Before I Sleep. the Last Days of Dr. Tom Dooley

Prince Souphan of Laos arrived at Lambert Field on November 30, 1959, to a proper St. Louis reception led by thedeputy mayor and the head of the board of aldermen. The young prince was in town to attend a dinner sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce honoring a thirty-two-year-old native St. Louisan who -- seven years after being nearly expelled from a local medical school -- was returning home as a hero, celebrated the world over for providing medicine and inspiration to Vietnamese refugees and Lao villagers. The prince told reporters assembled at the airportthat Dr. Tom Dooley, better known to his grateful Lao admirers as Thanh Mo America ("Dr. America"), had made such a profound impact in Southeast Asia that communist radio broadcasts frantically denounced him as an American spy and regularly demanded his expulsion from Laos. The Jaycees had backed Dr. Dooley's work since 1956, when he had first traveled to Laos to build a clinic financed in part by royalties from Deliver Us from Evil, a best-selling chronicle of his central role in the U.S. Navy's autumn 1954 campaign to transplant Catholic North Vietnamese refugees to a newly created state in the South. Crawford King, a St. Louis Jaycee who ran his family's burial monument business, had volunteered to supervise the entertainment of the visiting dignitary during his brief stay in the Gateway to the West. The prince told King that he wanted to see some American dancing girls.