The Ugly American is a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that depicts the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia.

"[2] William Lederer was an American author and captain in the U.S. Navy who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific and Asian theater.

Eugene Burdick was an American political scientist, novelist, and non-fiction writer, and served in the Navy during World War II.

In Asia, the French had left Indochina in 1954 after their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the U.S. became involved in Vietnam to fill the perceived power vacuum.

In the Middle East, the U.S. feared the spread of Communism starting in Egypt and attempted to secure the region's most populous and politically powerful country for the West by guarantees of funding for construction of the Aswan Dam, but it was eventually the Soviets who prevailed.

Soviet diplomatic and political successes in the Third World left the West worried about losing one country after another to Communism[4] according to the domino theory invoked by President Dwight D.

[citation needed] It was in this atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and uncertainty in the United States about Soviet military and technological might and Communist political success in unaligned nations of the Third World that the novel was published in 1958, with an immediate impact.

Atkins, who lives with the local people, comes to understand their needs, and offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump.

[3] The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (an imaginary country in Southeast Asia that somewhat resembles Laos, but which is meant to allude to Vietnam) and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed.

The book describes the United States' losing struggle against Communism because of the ineptitude and the bungling of the U.S. diplomatic corps[8] stemming from innate arrogance and their failure to understand the local culture.

He informs his Moscow superiors that Sears "keeps his people tied up with meetings, social events, and greeting and briefing the scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, under secretaries of state and defense, and so on, who come pouring through here to 'look for themselves.'"

According to an article published in Newsweek in May 1959, the "real" "Ugly American" was identified as an International Cooperation Administration technician named Otto Hunerwadel, who, with his wife Helen, served in Burma from 1949 until his death in 1952.

[10] Another of the book's characters, Colonel Hillandale, appears to have been modeled on the real-life U.S. Air Force Major General Edward Lansdale, who was an expert in counter-guerrilla operations.

[1] According to British documentary film maker Adam Curtis, Senator and future U.S. President "John F. Kennedy was gripped by The Ugly American.

[15] Senator Hubert Humphrey first introduced a bill in Congress in 1957 for the formation of a Peace Corps aimed primarily at development in the Third World, but "it did not meet with much enthusiasm"[16] and the effort failed.

[7]: 17–18  Historian Daniel Immerwahr wrote that the book promoted the idea that Americans, if they conducted themselves properly, could solve the problems of the Third World.