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Disenchanted: Thailand's indigenisation of the American Cold War, seen through the experience of Gordon Young
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2023
Abstract
Oliver Gordon Young was a third-generation American Baptist missionary who served with the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and the United States Agency for International Development during the 1960s. He left Southeast Asia in 1974 disenchanted with his missions in the border areas of Thailand, Burma, and Laos. His ‘disenchantments’ with these two preeminent American Cold War agencies illustrated what the United States had increasingly failed to grasp, which was the ‘indigenising’ nature of the Cold War in Thailand. This essay examines Young's career in Thailand and bordering regions to better understand the limitations of American foreign policymaking establishments and their Cold War policies.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2023
Footnotes
The first versions of this article were presented at a workshop on ‘Critical Perspectives on US–Southeast Asian Relations’, organised by Duncan McCargo at Columbia University as well as at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, with an introduction by Dr Alfred W. McCoy furnished with his personal memories. The author would like to thank Dr McCargo, Professor McCoy, and many scholars who have shared their inspiring comments and kind encouragement for this research project. The author also wants to express her deepest gratitude to the late Oliver Gordon Young and his family for sharing their stories and heartfelt blessings. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5C2A01093243).
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84 Ibid., p. 262; ‘Members of a congressional committee visit a South Vietnamese island for political prisoners: The tiger cages of Con Son’, LIFE Magazine, 17 July 1970, pp. 26–9; Sylvan Fox, ‘4 South Vietnamese describe torture in prison “tiger cage”’, New York Times, 3 Mar. 1973.
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96 Hollinger, Protestants abroad, pp. 24–58, 187–213.
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