Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ugly American, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Failure of the American Foreign Service
Communism vs. Capitalism
Grassroots Development
Self-Interested Philanthropy
Racism and Cultural Insensitivity
Summary
Analysis
Senator Jonathan Brown starts his career as a very corrupt politician. When he first runs for office, he strolls into the office of the largest private power company and tells them that if they get him elected, he will award them the contract for all of the region’s power needs. They get him elected and pay him $150,000. However, as he grows older, Brown starts to feel a sense of pride in the workings of the Senate and his corruption slips away. He even passes a bill against the same power company that sponsored him. In 1942, Brown becomes a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and starts carefully studying American work abroad.
Senator Brown’s vignette demonstrates how Foreign Service workers can hide their own incompetence and lack of real progress from oversight committees. Brown’s political career moves from corruption to respectability, subverting the typical movement of politicians from clean-cut to corrupt. This establishes him as an upstanding, responsible, and severe figure who will ensure that the American Foreign Service is doing its job.
Themes
Brown becomes the committee chairman and plans a tour of East Asia to see how America’s Foreign Service projects are operating. Seeing the long itinerary, his wife reminds him to be careful of his “heart condition and arthritic legs,” both of which he conceals from the public. Brown tells his staff that they are not to party or socialize during this trip, though he brings his own personal case of whiskey. He intends to determine whether the foreign diplomats are using the several billion dollars of American money well.
Brown hides his health issues, suggesting that he wants to project a strong public image. His demand for strict discipline echoes Solomon Asch, who nonetheless failed in spite of it. This foreshadows Brown’s own failure in his mission to accurately investigate the Foreign Service projects and determine whether their massive budgets are justified.
Themes
Arthur Alexander Gray, Ambassador to Vietnam, receives a cable from a friend in Washington warning him of Brown’s visit. The friend tells him that Brown has a reputation for extracting information from low-ranking staff and using that information to slash their budgets when he believes they’re overspending. Gray calls a meeting with his staff to plan for Brown’s visit. They plan to print new brochures about agricultural challenges and plan an exhaustive itinerary that will take Brown past every American agricultural station in the rural countryside, though they are fully aware that these do not reflect the “typical countryside.”
Gray’s plan to show Brown agricultural stations which are not actually representative of the “typical countryside” suggests that they mean to actively deceive Brown. This darkly suggests that American Foreign Service workers are not only ignorant and incompetent, but even corrupt as they purposefully dodge congressional supervision.
Themes
Gray decides that all his employees must work late each night while Brown is there and should ride bikes instead of driving their personal vehicles. He warns their military attaché, Major Cravath, to be careful when talking to Brown about their military endeavors. Gray warns their only Vietnamese speaker, Dr. Hans Barre, not to let Brown speak to any of the local Vietnamese people so that he doesn’t “take seriously some of the nonsense uttered to him by the natives.” If Brown insists on speaking to a Vietnamese person, Barre should change their words while he translates.
Gray’s strict instructions to his staff are meant to give Brown the impression that they work hard, even if they do not. Gray’s purposeful shaping of perception echoes the Communists’ practice of shaping public perception, suggesting that Gray sees Brown as a sort of enemy. His insistence that Brown not be allowed to speak to the locals, who speak “nonsense,” indicates that he is racist toward the very people he’s supposed to be helping and supporting.
Themes
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Brown and his wife arrive in Vietnam and meet up with Gray, Cravath, and Barre. Brown states that he wants to see if Gray and his people have been using their budgets well. Gray’s staff shows Brown a 90-minute informational film, and when Brown asks how much the film cost, an information officer insists he made it on his own time. The next day, Brown accompanies Major Cravath out to several military sites, which involves a lot of walking. Cravath can see that Brown’s legs hurt, but he keeps a quick pace throughout the day. They pass a Vietnamese man training with a rifle. Brown tells Barre to ask the man how often he’s fired that rifle. The Vietnamese man tells Barre he’s a cook, and they only handed him the rifle this morning, but Barre tells Brown that the man has trained with it for several weeks and wants to fight the Communists.
Cravath’s refusal to slow down even when he can see that Brown is in pain suggests that he intentionally wears the old senator out, presumably hoping to exhaust him and make him less observant or engaged. Likewise, Barre blatantly lies while translating the Vietnamese man’s words. Both of these instances suggest that Gray and his American staff are willing to actively sabotage an American senator’s oversight tour, which points to the book’s overarching message that the American government is beset by infighting, bureaucracy, and mistrust.
Themes
By mid-afternoon, Brown decides he’s had enough for the day and asks a driver to take him back to his hotel. On the way, Brown interrogates the driver and learns that he has a wife and family with him in Vietnam, their own home staffed with servants, and a personal car shipped to Vietnam at the government’s expense. On the way, they pass Tex and Monet, in uniform, getting drunk in an outdoor bar. Brown gets out of the car and angrily confronts Tex for being drunk in uniform, but Tex just threatens him. Brown leaves and tells Gray about the two officers. Gray promises they’ll be punished.
The driver’s admission that he has a wife, children, large home with servants, and personal car suggests that for every Foreign Service worker, the government may be supporting lavish lifestyles for five or more people when accounting for spouses and children. This implies that the American government spends an astronomical amount on its Foreign Service workers, placing few restrictions on what they can and cannot have.
Themes
From then on, Brown seems “much more amiable.” He conducts all his inspections from inside a car. He visits a bunker where French soldiers are holding their defensive line against the Communists. The French commanders paper over their own humiliating losses and assure Brown they are doing a fine job, though they could use better radio equipment and supplies. That evening, Brown and his wife have an elaborate French dinner with one of the French officials and drink lots of whiskey. The official starts showing Brown photographs of gross atrocities and tortures committed by the Communists. The photos disturb Brown, but he starts to respect the French more and more, even when the official asks for better equipment and weapons.
Brown’s new “amiab[ility]” presumably stems from the fact that he has seen the wastefulness and lack of discipline he was looking for. However, the photos of Communist atrocities disturb Brown and grow his respect for the French, suggesting that compared to such atrocities, some budgetary wastefulness suddenly seems less significant.
Themes
The next day, Brown flies just outside of Hanoi to see the fighting. French officers continue to tell him small lies about their fight against the Communists. Brown asks to see a prison stockade, but between a heavy lunch and a long, hard hike through deep mud, he cannot finish the journey. A stream of Vietnamese refugees walk past Brown into Hanoi. Brown points out an old woman and asks Barre to ask her why she is going into the city. The woman tells Barre that the French and the Communists are both terrible: the Communists killed her sons and the French burned down her home and then didn’t even try to defend her village. She is going to Hanoi to find food and shelter. However, Barre tells Brown that the woman said that the good French will take care of her in Hanoi, and the Communists oppressed her.
Once again, Barre’s twisting of the Vietnamese woman’s testimony demonstrates that Foreign Service workers intentionally deceive their superiors in order to hide their own failures. The Vietnamese woman’s actual testimony suggests that, despite the Westerners claiming Communism is the greatest threat to Southeast Asian prosperity, the French inflict plenty of suffering on their own. This delegitimizes any claim that the French—and the Americans, as their allies—might make to being morally superior to the Communists.
Themes
Brown goes back to Hanoi and enjoys another large banquet in his honor. He speaks to French officers, officials, and journalists throughout the next day and during several inspections. Everyone he talks to speaks frankly and says the same things. Brown leaves a week later and returns to the United States. On the plane, he briefly realizes that he only spoke to two Vietnamese locals and three soldiers below the rank of general, two of whom were drunk. Brown pushes the thought out of his mind and falls asleep.
A combination of health issues, overconsumption, and oversight effectively eliminates all of the conviction Brown had to find the truth out for himself and decide whether the Americans in Vietnam deserve their massive budget. The fact that he only spoke to two common people implies that he could not possibly have an accurate understanding of what average Vietnamese people feel about the French or Americans’ presence.
Themes
On the Senate floor in America, Brown debates Senator Corona about the massive budget given to the French fighters and American Foreign Service in Vietnam. Corona quotes a letter from Ambassador MacWhite, detailing endless corruption and waste. Senator Brown rises and says that everything MacWhite said was a lie. He knows this, because he saw the work in Vietnam himself
Although Brown’s failures seem insubstantial compared to characters like Louis Sears or George Swift, his leverage as a Senator amplifies his failure to see the truth in Vietnam. Not only does he not have an accurate understanding himself, but his power as a Senator allows him to nullify MacWhite’s much more accurate testimony.
Themes
