Book published about Charlie Dean and his death in Laos in 1974.

madfloridian

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Wed Sep-03-08 10:37 PM
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Book published about Charlie Dean and his death in Laos in 1974.

Book published about Charlie Dean and his death in Laos in 1974.

My first thought was how very hard this would be for the Dean family. I felt better when I saw that Howard Dean had written the introduction to the book himself.

From what I have been seeing, this book was compiled by a Vermonter named Louella Bryant. Her husband, Harry Reynolds, traveled with Charlie Dean to Australia where they joined other Americans at a place called Rosebud Farm.

She says four years ago when Howard Dean was running for president, her husband gave her a box with letters and pictures from their journey. Charlie went on to Southeast Asia. Her then future husband returned to the US.

Charlie Dean

Howard and Charlie in younger years

From the Louella Bryant website:

With the perseverance of Charlie’s brother, Howard Dean, Charlie’s remains were recovered in 2004 while Howard was a candidate for U.S. President. But questions remained unanswered. What was Charlie doing in Southeast Asia, where fighting continued even though the United States had withdrawn troops? And what happened at the Rosebud Farm commune during those months leading up to Charlie’s death?

Howard Dean’s heart wrenching foreword details the recovery of his brother's remains. Bryant’s research, based on journals, letters, and interviews with friends and Dean family members, imbues the story with authority.

From the website also, the way the story came out in pieces.

In early spring of 2004, when Howard Dean was running for President, my husband, Harry Reynolds, sat on the front porch of our Vermont house and talked about Howard’s brother Charlie.
Harry had met Charlie in 1968 as a freshman at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island. Charlie was a year ahead of him and Howard was a senior. Harry’s father, Director of Alumni Affairs, was friends with the Dean boys’ father, who was on the Board of Trustees. There were only two hundred students then—all boys—and everyone knew each other well.

Harry had told me about visiting a St. George’s School classmate in Australia for six months after he graduated from Harvard in 1973. Harry is not much of a talker, and the information about his time at Rosebud Farm in Far North Queensland came in fragments. I remember him mentioning Howard’s brother Charlie, but I didn’t get many details. I knew Charlie had died, but I didn’t know how or why. When Howard appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, Harry began to open up about that time in Australia with Charlie. He told me about how Charlie had asked him to travel with him in Southeast Asia and how he told Charlie that he didn’t have the money and needed to go back to the states and get a job. He talked about letters Charlie had sent from Bangkok and about hearing that he’d been taken prisoner by the communist Pathet Lao and later executed.

This sounds like a book, I said. Do you still have the letters?

Fortunately, Harry is a packrat. He disappeared, and I heard him rummaging in the attic. He came down with a shoebox filled with letters he had written to his parents from Australia that his mother had saved and the letters he had gotten from Charlie. And then he handed me a journal covered in red leather. I leafed through the pages, barely holding onto the binding after thirty years, and found an almost daily accounting of those days in Australia.

I found her blog interesting. It is linked on the left of the site. It is so warm and funny how she got the picture of Howard Dean and her together after the convention.

I figured Howard was in Vermont recovering from the convention over the long weekend and on Saturday morning emailed him to see if I could meet him in town for a photo, which I might use to generate some attention from glossies. He said sure, meet him at the nearby park at 10 a.m.

..."There was a message from Howard saying to meet him at his house at 10 a.m.

..."I used to jog past Howard's place when he was governor, so no problems finding it. It's the house in the nicely groomed middle-class neighborhood near the lake (you can't see the lake from his house) and the bashed up yellow mailbox. I pulled up under the basketball net and went into the garage, where there are no cars but stuff piled around the walls. The door to the family room was ajar, and I yelled "Hello?" Howard came out wearing a polo shirt and running pants, torn sneakers splattered with paint, one with a brown lace and one with an orange lace, his reading glasses hung over the front opening of the shirt.

The picture from her blog

The rest of the blog post is interesting as well. Since Dr. Judy seeing patients, they had to find a neighbor to take the pictures.

From an article in the Addison Independent

They never had a chance to say goodbye to Charlie,” Bryant said. “There was this sort of hole in their hearts. The book, for them, brings Charlie back to life. It explains what happens to him the last year before he disappeared.”

Though written in part for the Dean family, Bryant said, the author is excited to send the book out into the world — in large part because she hopes the story about Rosebud Farm and Charlie’s death will have some resonance with readers today. She set out to “interpret a life,” she said, and hopes her readers “find something of themselves in it.”

In this sense, Bryant succeeds admirably. “While in Darkness” not only relates the urgency of early adulthood, but also captures the idealism, turbulence and uncertainty of the 1970s. For readers who lived through the era, it’s an echo of a time invigorating and heartbreaking. More importantly, the book manages a quiet sense of modern relevance.

The book is on sale at Amazon.