Afro-Asian Alliances
When Browne first arrived in Cambodia in 1955, he was single and in his early thirties. By the time he left South Vietnam in 1961, he was approaching his late thirties and a member of a multiracial family with four children. He initially had little idea of what was in store for him personally or for the entire world politically. Browne recalled, “Like most Americans of my generation, I had learned little about Indo-China in my schooling. To me, it was a vaguely recalled blob of purple on the map of Asia, clinging to the southeastern border of China.”1 Even the State Department, which sent Browne as a member of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) to administer U.S. economic aid, had little to offer in terms of guidance. During his briefing in Washington, DC, they were “unable to locate a single American in Washington who had ever lived in Cambodia.”2 Within a decade, though, Southeast Asia would become the focus of the world’s attention. In Vietnam and its bordering countries, the United States fought and lost a war that was then the longest in U.S. history.3 The bloody conflicts there aroused passionate antiwar movements both in the United States and internationally. Browne’s years of living and working in Southeast Asia would place him at the epicenter of these political developments in the 1960s.
Browne’s engagement with Asian people and politics provides an opportunity to examine Afro-Asian connections during the crucial period of the Cold War, decolonization, and civil rights. Various scholars have traced a history of African American interest in Asia. As Bill Mullen and Cathryn Watson argue, W. E. B. DuBois “consistently saw Asia as the fraternal twin to African—and African American—struggle for political freedom.”4 Also, as Marc Gallicchio, Gerald Horne, Reginald Kearney, Yuichiro Onishi, and Nico Slate demonstrate, a variety of black leaders and the black press followed political developments in Asia with great interest throughout the first half of the twentieth century.5 Japan, in particular, received African American attention. As Japan challenged European dominance on the global stage, the country became perceived as a model for other racialized and colonized people for independence. This interpretation of Japan, however, overlooks that nation’s campaigns to colonize other Asian countries and peoples. Bill Mullen describes this tendency among African American thinkers to idealize and romanticize Asia in the name of anticolonial and anticapitalist solidarity as a form of Afro-orientalism.6 He raises the possibility that this particular form of orientalism could “do the work of both colonizing and decolonizing the mind.”7
These studies on African American internationalism in relation to Asia have tended to focus on Japan, India, and China and how their status on the global stage has shaped thinking about black liberation struggles. In addition, these studies have analyzed African American leaders and cultural figures who traveled and lived abroad. These individuals tended to either make brief visits or live abroad for an extended period of time due to their status as political exiles. In contrast, Browne resided and worked in Southeast Asia for six years as an agent of the American government. Furthermore, he developed an intimate relationship that mirrored the possibilities of Afro-Asian political unity.
Browne’s status as a racial outsider but a national insider provides an opportunity to consider how racial triangulation operated in the global arena during the Cold War. Political scientist Claire Jean Kim proposed the concept of racial triangulation to analyze the relational ways in which African Americans and Asian Americans are racialized in the United States.8 She posits the importance of understanding social hierarchy beyond a linear or one-dimensional analysis. Instead, she argues for the need to recognize at least two axes by which Asian and African Americans have been conceptualized in relation to each other and to the dominant white group. On the one hand, Asian people in the United States have tended to be “valorized” above African Americans as “model” minorities. On the other hand, African Americans are deemed civically superior, since people of Asian ancestry tend to be regarded as perpetual foreigners. Kim’s idea of racial triangulation is intriguing to consider in the context of the Cold War. As a member of a racially marginalized group who could nevertheless become a spokesperson for the U.S. state, Browne served as a unique asset for American Cold War efforts to win the hearts and minds of the decolonizing Third World. However, his potential alliance with Asian people and their interests could upset the racial logic of mainstream America. A personal and political partnership between African Americans and Asian foreign others could potentially invert the power dynamics of the racial triangle, not just in the United States but also globally.
Bob Browne left the United States in 1955, a momentous year in which the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement converged to generate a world-changing political storm. Browne arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, when, in his words, “the signatures of the 1954 Geneva Agreement . . . were hardly dry.”9 Under the Geneva Accords, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, colonies of France since the mid-to-late nineteenth century, finally achieved nominal independence. Vietnam, which had engaged in a nine-year war against the French since the end of World War II, was divided into two sections at the seventeenth parallel with the promise of a national election in 1956. Cambodia, which had negotiated its sovereignty previously, remained intact.
Like other decolonizing nations during the postwar era, these liberation struggles were profoundly shaped by the Cold War. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, or the League of Independence for Vietnam, was the most organized force fighting against French colonialism. Its members held a range of political beliefs, but the league was led by Ho Chi Minh, who also cofounded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930.10 Ho was not necessarily anti-American. He had previously traveled to the United States in the 1910s and even lived in Harlem. During World War II, he also cooperated with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. When Ho pronounced Vietnamese independence in 1945, he quoted from the American Declaration of Independence, proclaiming, “All men are created qual. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”11 Ho also petitioned President Truman for his endorsement and cited the Atlantic Charter. Signed by the United States and Great Britain in 1941, the charter pledged “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”12 Truman never responded to Ho’s letter. Instead, the United States, with its own history of racial domination and its fear of the spread of communism, began supporting the French, supplying them with economic and military aid to fight against Vietnamese independence. By the time the French lost the final battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the United States had spent one billion dollars and was paying for 80 percent of the French costs of the war.13 To counteract this level of support, the Viet Minh had turned to the Soviet Union and to the People’s Republic of China for economic and military aid.
The end of the First Indochina War against the French did not bring peace to the region. In 1955, the same year that Bob Browne arrived in Southeast Asia, the United States installed the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Diem refused to hold the national elections promised by the Geneva Accords. He also resisted instituting domestic political and economic reforms to build support for his rule.14 Nevertheless, the United States continued to escalate its financial, political, and military commitment to South Vietnam, thereby laying the foundations for the Second Indochina War. More commonly known in the United States as the Vietnam War, the military conflict actually took place throughout the entire Southeast Asian region, including Cambodia.
Because of the high political stakes involved in the Cold War, decolonizing nations sought to neutralize the pressures to choose between the capitalist West and the socialist East. The same year that Bob Browne arrived in Phnom Penh, twenty-nine Asian and African nations, including Cambodia, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam, met at the historic Afro-Asian Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Challenging the bipolar perspective of the Cold War, these emerging nations affirmed their alliance with one another as members of a third “nonaligned” force, self-designated as the “Third World.”15 Although it proved almost impossible to remain neutral, the declaration of an independent Third World bloc was a powerful statement that created a degree of political leverage for these nations.
In this context, Browne’s desire for professional and life opportunities overseas coincided with American strategic efforts to obtain the allegiance of the emerging Third World. Browne’s racial identity constituted a crucial political asset, especially as the civil rights movement blossomed in the United States and gained international attention. The year before Browne went abroad, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. The year that Browne left for Cambodia, Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her bus seat to a white man and sparked a year-long boycott of segregated public transportation. It was during this campaign that Martin Luther King Jr. became an internationally recognized spokesperson for nonviolence and civil rights. At the time, he was just a young minister leading his first congregation. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock High School in Arkansas, and the other dramatic struggles for civil rights throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s brought to light the entrenched inhumanity of American race relations.
Projecting a more positive racial image abroad, then, was crucial to the U.S. position as a global leader. The 1958 best-selling novel The Ugly American, published the year that Browne was transferred from Cambodia to South Vietnam, warned of the damage to international relations that resulted from the arrogance and cultural insensitivity of American foreign service personnel in Southeast Asia. One method to promote a more positive representation of the United States was to encourage certain African Americans to travel abroad. While leftists or suspected leftists like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois had their passports revoked, the State Department enlisted African American jazz musicians to serve as cultural ambassadors for the United States.16 The presence and music of Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie projected a national image of racial equality and democracy, a particularly necessary propagandistic goal, given the target audience of Third World nations. As Browne pointed out himself, “the State Department [was] becoming aware of the Negro’s direct usefulness in international relations [as] evidenced by the . . . growing numbers of Negroes in diplomatic and semi-diplomatic positions.”17 Once almost denied a passport by the U.S. government, Browne now served as a valuable representative of his country.
Instead of taking an ocean liner, Browne flew to Asia on a “pre-jet jumbo carrier . . . a four engine-pot-bellied aircraft which included a few sleeper berths.”18 He stopped in Seattle, Anchorage, and Tokyo before finally landing in Phnom Penh. Never having traveled to Asia before and with little time to prepare linguistically or culturally for his journey, Browne was initially overwhelmed and even somewhat regretful about his decision to spend two years of his life there. His immediate impressions of Cambodia focused on the agrarian and underdeveloped nature of the society there:
Although the scene at the airport had been one of considerable animation and crowding . . . the road from the airport proved to be sparsely utilized, primarily by slow-moving carts pulled by oxen or small horses, transporting farm produce of various sorts. There was a sprinkling of cars. . . . Scenically, one faced vast tracts of rice paddies of an unbelievably powerful green coloration, sparkling in the sun because their roots were submerged under a very thin sheet of water. The paddies were periodically interrupted by stretches of lightly forested acreage interspersed with leafy banana plants and stately coconut palm trees. Wooden houses were spotted throughout the area, many of them on stilts, most of them with thatched roofs made from local grasses.19
Even though Phnom Penh was the country’s capital, it was quite a contrast from the Big Apple. Browne pondered why he was “voluntarily giving up [his] life in New York City to come and dwell in a sleepy tropical town which apparently had little to recommend it.”20 Browne’s impressions mirrored the classical orientalist outlook of other people from the West. As scholar Edward Said observes, those from the Occident tend to emphasize the contrast between the First and Third Worlds, between what they regard as the “primitiveness” and “backwardness” of Oriental countries in comparison to the “modern” and technologically advanced West.21
Browne’s fellow Americans tended to exhibit this orientalist outlook as well. During his two-year stay in Cambodia, he became a member of a U.S. country team, which consisted of four units: the American Embassy, the U.S. Information Services (USIS), the Military Assistance Advisory Group, and the United States Operations Mission (USOM), otherwise known as the ICA. Overall, the country team employed approximately 160 Americans and 260 Asians.22 All of the Americans stationed in Cambodia were relative newcomers. During the First Indochina War, the United States had provided economic and military aid to Cambodia through the French. Communication and money were channeled through a regional office in Saigon, which was accessible from Phnom Penh by a one-hour plane ride or a six-hour car ride. Following the Geneva Accords, the United States established an office in Cambodia to, in Browne’s words, “fill the vacuum which was being created by the departure of the French.”23
The United States considered Cambodia significant enough to warrant a country team for political, military, and economic reasons. Bordered by Vietnam to the east, Laos to the north, and Thailand to the west and northwest, Cambodia constituted a crucial domino in America’s Cold War calculations. U.S. officials feared that “the fall of Cambodia into Communist hands would lay open the flanks” of Southeast Asia. Cambodia, with an estimated population of four million and land size equivalent to the state of Missouri, had relatively few desirable raw materials or exports, aside from rice or rubber; however, “because of its interrelation with the defense of SE Asia,” the “loss of Cambodia . . . would endanger sources of raw materials needed by the U.S. in order to prosecute a major war.”24
To maintain Cambodia’s independence from the communists, the United States first and foremost provided significant military aid. Aside from supplying equipment and advisers, the United States also directly financed the budget of the Cambodian military, paying the salary of its personnel. A 1956 report indicated, “the total cost of the Cambodian armed forces is approximately $37 million, of which the Cambodians are contributing some $8 million and the United States some $29 million.”25 The funding was deemed necessary, given the incursions into Cambodia by Vietnamese forces. In addition, the United States at times covered a portion of the deficit spending of the Cambodian government, which was struggling to stabilize itself given the limited revenue stream from its antiquated taxation system.
In addition to these pressing military and fiscal concerns, the United States, through USOM, provided technical and financial assistance with an eye toward modernizing the economy and society of Cambodia. The ICA sought to demonstrate the benefits of capitalism by investing in the transportation infrastructure, encouraging private enterprise, developing the export and industrial capacity of the nation, and generally raising the living standard of Cambodians. As a member of this economic aid team, Browne was inspired sincerely by “the prospect of rendering real service to an area of the world that needed help”; he wanted “to help rebuild the shattered economies of this war torn area and to bring it the benefits of western medicine, technology and education.”26 Years later, Browne recognized the missionary-like approach of this modernization project. He recalled, “Much like a dedicated corpsman of the Salvation Army, I arrived in Cambodia convinced of the rightness of my cause.”27
The desire to transform Cambodia so that it might serve as an American Cold War ally led members of the U.S. country team to express frustration and at times contempt for the people whom they were seeking to assist. The reports from American personnel frequently contained complaints about what they perceived as the ineptitude and noncooperation of the Cambodian government. The conflicts resulted from a variety of complex factors. At the basic level of communication, there were linguistic and cultural gaps between Americans and Cambodians. Most members of the U.S. country team did not speak French, the language most commonly used within elite Cambodian political and economic circles. The inability to communicate without translation proved frustrating to American personnel, which is why Browne’s facility in French was so highly desired. However, hardly any Americans, including Browne, spoke Cambodian, the language actually used by the overwhelming majority of the people in the country. Beyond this linguistic disconnect, cultural differences also fueled misunderstanding. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the central political leader in Cambodia during this period, was a charismatic and cosmopolitan figure. In contrast, according to historian David Chandler, Sihanouk perceived “the first U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Robert McClintock, . . . as dogmatic, imperious, and gauche. McClintock attended at least one official reception accompanied by a dog; he moved around the capital in shorts and occasionally affected a baton.”28
There were also distinct political differences between Americans and Cambodians for historical and contemporary reasons. It is perhaps not surprising that relatively few officials had experience or knowledge about Western forms of governance, a complaint that U.S. personnel frequently raised. After all, as McClintock observed rather dismissively, “under almost a century of French rule, important administrative posts were staffed by French personnel and the Cambodians were relegated to the positions of office boys.”29 The limited pool of potential officials became further reduced as the Cambodian government, led by the somewhat mercurial Prince Sihanouk, experimented with various political structures and leaders in the early years of the nation’s founding. Browne arrived just as the country held its first elections. The government was subsequently constituted and reconstituted with varying prime ministers and different degrees of influence from an elected assembly that was ultimately dissolved. In addition to this instability, there were also distinct differences between Americans and Cambodians in terms of political priorities. While U.S. Ambassador McClintock was prone to lecture “Sihanouk about the dangers of Communism,” Sihanouk declared his country as a neutral state and sought aid not only from the capitalist West but also the socialist East.30
Despite these complex factors that shaped relationships between American and Cambodian leaders, McClintock, as the highest-ranking representative of the United States, boiled down these differences to a fundamental racial distinction between the West and the East, the white and the nonwhite. In a report to Washington, DC, McClintock posited:
In my judgment—and these observations apply generally throughout Southeast Asia as well as to Cambodia—the inherent difficulty of ICA is its attempt to super-impose on primitive, unsophisticated, highly nationalistic and poorly staffed newly-independent countries a mechanism for aid which as the Marshall Plan was originally applied to the long-established, economically sophisticated, financially experienced and ancient countries of Europe. The attempt is comparable to giving one of Einstein’s more simple equations to an Australian bushman who, on receiving the priceless formula, promptly goes out and does what he knows best—throw a boomerang.31
This polarized sense of difference between Westerners and “natives” was deeply ingrained in the way that the country team functioned. American and Asian staff members were paid according to different pay scales. In addition, U.S. personnel lived in quarters deemed suitable for Westerners to occupy. Aside from official functions, Americans tended to socialize exclusively with one another at the few sports and social clubs established for Westerners.
This practice of social segregation between Americans and Asians ironically situated Browne in a relatively privileged position. Although black, he was American.32 He joined and played tennis at the country club for foreigners. His regular career promotions and pay raises in USOM suggest that his supervisors recognized and rewarded his contributions. He first arrived in Cambodia as a program accountant auditor in August 1955, became an economic analyst in July 1956, and then served as an assistant program officer of operations in November 1957 before he succeeded in obtaining a promotion and transfer to the much larger country team in South Vietnam in February 1958.33 Milton Esman, the chief program officer for USOM in Saigon from March 1957 through July 1959, recalled that Browne was a “personable individual” who was “well liked.”34 When asked if Browne’s racial background played a role in the way in which he was treated or regarded, Esman emphasized that “race did not enter into relationships abroad.” Although there were clear hierarchies based on rank within the country team staff, Esman recalled that he and Browne “socialized frequently in the evenings.”
The lack of racial prejudice among foreign service staff seems somewhat exaggerated.35 After all, The Ugly American, which depicted the racism and cultural ignorance of American diplomats and aid workers, was based on actual incidents and people who were in the foreign service in Southeast Asia.36 In fact, the popularity of the book led the director of the USOM mission in Vietnam, Arthur Z. Gardiner, to speculate who among them inspired the characters in the book. In addition, the American ambassador to Vietnam, Elbridge Durbrow, even corresponded with his superiors in Washington, DC, to supply ammunition to discredit both the book and the authors.37
Yet in the midst of this defensive reaction to charges of racism, Browne discovered a more welcoming environment for him while abroad:
Despite my rather severe criticisms regarding the general behavior of white people toward colored people, my references are to be interpreted as generalizations, with all the exceptions which that term implies. Not only are several white persons included among my most cherished friends, but my prolonged foreign residence has resulted in my circle of American acquaintances becoming almost exclusively white in recent years. One of the most surprising aspects of my overseas experience has been to witness and enjoy a social intercourse with my white fellow countrymen which is both natural and easy—free of the artificiality which so frequently plagues interracial relationships in the U.S.38
Browne’s closest friends during his years in Cambodia and Vietnam included Ed Smith, a white Southerner, who worked as an English-language instructor for the Military Assistance Advisory Group. Smith recalled that he and Browne “just had a good time” together.39 They enjoyed each other’s company so much that when they both went on home leave, they traveled together through Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
Other African Americans, such as the Black Panther Party leader Kathleen Cleaver, also recalled that living abroad as a member of the foreign service mitigated some of the domestic experiences of American racism.40 Born in 1945, Cleaver spent roughly six years of her formative childhood in Asia. Her father, Ernest E. Neal, was a professor who specialized in rural sociology at Tuskegee University, a historically black college whose first president was Booker T. Washington. Neal first went to India in 1953 as a Ford Foundation Fellow and then to the Philippines in 1956 as a member of ICA, the same organization that employed Bob Browne. Neal attempted to apply the theories that he developed in the American South to the decolonizing nations of Asia to promote rural community development and help eradicate poverty.41 In essence, his position in Asia was comparable to Mr. Jones’s in North Africa and Browne’s in Southeast Asia. Growing up in Asia, Kathleen Cleaver recalled the lack of racial segregation among foreign service personnel and the integrated educational opportunities for American children abroad. Her experiences in Asia contrasted sharply with Jim Crow conditions in Alabama, which she experienced firsthand when she returned to the United States.42
Despite the greater opportunities available for African Americans abroad, Browne’s racial identity still held significance. He was acutely aware of how his race benefited the U.S. government as well as himself. In several interviews and writings, he stated his belief that it was not only “my fluency in French” but also “my dark skin” that resulted in his employment by USOM.43 His country team sought to capitalize on his presence to address concerns about racism among Asians. For example, Browne recalled:
While working for the foreign aid program in Cambodia I was once requested by USIS (the U.S. Information Service) to deliver a short orientation talk to a group of Cambodian young men who were going to America to study. The topic designated for my talk was “The United States, a Melting Pot.” Inasmuch as Cambodians are brown-skinned like myself I surmised that USIS was attempting to prepare these students for the color antagonisms which they might encounter upon arrival in the United States. My inference was confirmed a day or two later when one of the USIS officials informally mentioned to me that he hoped that I would describe things just as I saw them, keeping in mind that my audience would actually be in the U.S. within a couple of months’ time. I assumed that he meant that I should tell the truth. . . . I did not hesitate, therefore, to point out the ugly aspects of race relations in America but at the same time explained the historical reasons for the situations which exist and the progress being made to correct them. During a question period which followed my talk I discovered that one or two of the students had come armed with perceptive and incisive questions about race discrimination in the U.S. which they had culled from a variety of sources. Fortunately, my talk had anticipated and answered most of them and as a result of this initial frankness the group left with complete confidence in what I told them. Admittedly, they left feeling that although America might be a melting pot it was one under which the flame had not yet been turned high enough. They were, however, better fortified to face the realities of American life without being shocked into anti-Americanism.44
Browne recognized that the American government sought to use his brownness to further their political goals with Asians. Being in this “middleman” position benefited Browne as well. It gave him a platform to talk about race.
Browne developed a closer rapport with Cambodia and Cambodians than many of his white colleagues. Despite his initial hesitancy about coming to Phnom Penh, Browne came to enjoy “the rhythm of the country.”45 He also felt “great to be earning a decent salary for the first time in [his] life,” particularly since his position allowed him to more fully utilize the knowledge and skills that he had acquired through his education. Most significantly, Browne found it “exhilarating to be in a country where colored peoples were in charge of themselves.”46 In contrast to the negative reaction to Sihanouk that many of his colleagues expressed, Browne emphasized the prince’s “imaginative and independent” thinking as well as his popularity and accessibility to “his people. . . . Prince Sihanouk regularly made himself available to listen to individual complaints about his government, to settle domestic and marital disputes, to hear public suggestions and to engage in whatever type of verbal exchange his supplicants requested.”47 During Browne’s stay in Southeast Asia, he took the opportunity to travel widely throughout the entire continent, where he observed the emerging nations of Thailand, India, Malaysia, Japan, and Taiwan.
Browne’s growing connection with Asian people appeared to be recognized and reciprocated by Cambodians. As part of his responsibilities with USOM, Browne advised government officials and business leaders about how to apply for and allocate American funds. He “was the junior member of a two person American team designated to assist the Cambodian government officials in managing the commercial import program which the US was providing.”48 The Commercial Import Program (CIP) served a crucial purpose, because it was the primary mechanism by which the United States contributed aid to Cambodia. Through the CIP, Americans paid for “the purchase of foreign products which were needed or desired by the Cambodian economy and whose purchase required the use of a hard currency.”49 Asian importers then applied to the Cambodian government to purchase these goods, depositing local currency into a “counterparts” fund. The fund was then used to pay for military aid and government expenses as well as technical assistance and economic programs. The CIP basically converted U.S. aid into local currency and did so at an exchange rate, usually half the market rate, that was extremely favorable to Cambodians. This system was utilized to protect the Cambodian economy from “highly dangerous inflationary pressures” that would have resulted had the United States simply given grants of American dollars.50 In Browne’s future speeches and writings about South Vietnam, which also utilized the CIP mechanism to distribute aid, he would critique many aspects of this program. Given the sums involved, there were “fascinating opportunities for local profiteering.”51 More disturbingly, because of the large amounts necessary to fund the military, the CIP did not necessarily prioritize the importation of products that could further the long-term economic development of either Cambodia or Vietnam. Instead, the CIP facilitated the importation of luxury commodities that could quickly generate currency for the counterfunds. Finally, the availability of U.S. goods, along with the low exchange rate, encouraged Asian leaders and entrepreneurs not to invest in the industrial development and economic infrastructure of their own country. Greater and faster gain could be obtained more easily through the CIP instead.52
Because the CIP represented the nexus of U.S.-Cambodian relations, Browne, even with his junior status, occupied an influential position. His advice appeared to be appreciated by Cambodian officials. Browne recalled that when they began negotiating with the Soviet Union for economic aid, “a team of Cambodian officials approached me for suggestions as to what kinds of assistance I felt they should request from the Soviets. I was never certain why the Cambodians had chosen to direct this request to me. One possibility was that the Cambodians had decided that I might handle this inquiry more discreetly than some of my colleagues.”53 The Cambodians appeared to perceive Browne as more approachable, trustworthy, and more likely to consider their interests compared to other Americans. The Cambodians also invited Browne to accompany “a delegation . . . to some neighboring countries to see how they were addressing common problems. They asked me . . . as a technical assistant and also to trouble shoot any language problems. . . . The delegation was received at cabinet level in each of the countries, and in Japan and the Philippines I had a major role to play.”54 Although a representative of the United States, Browne was considered a valuable adviser to the Cambodians.
Due to Browne’s brownness, he developed the ability to “switch-hit” for both the United States and Cambodia. His very presence in the ICA exemplified some degree of progress in American race relations, and he could serve as a spokesperson about race to interested audiences. With his economic training and work experience, Browne also could advise Cambodians about possible paths toward modernization and national economic development. Browne’s intermediary position between the Americans and the Cambodians is reflected by the references on his résumé. Following his departure from USOM, he listed both Milton Esman, who was his ICA supervisor, and the governor of the National Bank of Cambodia.55 As a racial outsider in the United States, Browne could more easily become a cosmopolitan insider in decolonizing Asia.
In South Vietnam, Browne also claimed a sense of affinity with Asian nationals. In contrast to Phnom Penh, “central Saigon was a sophisticated, bustling city of heavy automobile traffic and diesel buses, of night clubs and classy French restaurants.”56 The differences between the two capitals reflected broader divergences in the two countries. The southern half of Vietnam was approximately the same land size as Cambodia, but it was home to roughly twelve million people, or three times the population of its neighbor.57 The U.S. country team was exponentially bigger and better financed. The USOM staff alone in Saigon was greater than the entire country team in Cambodia.58 Furthermore, the ICA budget for Vietnam was roughly ten times the allocation for Cambodia and the second biggest overall among all the USOM units in the world.59 The U.S. government deemed Cambodia significant because of its geographical location in Southeast Asia, but Vietnam was the primary focus of American strategic interests in this region.60
The United States began supplying aid directly to South Vietnam in 1955 in order to help stabilize the Diem government that Americans helped to install. One of the key concerns during this early era was the care and adjustment of political refugees. The temporary division of Vietnam, mandated by the Geneva Accords in 1954, was followed by a resettlement period, during which approximately eight hundred thousand Vietnamese from the north migrated south and approximately one hundred thousand from the south relocated north. Not surprisingly, the refugees to the south tended to be anticommunist and Catholic. Although the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese were Buddhists, President Diem and his family subscribed to and promoted Catholicism. In his new post in Saigon, Browne no longer had “oversight of a commercial import program” but instead “became linked to the programs which American technicians were being brought in to mount and implement in public works, education, agriculture, health or other sectors”; his “contacts were now more frequently with other Americans and less often with local officials.”61
Browne compensated for his “reduced contact with local officials by greatly enlarging the scope of [his] non-official contacts with the local population.”62 He volunteered to teach English at a nearby school. However, his Vietnamese was rather poor. Browne admitted in his memoir,
I had ambitions to learn Vietnamese when I moved to Saigon, but I found that to be a hard nut to crack. Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means that to speak and understand it requires an ability to distinguish the tone in which each word is being uttered, because the tone determines the meaning of the word. Tone is used in speaking English also, but as a means for showing emphasis, not to change the basic meaning of the word. In any case, I found myself making such slow progress in Vietnamese that I devoted ever-diminishing amounts of time to it, and consequently never mastered it.63
Despite Browne’s limited language skills, his relationship with a woman of Vietnamese ancestry likely facilitated an easier rapport with the locals.
Browne met his future wife soon after his arrival in Cambodia. Two years younger than Browne, Huoi was of Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry and consequently an ethnic minority on two counts. Her great-grandmother had migrated to Cambodia from Vietnam, while her father was born in China. Huoi grew up in an impoverished family and received little formal schooling. Her educational background could be considered typical. According to U.S. reports, the literacy rate in Cambodia was 45 percent among men but only 20 percent among women.64 When she met Browne, Huoi was working as a cook in a French household to support herself and her daughter from a previous marriage.65 They encountered each other by chance when Huoi accompanied a friend to make laundry deliveries at the hotel where Browne lived at the time.66 According to Huoi, Browne pursued her. When he subsequently moved into his own apartment, which was allocated by USOM, he invited Huoi to help decorate his new home. She did not accept. As a single mother, she was leery of courtship. When asked if race was a consideration in her decision to develop a romantic relationship with Browne, she stated that it was not a factor.67 In her own family, there was intermarriage among Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Although these groups may appear racially similar to Western eyes, they had distinct historical, cultural, and social differences. What mattered to her was the quality of the person, which is why she ultimately reciprocated Browne’s advances. Huoi and her young daughter, Hoa, described him as a warm and compassionate person. Because Browne persisted in his attentions to Huoi, they eventually moved in together.
Browne and Huoi were in many ways an unlikely couple. Although he had romantic and sexual relationships with other women in his travels around the world, he had qualms about marriage in general and particularly about a union between people of such different backgrounds. He recalled, “My relationship with Huoi was slow in starting and bounced around in an undefined status for quite some time, as much a reflection of my uncertainty about the institution of marriage as of uncertainty about the person in question. . . . Huoi’s obvious positives (starting with her disarming smile), and our excellent personal chemistry, were countered by negatives of monumental proportions, with the most important being the drastic difference in our cultural backgrounds.”68
Despite his vacillations, Browne felt “smitten by” Huoi and decided that he “would never find happiness without her at my side.”69 He adopted Hoa, who was eleven by the time the family left for the United States. In addition, Browne and Huoi had three children in quick succession, each of them with Vietnamese as well as Western names. Mai Julia was born in Cambodia in 1956, while Alexi Ngo and Marshall Xuan were both born in South Vietnam, in 1958 and 1960 respectively. The parental nicknames of Browne and Huoi also reflected the cultural mixture of their family: Bob became “Ba,” the Vietnamese term for father, and Huoi became “Mommy.”
Browne kept his family life a secret from the foreign service. His supervisor, Milton Esman, regarded himself as a good friend of Browne’s but recalled that he simply disappeared on the weekends.70 When one of Browne’s work colleagues unexpectedly visited him at home, his eldest daughter, Hoa, remembered that the entire family had to hide. The secrecy surrounding Browne’s personal life stemmed from complex reasons.
It was very difficult to have a private life away from the gaze of the U.S. country team. Marital and family status were the basis for housing allocations and hence were public knowledge. Single personnel lived either in hotel rooms or small apartments. Married individuals and those with children received larger residences, like a house or villa. In addition, personal relationships could be scrutinized if they had the potential to damage the reputation of the U.S. mission.71 One staff member in Vietnam was investigated because of allegations of drunkenness and domestic abuse.72 The case came to the attention of the ICA personnel division because of reports circulated by this person’s Asian servants as well as his American acquaintances. Private behaviors had the potential to publicly damage the United States. In a memo about reckless driving, L. Metcalfe Walling, the director of USOM in Cambodia, explained, “We are guests of Cambodia and we should conduct ourselves accordingly; there is nothing which can cause more criticism of us than stories circulating, based on fact unfortunately, that we are driving recklessly and with no concern for others.”73
In the case of interracial personal relationships, the U.S. government turned a blind eye on informal and casual relationships but focused its full scrutiny when it came to marriage.74 USOM authored country books and post reports to introduce new staff to their host countries. These writings anticipated that recruits might be curious about entertainment opportunities. The post reports described respectable events like dinner parties, sports functions, and nightclubs. In addition, more risqué information intended for heterosexual males was included. One such publication explained “the dearth of single French girls here” and also warned that “Cambodian girls do not go out without their families. . . . However, lest the single men totally despair, there are many pretty Chinese ‘taxi’ girls that can be hired by the hour for dancing.”75 Another report compared these Chinese “taxi” girls to Japanese geishas. While these women were not necessarily prostitutes, their company, whether on the dance floor or elsewhere, was explicitly described as being available for purchase. This government advertisement of casual and commercialized relationships between American men and Asian women reflected a broader practice among U.S. overseas missions. The American government and military, as well as the tourist industry, collaborated with one another and their Asian counterparts to develop and promote prostitution.76 Sociologist Joane Nagel has described this partnership as the “military sexual complex.”77 After all, part of the allure of being stationed abroad for many American men included the prospect of meeting and having sexual relationships with “native” women.78
Figure 2. A holiday greeting card from the Browne family. Left to right, back: Bob and Huoi; front: Huo and Mai. Personal collection of the Browne family.
Not all interracial relationships could be characterized as financial and casual transactions. Ed Smith, one of the few people who knew of Browne’s relationship with Huoi, also had a Cambodian “girlfriend” during his stay in Southeast Asia. His partner worked as a member of the U.S. country team. Smith did not believe that the type of relationship he had with her was a common practice among other Americans: “There [were] some that just had prostitutes, but not many . . . had a girlfriend who wasn’t a prostitute.”79
An American dating an Asian, although rare, did not receive the same scrutiny as individuals seeking to marry across racial and national lines. In one source, Browne claims that he and Huoi were married in 1956, and they may have done so according to local custom.80 His personnel file indicates that an official marriage, that is, one recognized by the U.S. government, did not occur until April 3, 1961.81 The time lag between the two dates reflects the fact that a marriage between a U.S. foreign service member and an Asian national could occur only with the approval of the American’s superiors. Taboos against interracial marriage very likely served as a subtext for this regulation. After all, antimiscegenation laws in the United States were not deemed unconstitutional until 1967. In addition, Asian wives of American personnel faced difficulties gaining entry into the United States due to racially discriminatory immigration laws. Although the U.S. Congress enacted special legislation to allow some “war brides” to enter the country, Asian women were initially barred and then only had limited access to these opportunities.82 Officially, the marriage policy for members of the country team was explained in terms of security concerns. When Browne’s relationship to Huoi finally became public, a memo from the ICA personnel office in Washington, DC, asked “has this relationship been a source of embarrassment to the USOM” and “whether there is any objection to the marriage from a security standpoint.”83 Being Asian, Huoi was suspected as a potential risk. Her dual Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry may have placed her under double suspicion, since her ethnicities could link her to both North Vietnam and communist China.
Browne must have understood that officially requesting permission to marry an Asian national would have placed him in a precarious situation in terms of his career. As Milton Esman explained years later, no one under his supervision ever asked to marry someone of Vietnamese ancestry.84 Following Esman’s departure from Saigon, there was at least one recorded request for marriage between an American man and an Asian woman, both employees of the U.S. country team. The request received approval, because there was “no security objection [to the] proposed marriage.”85 Within two weeks of their wedding ceremony, though, the American employee was stripped of his access to classified materials.
Esman believed that following his departure from Vietnam in 1959, his replacement discovered Browne’s marriage and family and forced a resignation. It is also possible that Bob and Huoi decided to disclose their relationship. They may not have wanted to maintain their family life in such a closeted fashion. In addition, he became increasingly dissatisfied with U.S. policies in Vietnam and may have wanted a way out of Saigon.
In contrast to his respect and affection for Sihanouk, Browne expressed disdain for President Diem, who received extensive support from the United States but ruled his country in a corrupt and dictatorial fashion.86 The opposition to Diem and to the United States became formalized through the founding of the National Liberation Front in 1960. The NLF, or the Vietcong, as Diem and the Americans began to call this opposition, executed raids and attacks in the countryside and in urban areas. During the year that Browne left Vietnam, two unsuccessful assassination attempts were made on Diem’s life. In response to the growing violence, the U.S. country team issued increasing numbers of security memos to its personnel, instructing them not to travel in certain parts of the country, to be on guard especially around national holidays like Tet, and to more closely scrutinize the Asian servants in their homes.
Through his position at USOM, Browne had a front-row seat as he observed the escalating military and political conflict. He also understood the inadequacies of the U.S. economic mission. He recalled, “When I had signed on to work for Uncle Sam I had believed that I was joining a massive effort to alleviate poverty and improve the living conditions of deprived people. I think that most American workers in the aid programs of the fifties had such motivations. . . . As I became more politically savvy, however, . . . I began to realize that Washington’s priority goals in Indo-China were not to raise peoples’ living standards but to win points in the cold war.”87 The disproportionate amount of aid given to maintain the South Vietnamese military through the CIP was a significant indicator of this imbalance in priorities. As the ICA itself acknowledged:
Since 1955, two-thirds of the dollars provided to Viet-Nam through ICA channels have gone to provide budget support to the Vietnamese armed forces and hence, have been spent for commercial imports. This heavy emphasis on budget support does not reflect anybody’s judgment that such use of funds is the best way to restore Vietnamese agricultural production, foster industrial development, and bring about an early economic independence of Viet-Nam. It has been dictated by the fact that our primary objective has been to establish and maintain law and order within the country and create such a position of military strength as will deter communist infiltration and subversion and prevent overt attack upon this country by hostile military forces.88
The military aid did not deter opposition to Diem. Furthermore, the emphasis on commercial imports had “bad economic consequences.”89 Browne helped to author glossy USOM brochures, featuring hopeful stories and images of improvements in the transportation infrastructure, and education system, as well as the craft and manufacturing industries. In reality, these projects received 10–20 percent of the CIP counterfunds during the years that he was in Saigon. Both he and his supervisors at the ICA office in Vietnam clearly understood that the two goals of security and development directly conflicted with one another. The consequences of prioritizing the military goals and delaying the economic plans meant that the Diem government would indefinitely rely on the United States to prime its fiscal pump. The financial benefits of this relationship, though, only trickled down to selected circles within South Vietnamese society. Combined with Diem’s unwillingness to institute political reforms, the situation would continue to facilitate the growth of opposition to Diem and necessitate increased U.S. military aid. Browne could see the beginnings of the U.S. quagmire in Southeast Asia.
His last major project with USOM drove home this point. As a result of the growing “unrest and disturbances in the countryside,” Browne was asked to prepare a report analyzing the impact on the “rural aid projects” sponsored by ICA:
We knew that public works of various sorts were being blown up, that crops were being burned, that many of our educational programs had been made inoperable because teachers were being terrorized and murdered, but the embassy wanted some quantification of the seriousness of it all. Working together with a State Dept. colleague over a three week period, I co-produced a report that, after aggregating the results of the numerous attacks to which our program had been subjected, essentially concluded that the effectiveness of our program, overall, had been reduced by a factor of as much as two thirds, depending on the region of the country. We had encountered a highly discouraging and starkly gloomy picture and we reported it as such. We had anticipated that the report would become a hot topic within the embassy family and were more than a little surprised when it was not even mentioned at the country team meetings. A week or so later, still confused by the silence, I undertook a little research to discover what was happening and was astounded to learn that the Ambassador had decided to “kill” our report in his office and not share it with Washington, presumably because it conflicted with the generally positive picture which the embassy had been reporting and too forcefully contradicted President Diem’s assurances to Washington that he was in full control of the country. Truth was an early and regular casualty of the US experience in Vietnam.90
In Browne’s memoir, he explained that he chose to leave the ICA because he became increasingly disturbed by the “absurdity of the Vietnam policy” as well as “growing rumors that the US was giving serious consideration to sending combat troops to South Viet Nam.”91 In Browne’s official resignation request, he indicated that his marriage was the reason for his departure. In a letter dated 8 August 1960, he wrote, “In accordance with Manual Order No. 451.2, I herewith offer my resignation from the foreign service of the International Cooperation Administration. This is submitted in connection with my request for permission to marry a foreign national.”92
Perhaps it was easier for Browne to leave the ICA by focusing on “personal” rather than “political” issues. In a sense, Browne’s decision to prioritize Huoi and their family over his job was indicative of his politics. Other American men, of varying racial backgrounds, had relationships and children with Asian women during their stints abroad. A significant number of these men chose to discard these entanglements when they left Asia.93 The famed opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and the more contemporary musical Miss Saigon both explore these themes of interracial romance and abandonment. Bob and Huoi no doubt became familiar with the storyline of the former, because they were regular patrons of opera.
In contrast to stories of American soldiers and diplomats deserting their Asian lovers and offspring, Bob assumed responsibility for his wife and children and facilitated their entry into the United States. Even as he left his ICA position, he made sure that Huoi and their children were officially listed as members of his family and hence eligible for health benefits under his appointment. Browne had to decide between a foreign service career and his Afro-Asian family. He chose the latter, for both personal and political reasons. His multiracial family reflected the affinity that he developed with Asian nationals over the course of his stay in Southeast Asia. In a sense, his family represented a personal version of the Afro-Asian alliance espoused in Bandung. Like the leaders who gathered in Indonesia in 1955, Browne returned to the United States eager to find a path beyond the binary politics of the Cold War and the racial hierarchies of global imperialism and domestic racism.