests that Mao´s tactics are hardly the issue, for the French soldiers achieve their victory from superior firepower and the element of surprise—hardly unconventional warfare. When Tex and Monet, based on this single success, try to sell the French and American higher commands on their method, the Eurocentric generals remain unconvinced, not from tactical but racist motives, refusing to accept that Asians could have changed the accepted ways that wars have always been fought. They are shown to be wrong when shortly afterwards the French have to evacuate Hanoi. That the military is blind to what is really happening is shown again in the episode where Homer Atkins informs an incredulous group of French generals of the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Impossible!” they reply.

The main example of how a “good” American can be discarded by the system is the story of the Honorable Gilbert MacWhite, who becomes US Ambassador to Sarkhan in 1954, a capable administrator and determined Cold Warrior, who “regarded his anticipated combat with the Communists as the capstone of his career” (81). MacWhite, however, makes several fatal mistakes. He is unable to fathom that the two elderly Chinese servants at the Embassy are Communist spies. When he reports that “the Vietnamese, both Communist and non-Communist, hated the French” as exploitative colonialists (hardly news to any outside observer, it would seem), the duped Senator Brown claims “from first-hand knowledge” that he must be in error.

MacWhite receives a letter from the Secretary of State, who personally likes him, listing his diplomatic mistakes (i.e. everything, according to the authors, that he did right in Sarkhan) and hinting that he resign. MacWhite replies with a longer letter in which he informs the Secretary why the US is not winning hearts and minds in Asia:

I do not think the Russians will ever resort to thermonuclear warfare. They won’t have to. They are winning much too easily to run the risk of annihilation by retaliation…the Russians will win the world by their successes in a multitude of tiny battles…[and] the sum of these battles will decide whether our way of life is to perish or to persist (225).

This is an example of the sort of reasoning that ensured that Americans would take up the cudgel in Vietnam.

In the authors’ view, the “ugly Americans” are those people who are totally unprepared for their mission abroad, unlike the Russians, as MacWhite points out in his letter, who are doing everything right. The Americans know nothing of the countries that they are sent to and, since they do not learn the native language, they are unable to read the local newspapers and can communicate only with the English-speaking elite. They isolate themselves in the “golden ghetto” of privilege, hang out at the “Press Club or the American Club or at the Officer’s Club” and in their ignorance of how people really think are incapable of representing the best interests of the United States—all valid criticisms.

In an interview, a Burmese journalist who apparently represents the authors’ viewpoint succinctly defines the “ugly American” even while insisting that he admires the Americans he meets in the United States: “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious” (123). The problem is shown to begin with the civilian personnel that the State Department recruits to work abroad. As MacWhite complains, the emphasis in recruiting people for the Foreign Service is on good salaries and favorable exchange rates, commissary privileges, free housing, government vehicles, and native servants. Rather, he thinks, candidates should show a willingness to face challenges, work long hours, make sacrifices, live in modest housing, eat native food, read Marx, Lenin, and Mao (i.e. the know-your-enemy strategy), give up private automobiles, and learn difficult languages. Is it any wonder, MacWhite asks, rather redundantly, that we attract only mediocrities?

Such people include both MacWhite’s predecessor and his successor as ambassador to Sarkhan. Louis Sears, his predecessor, is a political party man and appointee who is just putting in time at the post until he can secure a tenured federal judgeship. Sears is a man who knows nothing of the country to which he is ambassador and cares even less. He calls the Sarkhanese “monkeys” and, unable to recognize a dedicated American, believes in the set-up that the Communists arranged for John Colvin and has him sent home. His successor is Joe Bing, the Ugly American made visible: a fat, brassy, glad-handing public-relations type who “knows everybody”—except the nationals.

Not only are civilians members of the wrong type. Captain Boning (sic) of the US Navy, is another example. He is part of the American Delegation to an Asian conference on arms, which will decide which American arms should be distributed and to whom. The conference leader Solomon Asch has experience as a tough labor-negotiator, but even he cannot prevent Boning, their technical expert, from dozing off at meetings and not being sufficiently prepared to come up with fast, accurate answers for the Asian delegates. Boning has also been set up, going out with an attractive Chinese doctor every night, a lapse that causes the conference to flounder. This is meant to be an example of the lack of professionalism that the Russians, far more serious and effective in their diplomacy, successfully avoid.

Colonel Hillandale (based on Landsdale) is one of the “good” Americans in the novel, but also a fantastic caricature of Landsdale in the Philippines. Hillandale is a palm-reading “six-foot Swami from Savannah,” and a harmonica-playing “Ragtime Kid,” “one of those happy, uninhibited people who can dance and drink all night and then show up at eight fresh and rested” (92). He can “jam” with an orchestra on his harmonica, “improvising Satchmo himself” (sic) and shows his democratic spirit by eating in little Filipino restaurants. He also studies Tagalog at the university in his spare time, and is popular with politicians, including soon-to-be President Magsaysay, as well as taxi-drivers and bandleaders. Only the counselor at the American Embassy refuses to be overwhelmed by his talents and charm.

John Clark Pratt, taking note of Lederer and Burdick’s caricature-like portrait, believes that Hillendale is “one of the inept, short-sighted Americans” in the novel, which may suggest that he is one of the “Ugly Americans” that I have described above.66 From the point of view of Lederer and Burdick, however, Hillendale shares more features with the other so-called “good” Americans of the novel: he is sympathetic to the natives, antipathetic to the bureaucrats, and generally effective in handling difficult situations. Internal evidence in fact shows that he is supposed to be one of the good guys: MacWhite’s letter to the Secretary of State lists only five men out of the “three hundred” Americans who have passed through the Embassy in some capacity: “One of them was a Catholic priest, one was an engineer, one an Air Force Colonel, one a Major from Texas, and one a private citizen who manufactures powdered milk,” namely, Father Finian, Homer Atkins, Colonel Hillendale, Major Kolchek, and John Colvin, respectively.

To ensure support for Magsaysay in the upcoming election, Hillandale goes alone on a motorcycle to a province where “the Communist propagandists had done too good a job” (93). By playing favorite Filipino tunes on his harmonica, he attracts a crowd that he encourages to “sing along,” and talks about the cost of living in America, managing to convince this potentially hostile crowd that not all Americans are rich. The reader is asked to believe that in a single afternoon, this simpático American is so successful at overriding Communist propaganda that 95% of the people of the province turn out to vote for Magsaysay and his pro-American platform.

In the second episode in which Hillandale is involved, he is equally imaginative but less successful. On loan from the Filipinos to Sarkhan, he is invited to the Philippine Ambassador’s dinner party in “Haidho,” the Sarkhanese capital, where he is asked by the ambassador to entertain the guests by reading their palms while the chef makes his final preparations. George Swift, the American chargé d’affairs, is contemptuous and sarcastic about “vaudeville tricks” (he means parlor tricks) at a diplomatic reception, but Hillandale shuts him up by revealing some embarrassing things about his past. The Prime Minister, impressed by this exhibition, asks to have his own palm read in private, which is to be done a day or two after the proper protocol has been observed. Swift, who is responsible for this contact, simply ignores it and thereby insults the Filipinos and causes Hillandale to lose an opportunity to tell the King that the “stars” (Hillandale can also do astrological charts) have advised troops be sent on maneuvers to the northern border, where Chinese Communist troops have massed.

Earlier, on a walk through the streets of Haidho, Hillandale had astutely noted that astrologers and palmists in Sarkhan had offices that resembled those of fashionable doctors in the US and that their shingles outside these offices “all indicated that these practitioners had doctors’ degrees” (148), which reminds the Colonel that he has had the foresight to get his own diploma from the “Chungking School of Occult Sciences.” The opportunity for American mystical influence has been lost, however, for Swift, one of the “Ugly Americans,” has undone the efforts of someone who understands the Asian mind enough to use astrology for his purposes.

As Landsdale’s pupil and admirer, John Vann said, with unconscious racism: “Landsdale understood that Asians were people, that you could discern their desires and play upon those desires to your advantage.”67 Whether Landsdale had actually studied astrology is unclear, but like Hillandale he did make opportunistic use of it in his misinformation campaign in North Vietnam. One of Landsdale’s clandestine tactics for harassing the Hanoi government and encouraging emigration to the south was bribing astrologers to make the desired predictions. In the words of The Pentagon Papers: “In the South, the team hired Vietnamese astrologers—in whose art many Asians place great trust—to compile almanacs bearing dire predictions for the Vietminh and good omens for the new Government of Premier Diem.”68