 Years before the Vietnam War, he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs of "The Quiet American", whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese.In "Ways of Escape", reflecting on his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing compared with Cuba's.In Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".