Books: The White Man’s Burden

THE UGLY AMERICAN (285 pp.)—William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick—Norton ($3.75).

The British East India Company thought it would be a good idea to annex Sind, a sizable province in what is now Pakistan. General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B., was glad to oblige, and before long he was able to send a progress report to his superiors. He did so, one legend has it, in a signal that represents one of history’s more famous puns: “Pec-cam [I have sinned].”

Sir Charles presumably did not feel in the least sinful for adding yet another jewel to Queen Victoria’s imperial crown.

But that was in 1843. The Americans who have followed General Napier into Asia are far more apt to say peccavi without intending a pun. Vast numbers of well-meaning Americans are instantly ready to feel guilty and inadequate about their nation’s role among the “underdeveloped” peoples. This book is a slashing, oversimplified, often silly and yet not-to-be-ignored attack on the men and women who have taken up the white man’s burden for the U.S. in Southeast Asia.

Diplomatic Diet. To document their case, the authors—Captain William J. Lederer, U.S.N., an Annapolis graduate and special assistant to Admiral Felix B. Stump in the Pacific, and Political Scientist and Novelist (The Ninth Wave) Eugene Burdick—have chosen to write a series of fictional sketches “based on fact.” They are really a series of crude, black-and-white cartoons.

There is, to begin with, the American ambassador to a Southeast Asian nation called Sarkhan. Louis (“Lucky Lou”) Sears is a political hack who does not speak Sarkhanese (“Fifty percent of the entire Foreign Service officer corps do not have a speaking knowledge of any foreign language”). He loathes the people, the place, the climate. By contrast, the Soviet ambassador is a carefully trained career diplomat who reads and writes Sarkhanese, has studied Buddhism. To show his appreciation of the Sarkhanese ideal of slimness, he diets away 40 Ibs.; to indicate his enthusiasm for Sarkhanese music, he becomes “a fairly skillful player on the nose flute.” Obviously, the political battle between these two is no contest.

Inept Ambassador Sears is followed by a ragtag succession of diplomatic incompetents. Many of these types undoubtedly have their counterparts in real life, but the authors weaken their case by often carrying ridicule beyond reason. A single minor Navy officer, for instance, is shown as preventing the Indian government from accepting U.S. atom bombs. Captain Boning supposedly is the only American technical expert at an Asian arms conference, and he ruins the whole show by giving a hesitant answer to a question about A-bombs that a bright high school student could furnish (the reason he is hesitant is that he is sleepy, having spent most of his nights with a Communist-Chinese cutie).

Golden Ghetto. Opposed to the no-goodniks are the do-gooders, who, according to the Lederer-Burdick ideal, live at the native level, stay outside the Americans’ “ingrown social life,” also known as S.I.G.G. (Social Incest in the Golden Ghetto), never shop at the PX, work with their hands, and do winsome things like playing the harmonica. Among the best of these is “the ugly American” of the title, a big, homely engineering genius full of bright, simple, technical ideas that the overambitious Asians want no part of. Like most of the “good” Americans in the book, he is eventually brought down by stuffy and hidebound U.S. officialdom.

What Lederer-Burdick say they want in the U.S. Foreign Service is “a small force of well-trained professionals” who are willing “to risk their comforts and—in some lands—their health.” What the authors really want (and no one can deny that it would be fine, if it were possible) is a bunch of saints with engineering degrees.

New Brooms. For all its blatant oversimplification, The Ugly American (a title that seeks to go beyond and below Graham Greene’s The Quiet American) has the great merit of drawing the reader into a vital subject rarely treated by fiction. And this Book of the Month Club selection does illustrate the fact that no nation in history has ever faced the problems the U.S. encounters. Like proconsuls of General Napier’s type, U.S. officials are held responsible for the welfare of millions, are expected to attend to their wants and hopes, from plumbing to higher education. But, unlike proconsuls, they have no power to enforce their policies.

And there is, after all, the wife of the “ugly American,” a lady readers will enjoy meeting. Looking over the situation in Sarkhan, she decides that the people’s backs are bent because they use short brooms. Hustling into action, she discovers a 5-ft. reed instead of a 2-ft. reed to be used for broom handles, a technological revolution for which the villagers reward her with a small shrine bearing the inscription. “In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people.”

Even General Sir Charles Napier could not be more gloriously remembered.