H-Diplo Roundtables, Vol. XIV, No. 29 (2013) - H-Net

H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XIV, No. 29 (2013)
Review by Anne L. Foster, Indiana State University
T
he Universe Unraveling by Seth Jacobs will prompt us all to re-write our lectures. His
book-length exploration of U.S.-Lao relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s
complicates the easy anecdote that I, and probably many readers of H-Diplo, made
out of President John F. Kennedy’s handling of the challenges Laos posed to U.S. Cold War
policy in Southeast Asia. Whatever our individual assessments of Kennedy’s overall Cold
War policy, Laos was a bright spot in many of our lectures. The Kennedy administration’s
ability to achieve a negotiated compromise for Laos, resulting in a government which
included all the political groups, even communists, could be made to have many meanings.
It could represent the lost chance for peace in Vietnam, the model which might have been
followed. It could show that Kennedy officials really were the brightest, able to negotiate
and compromise even at the height of Cold War inflexibility. It could demonstrate that the
zero sum game of the Cold War sometimes bowed to unemotional assessments of costs and
benefits. After reading Jacobs’ entertaining and distressing narrative, those arguments are
harder to make.
The subtitle, American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos, signals, as subtitles should, the
scope and extent of the analysis. Jacobs explains what the United States did, and what
Americans thought, and how they felt, about Laos. It turns out that the United States
attempted much more than most Cold War histories report. And, more surprisingly
perhaps, Americans avidly followed the adventures of Dr. Tom Dooley 1 and farmer Edgar
“Pop” Buell 2 in Laos in the pages of Time and The Saturday Evening Post, among other
middle-brow mass circulation magazines. Laos, nearly unknown in the United States before
it became a critical battleground of the Cold War, and nearly forgotten today, was briefly, in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, a most consequential place. Jacobs revives that sense of
importance, as well as the vast prejudice which accompanied it.
He opens with an extended version of the well-known anecdote about the pre-inaugural
briefing of Kennedy by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower, at which Eisenhower
famously told Kennedy that Laos was among his most important foreign policy problems.
Students today, upon hearing this, usually chuckle to learn that Laos, of which they have
barely heard, was thought in early 1961 to be more of a threat to U.S. Cold War success
than the situation in Vietnam. Kennedy and his advisors did not chuckle in early 1961.
They despaired, because all they were told about Laos by so-called experts led them to
1 Tom Dooley was a medical doctor who established clinics in South Vietnam and later Laos. An
exemplar of the muscular Catholics of the mid-twentieth century, his clinics served humanitarian purposes
but U.S. interests as well. He courted public attention to raise money and awareness of those the United
States was trying to help, or influence, in South Vietnam.
2 Edgar Buell was a retired Indiana farmer who sought adventure after the death of his wife. He
volunteered with the International Volunteer Service, which sent him to Laos. He proved to have a skill for
connecting with the people of Laos, and was soon enlisted to help get supplies to refugees within Laos. He
also was willing to use his connections in the rural areas of Laos to promote U.S. official interests.
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