The Quiet American

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She's no child. She is tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all. She'll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she'll never suffer like we do from thought, obsession-she won't scratch, she'll only decay." The most realistic of the four, Peter Sichel, came to realize that most spies dropped behind the Iron Curtain were soon captured and killed. Even when small bands of insurgents survived for a few weeks or months, they were unlikely to be able to mobilize widespread rebellion against entrenched Communist regimes and would not receive support from America and its NATO allies even if rebellion took place. Last, I’ll add this book to a ‘journalism’ shelf – the life of a war correspondent at a time when news dispatches were sent by telegram. French authorities control the press. Dispatches are censored. Only victories are reported. Body counts are given of the enemy but not of French troops – as if the military had time to count enemy bodies before their own. Nor can Fowler, who works for a British newspaper, ever get a real ‘scoop’ – the telegraph people won’t send his story out until the French press reports it first.

Anderson vividly tells the story of the CIA’s early years through the experiences of Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Edward Lansdale, and Peter Sichel. I’ve read a lot about Wisner and Lansdale, a little about Burke (mostly dealing with Albania), and Sichel was a new figure to me. Still, if you’ve read about this subject before, you probably won’t find that many new revelations. He also covers J. Edgar Hoover and his distrust of the new Agency. Anderson faults the CIA’s political superiors for much of what ended up going wrong; he’s pretty critical of George Kennan, for example, who he calls a “two-faced weasel,” and of Eisenhower. Tone Fowler’s narration is ironic and sometimes vitriolic when it pertains to Pyle. However, when it pertains to Phuong or his own life and experience, Fowler’s narration is often serious and melancholy. Politics: In contrast to Pyle’s idealist attitude of ‘wanting to do good and help,’ Fowler’s attitude is ‘what difference can it possibly make’ to these peasants whose main concern is growing enough rice so that they won’t starve? Although it’s not stated in so many words, Fowler is aware of the calculation: how many deaths and maimings is it worth to produce a vague degree of ‘freedom’ a generation from now? 100,000? A million? The author is credited with ‘predicting the outcome’ of American involvement in Vietnam. Why indeed? "We are fools," I said, "when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing – I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just as a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over." Anderson later notes Wisner's despair over Washington doing nothing over the Hungarian uprising and Cabot Lodge deliberately sandbagging the UN looking at it. Out in the field at the time, he was unable to add his voice in Washington, although it probably wouldn't have helped change things anyway.

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Besides Ike and other antagonists mentioned above, two others are of note. J. Edgar Hoover hated the CIA's existence, and even before it was officially created out of its predecessor, conspired to take down Wild Bill Donovan. He also repeatedly went after Wisner.

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. The theatrical release ran 118 minutes. [4] Subsequent television and video releases cut 17 minutes, and run 101 minutes. Cut were: love scenes between Fowler and his young mistress, Phuong; Pyle's courtship of Phuong while Fowler is away; and much of the exposition of the police investigation at the end of the film.Suffering is not increased by numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist in terms of quantity and I betrayed my own principle; I had become as engaged as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again. The Quiet Americans is a fascinating look at the early Cold War through a close study of the careers of four CIA agents from 1944 to the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. The close study is used to examine the bigger picture, of how American foreign policy and the cause of anti-Communism became a bloody lie over a host of atrocities. The way they transported me to different worlds, evoked emotions, and sparked my imagination left an indelible mark. It was no surprise that I decided to pursue a degree in Film Studies, where I deepened my understanding of the art and craft of filmmaking. What can you offer her?" he asked me with anger. "A couple hundred dollars when you leave for England, or will you pass her on with the furniture?"

Literary significance and reception [ edit ] Cover of the second German edition from 1956, which according to the cover inscription was on sale only 8 weeks after the first edition, implicity telling that the first had already been sold out The subjects of the book; Frank Wisner, Peter Sichel, Edward Landsdale, and Michael Burke all wound up in the Office of Strategic Services in the Second World War, running the American side of the intelligence and sabotage efforts against the Axis powers. After victory, the OSS was disbanded and dramatically reduced in scope. Wisner and Sichel remained in occupied Europe, witnesses to the fall of what Churchill would soon term the Iron Curtain, as the Soviets disappeared political enemies and looted and pillaged their subjects. Their warnings, that while Stalin's USSR was a necessary wartime ally, it was no partner in peace, went mostly unheard for a few vital years.Fowler has a live-in lover, Phuong, who is only 20 years old and was previously a dancer at The Arc-en-Ciel (Rainbow) on Jaccareo Road, in Cholon. Her sister's intent is to arrange a marriage for Phuong that will benefit herself and her family. The sister disapproves of their relationship because Fowler is already married and an atheist. At a dinner with Fowler and Phuong, Pyle meets her sister, who immediately starts questioning Pyle about his viability for marriage with Phuong. The Quiet American’s reputation has only grown with time. As the United States waded ever deeper into an unpopular and devastating war, Greene’s book came to be seen as a masterpiece of anti-imperialism. Indeed, the very title has become a shorthand for a certain brand of American who is arrogantly unable to foresee the unintended consequences of his purportedly-good intentions. Although Greene wrote popular thrillers like The Orient Express (1932) and classic screenplays like The Third Man (1949), his literary reputation largely rests on his more serious novels that explore faith and politics, of which The Power and the Glory (1940) is a standout example. The Quiet American in 1955 and is perhaps the last of the writer’s great novels. Like his other novels of this major period of writing, The Quiet American combines Greene’s interest in foreign settings with his concerns about political conflicts and crises of faith in a century that, already at the time of writing, had experienced the horrors of colonialism, two world wars, a holocaust, and the threat of communism East Asia. Anderson points to Eisenhower's New Look policy as the source of many of the worst miscalculations during the early years of the Cold War. New Look held that the nature of war had changed such that a large standing army was no longer the best way to intimidate enemies. Instead, Eisenhower invested in the threat of "massive retaliation" (i.e. nuclear weapons) as well as covert operations, which were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to fight. So the US avoided overt military action in the Soviet Union and its satellite states because of the risk that it would escalate into nuclear war -- a risk that the US created itself (at least in part) by way of the New Look policy. This led directly to the many proxy wars of the time as well as to inconsistent application of US military resources.