Abstract
Vietnam was the ninth of 13 countries the Joey Adams Vaudeville Troupe visited in their four months on the road. Early November 1961, however, was not a particularly propitious time to perform there. Battles raged around Saigon, and a grenade had been thrown at the US ambassador four months earlier.1 Adams feared the show would not happen. “Right up until … our … jet … set down …, we didn’t think we were going to make it. None of us really thought we’d be allowed to enter Saigon,”2 he records. Performances were delayed by bomb squads and police patrolled the theatres; however, the company did their duty. “We all knew the lay of the land. But none of us talked about it. We had a job to do. Uncle Sam at this point was our father, mother and guardian. He was responsible for us. If he thought we should go in, we were going in.”3 If their country needed them, these 25 US citizens would brave any hardship.
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Notes
Joey Adams, On the Road for Uncle Sam: The Bittersweet Adventures of an American Vaudeville Troupe in Southeast Asia (New York: Bernard Geis, 1963) 207.
K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005) 167.
Jeannette Walls, Dish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show (New York: William Morrow, 2001) 71.
Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (London: Bloomsbury, 2001) 157.
Roy E. Larsen and Glenn G. Wolfe “Report of Survey Cultural Presentations Program,” 17 December 1962. SD/UAR.
Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2001) 65.
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012) 702.
Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012) 213.
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War (New York: Henry Holt, 2013) 203
and Ted Morgan, My Battle of Algiers: A Memoir (New York: Collins Books, 2005) 21.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Kensington, 2001 [1971]) 104.
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain [1956], Black Power: Three Books from Exile, ed. Cornel West (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008). Emphasis in the original.
Richard Goold-Adams, John Foster Dulles: A Reappraisal (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962) 169.
See also Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Columbus: Ohio University Research in International Studies, 2010) 15–16.
As quoted in Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2001) 57.
Scott Lilly, “Diplomats, National Security, and the House Budget,” Center for American Progress, 18 September 2012. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/news/2012/09/18/38352/diplomats-national-security-and-the-house-budget/. Accessed 6 June 2013. Richard Arndt notes that when traveling abroad, Rooney had expected embassies and consulates to “meet[] his heavy need for liquid refreshment,” despite his public disparagement of such budgetary requests. Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2005) 392.
Charles Frankel, High on Foggy Bottom: An Outsider’s Inside View of the Government (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) 19.
As quoted in Richard Scharine, “Kaleidoscope of the American Dream,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 10 (Spring 1998): 43–44.
Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford University Press, 2008) 125.
David Savran, “Trafficking in Transnational Brands: The New ‘BroadwayStyle’ Musical,” Theatre Survey 1.03 (September 2014): 319–20.
Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (New York: Pantheon, 2014) xxvii.
Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014) 230.
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© 2015 Charlotte M. Canning
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Canning, C.M. (2015). Conclusion. In: On the Performance Front. Studies in International Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543301_8
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