The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in ASEAN studies, Thailand, literature, history, political science, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and related subjects.

Among them is Bangkok Editor, a memoir by Alexander MacDonald, a cofounder of The Bangkok Post.

The TU Library circulating collection also includes several other books about news media in Thailand.

When Alexander MacDonald died in the year 2000, The Los Angeles Times reported:

Alexander MacDonald; Ex-Editor of Bangkok Post

May 26, 2000

Alexander MacDonald, 92, former editor of Thailand’s oldest English-language newspaper, the Bangkok Post. MacDonald began his journalism career in Boston, working for the Advertiser, the Evening American and the Post before moving to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, in the Pacific. He wound up commanding an OSS unit in the Burmese jungle in the final months of World War II, broadcasting Allied news into Japanese-occupied Thailand. After the war ended, he stayed and created the Bangkok Post with a polyglot staff recruited from among Thais who had worked with him in the jungle and Japanese from a detention camp who apparently were the only people in Thailand who understood how to run his printing press.

During his eight years as editor, he often used the paper to promote democracy and free speech. He wrote a highly regarded column called “Postmen Say.” In the early 1950s he was ousted from the paper and ejected from Thailand by a military regime that opposed the Post’s reporting.

He returned to the United States and managed a resort on Cape Cod, later moving to become publisher and editor of the Marblehead Messenger in Marblehead, Mass., in 1966. A native of Lynn, Mass., he wrote two books, “My Footloose Newspaper Life” and “Bangkok Editor.” On Sunday of a heart attack at his Marblehead home.

Here is a brief excerpt from his memoir, as posted online:

ОNE YANKEE IN A SIAMESE COURT

There are few men who, sometime in their life, have not dreamed of living in a palace.

With most, the dream takes shape upon hearing their first fairy tale. Their dream palace becomes for a time quite a real place, with spires of pure gold and long cool halls of marble. All manner of fine and exciting things take place around their palace. They go there on snow-white chargers, and usually there is a dragon or two to dispose of before reaching the princess in her silver tower. Of course, they marry the princess and live happily ever after.

The only trouble is that men grow up. Things don’t just go on happily ever after. With the passing years the dream gradually dissipates, and most men before long are willing to agree that princesses and palaces were never meant for them. Most men, indeed, never see a palace, much less live in one. I was lucky. I saw my palace. I saw it and I lived in it. I saw princesses – not one, but dozens, and got to know some lovely ones.

My dream became so real a thing that there was some danger I might begin to think I was to the manner born. It took only that cable, arriving one day from Washington, to shatter such a pretty delusion. First, about the palace.

If I had had my choice of dream palaces I probably would have picked one just like Suan Kularb. That was my palace: Suan Kularb. It was one of the many palaces built in Bangkok by the Kings of Siam, who seem to have made a hobby of building them. They built summer palaces and winter palaces. […]

Anyone who watched me closely in the weeks that followed probably could have detected the metamorphosis that was taking place. It must have stuck out at every joint. My transformation from bureaucrat to businessman had all the subtlety of a snake shedding its winter skin. Whereas most of my previous concern had been with government and military affairs in Siam, I now began to look with what I hoped was a hard, calculating eye upon the commercial features of the kingdom.

As a prospective publisher I had to learn some of the refinements of Bangkok business. For the first time in my life I had to start thinking in terms of profit and loss. So I looked the situation over, as businesslike as I could be.

It was not too encouraging. For one thing, Siam’s basic trade, rice, was a casualty of war. Before the war it was about all that had kept the kingdom going—a million tons or so exported abroad at premium prices, for Siam’s rice was always the best in the world. During the war none had gone out except that requisitioned by Hirohito’s Imperial Army.

After the war, Siam’s treaty with Great Britain provided that she export free all the rice her own people did not eat. So it looked as though there were not going to be much income from rice. The kingdom’s three other principal industries – teakwood, rubber, and tin – had been even more seriously despoiled by war.

The teak forests, worked under concessions to foreign firms, had been looted and neglected; tin-mine machinery had been sabotaged, and rubber plantations had been used as camps by Japanese troops […]

Journalism in Siam was of a kind to make men like Pulitzer and Greeley whirl like dervishes in their graves. It was not a profession; it was a happy-go-lucky, unprincipled, catch-as-catch-can game, played by ink-stained saints and sinners. The saints were few, the sinners legion. But I had been warned. There was the day that Chavala recounted some of the sins committed in the name of Siamese journalism. We had gone into the subject late one afternoon over a bottle of mekong in a Chinese shop on New Road. The shop was Bangkok’s equiva- lent of an American bar-with modifications. There were a half- dozen bare tables and a food counter in one corner where whole fried chickens and chunks of roasted pork hung on hooks, heavily besieged by flies. A barefoot boy had brought the bottle when we ordered “whis-a-ky.” Mekong was made in Siamese government distilleries from molasses and rice, and bottled very early. Answering reports one time that people were dying from the stuff, an indignant official announcement pointed out, among other things, that the whisky was not allowed to leave the distillery until it had been aged at least twenty-eight hours. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)