Hemispheric Alliances: Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America

By Andrew J. Kirkendall

Hemispheric foreign policy has waxed and waned since the Mexican War, and the Cold War presented both extraordinary promises and dangerous threats to U.S.–Latin American cooperation. In Hemispheric Alliances, Andrew J. Kirkendall examines the strengths and weaknesses of new models for U.S.–Latin American relations created by liberal Democrats who came to the fore during the Kennedy administration and retained significant influence until the Reagan era. Rather than exerting ironfisted power in Latin America, liberal Democrats urged Washington to be a moral rather than a militaristic leader in hemispheric affairs.

Decolonization, President Eisenhower's missteps in Latin America, and the Cuban Revolution all played key roles in the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress, which liberal Democrats hailed as a new cornerstone for U.S.–Latin American foreign policy. During the Vietnam War era, liberal Democrats began to incorporate human rights more centrally into their agendas, using Latin America as the primary arena for these policies. During the long period of military dictatorship in much of Latin America and the Caribbean, liberal Democrats would see their policies dissolved by the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations who favored militant containment of both communism and absolutism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469668024

Andrew J. Kirkendall

Andrew J. Kirkendall is author of Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy.

Book preview

Cover: Hemispheric Alliances, Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America by Andrew J. Kirkendall

Hemispheric Alliances

Hemispheric Alliances

Liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America

ANDREW J. KIRKENDALL

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kirkendall, Andrew J., author.

Title: Hemispheric alliances : liberal Democrats and Cold War Latin America / Andrew J. Kirkendall.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021046321 | ISBN 9781469668000 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469668017 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469668024 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Democratic Party (U.S.)—History—20th century. | Cold War. | Liberalism—United States. | United States—Relations—Latin America— History—20th century. | Latin America—Relations—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC F1418 .K53 2022 | DDC 973.922—dc23/eng/20211007

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046321

Cover illustrations: Left to right, Robert Kennedy, Edward Ted Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, August 28, 1963 (National Archives, Cecil Stoughton White House Photographs, compiled 1/29/1961–12/31/1963, NAID 194238); background, American continent blank map vector (Danzky/Shutterstock.com).

To Richard S. Kirkendall, one of the first liberal Democrats I ever met.

To Meg Reynard, my dear heart.

To Panalin, Book, and Eli: may they yet discover that another world is possible.

To Terry Anderson, Al Broussard, and Chester Dunning: I have not forgotten.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Liberal Democrats and U.S. Hemispheric and Global Leadership

Chapter 1 Liberal Democrats and Latin America

Toward Engagement

Chapter 2 Let Us Begin

The Many Fronts of John F. Kennedy’s Latin American Cold War, Part I

Chapter 3 The Many Fronts of John F. Kennedy’s Latin American Cold War, Part II

Chapter 4 Kennedy’s Unfinished Legacy and Intended and Unintended Consequences

Chapter 5 Let Us Continue

Toward the Johnson Alliance

Chapter 6 Robert Kennedy, Kennedy Men, the Kennedy Legacy, and the Johnson Alliance

Chapter 7 The End of the Alliance for Progress and the Origins of the Human Rights Issue in U.S.-Latin American Relations

Chapter 8 Jimmy Carter and Human Rights in South America

Chapter 9 The Carter Administration in Central America and the Caribbean

Chapter 10 Liberal Democratic Resistance and Accommodation in the Reagan/Bush Years

Conclusion

Cold War Legacies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

When I was researching a book on Paulo Freire back in 2004, I had my first experience at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. I soon realized how rich it was in material on Latin America. That became clearer over the years as the consistent annual support of the Texas A&M University History Department for my research on this book enabled me to work my way through the presidential library system from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Although people lambaste presidential libraries periodically, I rarely find historians among the naysayers. I am grateful that the system exists. Two of them, the Dwight David Eisenhower library and the Kennedy library, provided me with small research grants. In the case of the Kennedy library, I received a grant named after one of the main characters in this book, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (That paid for my second trip to Boston.) My last and longest trip to the JFK library was paid for by A&M’s much-lamented Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities. A Fasken grant helped me to do research in the Wayne Morse and Frank Church papers at the University of Oregon and Boise State University at a critical turning point in the project. The Princeton University library also supported my research in the Adlai Stevenson and George McGovern papers.

I have been presenting on this project at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) since 2005. My debts to many foreign relations scholars are largely impersonal. I have read their books and articles with profit, and my notes reflect that. But there are a few people to whom my debt is rather more direct, particularly Tom Zeiler, B. J. C. McKercher, Mitch Lerner, Andy Johns, Matthew Masur, Dustin Walcher, Tom Maddux, and the incomparable Diane Labrosse. From the beginning, SHAFR’s reputation for being among the friendliest academic organizations has been confirmed. Thanks as well to Diplomacy and Statecraft (published by Taylor and Francis), which gave permission for me to include material that originally appeared there as a 2007 article that developed out of that first paper I presented at SHAFR seventeen years ago.

There are far too many archivists and librarians whose names I cannot locate for me to feel comfortable citing only those whose names I can. I will bend this rule slightly to thank two people at the Sterling C. Evans Library in College Station, Joel Kitchens and Laura Sare. They were particularly helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic as I was finishing the book. I am also grateful to Congressman Donald Fraser for giving permission to do research in his papers at the Minnesota Historical Society.

I cannot pass up the opportunity to thank several friends. My favorite reviews of my books over the years have been those supplied by Manuel Serpa. He and his wonderful wife, Angela Colognesi, have long been dear friends. Manuel worked for many years as an engineer for a state-owned company in Brazil. In the evenings, he never talked about his work and spent much of his time reading novels in numerous languages. I always appreciated his thoughtful engagement with my books. I was thrilled one evening in Aracaju when he told his sons and some of their friends that they should read my first book if they wanted to understand Brazil. Harlan Gradin has been a constant friend since the 1980s. I much admire his work of many years at the North Carolina Humanities Council. In this age of social media, he remains the only nonfamily member with whom I speak regularly on the phone. My work at the Minnesota Historical Society made it possible for me to visit with my mom’s best friend, Joan Watson. It is a testimony to my deep affection for this woman of tremendous warmth and endless curiosity that I can be grateful for experiencing kidney stones on the first trip, so that I had to return to finish my research a year later.

My colleagues in the Texas A&M University History Department have helped in various ways. Roger Reese inspires by his work ethic, and I am grateful that I have had an office right next door to him to share the daily professional grind, even during the pandemic. Brian Rouleau is a dear friend, whom I saw rarely during the pandemic, but who kept my spirits up even via e-mail. Toward the end, he read the whole manuscript, and had some valuable suggestions regarding final revisions. Dan Schwartz, a digital humanist, gave me more help with the computer than the people who are actually paid to do that sort of thing. Jason Parker and I always enjoyed long debriefing sessions following SHAFR meetings. Walter Kamphoefner has been supportive since the beginning. David Hudson has always been generous with his time. I miss model citizens Jim Bradford and John Lenihan. As my dedication shows, I have not forgotten how much I owe to Terry Anderson, Al Broussard, and Chester Dunning. Many thanks also to the front-office folks who kept things going over the years: Mary Johnson, Barbara Dawson, Rita Walker, Kelly Cook, Mary Speelman, and Erika Hernández, as well as department advisers Robyn Konrad and Phil Smith.

Richard S. Kirkendall will be happier than anyone to see this book in print. Although for many years I tried to avoid going into the family business, I eventually succumbed and found that it was where I belonged all along. Dad was not surprised. He himself had an extraordinarily satisfying career in history in the Golden Age of academia. As I have said elsewhere, he showed me how to find my way around a library at an extremely young age. I believe we were looking up books about pirates! He was also a liberal Democrat committed to progress in civil rights. He served on a navy destroyer during the Korean War, and although he supported the Vietnam War initially, he came to see it as a misguided application of the containment policy following the congressional testimony of George Kennan in 1966. Dad served as cochair of the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign in Boone County, Missouri, alongside Betty Anne Ward McKaskill, mother of future Senator Claire McKaskill. Dad has often mentioned to me in recent years that if he had not left the University of Missouri in 1973 to head up the Organization of American Historians in Bloomington, Indiana, he might have run for Congress. I do not recall Dad ever talking about Latin America at any point growing up, which probably helped me as I found myself as a Brazilianist in the 1990s, getting my PhD at thirty-eight. I had already started publishing when I started presenting at SHAFR, and I remember a hilarious encounter with a fellow SHAFR-ite who kept insisting that he knew my work, and I kept responding, No, my dad wrote that … no, my dad wrote that … no, my dad wrote that too. Fortunately, by this time, I was okay with the fact that I was always going to be little Kirkendall to many in the profession. Dad and his wife Kay enjoyed living in a retirement community in Seattle for many years; he gave roughly forty-six lectures to his friends there on Harry Truman. My dad has had some tough times since he turned ninety, not least of all the loss of his wife. I am grateful that he is still around, if, sadly, not close. (I wish that my brothers were closer too.) Many thanks to Sherry Thompson and, especially, Merry Dale, Kay’s daughters, for all that they have done for Dad over the years. (Above and beyond, Merry, always, above and beyond.)

My wife during these years suffered more personal losses, including the death of her only sibling, brother Buv. During these years in which she was finally and completely orphaned, she found tremendous personal satisfaction as an English as a second language teacher, which also employed her community development skills. She has loved meeting many students from foreign countries, from working-class people to professors. She continued the political work she had begun a decade earlier, and she and I attended a number of state Democratic conventions. She was a delegate many times. I often noted during those years that it said something about the state of the Texas Democratic Party that even I could be a delegate once. The party has been doing better of late, although certainly not as well as some pundits predicted.

I grew up heavily influenced by the New Left critique of liberalism, and then later was touched as well by both the libertarian critique thereof (think Inquiry, not Reason) and the anti-interventionism of the 1980s (No draft, no war, U.S. out of El Salvador). As a historian of Latin America initially trained by Gil Joseph, and as a person who lived in Brazil for the first time during the last year of military rule, I identify strongly with Latin America and its democratizing currents.

I created the first history class on Inter-American Relations at Texas A&M, and for a long time, it was primarily a teaching field. A historically minded political scientist (and warm, generous, and gentle man), Lars Schoultz, to whom I owe much, told me during my Chapel Hill days that this was the most important subject I could teach my mostly U.S. citizen–students. I am grateful for so many undergraduates who have embraced the challenge of learning about topics they have often found emotionally fraught. Let me mention two former students who have kept in touch. A supporter of Ralph Nader when he took my class in 2000, Stephen Wright started dropping by for lunch on his way through town in the years following graduation. This has made me very happy. I have enjoyed his life’s journey between teaching and union organizing and back again. I have enjoyed watching his delightful children grow up as well. I am very proud of a former undergraduate student who is now a Cuban historian. Kelly Urban has a tenure-track position at the University of South Alabama following her completion of a doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. Two of my graduate students, David Tomlin and Sebastian Arandia, worked on topics that I discuss in this book, although I did not know at the time that I was going to write a book like this when they finished their master’s degrees. Micah Wright was my first doctoral student, and I am grateful to have worked with him on his lovely dissertation on Puerto Rican military service in the age of intervention. I am looking forward to Laurence Nelson finishing his work on the U.S. Marine Corps and Augusto César Sandino. Jonathan Carroll and Ian Seavey, two graduate students who do not work with me, nevertheless were willing to try to help me with the mechanics of teaching a nightmarish hybrid course during the pandemic; I am pathetically grateful, even though, in the end, it didn’t work.

Toward the end of my work on Paulo Freire, and for much of the next decade or so, I returned to an old love, community radio, which I had begun working in at fourteen, and continued once again from twenty-six to twenty-nine. Hosting Listen Globally, a Brazilian and world music show, for eleven and a half years kept me connected to Brazil. Community radio as I came to know it many years ago was in many ways a product of the counterculture, and I remain in my heart a community radio activist, inspired by the writings of Lorenzo Milam and the man who introduced me to them, Jeff Mintz. Over the years, I have been grateful for my radio ties to David Owens (the anarchist at the wedding), Susan Newstead, Butch Burrell, Paul and Win, Bill Wax, Jay Brakefield, Stevo Schlemmer, Lance Paar, Donna Hanna-Calvert, and the wonderful Brazilian family choro band, Choro das 3, whom I got to know because of our dear friend Renata Myers, and who memorably not only appeared on my program many times but also played in our living room on Meg’s fifty-eighth birthday in 2016.

It is a pleasure once again to be working with the University of North Carolina Press. I cannot begin to say how pleased I was when I ran into David Perry, who was by then already retired, at a jazz club on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans during an American Historical Association meeting; he mentioned how much it had meant to him that the press had published my book on Freire. Perry made the press a home for Latin American history; Elaine Maisner, with whom I worked last time, has continued to do so. Since this book is primarily, of course, about U.S. foreign relations, it was first acquired by Chuck Grench and was one of the last he worked on before his retirement. Chuck then passed the baton to Debbie Gershenowitz. Thanks to both of them, both consummate professionals with careers worth emulating, as well as Dylan White and Andrew Winters, who are following in their footsteps. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who helped make the book stronger. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own responsibility. What happens to a manuscript after one finishes writing is a bit of a mystery to many authors, and I am sure that I do not know how much I owe to many people in the production, design, and marketing end of the business. I know enough to thank Michelle Witkowski, Cate Hodorowicz, Wendy Muto, Iris Levesque, and Valerie Burton. May the rest of those who worked on the final product not think me ungrateful, just ignorant.

Hemispheric Alliances

Introduction

Liberal Democrats and U.S. Hemispheric and Global Leadership

In announcing his candidacy for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, New York Senator Robert Kennedy made it clear that the stakes were high. In his travels abroad in recent years in South America, Africa, and Europe, he had seen U.S. influence on the decline because of the war in Vietnam. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.¹

The New York senator struck a dramatically different tone than brother John in his inaugural address more than seven years earlier. President Kennedy had expressed a forceful confidence in U.S. global leadership. Fidel Castro’s Cuba was challenging the legitimacy of that leadership, even on the regional level, but the young president from Massachusetts had affirmed a determination, in the now long-familiar words, to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. These words had a special meaning for Latin America.²

At key moments in the history of the global Cold War, liberal Democrats in opposition to existing Republican administration policies sought to create new models for U.S.-Latin American relations that went beyond containing communism. These policies were intended, as Samuel Moyn has written recently in another context, to embody the notion that American power could be indistinguishable from the exercise of American virtue.³ U.S. influence around the world was growing in the late 1950s, though it was increasingly contested by the Soviet Union under an adventurous leader, Nikita Khrushchev. During the Eisenhower administration, the United States began to take Great Britain’s place as the foremost Western power in the Middle East. The dramatic acceleration of the process of decolonization also created new opportunities for the United States at the expense of its own allies.⁴ Latin America, which had long been a region where the United States exercised power, needed to be a place in which the United States demonstrated its right to moral leadership in the world. In the age of decolonization and in response to the ideological challenge of the Cuban Revolution, the John Kennedy administration introduced the Alliance for Progress, which promised large-scale socioeconomic reform and democracy promotion in Latin America.⁵ (The Peace Corps was a program for the Third World in general, which also was intended to demonstrate U.S. idealism.⁶) The Alliance for Progress offered more than containment, but it certainly assumed that the Alliance would aid containment. Immediate threats would be met, short-term opportunities with allies would be pursued, and ambitious long-term goals would be attempted. Over time, and particularly during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, Alliance aid would be applied most where political need was greatest. As the United States faltered during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, liberal Democrats, in particular, embraced human rights, which was presented as universal, but which would be applied particularly to Latin America. Human rights proponents did not abjure containment exactly; containment was, to some extent, assumed even in the age of détente. There was less of a threat to U.S. interests in the region generally. But the human costs of containment themselves had to be contained, and U.S. credibility in the world had to be restored, at home and abroad. Both the Alliance for Progress and human rights assumed a special U.S. responsibility for Latin America. Both the Alliance for Progress and human rights significantly complicated foreign policy making. Human rights, in particular, created problems for those who still prioritized containment within the Democratic Party. Human rights was an important factor in the breakdown of the Cold War consensus, and led to the departure of many from the party itself. But for those who made it a priority, it had the potential to reassert that moral leadership that many thought had been lost, as it promised to change the behavior of recalcitrant allies.⁷

This book pays particular attention to liberal Democratic Latin Americanists, those who thought Latin America was of particular or even primary importance, or who came to believe that this was so because of circumstances or experience. Within Latin America, some countries also mattered more than others, where threats seemed greater or when allies were available. Throughout the book I emphasize countries where liberal Democratic Latin Americanists were most engaged. Whether they chose wisely is up to the reader to decide. During both the Kennedy and Carter presidencies, the presidents were particularly attentive to Latin America, in the former case in large part but not only because the threats seemed so acute.

Fifty years before Robert Kennedy’s announcement of his candidacy, Woodrow Wilson, father of liberal nationalism, was making his bid for world leadership. Although generations of U.S. leaders had believed that the world would eventually follow the U.S. example, the United States had not been ready to lead.⁸ The United States had seen its power and influence expand in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States was a Pacific power to some degree as well. Wilson had benefited from a split in the Republican Party between incumbent William Howard Taft and his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, to become the first Democratic president since the 1890s. When the Great War broke out in 1914, Wilson had hoped that evenhanded neutrality would lead the Great Powers to look to the United States to mediate an end to the war. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the U.S. president announced a broad, sweeping justification for U.S. involvement in European affairs, which had been rejected in President James Monroe’s message almost 100 years before.

Wilson supported open markets, multilateralism, U.S. leadership, and, in theory at least, democracy. But it was his call for self-determination that resonated particularly strongly in a world divided, to a great extent, into colonies controlled by a small number of European countries and Japan. From the fall of 1918 to the spring of 1919, during what historian Erez Manela has called the Wilsonian Moment, many anti-colonial nationalists embraced U.S. leadership and looked to President Wilson for support at the peace table for their hopes for independence.⁹

This exaggerated faith in Wilson’s intentions and the potential for U.S. world leadership might have been tempered if these nationalist leaders had known more about Wilson’s leadership in Latin America. Despite a stirring rhetoric that has led generations of historians astray, U.S. policy in Central America and the Caribbean during Wilson’s presidency was much as it had been since Theodore Roosevelt reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine and turned the United States into a policeman for the Western Hemisphere. (Despite his broader claims, TR’s policing was limited to the Caribbean Basin.) The occupation of Nicaragua continued, and Cuba and Panama remained U.S. protectorates. Under Wilson, U.S. troops invaded both Cuba and Panama. Wilson took advantage of heightened wartime perception of extra-hemispheric threats to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Haiti and the Dominican Republic to promote his vision of economic and political stabilization. The United States sent troops into Mexico twice during the Mexican Revolution. Even other members of his administration sought to temper Wilson’s claims regarding U.S. commitment to small nations’ autonomy. And democracy was not a primary goal in any of these countries. Regional leadership had made the United States a Great Power, but much of Latin America was still not part of the U.S. sphere of influence.¹⁰

A Republican Senate defeated Wilson’s hopes for inclusion in a world body in which the United States could exercise world leadership and promote world peace. Republicans continued to support what they called a protective tariff. They promised not to enter into political commitments which would involve the U.S. in the conflict of European politics. Republican leaders maintained U.S. leadership in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines.¹¹

Throughout the 1920s, Democrats praised Wilson, who, during the war, had exhibited the very broadest conception of liberal Americanism. In the months and years following his death in 1924, the party would invoke his memory and his hope for cooperation between sovereign nations to prevent war and promote law and order. In the concluding paragraph of its 1924 platform, the party committed itself to friendship with Latin America: God has made us neighbors—justice shall keep us friends. Democrats in opposition criticized U.S. interference in elections abroad, most notably in Nicaragua. They claimed that the Republicans had no foreign policy, and affirmed, This great nation cannot afford to play a minor role in world politics.¹²

Public enthusiasm for U.S. occupations of Central American and Caribbean countries waned during the 1920s. Congressional criticism was strong at times, but only in the Dominican Republic were troops removed permanently. Herbert Hoover, perhaps the most influential U.S. secretary of commerce ever, thought that the presence of U.S. soldiers was hurting U.S. trade and investment opportunities. As president-elect, Hoover toured the region for seven weeks. As president, he affirmed that In the large sense we do not wish to be represented abroad by U.S. troops. Historians have a case for granting the Republican president paternity status for the Good Neighbor Policy, as he began a long-term process of removing U.S. troops. This was certainly a movement in a good neighborly direction. It is a stretch to call it a policy, however. While some Latin Americans may have been hopeful initially, relatively few seemed to have been aware of a dramatic change under President Hoover.¹³

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. In that capacity, he had taken credit for Haiti’s new constitution and had seen the occupation as uplifting savage people. As president, Roosevelt hoped that the United States would be a good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors. FDR’s hopes for a world leadership role were not accomplished as easily or as quickly as his vision of hemispheric leadership through the Good Neighbor Policy. In his first term in office, he began to make a dramatic change in U.S. policy, to abandon, as Sumner Welles put it, the erroneous interpretations given to the Monroe Doctrine over many decades. He had many foreign policy aides with experience in Latin America; it had been easy to acquire that experience in recent decades. Some of them even spoke Spanish. More importantly, Roosevelt was responding to the hopes of generations of Latin Americans who had called for an end to foreign intervention. Nonintervention would remain an elusive concept; in Roosevelt’s case, the emphasis was on removing the remaining U.S. troops (except those in the Panama Canal Zone and in Guantánamo) and renouncing any more invasions and occupations. But there was also a rejection of interference in internal affairs (more on this below). By 1936, the United States had abrogated the Platt Amendment, which had allowed the United States special rights to unilaterally intervene in Cuban affairs, and negotiated a new treaty with Panama that forsook such rights in Panama as well. For many in the United States, the most shocking application of the nonintervention pledge was President Roosevelt’s steadfast refusal to send in troops following Mexico’s nationalization of foreign oil companies. This would not be the only time the Roosevelt administration responded with a degree of sympathy to economic nationalism, which had begun to temper the long-standing Latin American embrace of free markets and foreign investment. In 1932, the Democratic platform blamed the Republicans for ruining foreign trade. Secretary of State Cordell Hull blamed Republican tariffs for economic distress in Latin America. (As historian Thomas Zeiler has argued, Roosevelt himself preferred freer trade to free trade.) Throughout the 1930s, Hull promoted free trade in the hemisphere, and following the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, the United States negotiated reductions in tariffs with Latin American countries one at a time. By 1938, the United States was the number one trading partner of every Latin American country except Argentina.¹⁴

Latin Americans responded positively to the new direction in U.S. policy. Roosevelt himself became personally popular and was greeted warmly during his travels in the region. Europe was rejecting Roosevelt’s efforts at mediation in the 1930s, but U.S. leadership was expanding into much of South America, where U.S. influence previously had been limited. Democrats sought to employ the good neighbor analogy in reference to relations with other parts of the world, but it did not take.¹⁵

But nonintervention had its consequences, particularly in countries that had experienced long-term occupations in recent decades. The U.S. armed forces had trained constabularies to maintain order after U.S. troops eventually departed; they were ostensibly nonpartisan and apolitical. Rafael Trujillo, a former security guard who studied at the Haina Military Academy with U.S. forces during the occupation of the Dominican Republic, rose to power as the Hoover administration rejected pleas from the U.S. ambassador to send gunships to prevent him from doing so. Trujillo, one of the most notorious dictators in Latin American history, remained in power until 1961. In Nicaragua, control over the U.S.-trained National Guard enabled Anastasio Somoza García to seize power in 1936; the Roosevelt administration refused to save the Nicaraguan political system that had evolved under his predecessor; Somoza and his sons ruled until 1979. In Cuba, U.S. officials also refused to send in troops during a period of unrest, but they cultivated a sergeant named Fulgencio Batista and used the power of nonrecognition to bring down a nationalist government. The Good Neighbor Policy did not promote democracy, and a pledge not to send in troops to occupy countries was adhered to more definitively than one not to interfere in internal affairs. These new allies would create as many problems during the Cold War as they solved.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the Roosevelt administration was successful in improving relations with its hemispheric neighbors. Progress was made toward mutual defense agreements. Republicans and Democrats in 1940 promised that the United States would avoid getting involved in foreign wars, but both parties promised to defend the Monroe Doctrine. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Central American and Caribbean countries declared war. Other Latin American countries broke off diplomatic relations but did not declare war immediately. By the end of 1942, however, the hemisphere was, to a large degree, unified.¹⁷

An important figure in the Roosevelt administration during the 1940s was Nelson Rockefeller, heir to the family fortune and a man whose name came to define liberal internationalism in the Republican Party. Drawn to Latin American art and to the Latin American people (They made him feel human), Rockefeller had tried to promote what he considered a socially responsible capitalism based on his family’s interests in Venezuela. As World War II began in Europe in 1939, Rockefeller sought to build on the Roosevelt administration’s strengths in Latin America. In 1940, he became the coordinator of inter-American affairs, a position whose authority often overlapped with that of the more traditional State Department. He promoted efforts in public diplomacy to combat the influence of fascism in Latin America. He sponsored tours of Latin America by Hollywood stars and funded movies about the region by people like Walt Disney and others. He also initiated a wide variety of development projects that later were emulated by the Alliance for Progress.¹⁸

As most of the world divided between Allied and Axis sides, the advantage that the United States had in its geographical isolation would have meant little without the near hemispheric unity the United States achieved thanks to the Good Neighbor Policy. U.S. trade with Latin America continued to expand. Most Latin American countries allowed the United States to build or use air or naval bases in their territory, and the United States established military missions and achieved an unprecedented degree of cooperation between the United States and Latin American armed forces. The most important air base in South America was a relatively short plane ride away from Africa, in Natal on the northeast coast of Brazil, which provided what was called a trampoline to victory. Although its government since 1937 had been borderline fascist, Brazil became the most important ally the United States had in Latin America following the $20 million U.S. loan to build a state-owned steel mill. Relations between the U.S. military and the Brazilian military grew strong, as a small Brazilian Expeditionary Force served alongside U.S. forces, primarily in the Italian campaign. Mexico also sent forces to fight in the Pacific war. While other countries did not participate so directly, the use of Latin American bases and the military missions expanded ties between U.S. and Latin American military men dramatically.¹⁹

The United States did not choose its allies based on their ideological orientation but on whether they cooperated with the war effort. Democracy in Latin America had always developed in response to internal dynamics, and tended to be stronger where U.S. influence was limited. Nevertheless, in many countries, the sense of a common struggle against fascism, encouraged by U.S. and Allied propaganda, enabled proponents of democracy in many Latin American countries to succeed, particularly as the war turned in the Allies’ favor by 1944. This created opportunities for labor movements in many countries as well. Democratic governments were established unexpectedly in countries like Guatemala and Venezuela. This was more an inadvertent result of U.S. efforts to promote a clear ideological orientation for its own struggle rather than to promote democracy per se. Within the State Department, however, a vigorous debate developed over whether the United States actually should promote democracy in the region. This discussion was prompted by Spruille Braden, U.S. ambassador to Cuba, where communists were allied with Batista. In a new role as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Rockefeller supported Trujillo, who had benefited greatly from U.S. aid during the war. Other Foreign Service officers were sympathetic to Dominican prodemocracy exiles. U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic Ellis Briggs argued that Trujillo is primarily a Dominican problem, for solution by the Dominican people, but he presciently suggested that Sooner or later American public opinion will interest itself in the kinds of governments existing in the other republics. Briggs also said that even while continuing to follow a nonintervention policy, the United States might have to take more positive action in cases like Trujillo’s. Moreover, U.S. actions in small Caribbean nations were being carefully examined by other—and more important nations with which we are dealing. Batista, at least, left power after completing a term as an elected leader in 1944. U.S. pressures played a small role in the ouster of valuable U.S. ally Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, but at a time when he was trying to remake himself as a prolabor leader. Bradenism, such as it was, came to be discredited as Braden, who had succeeded Rockefeller as assistant secretary of state, became overly involved in trying to seek to stop the election of Argentina’s Juan Perón, a truly popular leader with an authoritarian bent. His election in 1946 certainly was not hurt by U.S. opposition. This would not be the last time that elections in Latin America would produce the wrong result as far as the United States was concerned.²⁰

By the end of the war, U.S. influence in Latin America had never been greater or more widespread. But the United States was not merely a hemispheric and a Pacific power anymore; it was a global power, and Latin America’s relative importance had declined long before the war had ended. When Rockefeller resigned as assistant secretary of state in 1945, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Adolf Berle Jr. noted in his diary that "men

[in the administration]

who know the hemisphere and love it are few, and those who are known by the hemisphere and loved by it are fewer still."²¹

The world was being divided up again. Enemies were becoming friends, and allies enemies. Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States broke down soon after the war. But even though the Soviet Union had experienced massive destruction during the war, its prestige was never greater. Communist parties grew in many parts of Latin America, and they played a part in political openings in some countries.²² The Truman administration saw the primary threats to U.S. global interests in Europe and, increasingly, in Asia. In 1946, President Truman affirmed his commitment to a Western Hemisphere free of interference from outside forces. There must continue to be joint efforts to work together as good neighbors in the solution of … common problems. The United States consolidated its power in the hemisphere through a reciprocal treaty of military assistance, the first in American history, signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1947, and through guarantees that the United Nations’ writ did not run there. The Organization of American States, formed in 1948, would have primacy. But U.S. commitment to containing communism was global, particularly following the March 1947 announcement of the Truman Doctrine, with President Truman’s assertion that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. The importance of Latin America was, inevitably, reduced. U.S. influence was simply assumed in the hemisphere. Threats to U.S. influence—real, imaginary, or exaggerated—would cause great concern in Washington periodically throughout the Cold War.²³ Truman’s rhetoric about the Free World was stirring, and suggested a global ideological struggle. But it was problematic. If Latin American and other nations remained part of this world, even when military dictatorships came to power, what was the ideological justification for the Cold War struggle?²⁴

The United States had high hopes for world trade after the war’s end. Many U.S. politicians and officials feared that a return to the economic nationalism of the 1930s would curb economic recovery. Truman’s rhetoric about free trade, though, obscured his willingness to support U.S. producers. He too preferred freer to free trade, as Roosevelt had done. But the United States strongly criticized the partial turn toward economic nationalism in Latin America, preferring Latin America to continue to stick to the support for free trade and foreign investment that had been axiomatic prior to the onset of the Great Depression.²⁵

As the Cold War developed and the Truman administration made clear that it was going to maintain a global leadership role addressing threats in Europe and Asia, some (like a former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain named Joseph Kennedy) continued to argue for the primacy of the Western Hemisphere.²⁶ But in the short term, at least, the administration was able to enjoy a bipartisan consensus on the evolving containment policy and on foreign policy in general. This was good for Truman, since the 1946 elections had seen Republicans gain control of Congress for the first time since 1930.

In 1948, Truman was, unsurprisingly, his party’s nominee, but his own party split. The States’ Rights Party, or Dixiecrats, was focused on domestic issues and was trying to push back against movement on civil rights. Combative Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey had forced the party to take a stand on the issue at the party’s convention. For the United States to play its role as a leader in the Free World, Humphrey said, we must be in a morally sound position. The Progressive Party, led by former Vice President and Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, hoped to reverse the Cold War direction of U.S. policy and rejected, among other things, the Marshall Plan. Wallace’s party platform called for a return to, and the strengthening of Franklin Roosevelt’s good-neighbor policy, rejected the inter-American military program, and called for economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Republicans, for their part, sounded more like Truman than either the Dixiecrats or the Progressives and pledged support for reciprocal trade, the new spirit of cooperation in the Americas, and a more truly bipartisan foreign policy than they believed Truman had allowed.²⁷

Truman ran on a platform promising world leadership toward a realization of the Four Freedoms, of speech and worship and from want and fear. The platform invoked FDR’s military leadership and praised the creation of the United Nations. The Democrats backed vital aid for China, Greece, and Turkey. They promised the continuation of the Good Neighbor Policy and both economic and military cooperation. The United States would be the principal protector of the free world.²⁸

But what did that mean in the Latin American context? By 1948, a number of democracies established toward the end of the war had fallen. Historians have disagreed on whether the Truman administration could have done more to save the reformist Democratic Action government in Venezuela in 1948, for example. The professed commitment to nonintervention (increasingly used in a more general sense to include noninterference as well) let the United States off the hook when more creative thinking might have helped enable democracy to survive. Historians have also debated the degree to which U.S. influence led to the decline of pluralistic political systems in countries like Chile and Brazil, where Communist parties were outlawed and elected communists were removed from Congress. Labor movements, even those in which communists did not provide the primary energy, in general declined. This remained a problem for liberal anti-communists throughout the Cold War era who could not address how easily anti-communism was employed to weaken labor, which was assumed to be a natural and important political ally for liberals at home and abroad.²⁹

Contending forces in the Western Hemisphere sought U.S. support. Costa Rica, which had democratized gradually over a long period of time, had suddenly fallen victim to a bloody but brief civil war in 1948. The leader of the victorious faction, José Figueres, defeated a party allied with the Communist Party and supported, ironically, by Nicaragua’s Somoza. Over the next few years, Costa Rica would shelter exiles from nearby dictatorships and support efforts to bring down the dictators. Some Latin Americans hoped that the United States would support these efforts by what became known as the Caribbean Legion to promote democracy. Trujillo and Somoza, for their part, created an alliance to try and stop the spread of democracy. U.S. policy continued to favor stability and found both pro- and antidemocratic forces of this type to be disruptive.³⁰

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who would later advise President John F. Kennedy on Latin American matters, wrote a polemical book-length essay in 1949, which offered a defense of beleaguered liberal democracy. He saw Franklin Roosevelt as having rejected plutocracy (the domination of government by business and wealth) and affirmed the need for both capitalism and a strong government. He supported the struggle against totalitarian imperialism abroad and communists at home, while affirming the need to support free speech, essential for the claim to moral leadership. U.S. foreign policy should support the center and the anti-communist left (including, as we shall see, social democrats like Figueres) abroad. The United States was in the great world to stay. The United States should avoid expressing moral indignation, but focus on producing real change in the real world. Despite the need to focus on Europe, Schlesinger argued for rather vaguely defined special considerations and special solutions to respond to the social revolution taking place in the former colonial world, as well as in Latin America.³¹

Following the 1948 election, President Truman announced an international technical assistance program known as Point Four. In the short term, its promised reach was to be as global as the Truman Doctrine. The Cold War meant not only control, as Odd Arne Westad argues, but also improvement. Not surprisingly, Nelson Rockefeller got involved. The president tried to reassure him he was just as enthusiastic about Latin America as you, if not more so! Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given global Cold War dynamics, Latin America was not really a focus. Rockefeller himself was more vocal in his support for the program than most Democrats. Foreign aid was not popular in Congress or with the U.S. public. Point Four did not proceed very far. The onset of the Korean War soon thereafter aided a shift toward a concentration on military aid in Latin America and elsewhere. But as President Truman noted in January 1952, The areas most vulnerable to aggression are not in the Western Hemisphere. Latin Americans remained frustrated in their desire for development aid and, with the exception of Colombia, avoided participating in the Asian police action, in part because they believed that they had not received what they deserved for aiding in World War II.³²

Throughout the 1950s, there were a few liberal Democrats who sought to get the leaders of the party to focus more on the region. Frances Grant was among the most important, and her voice will be heard repeatedly in the course of this book. Like many people, Grant’s interest in Latin America stemmed initially from a passion for the region’s culture. That interest expanded through travel in the region and became increasingly more political as she became involved in the Pan-American Association of Women and then the International League for Human Rights. Grant had personal responsibility in the latter organization for Latin America. Despite the positive developments of previous years, by 1950 democracy in the region was, in her words, being gradually devoured. She hoped to create a network of prodemocracy political leaders and activists that could influence the political development of the Western Hemisphere, including Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela, Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende of Chile, the aforementioned José Figueres of Costa Rica, and Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic. All of them would be significant political figures over the next few decades. Figueres delivered a forceful critique of democratic nations that tolerated dictatorship and failed to promote democracy. Other sponsors of the 1950 meeting included leaders of the trade union movement in the United States. Hubert Humphrey, by now a senator from Minnesota, sent a statement expressing how heartened American liberals were by the counter-offensive against the totalitarian ideology penetrating Latin America. The association’s many voices, Grant promised, would be heard often when freedom is threatened and human rights violated in this hemisphere. The organization would press against recognition of de facto governments and support the withholding of economic and technical aid from what she called totalitarian regimes. The Havana meeting laid the groundwork for the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, which Grant ran on a shoestring budget for the next three decades.³³

Truman’s last secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was no admirer of FDR, not least because he saw him as having been interested only in Latin America. As biographer Robert Beisner has written, Acheson saw no paramount national security issues there. He was a Europeanist and a free trader, who found his greatest challenges in Asia. But Acheson played a valuable role in Latin America nevertheless, blocking efforts to aid Somoza in removing Guatemala’s elected leftist President Jacobo Árbenz. It was one of Roosevelt’s most trusted Latin Americanists, Adolf Berle, who would later advise John Kennedy, who argued that nonintervention did not apply to those countries like Guatemala that were allegedly tied to extra-hemispheric powers. Historian Nick Cullather has argued that Acheson, for his part, feared a blown operation would destroy the remnants of the Good Neighbor Policy carefully constructed by Roosevelt.³⁴

Frances Grant’s conference in 1950 had been held in Havana. Cuba’s democratic period was chaotic and brief. Batista had stepped down in 1944. But the elected governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás were marked by corruption. The former strongman hoped to be reelected in 1952, but Batista saw that the electoral route was blocked. He staged a coup and returned to power. The elections were canceled (blocking the congressional ambitions of a young lawyer named Fidel Castro). As historian Louis Pérez Jr. has written, The apparent indifference with which the U.S. government reacted to the abrogation of civil liberties in Cuba shocked and appalled many on the island.³⁵

In 1952, the Democratic Party had a new candidate, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. The platform that year was filled with self-congratulations for the party’s having put an end to a tragic era of isolation, though it claimed it had done so in 1933. The Democrats promised national security based on collective pacts, including the Rio pact. It promised to continue the policy of the good neighbor, to strengthen the bonds of friendship and cooperation with our Latin American allies, and to expand trade among free nations, invoking Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull.³⁶

Truman’s surprise victory in 1948, the communist victory in China in 1949, and the onset of the Korean War in 1950 all led to a decline in bipartisanship in foreign policy.³⁷ By 1952, the Republicans contended that the good in our foreign policies had been accomplished with Republican cooperation. The Republicans had abandoned protectionism and supported the expansion of mutually-advantageous world trade. But the Republicans charged that the Democrats had shielded traitors to the nation in high place and embraced the negative, futile, and immoral policy of ‘containment.’ The Republicans found it easy to blame the Truman administration for the neglect of Latin America, which was making people there resentful.³⁸

The Cold War consensus was forged around the perception of threats in Europe and Asia, and yet was applied globally. U.S. assumptions of dominance in Latin America were of even longer standing than actual U.S. interests in the region had been. If U.S. officials and politicians often seemed largely unaware during the Cold War years that U.S. influence had not been equally strong everywhere in the hemisphere (and was even fairly recent in some cases), they generally recognized that it was now stronger in more places in Latin America than it had ever been. The consensus regarding Latin America favored maintaining this influence. The most successful liberal Democratic Latin America policy was generally considered to have been Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. It was never formally disavowed. Liberal Democrats in the 1950s and early 1960s frequently invoked both Roosevelt and his policy, particularly the nearly complete hemispheric solidarity on security issues forged in 1941 and 1942.³⁹

Democrats promised to continue the Good Neighbor Policy in 1952 and to restore it in 1956, while Republicans claimed it as their own.⁴⁰ But in an age of covert action by the Central Intelligence Agency, it was not clear what a policy of nonintervention and noninterference really meant, and few Latin Americans still believed that the policy was in force.⁴¹ Despite what was beginning to be recognized by some as a problematic Free World discourse, Cold War fears, even if they had been largely if intermittently exaggerated before the rise of Fidel Castro, had revived an emphasis on stability. The United States had been able to remain complacent about the region, confident that communism was being contained. But times were changing, and new policies were necessary.

In the opening chapter, we will see how in the late 1950s, not least because of the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War had really arrived in Latin America. Eisenhower, the first Republican president since Hoover, was an internationalist who promised to go beyond containment; promises of rollback, however, proved largely hollow, with the exception, as he saw it, of Guatemala. In Latin America, the former general became associated with military leaders. But toward the middle point of his second term, a new liberal hour began when, as historian Robert David Johnson argues, congressional Democrats began to dominate the discussion of foreign policy. The fears and opportunities that defined the Cold War had not really been felt in the Western Hemisphere heretofore to a significant degree.⁴² But now liberal Democrats in opposition to Eisenhower policies began to develop a new consensus regarding what they expected would be productive policies toward Latin America. Although they did not renounce the Good Neighbor Policy, they believed they had to embrace a new framework for relations with Latin America. Moreover, they wanted to move beyond mere containment. They supported aid for development rather than just free trade and foreign investment (which had been the policies of Harry Truman as well as Dwight Eisenhower).⁴³ And they wanted to promote democracy. Liberal Democrats like Wayne Morse and Frank Church thought that Eisenhower’s policies were already inadequate even before Fidel Castro came to power. Liberal Democrats knowledgeable about Latin America were suspicious of military aid. John Kennedy would be more confident that he could increase military aid without encouraging military rule.

John Kennedy’s commitment to liberalism was rather recent in the late 1950s, and even his aide Schlesinger argued that his definition of liberalism was quite vague. Whether Kennedy would revert to a default position of mere containment at times and not follow the new liberal Democratic commitment to democracy and development was a defining tension during his presidency. Frances Grant, founder of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, as a non-state actor, and Wayne Morse from his position in the Senate, tried to push the Kennedy administration to be more consistent in its support for democracy and its degree of commitment to the region. (Within the administration, Schlesinger in particular did the same.) At the same time, the Latin Americanists within and outside of the administration had a narrow range of friends in Latin America whose prospects and policies they tried to promote, some of whom had felt kicked … around by the Eisenhower administration when they lived in exile.⁴⁴ More than many of the others, Grant’s deep personal connection to the region also led her to often adopt attitudes of particular Latin American leaders, as can be seen later in her response to the military coup in Chile in 1973. She saw the coup through the perspective of Eduardo Frei, a strong opponent of Salvador Allende, rather than that of many of her presumed allies in the United States who were now embracing human rights.

Chapter 2 addresses the larger Kennedy vision, which was embodied in the Alliance for Progress. The United States was now committed to larger socioeconomic transformation to address long-standing issues. At the same time, it was forced to address pressing issues from the left, in Cuba, and from the right, in the Dominican Republic. The administration rejected Eisenhower administration critics’ hopes of reducing military aid, but believed that it could control the impact of even dramatically enhanced military aid by attempting to discourage military coups and requiring timetables for the return to constitutional government. At the same time, the continuing reliance upon covert action by many of these leaders made a mockery of public promises of noninterference. The Kennedy administration hoped to make the Dominican Republic a showcase for democracy. There would always remain a tension between the larger long-term goals of the program and the more immediate needs of national security. Kennedy aides Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Ralph Dungan fought repeatedly during the Kennedy years to keep the administration focused on these larger goals. John and Robert Kennedy too often focused on Cuba itself at the expense of the Alliance.

In chapter 3, I show how these