The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War
By Joshua Kurlantzick
John Wiley & Sons, 264 pages

Two distinct stories, neither complete, sit uneasily between the covers of Joshua Kurlantzick’s The Ideal Man. The first is of Jim Thompson, the Bangkok-based OSS operative who became king of the Thai silk industry—and disappeared mysteriously in 1967. The second is of the expansion of the CIA into a war-fighting as well as an intelligence organization—a change he maintains occurred during the “secret war” that sought to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail, mostly from bases in Thailand, during the Indochina conflict. On Thompson, Kurlantzick is thorough, informative, and even empathic. His approach to the CIA and matters of war, however, is problematic.

Jim Thompson was born in Delaware in 1906. Kurlantzick tells us he grew up among “du Ponts and Rockefellers,” attended St. Paul’s School and Princeton, and spoke with a “clipped boarding-school accent.” He worked as an architect in New York until the approach of World War II, a crisis that Kurlantzick believes stirred in him an idealism like that of the Americans “fighting the fascists in Spain.” First joining the National Guard, he was eventually swept up as a natural for the Office of Strategic Services, which sent him to Bangkok as liaison with the powerful anti-Japanese guerrilla movements active in formerly colonized Southeast Asia. Impressed by their idealism, and convinced that if they talked about Communism it was only because Washington was shunning them, he argued that the United States should continue to support them against the reimposition of colonial power. In 1947 Thompson officially resigned from intelligence work.

Bangkok in those days could still be mistaken for being quaint and exotic. Thompson, who loathed most manifestations of American modernity, found the place deeply appealing. The war, moreover, had cost him his marriage. So Thompson settled down as an expatriate. He increasingly turned his love and attention to the indigenous Thai silk industry, which was slowly dying with the rise of synthetic fibers. He bought the beautiful hand-loomed fabrics and sold them in and around Bangkok. After he managed to send some of his silk to the desk of Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase and then provide textiles for The King and I (1951), his “Thai Silk Company” was, in effect, made.

As the company grew, so, too, did the American presence in Southeast Asia. Thompson was outspoken in his criticism of this development, which became a regular theme at his celebrated dinner parties.

The parties took place almost nightly at his exquisite Thai-style house, built out of components from several antique teak dwellings on a leafy site next to a canal. It doubled as a home to his art collection and is now a museum.

Thompson’s guests were a mixture of international jet-setters and intelligence and military figures (but few Thais). “At his home, with the dim house-lights flickering on the gold-lacquer bodhisattva statues and the sandstone Buddha heads from the 12th century, the talk always turned somehow to Jim, everyone seated around him lobbing questions about his life, his world, and his opinions.”

All seemed well, but as Kurlantzick makes clear, and this is his contribution, Thompson’s best friends understood that the ever convivial Jim was in fact deeply lonely and unhappy. Postwar Bangkok was not remaining quaint—rather, it was turning into a Blade Runner–esque metropolis where Kurlantzick himself lived for some years. More and more Americans were turning up in connection with the war. Thompson found them uncongenial and misguided. He also privately mourned his own failure to have a family. He pursued Irena, Charles Yost’s glamorous Polish wife, with whom he had a long affair—and other women, but without success. To numb the pain, Thompson needed his audience, his cigarettes, and his steady flow of scotch. By the 1960s, as war was spreading in Indochina and Thailand was becoming a major American base, his defenses were breaking down.

A blow from which Thompson never recovered came in 1962, when Thai authorities raided his house, confiscating five stone-carved Buddha heads that, it turned out, had been stolen by rural villagers and sold to unscrupulous antique dealers. The raid reflected deep-seated local resentment at Thompson’s appropriation of things Thai, even though he had always planned to leave his art to the country. After this he visibly aged. He became convinced he was being followed. He checked in and out of expensive clinics. Over late-night scotches, he was more vociferous than ever in his denunciation of the Thai military government and of American policies.

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday 1967, while visiting Singaporean friends in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia, Thompson went for an afternoon walk, evidently intended to be short as he did not even take his cigarettes—and never returned. Although unintentionally, he disappeared just as his long-running role as host sans pareil and political sage was dying of its own contradictions. What became of him has never been determined. Most likely, other merchants jealous of his success arranged for his kidnapping and murder. He had carefully constructed his legend, however, and like his company, it endures—and continues to bedazzle many, including Kurlantzick.

For the author, Thompson is above all a political prophet without honor in postwar America, a man who knew more about Southeast Asia than anyone else, whose end was hastened by his increasing bitterness and disillusionment with American policy. In fact, Thompson did not reach Southeast Asia until 1945. He had no academic background. Evidently the only Southeast Asian language he spoke was French.

Kurlantzick is extremely delicate about all things Communist. He discounts the fierceness of the Communist parties embroiled in Thompson’s life and seems not to believe that intelligent Southeast Asians might have thought the socialist path preferable to the American model. But many did. (Even the democratic prime minister Pridi, whom Thompson idolized, spent decades in Peking after being ousted in a coup, although he died in Paris, never having returned to Thailand).

The author makes some factual errors as he narrates the story of the CIA-run war in Laos, the culmination as he sees it of the events he chronicles and the harbinger of later, equally unsuccessful proxy wars. In truth, war began in Laos because North Vietnam recognized at the end of the 1950s that dislike for the Saigon government in South Vietnam did not translate into support for Communism but rather desire for liberal reform. North Vietnamese regulars would have to conquer the South and begin to be moved in via the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. The United States was unwilling to take a ground role in the country, which had in theory become neutral in 1962, and therefore the U.S. sought to interdict communications by means of covert air strikes and support for General Vang Pao’s heroic and highly effective Montagnard army—through operations originating across the border in Thailand. Failure to stop the North Vietnamese regulars pretty well spelled the end for the South Vietnamese regime.

Kurlantzick tells the story backward. The prime mover for him is “anti-Communist hysteria” that develops unaccountably in the United States and then leads Washington to focus, of all places, on Thailand. Heedlessly discarding the friendship proffered by the Southeast Asian insurgents, sinister right-wing forces put the United States on the wrong side. This sounds familiar. It is, yet again, the “lost chance” theory, applied at various times to Russia, China, and Southeast Asia and given definitive form by Barbara Tuchman in her 1972 Foreign Affairs article, “If Mao Had Come to Washington: An Essay in Alternatives.” An immense literature refutes this position, but none of it is reflected in The Ideal Man. Kurlantzick frames his characters squarely within the “lost chance” argument and ultimately misrepresents Thompson in the process.

Without question, Thompson came to vociferously oppose U.S. policy and in his very last years spoke out to TV networks and journalists as well as dinner guests. But it is wrong to imagine that Thompson was an infallible guide to policy, or that his expertise on Southeast Asia was quite what Kurlantzick asserts. Ironically, the best part of this book is the personal story of Thompson that the author has cobbled together through multiple interviews, readings of correspondence, and other primary sources. Far from being an intelligence lion at bay, ready, if only he had been heeded, to save the United States from needless conflicts, the real Jim Thompson was an unhappy expatriate and compulsive socializer, far more concerned, if Kurlantzick’s evidence is to be believed, with his silk company, his art collection, and the fugitive affections of Irena Yost and others than with American policy.

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