Tom Dooley's many lives
Fisher, James T.
that the end was indeed nigh? The most amazing news out of rounding his message, that gays have served proudly and well Waco is that none of the government agents apparently thought ...
...military only to find themselves harassed, reviled, of "the fire next time...
...Shilts's discussion is, in its way, as church without revealing much of his personal situation...
...He seemed aware that his own life was less "everything good and everything evil that he did can be traced important than the impact he might have on others because of back to the shame he carried over his homosexuality" reduces his charisma and the powerful mystique of service generated Dooley to the sum of his sexuality for polemical reasons and by his work in Laos...
...performing acts of kindness and obe- Corps...
...In this respect he is Dooley's story is extraordinary, maddeningly complex, as I perhaps the first postmodern saint, continually shifting in his have learned in the course of research for a biography I am cur- appearance as we seek to discover some deeper reality...
...Tom Dooley sexual orientation and that he dealt with it by acting as though may not have been a saint, but he was no patsy either...
...Jewish organi- on what may look to some like cold slaughter in former Yugoslavia...
...tablish village clinics...
...And ministration to do Lewis is chief among them) have called yet General Colin Powell has opposed it something about the for military intervention...
...celebrity and sainthood...
...Pity Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI and the ATF The best-known victim of military homophobia in Conduct for a moment...
...Actually, the ONI report is readily TOM DOOLEY'S MANY LIVES available to scholars who will simply pay a visit to the Naval NOBODY'S PLASTER SAINT Operational Archives in Washington and request the documents...
...ment's interest in law enforcement was-to use the First While Dooley's ordeal comprises but a small part of Shilts's Amendment buzzword-truly "compelling...
...In fact several Dooley wanted out of the Navy and enjoyed enraging the top of Dooley's gay friends insist he was convinced that God had brass with his antics, since they had fallen for the largely fabmade him homosexual and that, since he was considered high- ricated version of recent history he presented in Deliver Us from ly attractive, his sexuality was offered as a gift to others...
...I can attest that the contradictions in the of Dooley's story...
...Ile was works by hitter ex-Catholics and New Leftists that claimed to at once hugely egocentric and unintrospective, at least in the expose Dooley's links to the CIA, or that held him responsible thousands of letters he wrote in haste from remote corners of for the Vietnam War, were only secular equivalents of the re- Asia...
...JAWS T. FISHER so I don't do that anymore...
...JR example, she dismissed Dooley's "Vientiane clinic project" as Edward McGlvnn Gaf(nev, Jr., is the dean of the Valparaiso a "sham": while it is true he never worked in Vientiane, his vilUniversity School 0/ Law...
...I would have preferred that the scarce resources Counterculture in America, 1933-1962...
...At the time I felt it allocated to law enforcement on firearms be spent on regular sufficient to describe the circumstances of Dooley's ouster from interdiction of the massive violations of federal laws at the gun the Navy and indicate the role this forced resignation played shows each weekend...
...The most amazing news out of rounding his message, that gays have served proudly and well Waco is that none of the government agents apparently thought in the U.S...
...dreds of locations throughout the country...
...He was an arrogant, board Dooley as gay martyr in order to promote his own im- supremely self-confident, and in many ways profoundly comportant cause, but there is no evidence that Dooley would have pelling individual who believed he was destined to perform a been in any way interested in serving as a symbol of oppres- special errand in God's wilderness...
...and persecuted simply for being themselves...
...Press, 527.95...
...Having interviewed nearly two hundred of his understand why Randy Shilts needed to tell his limited version friends and associates...
...By the time this column appears some deciBETWEEN DRACULA & BOVARY sion will almost certainly have been taken...
...Shaw, a researcher for the film industry, pubzies, but as the basis for tougher federal restriction on access lished an article on Dooley in the Los Angeles Times Magazine to automatic weapons at the wholesale end...
...He is he were another person during his often anonymous sexual en- much too interesting and his work too important to play a cameo counters...
...That doesn't require another gun control in determining his future relationships with American personlaw, even the sensible "Brady Bill," just somebody at the nel in Laos, where he went as a private citizen in 1956 to esTreasury and Justice Departments with different priorities...
...There Evil (one of their spies was more upset by Dooley's ignorance are also those who assert that he was indeed tormented by his of Navy terminology than by his sexual behavior...
...The use of military intervention would sure on the Clinton ad- Normally dovish columnists (Anthony seem to he justified here, if anywhere...
...mum dramatic effect...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey other atrocities to the Holocaust...
...Shilts describes Shaw's heroic pursuit of the secret Navy file CONDUCT UNBECOMING...
...One reading of the ONI report supports a theory that diently following the ideology of the church...
...have taken out newspaper ads suggesting that here a real comparison can be made...
...Shilts's claim that out belief in God...
...Shilts has made a remarkable number of errors in his brief but central discussion of the Tone Dooley case...
...Martin's actually occurred a thousand miles away in Saint Louis...
...Why did leaving the Davidians alone not seem Unbecoming is Thomas A. Dooley, the jungle doctor of Laos to be a real option for them...
...Yet Dooley's career remains shrouded It will be hard to move past the simplistic fixation of blame in mystery, and Shilts dramatically purports to expose the se(on the president, the attorney general, the federal agents, cret campaign that wrecked his life...
...on Dooley: "from the first time Diana Shaw attempted to retrieve Dooley's official Navy records, it was clear that the service had something to hide...
...Shilts describes the U.S...
...Elie Wie- zations, which normally-and appropri- grounds, but are actually quite sensible: sel, at the dedication of the new Holocaust ately -complain of facile comparisons of we can'tjust drop some bombs and, if that Commonweal 21 May 1993: 7...
...but I must also lament Dooley's continuing man's character multiply exponentially even as we seek some misuse by those less interested in understanding than enlisting definitive conclusions in his compelling, tragic journey to him in personal crusades, however legitimate they may he...
...protocol and rarely did anything he did not want to do, perhaps, Shilts writes: "The Catholic church had said he could not see according to some of his gay friends, because he enjoyed the the face of God because of his sin, so he struggled to be the patronage of well-placed homosexuals in the Navy Medical best Catholic he could he...
...For EDWARD McGLYNN GAFFNEY...
...Anthony Messenger in 1958...
...YUGOSLAVIA'S ROMANTIC NATIONALISM In the event that the Owen-Vance plan is not followed by its signatories, the use of air strikes against strategic targets and lifting the arms embargo to allow Bosnians it s everyone now knows, Museum in Washington, used the occasion to receive weapons is likely to occur...
...The Waco episode does not just give from Evil, the best-selling, highly embellished account of his me pause about the least restrictive alternative standard that used role in the Navy's 1954 "Operation Passage to Freedom," to govern the First Amendment religion clause...
...ligious hagiographies: they contained little of value concern- Dooley constantly sought to restore the faith of others in the ing the real Tom Dooley...
...The government poured Dooley's homosexuality has been no secret for years...
...other misleading and mistaken as the most garish Dooley tributes in than to state that he did not know how anyone could live withThe Sign or St...
...David Koresh, his followers, the media...
...Navy's frenzied Which brings me to gun control...
...Yet I discovered that or feelings about his sexuality or the state of his soul...
...it gives me big- which transplanted over 600,0(X) Catholics from North Vietnam time willies about the Second Amendment (relating the need to the new regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South...
...Military (St...
...lage clinics were no sham...
...in December 1991 which was riddled with factual errors...
...from calling Cardinal Francis Spellman "John" to elaborately Randy Shilts's Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and setting Dooley's funeral Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral...
...It was over $100 million of taxpayers' money into the ATF raid and first reported in an academic book I wrote in 1989 (The Catholic the FBI siege...
...In relying upon a single journalist's questionable work and a couple of interviews...
...there has been pres- to plead with President Clinton for action...
...Anyone hoping to understand Tom Dooley is no more justified than the ill-fated campaign for his canon- must first concede that we can only see him through the inization...
...On any given Saturday, il- Intelligence (ONI) operatives who bugged Dooley's phone and legal transactions are openly carried on at gun shows at hun- eavesdropped on his hotel room conversations...
...When I first began researching Tom Dooley's life and works Rushed into print to influence the raging de- I was often annoyed by the embarrassingly saccharine habate over the status of gays in the military, its giographies that pervaded the Catholic press during his lifedust jacket proclaims, "Once in a generation comes a book that time and even in the years since his death from melanoma in can change the world...
...784 pp...
...had vast expose, the book is framed by Dooley's story for maxiviolated federal laws regulating access to automatic weapons...
...scandal that would diminish its own prestige, the Navy houndThe real problem is that Koresh is but the tiniest flake of pow- ed Dooley into confessing his homosexuality following a eainder (I mean snow, not gunpowder) at the tip of the iceberg of paign of surveillance and perhaps entrapment by Office of Naval automatic weapons in this country...
...Shilts appears content to present a card- Tony Dooley was nobody's martyr...
...1 sought out more critical treatments of his career that suffering from AIDS only adds to the poignant urgency sur- would help establish his significance beyond the confines of 6: 21 May 1993 Commonweal the preconciliar Catholic subculture...
...Koresh et al...
...Fearing a for a militia to the right of the people to keep and hear arms...
...finitely variegated perspectives of others...
...It Lesbians in the U.S...
...is no ordinary hook...
...Presumably because the govern- and folk hero to millions of American Catholics in the late 1950s...
...The point is simply that we have James T. Fisher is an associate professor of Arneric•cm absolutely no documentary evidence of Dooley's own thoughts Studies (it Yale University...
...Still another individual recalled making a sexual ad- role in a political melodrama he would probably have dismissed vance toward Dooley only to he told: 1 "in in a state of grace, as unworthy of his cosmic grandeur...
...He totally ignored Navy sion...
...The recent announcement that Shilts is 1961...
...One commentator noted, I hope investigation of Dooley's sexuality while Dooley was on the facetiously, that the Davidians had not violated any law of Texas American lecture circuit in early 1956, promoting Deliver Us of which he was aware...
...I can rently writing...
...But I hope that this Shilts's first mistake in Conduct Unbecoming is an overretragic case serves not as a precedent for more paramilitary op- liance on the work of Diana Shaw, whom he misidentifies as erations against the strongholds of the religious and secular cra- a "biographer...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 10
