Catholics, LindyBill? The official Catholic line was always pretty hawkish on cold war issues. Godless communists and all that. But tagging them with any particular influence there seems sort of a reach. I don't know why it was decided, post-WWII, to support reestablishment of the French colonial empire in Indochina, maybe the mother church played a role then. After that, the slide was fairly continuous, I can't see Catholic influence as more than a minor factor.
One rather odd memory I have from that era is reading a book by Dr. Tom Dooley. Officially a Catholic missionary in Laos, I think. Seemed quite stirring at the time, but I was a kid, and as near as I can remember it was pretty pure cold war propaganda. Turns out he had CIA connections of some form or other, but the whole story is so complicated it's hard to summarize. See for example query.nytimes.com
Writing a more imaginative book on a more bizarre person, Fisher, the author of ''The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962,'' deftly shows how religion, cold-war intrigue and show-biz shenanigans came together in ''Dr. America.'' Dooley, he persuasively argues, helped to pull American Catholicism away from its insular, angry anti-Communism, providing ''the bridge between Joe McCarthy and Jack Kennedy, to the great benefit of the latter.''
Strange. Dooley has his own google category at directory.google.com with many more mentions of the book reviewed in the other link. |
