He spent the later years of his naval service as a public information officer, and in that capacity eventually was posted to The Pentagon and later as special assistant to Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, Admiral Felix Stump at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii.
In the book's epilogue, they argue for the creation of "a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals" fluent in the local language, which presaged the Peace Corps, which John F. Kennedy proposed in 1960.
In Our Own Worst Enemy (1968), Lederer relates that as a young U.S. Navy lieutenant (junior grade) in 1940, he had a chance meeting with a Jesuit priest, Father Pierre Cogny, and his Vietnamese assistant, "Mr. Nguyen," while he was waiting out a Japanese bombing raid in China.
[5] Our Own Worst Enemy describes how the United States supported a corrupt President Ngo Diem in South Vietnam, ignored massive black market selling of stolen U.S. military supplies, food, and foreign aid, and refused to stand up to corrupt local officials who stole donated food and supplies, took kickbacks, and bullied their own population, as Americans continued saying, "It's their country, and we Americans are only guests here."
Two of his 1949 short stories published in Reader's Digest I Taught My Wife to Keep House the Navy Way and The Skipper Surprised His Wife were filmed in 1950 as The Skipper Surprised His Wife/ The television series Ensign O'Toole, a situation comedy which starred Dean Jones and aired on NBC from 1962 to 1963, was based on All the Ships at Sea and Ensign O'Toole and Me and depicted the misadventures of the crew of the fictional U.S. Navy destroyer USS Appleby in the early 1960s.