In print, the name of Jim Thompson is rarely far away from the word "legend". The outline of his life is well known. He arrived in Bangkok at the tail end of the Second World War as part of the proto-CIA. He gained a reputation as a host, bon viveur, aesthete and art collector. He started a glamorous silk business, that still bears his name, and built a house that remains a major tourist attraction. He disappeared off the face of the earth in 1967, providing the mystery which is essential for any good legend.
The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War By Joshua Kurlantzick John Wiley & Sons Inc, New Jersey, 2011. Hardcover, 272 pp. Available at Kinokuniya and Asia Books, 825 baht
Joshua Kurlantzick, a political analyst of Southeast Asia, has given us a portrait of Thompson that is both deeper and darker by setting the man into a context culled from recent scholarship on the Cold War era in the US and Southeast Asia.
Thompson was born into East Coast money and wasted his youth and prime as a socialite. In his mid 30s, realising life was slipping away, he became desperate for a role in World War II. Partly through luck, and partly by displaying talents in training that could hardly have been guessed from his earlier life, he landed a plum job with the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, arriving in Bangkok as the war ended.
The Americans were being heralded as saviours. They occupied old palaces and met anyone who mattered. Washington had decided Thailand was important but knew nothing about it, so, for a time, American policy was made by men on the spot. In this space Thompson and other pioneers could imagine the US shepherding the nationalists and idealists of the region to a new post-colonial era of freedom and democracy. Thompson fell in with Pridi Banomyong and dabbled with the proto-revolutionaries in Indochina, including Ho Chi Minh. On the side he started a silk business on a cottage-industry model.
This post-war moment lasted only a handful of years. By 1950, Washington had decided that those believing in liberty and equality were likely to become communists and had begun to back old regimes and military thugs in order to eliminate them. Thompson lost traction in the CIA and seems to have been eased out by 1947 (this bit is rather fuzzy). His political contacts in Bangkok were either driven into exile (like Pridi) or gunned down. His Indochinese networks took refuge in the jungles. Thompson railed against the downwards slide into the Vietnam War, becoming so much of a liability to the CIA that he was investigated (but cleared) for "un-American activities".
Thompson seems to have survived through the 1950s on the rising fame and profitability of his silk business and his reputation as an aesthete, host, art collector and "personality".
In some of the best passages of this book, Kurlantzick contrasts Thompson's trajectory with that of Willis Bird, the man behind Sea Supply. With no political agenda, Bird was prepared to act as a contact between Washington and whoever. He became the favoured gun-runner for Thailand's military dictators, while doing the dirty business of the Indochina War which Washington wanted to keep at arm's length.
Bird was the quiet but ugly American, while Thompson was loud but increasingly lost. Bird grew rich and lived on into old age. Meanwhile Thompson's life fell apart.
By the 1960s, US patronage had transformed the quaint Bangkok which Thompson had liked. His beloved Laos was being flattened by US ordnance. His silk business was beset by competitors and rip-off artists. As a last straw, the first, clumsy attempts by the Thai authorities to protect this country's cultural heritage pinpointed Thompson, perhaps because he was such a tall poppy. By the mid 1960s he had become sickly, depressed and irascible.
On the disappearance, Kurlantzick has no new evidence, but nicely reviews the extraordinary attention it attracted. He discounts the possibility of an accident given that none of the many searches produced any evidence. He doubts suicide. He entertains the possibility of a hit by Bangkok business or political enemies (why and how in Malaysia?), but ends up fingering the CIA by innuendo. Thompson's CIA file has never been declassified. Kurlantzick does not consider whether Thompson might have disappeared of his own volition, though the book's plotting leads in that direction and such an abrupt change would have been consistent with Thompson's reorientation in the 1940s.
Kurlantzick has provided a lot of new information from interviews with survivors of Thompson's circle and from private papers. The business, political, and personal strands of the plot are neatly interwoven and the writing is relaxed and readable, though sometimes the central character gets almost lost among great slabs of background. Nothing in the text has much to do with the (slightly absurd) title and subtitle which are, perhaps, gifts from the publisher.
Kurlantzick positions Thompson in a long line of foreigners who were momentarily useful to the Thai elite but were quickly rejected when they became too prominent. He suggests that Thompson's idealistic view of the US and Southeast Asia has been proved right by time. Though Thompson's later life was a cascade of disappointments, his legacy is the legend, which is far more brilliant than anything left behind by the likes of Willis Bird.
While this very enjoyable book gives the portrayal of Thompson a lot more depth and shading, it probably won't affect the legend at all.
Chris Baker is an historian and currently a visiting fellow at Kyoto University.
