Tom Dooley: "nobody's Martyr"

[sistersintigo]

Quote: "Tom Dooley was nobody's martyr. He was an arrogant, supremely self-confident, and in many ways profoundly compelling individual who believed that he was destined to perform a special errand in God's wilderness.... Tom Dooley may not have been a saint, but he was no patsy either. He is much too interesting and his work too important....
"Dooley constantly sought to restore the faith of others in the church without revealing much of his personal situation, other than to state that he did not know how anyone could live without belief in God....Dooley's story is extraordinary, maddeningly complex, as I have learned in the course of ... having interviewed nearly two hundred of his friends and associates. I can attest that the contradictions in the man's character multiply exponentially even as we seek some definitive conclusions in his compelling, tragic journey...." by James Terrance Fisher. Full article:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_n10_v120/ai_13784198/ titled: "Tom Dooley's Many Lives"

This is not a poll. Someone else may begin a poll thread on this topic if they choose.

It is possible to say -- cautiously -- that all the skeletons in Dr. Tom Dooley's closet are out here where everybody can see them, fifty years after he died. The man called "Dr America" polarized people in his day: Eisenhower talked with him soldier to soldier, while others in high places reviled and belittled him; more distractingly, he was literally promoted as a candidate for canonization. Back in the day, only a minority of his fellow men could look at the whole person and accept him, sins and all, the way that he truthfully was. Can we do so today?

[sistersintigo]

Did Dr. Tom Dooley have "groupies" ?

http://sueraypolenews.blogspot.com/2010/06/meeting-dr-tom-dooley.html

[sistersintigo]

"Whatever happened to Tom Dooley?"

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-05-03/news/1993123153_1_tom-dooley-conduct-unbecoming-catholic

[sistersintigo]

Would you compare Dr. Tom Dooley to Mother Teresa??

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/04/reviews/980104.04sherryt.html

Sorry, can't get this link to work. It came up in a Google search on "Tom Dooley".

Edited August 3, 2010 by sistersintigo

[sistersintigo]

[quote name='sistersintigo' date='03 August 2010 - 01:03 PM' timestamp='1280851431' post='2151499']
Would you compare Dr. Tom Dooley to Mother Teresa??
[/quote]

http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/deedy_7amrcs.html

[Maggyie]

I don't think anybody knows who this dude is... I certainly don't.

[sistersintigo]

Well, when JFK was president, I was only a little bitty kid myself. Even my recollection of JFK's assassination is kind of vague. For one thing, the household in which I grew up, was Protestant; so when JFK was killed, it was, "the President, the President has been shot" -- it was not as if a native son, a member of the family, had been killed, which many American Catholic households would have experienced at the time.
So I had to find out for myself who was Thomas A Dooley III, MD.

Back in the day, though, Hollywood was THISCLOSE to making a big heartstring-tugging feature film about him, they even thought of Jack Lemmon (you never heard of Jack Lemmon either?) playing the title role.

[sistersintigo]

[quote name='sistersintigo' date='03 August 2010 - 01:03 PM' timestamp='1280851431' post='2151499']
Would you compare Dr. Tom Dooley to Mother Teresa??

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/04/reviews/980104.04sherryt.html
[/quote]
Since Michael Sherry's review/comparison for the New York Times is protected, online, from being directly linked to:
I will attempt to cut some of it out, and quote the rest here.
[quote]It may seem odd to group together Tom Dooley, the lay Roman Catholic doctor briefly famous in the 1950's, and Mother Teresa, the long-famous Albanian nun. It may also seem distasteful to discuss them as celebrities. Yet celebrity is an inescapable if insufficient category for understanding them.
Each led an improbable life....After World War II, Mother Teresa founded a new order, the Missionaries of Charity....
While Mother Teresa became a fixed star in the firmament, Tom Dooley shot across it like a comet. He showed little promise as an indifferent Irish-American student at Catholic schools. But as a young Navy doctor, he gained fame for rescuing Catholics fleeing Communist North Vietnam in 1954....Although the Navy quietly booted him out in 1956 for his "extraordinarily active" homosexuality, the period's anti-homosexual taboos, author Fisher shows, shielded as well as victimized him. In public he achieved a "stunning metamorphosis from potential sex criminal to secular saint" through the work of Medical International Corporation (Medico), which sent medical teams to poor countries. He died at 34, of cancer, in 1961.
James T 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 Fisher's book "Dr America." [/quote]
Sorry, the computer says my time is up.

[sistersintigo]

Before the quote was interrupted...[quote]Tom Dooley, James T Fisher 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."
Despite obvious differences, Mother Teresa and Tom Dooley bore important similarities. Both cared less about the medical niceties of their work than about its personal and spiritual dimensions. Both had charismatic abilities with audiences to open donors' purses, and few scruples about where the money came from....Both promoted their celebrity status, citing its service to their causes, though Dooley appears far more the huckster, in part because he has been dead long enough for his secrets to be unearthed.
Both presented themselves as above politics while diving into it, in their contacts with world leaders, some eager to partake of their saintliness. Both shifted missionary work away from conversion, and toward what author Fisher calls "post-denominational humanitarianism," tapping desires, especially among young people, for something more uplifting than conventional cold-war postures. And both publicly displayed the wounds of sacrifice and death -- a stooped Mother Teresa in her pained later appearances; Tom Dooley when millions of watchers, viewing CBS's "Biography of a Cancer" (the network televised his surgery), saw his "diseased body" appear "as a billboard for Medico and as a template for all the world's sick and suffering."
But the two also illuminate contrasting varieties of celebrity sainthood shaped by their differences of gender, religious status, temperament, circumstance, and audience. Although his sexuality and CIA backing remained mostly hidden [during his lifetime], the handsome, protean, recklessly male Tom Dooley seemed an open book, just as his diseased body was an open text, while Mother Teresa's was fully cloaked. Dooley represented one kind of celebrity: the charismatic personality, the tension between a messy private life and mammoth public service, and the early, tragic death.
Dooley's case suggests that many people want their saints to be more like them -- evidently bearing the pain and sin of the real world, and therefore open to vicarious identification. Behond benefitting John F Kennedy's political fortunes, as Fisher argues, Dooley also prepared the cultural ground for the celebrity bestowed upon JFK in death and, much later, upon Diana, Princess of Wales. They were elevated to celestial heights in part because their failings were familiar even as their achievements were uncommon. Revelations of those failings, even before death in Diana's case, curiously enhanced adoration.
Ascetic, disciplined, disclaiming any private life, Mother Teresa elicited another kind of adoration -- all celestial heights, no identification. Her extraordinary difference, without compensating familiarity, inspired veneration but allowed little space for the flaws that gradually emerged, flaws that for some only diminish her. She is an almost certain candidate for canonization [this was written and published in 2004] ; Tom Dooley, a more transient figure, is not. Still the commanding statue of him near the Grotto of our Lady, at Notre Dame University (which he attended), and the continuing debates about him suggest that celebrity saints may follow improbable paths in death as in life.
These strange lives don't invite facile judgment; their biographies don't offer it. But another judgment seems possible. It's a cliche that today is "a godless and cynical age," as detractor Hitchens put it -- a cliche which religious leaders also find useful to intone, even as they invalidate it by assisting the religious revival now sweeping the world. Tom Dooley and Mother Teresa also gave the lie to that cliche, not just by what they did -- less distinctive than their celebrity allowed -- but by the devoted, ecstatic, different responses they elicited. [/quote]

[ardillacid]

Who is Tom Dooley

[Winchester]

He's nobody's martyr.

[sistersintigo]

[quote name='sistersintigo' date='04 August 2010 - 12:21 PM' timestamp='1280935302' post='2152013']
Back in the day, though, Hollywood was THISCLOSE to making a big heartstring-tugging feature film about him, they even thought of Jack Lemmon (you never heard of Jack Lemmon either?) playing the title role.
[/quote]

And this is the book upon which it might have been based:

http://www.archive.org/stream/beforeIsleepthel013580mbp/beforeIsleepthel013580mbp_djvu.txt read it online. Amazon.com sells it too.

[sistersintigo]

Reviews of "Dr. America", the Tom Dooley biography by James T. Fisher:

http://books.google.com/books?id=rA8cm8l7JXsC&sitesec=reviews&rf-st:us

[sistersintigo]

The Thomas Dooley Award

http://galandsmc.org/resources/Documents/Gramick_remarks.pdf

[sistersintigo]

Hello, everyone, and thank you very much, moderators.
This thread was hiding in plain sight on the Debate Table forum. But nobody wanted to debate on this thread.
There are one or two debates going on other threads, which could be kind of related to the Tom Dooley thread;
however, they are threads about issues and questions.
This is a Famous Controversial Person thread (in spite of those of you who never heard of him....he died in 1960).

So everybody who never goes to Debate Table, and has never laid eyes on the Tom Dooley thread, is heartily welcomed here, and encouraged to comment, question, investigate.