The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos

By Seth S. Jacobs

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Laos was positioned to become a major front in the Cold War. Yet American policymakers ultimately chose to resist communism in neighboring South Vietnam instead. Two generations of historians have explained this decision by citing logistical considerations. According to the accepted account, Laos’s landlocked, mountainous terrain made the kingdom an unpropitious place to fight, while South Vietnam—possessing a long coastline, navigable rivers, and all-weather roads—better accommodated America’s military forces. The Universe Unraveling is a provocative reinterpretation of U.S.-Lao relations in the years leading up to the Vietnam War. Seth Jacobs argues that Laos boasted several advantages over South Vietnam as a battlefield, notably its thousand-mile border with Thailand and the fact that the Thai premier was willing to allow Washington to use his nation as a base from which to attack the communist Pathet Lao.

More significant in determining U.S. policy in Southeast Asia than strategic appraisals of the Lao landscape were cultural perceptions of the Lao people. Jacobs contends that U.S. policy toward Laos under Eisenhower and Kennedy cannot be understood apart from the traits Americans ascribed to their Lao allies. Drawing on diplomatic correspondence, contemporary press coverage, and the work of iconic figures like "celebrity saint" Tom Dooley, Jacobs finds that the characteristics American statesmen and the American media attributed to the Lao—laziness, immaturity, ignorance, imbecility, and cowardice—differed from traits assigned the South Vietnamese and made Lao chances of withstanding communist aggression appear dubious. The Universe Unraveling provides a new perspective on how prejudice can shape policy decisions and even the course of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464515

Book preview

THE UNIVERSE UNRAVELING

American Foreign Policy

in Cold War Laos

Seth Jacobs

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For my father and mother

If you want to get a sense of the universe unraveling, come to Laos.

Norman Cousins, Saturday Review, 1961

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Long Country Inhabited by Lotus Eaters: Washington Encounters Laos

2. A Soft Buffer: Laos in the Eisenhower Administration’s Grand Strategy

3. Help the Seemingly Unhelpable: Little America and the U.S. Aid Program in Laos

4. Foreigners Who Want to Enslave the Country: American Neocolonialism, Lao Defiance

5. Doctor Tom and Mister Pop: American Icons in Laos

6. Retarded Children: Laos in the American Popular Imagination

7. No Place to Fight a War: Washington Backs Away from Laos

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

There is always a tension in this part of a book’s front matter between the need to be brief and the desire to thank everyone. I choose to err on the side of brevity. Apologies to those friends and mentors unacknowledged by name. You know who you are.

My colleagues at Boston College were supportive and empathetic throughout the five years it took to complete this project. Lynn Lyerly in particular furnished extensive feedback and lent her talents to the thankless task of editing my adjective-laden, oft-digressive prose. Courteous professionals staffed all the archives I visited, with Stephen Plotkin and John Waide deserving special mention. Michael McGandy, Ange Romeo-Hall, and Sarah Grossman of Cornell University Press were essential in getting the manuscript into publishable form. Mark Bradley and Andrew Rotter helped me expand and clarify my argument and saved me from numerous errors.

I am indebted to Howard Buell, who allowed me to peruse his father’s correspondence and who, along with his wife, Bonnie, hosted me during my stay in Hamilton, Indiana. Jeff Buell was a priceless source of information and anecdote. Charles Stevenson, who wrote his dissertation on U.S.-Lao relations over forty years ago and interviewed dozens of policymakers for that work, kindly supplied me with transcripts and other relevant materials. As for Joel Halpern—this book would not have been possible without him. Making his acquaintance was the luckiest break of my career. He knows more about Laos than anyone else on earth, and his letters and field notes from the late 1950s were my eyes on the ground for several key events addressed herein. Thank you, Joel.

As always, my deepest thanks are reserved for my family. My wife, Devora, and daughters Miranda and Sophie provided encouragement, loving companionship, and—especially in Sophie’s case—comic relief when I needed it most. I am dedicating this book to my parents, Max and Helen Jacobs, whose unshakable belief in me and many sacrifices on my behalf I have only just begun to appreciate. My debt to them goes beyond words and can never be repaid.

Laos, 1954–1962

Introduction

John F. Kennedy inherited a powder keg. The presidential transition from Dwight Eisenhower to Kennedy occurred during one of the tensest periods in the history of American foreign policy. Crises simmered and blazed all over the globe: Fidel Castro had established a communist beachhead ninety miles from Florida, rebels in the Dominican Republic seemed poised to turn that nation into another Cuba, Washington and Moscow clashed over a UN-sponsored peacekeeping mission to the Congo, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was threatening to force the Western allies out of Berlin. Most distressing was the situation in South Vietnam, where America’s ally Ngo Dinh Diem had just survived a coup attempt that exposed the precariousness of the Saigon government despite six years of unstinting U.S. aid.

Yet Eisenhower and Kennedy did not talk much about Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Berlin, or Vietnam when the outgoing American president briefed his successor on January 19, 1961, the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration. Instead, the two men, accompanied by their principal national security advisers, discussed Laos. A three-sided civil war in that country between the U.S.-backed Royal Lao Government (RLG), the communist Pathet Lao, and a neutralist front appeared about to conclude with the reds on top—an outcome that, Eisenhower warned, would mean more than the communization of one country. [T]he loss of Laos would be the loss of the ‘cork in the bottle,’ Eisenhower declared, and the beginning of the loss of most of the Far East.

Kennedy had great respect for Eisenhower’s judgment, especially in military matters, and did not challenge the older man’s contention that it was imperative to defend Laos. Rather, the president-elect observed that the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union had an advantage in this military situation because of their proximity to Laos, a point Eisenhower conceded. The president did not think, however, that Beijing wanted to provoke a major war, and Secretary of State Christian Herter questioned the extent to which the Soviets would wish to get publicly involved.

Herter was more concerned about another obstacle America faced in Laos. The factor disturbing us most, he said, was the unwillingness of the armed forces of the recognized government to fight. Royal Lao troop morale was not good, Herter noted, and this made waging proxy war in Laos difficult for us because the forces opposing communism were so undependable. Eisenhower then raised a point that, in retrospect, deserved more consideration than it received. He said he did not understand why the communist soldiers in such countries always seem to have better morale than the soldiers representing the democratic forces. Perhaps, the president ventured, there was something about the communist philosophy that gave its adherents a certain inspiration. Kennedy remarked that he was aware of the weakness of the troops of the government of Laos.¹

Just what Eisenhower counseled Kennedy to do about Laos is unclear. Clark Clifford, a Kennedy aide who took notes during the briefing, recorded the president advising that the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) take charge of the controversy. Unfortunately, two of SEATO’s members, Britain and France, were opposed to intervening in Laos, and Eisenhower found their proposals for a coalition government with Pathet Lao participation naïve. [E]xperience shows that any time you permit communists to have a part in the government, Eisenhower declared, they end up in control. Since a political settlement in Laos acceptable to Washington seemed unlikely, the incoming Kennedy administration would have to weigh military options. According to Clifford’s memorandum, Eisenhower "stated that he considered Laos of such importance that if . . . we could not persuade others to act with us, then he would be willing, ‘as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally.’ Yet Secretary of Defense-designate Robert McNamara, who also attended the transition talks, submitted a memo to Kennedy five days later in which he claimed, President Eisenhower advised against unilateral action by the United States with respect to Laos. Kennedy’s own aide-mémoire, dictated hours after he spoke to Eisenhower, did not recount the president’s advice but concluded that the Eisenhower administration would support intervention—they felt it was preferable to a communist success in Laos."²

Discrepancies in these first-person accounts notwithstanding, what is beyond dispute is that Eisenhower and Kennedy spent the lion’s share of their conference focused on Laos, that both men considered conditions there the most important business facing the new administration, and that other cold-war hornets’ nests like Vietnam barely registered as immediate concerns. Kennedy later remarked to Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, Eisenhower never mentioned the word Vietnam to me. That was untrue—Eisenhower had referred to Vietnam in passing—but Laos topped his agenda. McNamara recalled, We were left . . . with the ominous prediction that if Laos were lost, all of Southeast Asia would fall. . . . The meeting made a deep impression on Kennedy and us all. It heavily influenced our subsequent approach to Southeast Asia.³

Historians would do well to bear McNamara’s words in mind when assessing the early advisory stages of the Vietnam War. While the decade from Dien Bien Phu to Diem’s assassination has been the subject of numerous monographs, scholars have been inclined to treat U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia during this time as though it involved only Vietnam, not all of the former French Indochina. American-Lao relations in particular tend to be marginalized. This is understandable, given that neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy made a direct military commitment to Laos, and few American soldiers died in Laos on Eisenhower’s or Kennedy’s watch, or even when Lyndon Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia to levels beyond anything his predecessors had contemplated.⁴

Still, U.S. policy toward Laos under Eisenhower and Kennedy did much to shape America’s approach to Southeast Asia during the cold war. Laos was the testing ground for counterinsurgency and nation-building programs that came of age in Vietnam, and many of the features that distinguished those later programs—support of unpopular but pro-Western despots, slugging matches between U.S. civilian and military bureaucracies, and ignorance of the needs and problems of the native populations—first surfaced in Laos. The Eisenhower administration set the precedent for free elections in South Vietnam by encouraging its Lao viceroys to stuff ballot boxes, intimidate voters, and otherwise rig the electoral process. Eisenhower also launched Air America, the Central Intelligence Agency’s proprietary airline, on its twenty-year involvement in Southeast Asia when he ordered its planes to drop military supplies to anticommunist forces operating in Laos. And Kennedy sent the first official U.S. combat troops to Southeast Asia in response to Pathet Lao aggression, ordering marines to take up positions across the Lao border in Thailand.

Incongruous as it seems from a post–cold war perspective, Laos occupied more of Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s time than did Vietnam. The Kingdom of a Million Elephants was considered a vital piece of real estate in the contest between communism and anticommunism, a domino whose preservation was essential to America’s national security. During Eisenhower’s second term, Laos became the only foreign country in the world where the United States paid 100 percent of the military budget. Eisenhower approved the most audacious enterprise in CIA history when he permitted that agency to equip an army of Lao tribespeople to fight against communist guerrillas. Confrontation over Laos brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war in 1961–62, as Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff urged the president to use atomic weapons to counter communist advances on the Lao capital of Vientiane. For American statesmen in the early 1960s, Laos was no sideshow, its present erasure from collective memory notwithstanding. A reexamination of the Lao crisis can help rescue this episode from obscurity and deepen our understanding both of why Washington perceived such an immense stake in Laos and why policymakers chose to fight in Vietnam instead.

That latter question is of particular significance. The most compelling reason for scrutiny of Washington’s Laos policy in the Eisenhower/Kennedy period is that the capstone to that policy bound America more tightly to its client state of South Vietnam and, by extension, to its longest war. Laos was critically important in transforming America’s role in the Vietnamese civil conflict from adviser to combatant. When Kennedy repudiated Eisenhower’s support for the Lao right wing and accepted a neutralist government in Laos, this political solution to a Southeast Asian crisis made a military solution in Vietnam harder to avoid. In other words, Kennedy’s dovishness in Laos paradoxically dictated hawkishness in Vietnam. Some months after taking office, Kennedy decided that while it was necessary to confront the communists in Southeast Asia, Laos was a singularly unpropitious site to make a stand. Vietnam, the president calculated, would be a better battleground. Thus Kennedy threw his weight behind the neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma and agreed to American participation in an international conference organized to guarantee Laos’s nonalignment. But Kennedy assured South Vietnam’s President Diem that these moves in no way lessened U.S. determination to take up arms in Vietnam should the communists seek to extend their sphere below the 17th parallel. [T]he strategy best calculated to preserve Vietnamese independence and enable your brave people to build a better future, Kennedy wrote Diem in mid-1962, is clearly very different from the strategy required for Laos.⁵

Why was it different? Scholars who have examined U.S. policy toward Laos in this period argue, in effect, that geography was destiny, that Laos—a landlocked nation made up of deep valleys, triple-canopy jungle, and some of the highest mountains in Southeast Asia—presented American policymakers with what one historian calls a logistical nightmare that overwhelmingly favored the communists. Not only were China and North Vietnam closer to Laos than was the United States, which made it easier for them to send troops across the Lao border, but the communist doctrine of people’s war was suited to countryside both rugged and lacking in railroads, airstrips, or all-weather roads. By contrast, America’s mechanized forces would be nearly impossible to supply, defend, or transport in such terrain. Better to confront the communists in Vietnam, with its long coastline, deep-draft harbors, modern airports, and paved road system.⁶

These considerations played a role in Kennedy’s choice to content himself with a draw in Laos, but they were not the decisive factors. Indeed, Laos possessed some topographical and positional advantages over South Vietnam that made a determination based solely on logistics unlikely. First, much of the fighting between the Royal Lao Army (RLA), the neutralists under rebel captain Kong Le, and the Pathet Lao in the early 1960s took place in the Plain of Jars, a five-hundred-square-mile plateau of rolling grasslands that an observer aptly described as a sort of giant-sized golf course where enemy guerrillas did not have the kind of natural cover they could avail themselves of in South Vietnam. Furthermore, there was a pro-U.S. country on Laos’s western flank. Laos and Thailand share a border of 1,090 miles, and conservative Thai premier Sarit Thanarat was willing to allow U.S. forces to use his nation as a base from which to attack the Pathet Lao. It was in Sarit’s interest to maintain Laos as an anticommunist buffer between his country and North Vietnam. Also, Phoumi Nosavan, America’s Lao strongman, was Sarit’s cousin; the two men often coordinated their political and military strategies. Washington thus had an ally, contiguous to Laos, where American troops could be stationed and to which those troops could retreat. South Vietnam offered no such conveniences.⁷

More significant than strategic assessments of the Lao landscape were cultural perceptions of the Lao people. U.S. policy toward Laos in the 1950s and early 1960s cannot be understood apart from the traits that Americans ascribed to inhabitants of that country, the manner in which American statesmen and the American media constructed a putative Lao national character that differed from South Vietnam’s and that made Lao chances of withstanding communist pressure appear negligible. As several works of diplomatic history taking the so-called cultural turn have shown, it is not sufficient to accuse Americans of generalized bias in their cold-war dealings with countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and China. Policymakers and press lords may have mouthed the domino theory’s rhetoric of interchangeability, but they never believed that one Asian nation was much the same as any other. Rather, conceptualization of Asia in the American popular imagination was complex, positing a hierarchy of good and bad Asians, as Kennedy demonstrated in the above-cited letter to Diem when he contrasted Lao ineffectiveness with the fierce desire of your people to maintain their independence and their willingness to engage in arduous struggle for it. Americans at midcentury considered some Asians tough and therefore dependable anticommunist allies and consigned others to the ranks of those who, in the words of a State Department working paper, will not fight for themselves, much less the free world. No Asians rated lower in American eyes than the Lao.⁸

The record of policymaking deliberations under Eisenhower bristles with complaints about how difficult it was to get Lao soldiers and politicians to behave like cold warriors, or even to recognize that there was a war on. To American strategists, the Lao lacked every virtue desirable in an ally—courage, brawn, intelligence, maturity, acumen, morality, vigor—while possessing in abundance every shortcoming likely to render someone susceptible to red coercion: cowardice, feebleness, ignorance, childishness, injudiciousness, depravity, indolence. It is doubtful whether any people, even Amerindians in the Jacksonian era, have been held in greater contempt by U.S. government officials than the Lao, or that American policymakers ever resented an alliance more keenly than Eisenhower and his lieutenants resented their partnership with Laos in the crusade to keep Southeast Asia out of the communist orbit.

Kennedy found the partnership so vexatious that he ended it, disavowing Eisenhower’s hard line and opting for Lao neutralism. In July 1962, the American secretary of state joined representatives of thirteen other nations at Geneva to sign a treaty that left Souvanna in charge of a coalition government, ordered all foreign troops to evacuate Laos, and stipulated that Lao territory would no longer be used as an avenue for the infiltration of neighboring countries. This was not an ideal outcome from Washington’s perspective, even assuming the provisions were carried out in good faith, but it was better than large-scale American intervention or Pathet Lao victory. Kennedy has received high marks from historians for obtaining a negotiated settlement in Laos. Kenneth Hill cites the president’s handling of the crisis as evidence of his desire to initiate an era that would be devoid of old clichés and cold war slogans.⁹

Such praise hits wide of the mark. Kennedy was at least Eisenhower’s equal in terms of anticommunist pugnacity. He chose to neutralize Laos not because he questioned the view that the United States needed a stronghold on the Asian mainland—in fact, he increased America’s presence in South Vietnam while the 1961–62 Geneva Conference on Laos was unfolding—but because he considered the Lao miserable allies. Like Eisenhower, he was disgusted by reports of RLA incompetence. The intelligence briefings that landed on his desk every morning told him that royal troops regularly retreated in the face of a handful of Pathet Lao guerrillas. Sometimes they broke ranks to go swimming or pick flowers. RLA commander Phoumi Nosavan was, in Kennedy’s words, a total shit, and Lao civilian leaders were just as bad: lazy, stupid deadbeats, they soaked up millions of dollars in American aid without offering even verbal resistance to the communist bloc. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s chief speechwriter, put the matter plainly: Do we want an indefinite occupation of an unenthusiastic, dark-skinned population . . . unwilling to fight for their own freedom? Kennedy decided that he did not. According to Sorensen, the president justified the new course in Laos in his second State of the Union address, when he proclaimed that no free peoples can be kept free without will and energy of their own. He spoke of the world in general, Sorensen recalled, but he was thinking of Laos in particular.¹⁰

In this book I trace the evolution of American policy toward Laos under Eisenhower and Kennedy, interpreting that policy as a product of cultural prejudices rather than logistical considerations or other ostensibly more salient imperatives. Nomenclature in a work like this is always problematic, as one strives for precision as well as parsimony, and my efforts to navigate between the Scylla of hairsplitting and the Charybdis of reductionism have convinced me that there is no single term for midcentury Americans’ optique nuanced and elastic enough to serve the many functions to which it must be put. Orientalism and paternalism have their merits as explanatory rubrics, but neither encompasses all the feelings, attitudes, and values that drove U.S. policy. Bigotry, by contrast, is so vague as to be unwieldy. Ethnocentrism could conceivably work, since U.S. policymakers were incapable of understanding anything outside their own purview and presumed that the Lao wanted the same things they did; nonetheless, that expression has always rung tinny to my inner ear—it is too clinical to convey the malignancy of American anti-Lao sentiment, and it sounds, fairly or unfairly, like a word academics employ to avoid saying what they mean.

More useful for my purposes is Mark Bradley’s culturally inflected approach to U.S.-Vietnamese relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than relying on one structural category, Bradley writes of the ensemble of assumptions Americans brought to Vietnam, the deep-seated beliefs about Vietnamese mental, physical, and moral development that led U.S. statesmen to dismiss Ho Chi Minh’s demands for independence and at the same time congratulate themselves for being more enlightened than French colonialists. Some of these beliefs had a racist cast; others grew out of allegedly more progressive views about the influence of environment on aptitude; others reflected faith in the universal applicability of U.S. institutions; still others expressed, in muted form, the missionary impulse to save heathen souls. Together, they made up the prism through which Americans apprehended the Vietnamese while crafting policies appropriate—or so they thought—to the situation. As Bradley illustrates, this perceptual framework left Washington unable to appreciate the vitality of Vietnamese national pride and provided justification for what amounted to neocolonialism. Although American diplomats and military officials deplored France’s brutal administration of its Indochinese possessions, none believed the Vietnamese capable of self-government. All were certain that Vietnam would need a period of Western tutelage before it could join the community of nations. Thus blinkered, U.S. policymakers missed their opportunity to establish a working relationship with Ho and condemned their country to an unwinnable war.¹¹

The ensemble of assumptions Americans brought to Laos differed in degree and kind from the mental baggage they carried in Vietnam. Policymakers’ preconceived notions of the Lao were more dehumanizing, verging more often on social Darwinism. Saving graces that U.S. statesmen were willing to grant the Vietnamese—trainability, desire to move with the times, and, most important, aggressiveness—were absent from the Lao portrayed in diplomatic correspondence, position papers, departmental and interdepartmental committee reports, and the minutes of high-level meetings. U.S. ambassador to Laos J. Graham Parsons, roving ambassador W. Averell Harriman, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and other key actors in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations vied to come up with the most withering epithets to characterize Washington’s ally. They sneered at politicians like Souvanna, derided the RLA’s battlefield performance, traded horror stories of U.S. initiatives undone by Lao doltishness, and as a rule spoke and wrote about the Lao in terms that made their stereotypes of the Vietnamese seem flattering by comparison.

America’s prestige press, those newspapers and magazines with the widest circulations and most lustrous reputations, echoed such hauteur. Long before Kennedy removed Laos from the roster of disputes between Washington and Moscow, American journalists had identified the Kingdom of a Million Elephants as a losing proposition, and their disdain grew more entrenched as the Pathet Lao went from strength to strength. The Laotian people have a very passive nature and do not care one way or another about communism or other big questions, observed the Wall Street Journal toward the end of the Eisenhower years. Most don’t seem to care much which side—government or reds—wins as long as they are left out of the squabble. Newsweek agreed, noting, No one is less interested in the struggle for his country than the gentle Lao. Bloodshed and violence are alien to his nature. Red threats from the north mean nothing to him. The vision of Laos that arrived at American doorsteps and newsstands from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s was consistently opprobrious, and often presented in contrast to that of Vietnam, whose inhabitants, the New York Times declared, were of different ethnic stock than the Lao and had no compunctions against killing. Although Times reporter Max Frankel did not answer the question he posed after the signing of the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos—Why is a Vietnamese right-wing strongman worth additional American lives, money, and prestige while a Laotian one is not?—the bulk of received opinion in mainstream U.S. journalism made the answer obvious: because Americans could count on the Vietnamese to fight.¹²

None of the assumptions shaping American policy toward Laos functioned more powerfully than the religious. Laura Belmonte correctly calls religion an understudied element of U.S. diplomacy in the early cold war years, and while a handful of recent books and articles have addressed religion’s influence on midcentury American policymaking, their main contribution has been to show how diplomats like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceived of the cold war as a holy war. For Dulles and his contemporaries, writes William Inboden, the basic outline of America’s diplomatic theology was clear: communists sought to stamp out the worship of God, and the United States had a sacred duty to confront such militant irreligion. Yet it was not simply a matter of faith versus atheism. There were stalwart religions and inconstant ones. As Andrew Rotter, one of the few historians to take up this issue, observes, policymakers and public intellectuals differentiated between the forthright, vigorous, [and] combative Muslims of Pakistan and India’s Hindus, whom they considered debauched and pusillanimous. Starker still was the distinction drawn between Catholicism, an obtrusively anticommunist religion, and Buddhism, the dominant faith of Southeast Asia. A study of U.S.-Vietnamese relations under Eisenhower demonstrates that Buddhism was invariably identified with passivity, unindustriousness, and moral relativism, hardly desirable qualities in an ally when one is waging a crusade. The Catholic Diem, however, seemed committed by his faith to advance America’s cause in the cold war, and that is why the Eisenhower administration stood behind him rather than a Buddhist South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support.¹³

Laos had no Diem. No RLG leader possessed the religious credentials to convince Washington that he would never betray the free world. Even Souvanna, whose Western mien attracted much attention from American politicians and journalists, was a Buddhist, and hence unreliable. Indeed, according to the Operations Coordinating Board, an agency set up by Eisenhower to coordinate departmental execution of national security policies, Lao Buddhism was worse than garden-variety Buddhism. Like everything else in Laos, the board reported, the Buddhist Church is less energetic, less well-organized, less well-developed, and less unified than similar institutions in neighboring countries. The enervating Lao climate and the amiability and indolence of the Lao people have resulted in relaxed intellectual and moral standards. If the South Vietnamese needed a Christian soldier like Diem to rally them against red tyranny, the Lao required Richard the Lionheart, and no one matching that profile dwelt in what veteran Southeast Asia correspondent Stanley Karnow called an improbable little landlocked country where the passionless sage is still in popular esteem superior to warriors.¹⁴

Gender perceptions likewise played a role in the formation and execution of U.S. policy toward Laos, especially after Kennedy became president. By gender I do not mean biological difference; I accept the definition set forth nearly twenty years ago in an oft-reprinted article on U.S.-South Asian relations: [G]ender . . . is the assignment of certain characteristics based upon prevailing ideas of masculinity and femininity to a people and a nation by another people and nation. Many historians, among them Kristin Hoganson and Mary Ann Heiss, have demonstrated how American policymakers and the American media habitually accorded stock feminine traits to the citizens of poorer, predominantly nonwhite countries; thus nations as dissimilar as the Philippines and Iran were encoded as emotional, irresponsible, and unbusinesslike. Such gendered imagery, along with legitimating foreign policies of domination, led Americans to expect a kind of head-in-the-clouds caprice, a reluctance to face up to problems like real men, from representatives of those countries, and the Lao—judging by records in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential libraries, and collections of relevant papers—obliged. U.S. officials repeatedly commented on Souvanna’s quixotism, Kong Le’s impulsiveness, Phoumi’s petulance, and the general inability of any Lao to deal realistically, rationally, and logically with the threat facing the kingdom. While jungle-tough communists massed on Laos’s borders and infiltrated its government and army, America’s Lao allies were forever throwing parties, reshuffling cabinet positions, sulking because Washington would not give them enough aid, or, worst of all, indulging in the type of wishful thinking that had allowed Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other nations to slip behind the iron curtain. No matter how often Americans warned them otherwise, RLG leaders clung to the view that coalitions with communists were workable. They felt, as U.S. minister to Laos Charles Yost complained in a typical cable, that if they made concessions to the Pathet Lao, sweetness and light will be restored. Washington considered this a pipe dream. The dean of American journalists, Walter Lippmann, concurred. In any political marriage, he wrote, the communists are always the male. People too frivolous to heed the lessons of history were unfit to defend vital interests in Southeast Asia.¹⁵

The RLA’s blasé approach to combat fortified this judgment and the policies that flowed from it. Robert Dean has shown how the Kennedy White House thrummed with a boundary-defining masculinity that demanded self-sacrifice, vigor, and physical and moral courage; it is not surprising that this most manly of presidents and his two-fisted advisers should have considered RLA diffidence proof that Laos did not deserve to remain part of the free world. Shortly after taking office, Kennedy forecast that the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. From what Kennedy could gather, Laos epitomized such societies, a view Eisenhower encouraged when he informed his successor that RLA soldiers were a bunch of homosexuals. Kennedy expanded that slur in the retelling. Laos, he remarked to special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr., is a nation of homosexuals. In New Frontier–speak, there was no greater insult, and no stronger argument for policy change.¹⁶

Americans also infantilized the Lao, figuring them as dependents and Washington as their guardian. Naoko Shibusawa’s study of postwar U.S.-Japanese relations, the first to deploy maturity as a category of analysis, is instructive here, as many of the traits her actors ascribed to the defeated Japanese appeared in American representations of the Lao, albeit in more corrosive form. [A]dult over child was a universally recognized hierarchical relationship in Truman- and Eisenhower-era America, Shibusawa writes, and this helped to rationalize the U.S. occupation of Japan and facilitate the shift in Japan’s popular image from enemy to ally. U.S. policymakers assured themselves that Washington was not aping nineteenth-century imperial powers by seizing control of Japanese governmental activities; America, they said, would relinquish sovereignty once the Japanese grew up and were ready to take on the responsibilities and privileges of an advanced society. Moreover, the Japanese, who had been depicted in U.S. wartime propaganda as demons driven by bloodlust, received gentler treatment from American journalists, scholars, and Hollywood filmmakers in the late 1940s and 1950s. Now they appeared as wayward youths, left to their own devices for too long, needing the stern hand, but also the forgiving heart, of a father figure to guide them to figurative adulthood.¹⁷

The trope of maturity turned up often in American discourse on Laos. Tom Dooley, beloved jungle doctor of Asia and the most influential American interpreter of Laos at midcentury, frequently referred to his host nation as the Kingdom of Kids and touted Walt Disney movies as the perfect medium for capturing Lao hearts. News stories devoted to Edgar Pop Buell, the Indiana farmer who won fame for his efforts to aid refugees from the Lao civil war, likewise emptied Laos of its adult population as they portrayed Buell as a paternal presence coaching pre-civilized wards on the rudiments of self-help. Similar condescension bled through the mountains of memoranda and other documents flowing over desks in the State Department and White House and ran like a central artery through the reminiscences of U.S. officials responsible for devising policy toward Southeast Asia. Especially revealing were the names Americans posted to Laos gave to the country of their assignment: Never-Never Land, The Land of Oz, and other titles drawn from fairy tales. When Souvanna, attempting to ingratiate himself with Dulles, told the secretary that he considered Laos a child . . . in relation to the United States, he reinforced American assumptions about Lao immaturity.¹⁸

Yet Americans saw a different breed of children in Laos from what they had encountered in Japan—or Vietnam. As early as the 1890s, Joseph Henning notes, Japan confounded the West by industrializing and developing a first-rate navy. U.S. diplomats, military men, and journalists struggled to reconcile stereotypes of backward Mongolians with the Meiji Restoration. They eventually concluded, as they would during the two decades after Hiroshima, that the Japanese, while inferior to Euro-Americans, were exceptional among Asians in their knack for mimicry and hunger for the fruits of civilization. In other words, the Japanese were gifted children, at the top of the class. Although the Vietnamese ranked a notch below, they were still, according to U.S. ambassador to Burma William Sebald, super-Orientals, ambitious and ripe for instruction. The Lao, by contrast, were Asia’s underachievers, both for reasons of temperament and, some Americans suspected, because nature had not endowed them with much cerebral capacity. U.S. missionary and right-wing talking head Matt Menger went so far as to call them retarded children. By employing such rhetoric, he and many of his countrymen crossed the line from derision to outright racism.¹⁹

I use that term with caution, aware that racism is the most loaded word out there, guaranteed to set eyes rolling and prompt charges of presentism from more traditional scholars. Let me be clear: the type of racism exhibited by Americans in Laos during the 1950s and 1960s was historically specific. It ought not to be confused with justifications for chattel slavery in the antebellum South. Midcentury Americans would never have asserted that the Lao were a separate biological group possessing genetically distinct talents. Nor would they have blamed Laos’s myriad troubles on innate inferiority. Quite the reverse: many Americans saw the free world’s challenge in Laos as one of accelerating progress, of helping the Lao fulfill their economic and political potential. In conformity with the principles of then-regnant modernization theory, Washington sought to catalyze a Lao takeoff toward capitalism, industrialization, and representative government before Marxist revolutionaries could exploit local grievances and communize the recently emancipated colony. America’s whole cold-war campaign in Southeast Asia rested in large part on the premise that indigenous peoples were capable of ascending the rungs of a developmental ladder, even if some of them, namely the Lao, needed to start at the bottom.²⁰

Fashionable theories aside, though, many American politicians, journalists, and opinion leaders wrote and spoke about the Lao with such poisonous antipathy that no expression save racism will suffice. Men like Parsons and Harriman openly despaired of ever getting the RLG or the RLA to behave like citizens of the free world. They viewed their allies as uneducable, sleep-drunk, affectless, content with the most limited horizons. If they never distinctly called the Lao a lesser breed of human beings, they conducted themselves with sufficient arrogance to earn the label racist and the reproachful connotations it entails.²¹

Not every American sank to their level. Indeed, Parsons’s two successors at the Vientiane Embassy, Horace Smith and Winthrop Brown, held markedly more forbearant views than their colleague. Younger, lower-echelon Americans in Laos, like the anthropologist Joel Halpern—who might qualify as this book’s hero—also approached their task from a perspective that, by the standards of the day, was quite broad-minded. Yet even the most charitable Americans looked down on the Lao. For example, Halpern, when asked in 1959 if communist leadership could instill rigid discipline and a strong sense of national dedication in Lao villagers, quipped that he doubted whether the communists had enough No-Doz to stay awake.²²

This was mild teasing compared to the bile spewed by Halpern’s superiors in Vientiane and Washington; still, it betrayed a strain of contumely to which no midcentury American was immune, a strain that centered on one Indochinese country, not the entire region. Christian Chapman, the State Department officer in charge of Lao affairs during Eisenhower’s second term, spoke for many of his associates when he contrasted the Vietnamese, a dynamic, energetic, determined people, with the relaxed, non-competitive Lao. The Lao are . . . not very vigorous, Chapman noted, and they don’t work too hard. . . . They’re very humble and say, ‘Oh, we’re just three million people in the middle of Southeast Asia, and there’s just so much we can do.’ While putting these words in Lao mouths hardly made Chapman a pith-helmeted imperialist, he would not have attributed comparable views to the inhabitants of another country, least of all his own, and the ease with which he invoked a monolithic Laos, shrugging its collective shoulders and hanging its communal head, was telling, especially if we position his relatively tame comments over against a random sample of descriptors favored by other policymakers and the American press when discussing the Lao: docile, apathetic, gutless, spineless, useless, feeble, dreamy, unprepared philosophically to defend themselves, lacking in discipline and morale, like children caught in a grown-ups’ quarrel. Virtually every American in a position to influence U.S.-Lao relations between 1954 and 1962—presidents, cabinet members, military leaders, Foreign Service officials, aid workers, missionaries, editors, publishers, columnists, and reporters—drew from the same grab bag of pejoratives to characterize the people they professed to be helping.²³

Had Americans not been so locked into their Kiplingesque conception of Laos, they might have been able to grasp a hard fact that, in retrospect, seems manifest: not all Lao were battle-shy; only the royalists were. The Pathet Lao fought with valor for years against better-armed opposition. The neutralists, too, showed pluck and resourcefulness; in August 1960, as Eisenhower’s second term drew to a close, Kong Le and his single paratroop battalion seized Vientiane, which was not recaptured by Phoumi’s American-trained divisions until December of that year. History indicated that the Lao did not have a congenital distaste for warfare; it was just those Lao asked to fight for Washington’s puppet who threw in the towel. Yet Americans ascribed U.S. reverses in Laos to flaws in the Lao national character rather than to blind spots in U.S. foreign policy. When they stopped to ask themselves why neutralists and Pathet Lao performed so much better under fire than the RLA, a query they raised with remarkable infrequency before mentally sweeping it under the rug, the response was that the soldiers following Kong Le and Red Prince Souphanouvong were really North Vietnamese cadres in disguise.

To be sure, that charge had some merit. Control of eastern Laos was vital to Hanoi’s long-term strategy of national unification. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through this territory, forming the principal supply route for the rebellion against Diem’s government in Saigon, and the North Vietnamese politburo was not about to allow anyone to deprive it of a crucial logistic and tactical advantage. Hanoi therefore sent a delegation of military specialists to work alongside Pathet Lao forces in 1959, and gradually increased its commitment until, by the end of the 1961–62 Geneva Conference, there were around eight thousand North Vietnamese troops and twenty thousand auxiliary personnel in the northeastern Lao provinces