THAILAND GLIMPSES
Bronfenbrenner, M.
Thailand Glimpses Brief Authoritv, by Edwin F. Stanton. Harper. 290 pp. $4, Reviewed by M. Bronfenbrenner EDWIN F. STANTON'S "brief authority" began as a student interpreter at the U. S. Embassy...
...Seven years later, as Thailand took on international importance following events in Indo-China, he was recalled to the United States...
...He rose through the ranks of the U. S. consular service in China until the onset of World War II...
...It is the need for better housing and post exchange (or equivalent) facilities for our junior foreign service people abroad...
...His reticence extends even to matters in which he played a laudable personal role—particularly the decision to treat Thailand after World War II as a victim rather than an accomplice of Japanese aggression, and not to cripple the Thai economy by reparations in rice...
...Stanton is even more likely to have interesting and valuable insights on Thailand: is it the prosperous, happy, democratic showpiece in East Asia that the State Department says it is, or the corrupt fascist dictatorship some of its Asian neighbors say it is...
...Stanton does not say...
...Stanton rather overdoes his valid point...
...His sympathy extends beyond humanity to cover people...
...He may well have interesting and valuable insights into what might have been required to save Chiang Kai-shek in China, or what his future may be on Formosa, but he goes no further than pointing out obliquely that his control over the Mainland was never so complete as the American man-in-the-street believed it was...
...He sees Asians and their problems sympathetically—enough so to achieve genuine personal popularity in Thailand...
...After one interval in a Japanese internment camp and another in wartime Washington, he was sent to Thailand as minister (later ambassador) in 1946, just as China was becoming a major cold war battleground...
...There is precious little in Stanton's memoirs to contradict such an impression...
...They are for the most part glimpses of "quaint" and "picturesque" people, places, and institutions, belated reprises of volumes turned out at wholesale by assorted Pukka Sahibs and Old China Hands down through the Kipling era, when travel was more difficult than it is now and the Orient quainter, more mysterious— and less important...
...4, Reviewed by M. Bronfenbrenner EDWIN F. STANTON'S "brief authority" began as a student interpreter at the U. S. Embassy in Peking in the early 1920's...
...Yet Stanton is neither a "striped-pants cookie-pusher" nor an American Colonel Blimp...
...He shows himself a sincere and earnest student of the less controversial aspects of Asian, particularly Chinese, language, history, and customs...
...He has had dealings with Japanese militarists and their Chinese puppets, with Chinese "Christian generals," war-lords, and just plain bandits, with Chinese and Thai politicians currently on the Communist side in Asian affairs...
...It will take more than diplomatic PXs to countervail McCarthy...
...He knows the back country of China along with the major cities...
...This sounds like the career of a man regarded by his superiors as an amiable middleweight at best...
...Dollars spent for these purposes do more to keep capable people and their wives happy in foreign service than would equal amounts in higher pay, to be siphoned off to local landlords and importers...
...But Stanton has a valid and to some extent important point...
...the average career diplomat stays closer to his embassy or consulate...
...the average career diplomat is not...
...Stanton sedulously avoids "heavy" or "controversial" material...
...There is plenty in Stanton's book for the vicarious tourist and the hammock dozer, but little for anyone more serious...
...We get only glimpses of them, but the glimpses are of human beings...
...The closest approach to a "message" which Stanton stresses over and over, seems so petty and self-seeking to most readers that a reviewer hesitates to mention it...
...He avoids the easy temptation to paint these people as fiends, demons, or ogres...
...This wise decision, made over great British protest, became the basis for Stanton's (and America's) considerable prestige in Thailand, but details are lacking here...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
