Disarmed and Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan by Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady (review)

BOOK REVIEWS595 What little medical assistance he founded did not survive his well-publicized death from melanoma. The author misses an essential point: Dooley's flaw was not his tedious homosexual promiscuity. His lying, egocentricity, manipulativeness, and lack of close human relationships document a profound psychopathic character disorder . Charming, pretty, and sexually available, he simply had no sense ofright and wrong. Psychological rationalization of unacceptable behavior not very uncommonly assumes a super-righteous, sometimes super-patriotic, facade that can end in fantasy. Dooley's fair-haired status among parochial sectarians protected him from the less forgiving conservative Protestant establishment that he so much resented. Morally rootless, Dooley served a bizarre confederacy ranging from the messianic liberal left through public relations firms and the Vietnam lobby to Cardinal Spellman, all eager to involve the United States in Southeast Asia. He gladly proved useful to Diem's handlers. His stateside public persona—"Blessed Thomas of Laos"—precluded control and his role in getting at least Irish Catholics (and, therefore, Democrats) to support the American disaster in Vietnam remains murky. He certainly helped to focus Catholic hatred on Asian communists, but the State Department and CIA loathed and mistrusted him. The author hints at but does not document some vast gay network involving the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Catholic Church; nudges and winks are not scholarship. Balance required more attention to what other superpatriots contributed to anticommunist hatred, and why. This book required tighter editing than it got, and it is not clear what it set out to be: it is not satisfactory political history; it certainly is not medical history and it cannot be dismissed merely as gay history. Cesaropapism proved no blessing! William D. Sharpe, M.D. South Orange, NewJersey Disarmed and Dangerous:The Radical Lives and Times ofDaniel and Philip Berrigan. By Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady. (New York: Basic Books. 1997. Pp. xiv, 434. $30.00.) Journalists Murray Polner and Jim O'Grady have written a comprehensive joint biography of twentieth-century America's most celebrated and controversial radical priests. Darnel and Philip Berrigan were born in rural Minnesota in 1921 and 1923, respectively, the fifth and sixth (and youngest) sons of the devoutly Catholic Freda and Thomas Berrigan. They grew up in a rented farmhouse near Syracuse, NewYork, that lacked indoor plumbing or central heating. Polner and O'Grady depict their father as a frustrated poet and quixotic Irish romantic who, despite being a staunch union man, impulsively traveled from Syracuse to New York City "for the purpose of personally breaking the 1949 596book reviews Catholic gravediggers' strike" (p. 43). By then his son Daniel had been a member of the Society ofJesus for a decade (in an otherwise historically wellinformed account, the authors mistakenly give 1591 as the year of the order's founding). Philip Berrigan entered theJosephite order after graduating from the College of the Holy Cross in 1950. Polner and O'Grady show how the brothers Berrigan were only tentatively radicalized during the first decade of their priesthoods: Daniel discovered the French priest-workers during his tertianship year at a seminary near Lyons but remained a conventionally ambitious priest-poet through the 1950's; Philip witnessed the effects of racism firsthand while teaching in New Orleans and was jarred by the Cuban Missile Crisis, because "other people were deciding whether I would live or die. I felt betrayed, and not just about the urban crisis but for all that was behind the threat" (p. 104). The Berrigans began questioning America's growing involvement in SoutheastAsia in the early 1960's,just as Dan Berrigan began a rich friendship with Thomas Merton. The renowned Trappist predicted that both brothers "will do much for the Church in America" but "will have to pay for every step forward with their blood" (p. 106). Daniel Berrigan was exiled to Latin America by his superiors in 1965 for disobeying Francis Cardinal Spellman's demand that he refrain from comment on the suicide of Roger LaPorte, a former student of Berrigan's who set himself afire outside the United Nations building "as a religious action" (p. 125) against the war in Vietnam. Polner and O'Grady provide a vividly...