According to Doolittle, the entire budget for the Laotian military effort came from America and was distributed through the CIA. "It was principally a CIA war fought through mercenaries and bombing. There were more bombs dropped in Southeast Asia than in all previous wars combined."
His chief duty in Laos was conducting press briefings. "The function of a press attache is to shield his superiors from the press," he says, explaining the "better me than the ambassador" philosophy.
Doolittle's career as a bureaucrat ended in 1980--"Reagan came in and turned all us rascals out"--and he went back to writing. He wrote a novel, The Bombing Officer, based on his experiences in Laos, and that sparked an interest in playwriting and poetry.
And now, after spending his life writing for newspapers, magazines, and the President of the United States, Jerry Doolittle is teaching his trade to Harvard freshmen.
Doolittle, 53, says that he never planned to teach students how to write--in fact, he says he "hadn't seen the inside of a classroom between 1953 and last year." But three of his five sons went to Harvard--Timothy '84, Ted '86, and Matthew '90--and when Ted was a sophomore, he told his dad that he enrolled in a writing course taught by an actual writer.
Doolittle decided that it would be interesting to teach, and he applied to Expository Writing and began teaching last year. Currently, he works at Harvard for half the year, and spends the rest of his time writing screenplays and poems. "I have no realistic expectation of making money out of these things," he says.
A Harvard Phenomenon
"Jerry's just great," says Richard A. Marius, director of Expository Writing. "He's wonderful at sharing interests with students."
Marius calls Doolittle "our phenomenon," since he teaches his students to write so well. Last year, all three of the entries from Doolittle's class were printed in Expose, the magazine published by Expository Writing.
Doolittle teaches two sections of Social and Ethical Issues: "all political issues are ethical issues at heart," he says. Students in his sections say that Doolittle's anecdotes make class entertaining and interesting. "His sense of humor really helps," says Preetinder Bharara '90. "He doesn't care about the excess stuff--just the writing," Bharara says. "The best thing about Mr. Doolittle is that he's had a lot of interesting life experiences," says Douglas W. Marx '90. "He's very opinionated" and that makes for spirited debates in class, says Marx.
Good Grades, Basic Flaw
Doolittle says that Harvard students are intelligent, but far too diligent. "There are depressingly few poor attitudes here. If I were the admissions office, I would make sure that some people had poor attitudes. Good grades in high school can be a possible indication of a basic flaw," he explains.
He adds that the "students are uninformed. Very few read newspapers." Doolittle says that only two or three people in each section know what's going on in the real world.
Despite the lack of poor attitudes among Harvard students, Doolittle says that he likes Harvard. "I'm very much at ease with all these folks here."
But Doolittle doubts that his sojourn at Harvard will be permanent. "I seem to have about a two-year span of attention," he says pragmatically. Doolittle doesn't know what he'll be doing in five years, or in 20, but he says he knows that one thing will be with him for the rest of his life: "I guess I'll die with a poor attitude."