Tulchin (1988) - The United States and Latin America in The 1960s, PDF

The United States and Latin America in the 1960s
Author(s): Joseph S. Tulchin

Source: Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1988),
pp. 1-36
Published by: Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/165788
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THE UNITED STATESAND LA IN AMERICA
IN THE 1960s*
byJOSEPH S. TULCHIN
INTRODUCTION
RESTROSPECTIVE CONSIDERATION OF UNITED STATES rela-

tions with Latin America during the decade of the 1960s h
centered on the Alliance for Progress and the Cuban Missile Cri
The second of these has been analyzed and re-analyzed as a c
study in decision making and as a critical point in the nuclear c
frontation between the United States and the USSR. Recentl
series of meetings, both political and scholarly, was conduct
with what amounts to a nostalgic atmosphere to reevaluate
crisis. All of the participants recalled the episode within the co
text of East-West relations. The fact that Cuba was a part of La
America scarcely entered into their reconstructions of events. T
scholars who took part in these meetings were specialists in
tional security issues, in Soviet affairs or in military affairs. L
Americans or Latin Americanists were conspicuous by their
sence.
By contrast, no one seems interested in celebr

ty-fifth anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, or
niversary of the Social Progress Trust Fund. At t
scholars consider the entire effort a noble failur
effort doomed from the start by inertia, conser
Joseph L. Tulchin is Professor of History and Direct

al Programs at the University of North Carolina, C
former editor of the LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH REVIEW. His recent
publications include ARGENTINA AND THE UNITED STATES: A HIS-
TORY OF MISUNDERSTANDING (Twayne, 1989), and, with Heraldo
Mufioz, LATIN AMERICAN NATIONS IN WORLD POLITICS (Westview,
1986).
* The author wishes to thank James H. Townsend for his help in
preparing this article.
2 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS
in this country and elsewhere in the hemisphere, and an underly-

ing contradiction between the call for fundamental reform and th
fear of instability. Such an interpretation gives to the policy and to
the effort to execute it the image of an aberration. In that manner
little effort has been made to understand the origins of the policy,
much less to evaluate its impact on the hemisphere and on rela
tions between the nations of Latin America and the United States.
That is an error. This paper attempts to understand both of these
episodes, and others during the decade, in the broad context and
historical dynamics of inter-American relations. That context in-
cludes an analysis of US policy during the decade, but cannot be
limited to such an analysis. It must include a consideration of the
elements leading up to the formulation of the Alliance for
Progress, conditions in Latin America that contributed to the en-
thusiasm with which the program was announced as well as to
the failure to carry out its terms, and to the global concerns of the
US government that shaped policy toward Latin America.
Ever since the independence of the republics in the Western
hemisphere, the United States has considered the region a special
preserve, one that should be kept free of European influence to
the extent possible. For nearly a century and a half, the notion of
the hemisphere as a special preserve, first stated baldly in the Mon-
roe Doctrine (1823), existed side by side with a more romantic
ideal of the Western hemisphere as a special community of na-
tions sharing secular beliefs and cultural norms, particularly the
belief in freedom and democracy. The events of the 1960s chal-
lenged both of these traditions and forced the leaders of the United
States to reevaluate their policy toward Latin America. By the end
of the decade, although policy was still very much in flux, the na-
ture of hemispheric relations had changed. No one, either in this
country or in Latin America seriously proposed that the region any
longer represented a family of nations or a special preserve in
which our security was essentially privileged. The Cold War had
been brought into our backyard through the Cuban missile crisis.
The fundamental premises on which our national security policy
had been based were challenged and found wanting. When Presi-
dent Lyndon B. Johnson left the White House inJanuary 1969, our
Latin American policy was in shambles. What once had been a
coherent line of policy was blurred by the obsessive focus on
events in Southeast Asia, so that policy toward the region became
TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 3
another victim of the severe distortions of the global framework

within which the United States understood its national security.
As a consequence of the events of the period, national security
interests in the region were redefined. Latin Americans moved
toward a more distant or wary posture toward the United States.
By the end of the decade, the nations of Latin America had begun
to define their position in world affairs independently of the
United States. This trend toward independence, together with the
persistent drive for economic development, has reduced the
leverage once exercised by the United States over the nations of
the hemisphere and has weakened our hegemony, perhaps per-
manently. To accomplish its objectives in the region, the United
States now has to act more on its own and has found itself increas-
ingly isolated from the rest of the hemisphere. In order to reverse
this trend, the US government must observe Latin American reality
with greater care, listen more attentively to the policy objectives
of our colleagues in the hemisphere than it has in the past, and
bring our policy more in line with that reality and those goals if it
hopes to protect the nation's security.
There are three keys to understanding the Latin American
policy of the United States during the decade of the 1960s. The
first is that policy was the result of a shift from a regional perspec-
tive on the hemisphere to a global perspective, a transition begun
as a response to the world war and that permeated the policymak-
ing process by the end of the war. Despite that shift, policymakers
continue to base their efforts on the Wilsonian assumptions that
our system, our way of life, was perfectly exportable and that all
right-thinking or responsible Latin Americans shared our values
and our view of the world. The second key is the fact that within
this global framework, the region had been a low priority of US
concerns. Third, that there was an unresolved debate within the
US government concerning the relationship between US national
security and economic development, including what was then
called good government, in the Western hemisphere.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
REGIONAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES were ne

dichotomous or mutually exclusive in either the theory or
tice of United States security before World War II. In the for
tion of the Monroe Doctrine, it is clear that the desire to keep Latin
America free of European influence was an intimate part of the
more general or global concerns of the US government. Toward
the end of the century, as the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan
came to have increasing influence over policy planning, the
elaborate proposals for coaling stations, an isthmian canal and
protection of shipping lanes in the Caribbean Basin were part of
Mahan's global project for the United States as a great power.
As the succeeding administrations put Mahan's national
security theories into practice, the anxiety over European inter-
vention was focused almost exclusively within the Caribbean area.
There, the United States came to believe that bad government and
fiscal irresponsibility - the two were virtually interchangeable in
US thinking - led to instability, and that it was instability that
created the conditions for external intervention that would
threaten the security of the United States.
The process culminated in the confident assertion by Presiden
Woodrow Wilson that the United States, with its democratic
government and its liberal capitalist economy, was the ideal mod
for all the nations of the world. Although the intensity of his me
sianic zeal fluctuated over time, Wilson considered it the respon-
sibility of the more advanced nations of the world to teach the le
fortunate peoples of the world how to enjoy the benefits of t
economic and political system that had evolved in the Unite
States. That conviction, that arrogance, never has been absent en
tirely from US policy in this hemisphere.
At the end of World War I, the threat of direct intervention b
European powers in the Caribbean seemed to have disappear
This, together with the profound disillusionment with the W
sonian project of exporting democracy which overcame t
United States following the war, provoked a significant retr
from the interventionist policies followed since the days of Wil-
liam McKinley. The definition of United States strategic concern
was expanded to include specific commodities and services wh
the war had demonstrated to be vital to the national security. At
the same time, however, the protection of adequate supplies
petroleum, open channels of communication, and the free fl
of financial capital in Latin America and elsewhere no longe
seemed to require direct intervention in the internal affairs
weaker nations in the hemisphere. Through the decade of t
1920s, the United States government worked to devise a policy

through which it could feel comfortable protecting the national
security of the United States through the use of financial and
economic influence.2
There were episodes of direct, military intervention in the
Caribbean danger zone during the decade, but they were never
specifically aimed at preventing European intervention. They
were expressions of the paternalistic, Wilsonian sense of respon-
sibility for good government in the region. Of course, as is well
known, the nations of South America, which always had seen
themselves as different from the nations in the Caribbean basin
and, therefore, exempt from the obnoxious tutelage of the United
States, were uncomfortable with the growing reach and suffocat-
ing control of United States economic influence. Led by Argen-
tina, which traditionally had been the strongest voice in the
hemisphere against United States hegemony, the nations of the
hemisphere began to use the forum of the Pan American Union
to curb the interventionist arrogance of the United States. Begin-
ning at the hemispheric meeting in Havana in 1928, the Latin
Americans hammered away on two issues: limiting intervention
in the internal affairs of other nations, and the adaptation of trade
and investment for the greater benefit of the peoples of the hemi-
sphere.
From this perspective, the Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s
was an effort to project United States hegemony throughout the
hemisphere by means of a compromise with the nations of the
hemisphere: "good behavior" by the United States, defined as in-
creasingly clear adherence to the principle of non-intervention, in
return for "good behavior" by the Latin Americans, defined as
hospitable treatment for the capital and trade of United States
citizens and the acceptance of United States hegemony in the
event of any threat from Europe.
During the second world war, although there were fears of in-
vasion and, before the United States entered the conflict, fears that
the hemisphere would become a theater of operations between
the European belligerents, the Western hemisphere was an area
of privileged security. With only one major exception, Argentina,
the nations of the hemisphere followed the lead of the United
States in declaring their allegiance to the Allied cause, particular-
ly in providing the Allies with strategic commodities at prices, and
in amounts, dictated by the Allies themselves. Even Argentina sold

its foodstuffs and other primary products to the Allies under
favorable terms. By the end of 1942, the US military command no
longer anticipated any serious threat from - or through - Latin
America. Nevertheless, Argentine deviance continued to be con-
sidered a serious offense in Washington. Hostility toward Argen-
tina eventually grew to the point where it bore little relation to the
broader objectives of the US war effort and even created con-
siderable friction between our government and the government
of our principal ally, Great Britain.
The official reason for sustaining hostility toward Argentina,
even after there was no reasonable threat to US security, was that,
by its failure to toe the line established by the United States, Ar-
gentina was, or could become, a focus for subversion from out-
side the hemisphere. The fear of subversion, anticipated from the
Nazis during the war, was a new concept in the definition of
United States security policy. The notion that foreign ideologies
could undermine the stability of a government in the hemisphere
and, in so doing, introduce the influence of a foreign, potentially
hostile power and thereby threaten the security of the United
states created an entirely new dimension in national security
policy. It was a dimension that would become increasingly
prominent in the period following the defeat of the Axis powers.
Because of its imprecision, it is a concept which has created dif-
ficulties between the United States and the nations of the hemi-
sphere.4
Prosecution of the war brought the United States to a broad,
global definition of its security. That definition, together with the
perception, even before the war had ended, that the Soviet Union
would not be a faithful ally and would represent a threat which
would have to be countered, led the United States to create a
global network of protection for its security. Within the hemi-
sphere, this took the form of an effort by the United States to rein-
force that sense of community which had been part of the Good
Neighbor policy and to create a defense organization directed
against possible threats from outside the hemisphere.
This policy of regional identity within a global framework ran
into difficulties from the very outset, at the hemispheric meeting
at Chapultepec (Mexico) in March 1945. The Latin Americans were
not opposed to strengthening a sense of hemispheric community,
but they insisted that membership in the community could not be

determined unilaterally by the United States, and that relations
among the members of the community had to include considera-
tion of the economic and social well-being of all. Specifically, this
meant an end to United States efforts to isolate Argentina plus
commitments to stimulate the economic development of the Latin
American nations, delayed, they argued, by their loyal coopera-
tion in the war effort.
The US government did not consider the Latin American posi-
tion unreasonable. It simply felt that other claims on its attention
and resources were more immediate. As a result, it adopted a
policy of delay, attempting, in effect, to maintain Latin American
support in the emerging global struggle against the Soviet Union
by a minimum expenditure of time and energy. Basically, the
government's policy toward Latin America seemed to be, "If it ain't
broke, don't fix it." As far as the Latin American request for
economic aid to stimulate development, the US position was a
friendly but firm insistence that the best fuel for the engine of
growth was private capital. Instead of asking the United States for
public loans, the nations of the hemisphere should do whatever
might be necessary to make their countries attractive to foreign in-
vestment. In the period 1945-1952, Belgium and Luxemburg
received more aid than all of Latin America. Assistant Secretary of
State Spruille Braden lectured the Latin Americans:
The institution of private property ranks with those of
religion and family as a bulwark of civilization. To tamper
with private enterprise will precipitate a disintegration of life
and liberty as we conceive and treasure them. The time has
come to realize that the United States Treasury is not an in-
exhaustible reservoir (Green, 1971: 262).
On the issue of defense, the only obstacle to signing a treaty
was the peculiar struggle within the United States government, in
which Braden was a notorious participant, over how to deal with
the Argentine government, still unrepentant in its resistance to
United States dominance (Tulchin, forthcoming: chapter 8; Wag-
ner, 1970). Finally, the nations of the hemisphere met at Rio, on 2
September 1947, and managed to sign a treaty of mutual defense.
In signing this treaty, it was the hope of the United States to insu-
late the hemisphere from external threats - a return to the hal-
cyon days of the inter-war period - or to induce the Latin
Americans to leave the security of the hemisphere to the United

States. By signing, it was the hope of the Latin Americans that they
could bring the United States to a public consideration of the
economic and social issues they considered fundamental to their
security. This asymmetry in the security interests of the signatories
to the treaty would undermine its effectiveness from the perspec-
tive of both the United States and Latin America.
During the decade following the end of World War II, the
United States gradually came to define its national security re-
quirements in terms of the bipolar competition, and the nuclear
confrontation, with the USSR. The concept of "containment" gave
the global reach of the nation's security interests both military and
political components. How Latin America fit into these global con-
cerns was a question to which the answer - or answers - were
always ambiguous. By focusing attention elsewhere, Soviet policy
facilitated efforts of the United States to take Latin American ac-
quiescence or support for granted, and to fit the region into its
own scheme of priorities where it rested, painfully, near the bot-
tom.
Because of perceived political threats from the USSR in various

regions of the world, the United States employed public funds to
fight underdevelopment and misery in such places as India,
Korea, and Southeast Asia, and used public monies to reconstruct
Europe, all in the name of national security and morality. Latin
America was treated differently, less because of the tradition that
the region was special and different from the rest of the world, al-
though that was given as the reason on some occasions, than for
the negative reason that the region was considered relatively
secure from Soviet invasion or subversion and, therefore, a low
priority in United States global policy.
United States policy, so preoccupied with the Cold War in its
bipolar formulation, considered as an adequate policy goal in
Latin America the achievement of a condition in which subversion
was either absent or at least modulated. So long as the area was
considered stable, the United States government was more or less
content. During the 1950s, the achievement of stability was ac-
complished in a wide variety of political forms. Many of these were
non- or anti-democratic. By the mid-1950s, a wide number of
governments throughout the hemisphere had come to power by
non-democratic means or governed in non-democratic ways. That
was nothing new. What was new was that, in the early 1950s, this
was not seen as a problem in Washington. In fact, the use of US
force in 1954, through manipulation of a military puppet to oust
the reformist democratic government of Guatemala, was con-
sidered one of the great successes of the administration. Lamen-
tably, it was held up as a model for future operations in Latin
America and elsewhere. It was considered the ultimate success in
counterinsurgency.5 At the time, Latin American outrage, ex-
pressed at the Caracas meeting of the Organization of American
States (OAS) and after, was either ignored or not heard.
During this decade, when as many as 13 out of 20 Latin
American states were ruled by dictators, the Eisenhower ad-
ministration changed its view and came to see the lack of
democratic governments in Latin America as a serious policy
problem. Anti-democratic or non-democratic regimes were con-
sidered to be unsympathetic to the problems of underdevelop-
ment and to the misery of the populations in the area. Therefore,
they were considered to be inherently unpopular, hence poten-
tially unstable. Since it was instability that, along with misery, was
considered to provoke subversion, policy planners concerned
with Latin America during the second Eisenhower administration
increasingly came to the conviction that anti-democratic regimes
in the hemisphere were a liability and that the United States should
do something about them.6
Within the government in Washington, the thinking came to
focus on the linkage between development and democracy
through a series of events and the concurrent public debate over
them. First the president's brother, Milton Eisenhower, made
several trips through Latin America, reporting directly to the presi-
dent concerning conditions in the hemisphere. It was Milton
Eisenhower's belief, from the first trip through the last, that
development and democracy were inextricably linked and the ab-
sence of both were a liability for United States national security.
His first report, in 1954, was filed without comment. By 1957 and
1958, however, successive reports were finding an increased echo
within the foreign policy establishment and among the informed
public. They were having more echo because of events contem-
poraneous with them, and because a growing consensus among
academics and policy advisers confirmed their conclusions.7
Perhaps the most influential academic argument for the use of

public funds to aid general societal development in under-
developed countries was that put forth by Rostow and Millikan
(1957) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Repeat-
ing many of the apocalyptic sentiments of George Kennen, they
called on the United States to rededicate itself to its "sense of world
mission." Rostow's arguments were grounded in a thoroughly op-
timistic view of US society. His prescription was for the United
States to look beyond its borders to problems in the Third World,
whose nations shared the priorities and values of US liberalism. It
remained for US foreign policy to "increase the awareness else-
where in the world that the goals, aspirations, and values of the
American people are in large part the same as those of the people
in other countries." These arguments would influence the Eisen-
hower administration, but would have a much more profound im-
pact on Kennedy and his circle.
The most important event occurred in May 1958, when Vice
President Richard Nixon visited Latin America. During this trip, in
Caracas (Venezuela), Nixon was stoned, spat upon, and very near-
ly hurt seriously. Some think his life was in danger. Washington
was in shock. Why was there such anti-Americanism in Latin
America? What started this fear and hatred in Latin America? A
month later, in June of 1958, a formal proposal - in which the
linkage between underdevelopment and democracy on the one
hand, and hemispheric security on the other, was made in the
strongest possible terms - was sent to President Eisenhower by
the President of Colombia, Alberto Lleras Camargo, and the Presi-
dent of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek. Kubitschek's letter, which ac-
companied the memorandum, referred to the unpleasant episode
in Caracas the previous month, indicating to President Eisenhower
that it was time for the United States to act. The president
responded by sending a task force to Brazil to have conversations
with the two Latin American leaders. The resulting memorandum,
known as Operation Pan America, proposed a hemispheric
program of public aid to alleviate the conditions of underdevelop-
ment and instability. It was no coincidence that, during the months
in which these memoranda were drafted, a movement of guerril-
las in the Cuban hills was gathering force, so that, by mid-1958,
most people who bothered to look, including those in
Washington, were convinced that the rebel movement led by Fidel
Castro was bound to win. On 31 December 1958, Fidel marched

into Havana in triumph. He immediately called for massive reform
throughout Latin America and began a campaign against US in-
fluence, or US imperialism as he calls it, which he continues to this
day.
It is important to remember that the Latin Americans had been
clamoring for public funds to aid them in the quest for develop-
ment ever since the end of the war. Their frustration with the US
disdain for their concerns led them to consider ways to solve their
problems without depending upon the United States. Given the
global reach of the struggle with the Soviet Union, tendencies
toward independence or neutralism were not looked upon with
favor from Washington, but they did not prompt a constructive
response until the end of the 1950s. The Latin American approach
consisted of theoretical and practical dimensions, just as the policy
process did in the United States. The theoretical dimension began
with a series of formulations explaining international economic
relations in terms of unequal exchange between the developed
nations, at the center of the world economy, and the under-
developed, at the periphery. Of great significance was the fact that
these theoretical formulations did not spring from an academic
source. They began in the research arm of the United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), under the fer-
tile, energetic leadership of Raul Prebisch, a conservative Argen-
tine economist and banker forced into exile by Per6n. An entire
generation of Latin American social scientists and policymakers
learned the principles of international economics according to
Prebisch and refined them. Dependency theory is an intellectual
descendent of the work of the Prebisch group in ECLA (or, as it is
known in Spanish, Comision Economica para Latinamerica-
CEPAL) during the 1950s. The CEPALinos argued strenuously that
structural rigidities in the international economy could be over-
come only with state intervention and with international state-to-
state aid. Private investment could not accomplish the task. As if
to strengthen their argument, in 1956 Khrushchev offered to help
the Latin Americans develop their economies with Soviet aid. Of-
ficials in Washington watched closely. Catching the mood of the
times, in July 1959 Fidel Castro - at the inter-American economic
conference in Buenos Aires - boldly called on the US govern-
ment to provide $30 billion in aid to the Latin American nations.
All of these events, coming together, convinced the United

States administration that the policy towards Latin America which
had been in effect since the second World War was no longer ade-
quate. A hands-off policy focused on private enterprise and in-
vestment would not work. It was time for a concession to the Latin
American demand for economic cooperation. At the next formal
meeting of the OAS, in Bogota in September 1960, the United
States, for the first time, signed a multilateral convention calling
for, or agreeing to, multilateral measures for economic and social
development of the nations in the hemisphere. The Inter-
American Development Bank (IDB), created a few months ear-
lier, was designated to serve as the vehicle for such multilateral
efforts. Further, the United States made a commitment of funds -
called the Social Progress Trust Fund - which would serve as its
contribution to the hemispheric effort to alleviate conditions of
underdevelopment. In fact, those monies would not be committed
formally until the new administration took office in 1961, when it
became a commitment which that administration embraced will-
ingly and with great energy.
Although creation of the IDB represents a significant innova-
tion in US policy toward Latin America, there is evidence that, like
the policy it supplanted, it was authorized because it fit the general
assumptions underlying global policy. Arthur Schlesinger (1965)
reports that plans were being made for a similar institution in the
Middle East, leading Under-Secretary of State Douglas Dillon to
argue that, under such circumstances, continued resistance to a
bank for Latin America would be untenable (Dillon & Mansfield,
1960). Despite recurrent crises, Latin America remained a relative-
ly minor strategic priority for US policymakers. Competing with
the ferment in Latin America for attention, in the late 1950s, were
conflicts in other areas of the world deemed to be of far greater
importance to US interests, including Europe, Southeast Asia, and
the Middle East. Faced with a choice between devising a set of
policies tailored specifically to Latin America and relying on
general approaches formulated on the basis of experiences in
other regions and tested in other regions, officials often chose the
latter course.
These events served as one of the important campaign issues
in the debates between Vice-President Nixon, running for presi-
dent, and the democratic contender, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy
was particularly energetic in his attacks on the Republican failure

to support democratic goverments in the hemisphere. He also
pounded on the administration's weakness and complacency in
allowing a communist base to be established at the "back door"
of the United States. After his election, Kennedy made Latin
America one of his top priority issues.
Ironically, US intervention in support of democracy was being
urged publicly by a number of Latin American leaders at the end
of the 1950s, especially Jose Figueres of Costa Rica and R6mulo
Betancourt of Venezuela. In Operation Pan-America, they ex-
plicitly advocated multilateral efforts in favor of good government.
They wanted the United States to join them, through the Organiza-
tion of American States, to get rid of dictatorship and to oust bad
governments so that democratically-elected popular governments
could lead the movement toward development. Because it
seemed to fit the global policy of containment and because con-
tinuing to refuse carried increasing risks, the United States, reluc-
tantly at first and then, once Kennedy had assumed office, with
more conviction and energy, seized upon this policy and made it
its own. In so doing, the US government deliberately manipulated
its Wilsonian past and promised to act in concert with Latin
American allies in ousting dictators, like Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic, in return for support in the campaign to neutralize the
influence of Fidel Castro in the hemisphere.
In the 1945-1960 period, US policy displayed a significant con-
tinuity, although the Eisenhower administration was more dis-
posed than its predecessor to view inter-American relations within
a global Cold War framework. Eisenhower was innovative as well,
both in using economic and social intervention to build progres-
sive democratic nations to fight communism and in the expanded
list of what actions might be "deemed appropriate" to protect US
national security and win the Cold War (Rabe, 1988: 176-78;
Zoumaras, 1987). Within the same framework, his successor
would be more innovative still - and he would be much more
Wilsonian than Eisenhower.
UNITED STATES UNDER KENNEDY AND

JOHNSON
The Kennedy Administration

IN EVALUATING THE NEW ADMINISTRATION we have to take
into account the personality of the President. He was markedly
different from his predecessor: almost 30 years younger, ener-
getic, playing touch football in Hyannis Port with his extended
family. All of this was enormously appealing in Latin America.
With a charming, attractive, and Spanish-speaking wife, who was
used almost as a public relations agent in the first two years of the
administration. Speaking in Spanish on several trips to Latin
America, the duo evinced an image of energy, youth, and op-
timism. The president had a charismatic appeal that virtually
swept the people of Latin America off their feet. That, together
with the idealism projected in the Kennedy rhetoric, defined a new
policy for the United States.
Kennedy's style was also markedly different from that of his
predecessor. He was an avid reader, of both newspapers and
reports, and loved to participate in the debate of policy altera-
tives. He considered himself an intellectual and enjoyed the give
and take of debate among his advisers. In this, as in all matters,
style was important to him, so that a clear argument elegantly
presented impressed him more than mountains of data or
evidence presented in an indiscriminate fashion. While he
preferred to have his advisers arrive at a consensus on matters of
policy, he was not reluctant to decide between alternatives nor to
take sides in an unresolved debate. At the beginning of his ad-
ministration, this style gave an advantage to the assertive and the
articulate among his advisers; it also had the unintended result of
drowning out minority opinions within the inner circle. After the
Bay of Pigs episode, Kennedy tried to insure that there always
would be a devil's advocate represented in the discussion of
policy, someone who would disagree with the majority and ask,
"What if?"
In his inaugural address, Kennedy promised Latin Americans
an alliance in the quest for progress, "To assist free men and free
governments in casting off the chains of poverty." But, he warned:
this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of

hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join
them to oppose aggression or subversion in the Americas and
let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to
remain the master of its own house (Public papers, 1961:170-
175).
Here was the central dilemma of the Kennedy policy in Latin
America and in the Third World: how can you effect change
without pitching the nations undergoing change into a condition
of instability that invites subversion by communist agents? As Al-
bert Hirschman warned in 1963: "To advocate reforms in Latin
America without tolerating, accepting, and sometimes even wel-
coming and promoting the only kinds of pressures which have
proven effective in getting reforms is to risk being accused of
hypocrisy and deception" (Hirschman, 1963: 260). To some ex-
tent, the government expected change to be accompanied by in-
stability. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara noted,
Roughly 100 countries today are caught up in the difficult
transition to modern societies. This sweeping surge of
development has turned traditionally listless areas of the
world into seething cauldrons of change. The years that lie
ahead for the nations in the southern half of the globe are
pregnant with violence. This would be true even if no threat
of Communist subversion existed - as it clearly does (Shafer,
1988: 80).9
To contain this seeming contradiction, Kennedy proposed a
dual approach of (a) supporting economic development and
political reform while (b) providing military aid to facilitate
counterinsurgency, to bring about a non-violent revolution in
Latin America. At the same time, his administration sponsored
Project Camelot to identify the causes and patterns of instability
in Latin America. In this way, he hoped to resolve the intellectual
battle over the nature of development and change, as well as to
avoid getting caught up in the political debate between those who
considered direct military aid the best response to communist
threats on the one hand, and those who considered economic
development the best defense against subversion on the other -
a debate that nearly had mired the Eisenhower administration in
inaction.
Part of the stimulus to merge the two approaches to the Third

World came from the liberal critique of the Eisenhower ad-
ministration. Liberals argued that the Republicans had lost sight of
the nation's revolutionary heritage, and that there was a crucial
distinction between communist initiatives and the progressive
programs which the United States had to offer the world. Failure
to take advantage of the nation's leadership of liberal forces in the
world was one of the principal causes of the nation's slippage as
a world power. The US had failed to market effectively the values
that made the nation great. Kennedy had used this argument to
good advantage during the campaign and had won the support
of many liberals.
The transition team Kennedy appointed to draft a Latin
American policy for his administration contained several
prominent liberals and was chaired by Adolph A. Berle. Berle as-
serted that the hope of Latin America lay with a new generation
of moderate democratic leaders emerging throughout the region.
These leaders, he argued, would steer a middle course between
right-wing oligarchy opposed to change and communists, who
advocated revolution and followed the lead of the Soviet Union.
What Berle found particularly attractive about these politicians
was that they shared US values. Many had been educated in the
United States. They undetstood and revered the United States.
Here were leaders to whom the United States could entrust the
process of change in Latin America (Berle, 1959: 20).11
Later, in his inaugural address, Kennedy gave voice to his dual
approach in describing his administration's attitude toward
foreign aid:
To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe
struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our
best efforts to help them help themselves...not because the
Communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes,
but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many
who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich (Sorenson,
1965: 245-248).
Thus, in his early statements, Kennedy was resurrecting the
Western hemisphere idea, the tradition of excluding Europe from
the affairs of the hemisphere. Of course, in the 1960s, Kennedy
was anxious to exclude only that portion of Europe dominated or
responding to the interests of the Soviet Union. Though he
promised to contribute to change, both political and economic, at

the same time he warned that we would not accept any subver-
sion of the hemisphere.
A month after his inauguration, Kennedy summoned the rep-
resentatives of the hemispheric nations in Washington to a meet-
ing in the White House at which he called upon them to initiate,
at the highest level of government, a multilateral effort to put his
new policy into effect. The hemispheric nations met in August
1961, at the beach resort of Punta Del Este (Uruguay), and
declared themselves bound together in an alliance for progress.
JFK sought to harness the power of democracy and the strength
of the US economy to the US tradition of revolution in order to
deny to communism, or to the enemies of the United States more
generally, the existence of misery or of social discontent as a
weapon to be fielded against the United States. He told the con-
ferees at Punta del Este,
We live in a hemisphere whose own revolution has given
birth to the most powerful forces of the modern age - the
search for freedom and self fulfillment of man (US Dept. of
State Bulletin, 1961: 1).
They drafted a charter for the alliance which enumerated all of
the social, economic, and political goals of the hemisphere. They
were a litany of demands that Latin Americans had made over the
preceding fifty years. The Alliance for Progress would attempt to
improve and strengthen democratic institutions, to accelerate
economic and social development, to carry out urban and rural
housing programs, to encourage - in accordance with the charac-
teristics of each country- programs of agrarian reform, to assure
fair wages and satisfactory working conditions for all workers, to
wipe out illiteracy and increase the facilities for higher education,
to press forward with programs of health and sanitation, to reform
the tax laws (demanding more from those who have the most), to
maintain monetary and fiscal policies which would protect pur-
chasing power of the people, to stimulate private enterprise in
order to encourage economic development, to solve problems
created by excessive price fluctuations and basic commodity ex-
ports. Finally, to accelerate the economic integration of Latin
America.
John F. Kennedy committed the United States to a decisive role

in the establishment and strengthening of free societies in the un-
derdeveloped world. It was an outgrowth of the global contain-

ment policy, intimately tied to national security policy, and a ring-
ing endorsement of the dominant social science paradigms
concerning the relationship between political organization and
economic development. The United States was committed to
spending $100 billion in a decade, the amount of a single year's
budget. Of that, 800/o was supposed to come from Latin America.
Half of the US share was to come from public money, half from
private sources.2
The multilateral mechanisms to be employed were the crucial
differences between the Alliance and earlier efforts. They were
not part of any social science orthodoxy. They were a political
response to pressure from the nations of the hemisphere and in
other regions. They helped to create a sense of partnership with
Latin America, which was especially significant in the realm of in-
tervening on behalf of good government. This was a major depar-
ture for Latin America as well, offering to join with the United
States to insure that democracy would reign in the hemisphere.
No one would disagree with those goals in 1961. No one would
disagree with them today. The idealistic rhetoric used and the na-
ture of the goals won widespread support. It was a dream set in
motion. Unhappily, the reality was markedly different. From the
very beginning the Alliance for Progress ran into difficulty. In
retrospect it is easy to see that it was an illusion, that it was a
Quixotic adventure. It had so many structural deficiencies and
flaws. It had obstacles on every side.
To-begin, it was the largest public program of aid ever con-
ceived by the United States. There was no administrative
machinery in existence to carry it out. The president attempted to
create the machinery and ended by creating a layer of bureaucracy
within the Agency for International Development (AID), then a
part of the State Department. The new organization ran into ex-
isting groups within the bureaucracy at every turn. The project had
opposition within the executive branch and in the Congress. It
was opposed by those who feared granting to the executive the
kind of long term commitment - ten years - without which the
planning function in the Alliance was unthinkable. It was opposed
also by-those in the United States who quite honestly felt that the
promotion of social change in the language of revolution,
however moderate and desirable such a revolution might be, was
contrary to national security interests. Instead of forestalling the

spread of communism, the fomenting or instigation of social
change would only accelerate the spread of communism.
There was opposition in Latin America as well. Even some of
the regimes or administrations which had, in the late 1950s,
embraced the idea of development the most warmly now looked
at the list of objectives and realized (1) that putting them into ef-
fect would more or less destroy their governments and (2) that it
was far beyond the means, both political and economic, of their
societies to bear such a program. From the conservative oligarchi-
cal regimes, still in power in many countries, there was passive
resistance. Even in those countries where there were constitution-
al and democratic regimes, there was resistance. Such simple
programs as taxes, for example, were considered anathema by
middle-of-the-road administrations. The Christian Democratic
regime in Chile was center-left and very nationalistic. It threatened
to expropriate US properties and was populist in its language. It
leader, Eduardo Frei, was one of the strongest advocates of socia
reform in the hemisphere. When a representative of the United
States Treasury visited Santiago (Chile), in 1962, to help th
government institute an income tax, he was told that such an in-
come tax was a communist tool and the Chileans would have none
of it. These were moderates! The hostile response to such social
reform programs was even greater from the more conservative
regimes.
There was opposition too - unexpected opposition - from
some of the people the reforms were designed to help: for ex-
ample, Indians in the highlands, whose lands were suddenly sub-
ject to expropriation decrees because of national land reforms.
These reforms may have been proposed with the best of inten-
tions, but they involved pushing Indians off communal lands and
small holdings so that the lands could be used for the production
of foodstuffs. These were the same measures by which, in the
name of progress and modernization, positivistic regimes of the
19th century had despoiled native populations of their lands. As
they had previously, the Indians resisted. All across the hemi-
sphere, from Mexico down through Chile and Argentina, there
was opposition to reforms from groups who had no political input
whatsoever.
The Alliance virtually did not get off the ground. The United
States fulfilled its commitment to the Social Progress Trust Fund
and $400 million dollars was committed by Congress at the end
of 1961 to the Inter-American Development Bank. By 1965, $2 bil-
lion in public monies had been committed to public aid programs.
However, this represented only a fifth of what the US government
had pledged itself to provide at the meetings at Punta Del Este.
For their part, the Latins, who were supposed to put up four dol-
lars for every one provided by the United States, had come through
on the order of approximately 10 cents on the dollar. They had
not met their commitments any more than had the United States.
There were a number of controversial issues raised by the Al-
liance, several of which continue to have an impact on policy.
First, essential to the Alliance was the concept of government in-
volvement in the development process. Prior to that date, the
United States had explicitly rejected the idea of government-to-
government aid in Latin America. The official policy had called for
making the region safe for private investment, as the appropriate
means toward the goal of self-sustaining growth. With the Al-
liance, government intervention became a central element in
hemispheric dialogue and remains so to this day. Closely related
to the issue of statism was the concept of centralized planning.
The notion that the United States encouraged, indeed demanded,
centralized planning from free enterprise, democratic societies,
was a subject that caused considerable discussion. The US Con-
gress, for example, debated for three months in 1962 as to whether
such planning was democratic or not. Significant elements of the
Congress considered such planning, and the commitments it rep-
resented, to be the essence of socialism. Consequently, broad ele-
ments in the Congress opposed such planning, despite the fact
that the United States, along with the other countries in the hemi-
sphere, had been signatories to the Declaration of Punta del Este,
in which centralized planning was stipulated in virtually every
major clause.
The linkage between democracy and development, and the
relationship of both to national security, became a bone of con-
tention among the nations of the hemisphere from the very first
declaration of the Alliance, and it continues to complicate US
policy to this day. Indeed, it had been a problem in the last months
of the Eisenhower administration, but the implications of the
linkage were not so apparent then as they became in the elabora-

tion of the measures related to the Alliance. Kennedy and his ad-
visers never for a moment questioned the linkage between
development and US national security. At the same time, they as-
sumed US security interests were identical with Latin American
security interests. The success of the Alliance, Secretary of State
Rusk told the delegates to the second Punta del Este conference,
depended on the security of the hemisphere against communist
interference (NYT, 1962: 1).13
The Bay of Pigs episode, in particular, unnerved many govern-
ments in the region. They feared both unbridled interventionism
by the United States and the threat of uncontrolled revolution rep-
resented by Castro triumphant. This mixture of reactions made it
impossible for any nation to share with the United States the sense
that the mere existence of the Castro regime was a threat to its own
national security. In this case, after the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs,
Kennedy's youth and personality served to stiffen both his policy
and his posture, making him less tolerant of reform and radical
movements in the hemisphere. He felt that he could not fail again
(Blasier, 1976:243-248). 14Furthermore, to the constant frustration
of policymakers in Washington, Castro remained a model for en-
ding the status quo. The Cuban crisis undermined the ability of
the executive in the United States to keep long-term political and
social goals in focus during debates on national security.
Indeed, analyzing the episodes from the perspective of more
than twenty-five years suggests that the Kennedy administration
was, from its inception, ambivalent about its Wilsonian liberalism
and uncertain in its support for democratic regimes under pres-
sure. Certainly, it is fair to say that, other things being equal, the
Kennedy administration preferred democratic regimes to non-
democratic ones, and that it would support and defend them in
times of crisis if there were no other factors involved which might
endanger national security. Nevertheless, they were vulnerable
from the outset to domestic attacks from the Right, attacks which
suggested they might expose the nation to danger through some
liberal, idealistic, or romantic defense of political forces in a
foreign country. Let me describe this ambivalence very briefly, in
two cases.
After Peron was deposed in 1955, the first democrat

elected president, Arturo Frondizi (1958-1962), tried to st
economic growth by massive investments in infrastructure, much

of it with foreign capital. His foreign policy emphasized hemis-
pheric affairs in a manner that seemed a throwback to Roberto
Ortiz and Jose Maria Cantilo prior to World War II. He cultivated
the friendship of the United States; he declared his government
opposed to the Soviet Union; he was one of the strongest sup-
porters of the Alliance for Progress; he made shrewd use of the
personal ties between his foreign minister, Miguel Angel Carcano,
and the family ofJohn F. Kennedy. At the same time, Frondizi tried
to balance these overtures to the United States and demonstrate
his independence by maintaining relations with Fidel Castro's
Cuba. This displeased the US government and upset the Argen-
tine military, whose ideological propensities were hostile to the
doctrines represented by Castro.
Frondizi's domestic economic policy, known as Developmen-
talism, sought to control the foreign investment entering the
country in order to free Argentina from its dependence on foreign
capital. This policy called for mild doses of nationalistic rhetoric,
but Frondizi was a moderate in comparison to some of his
nationalistic critics, who opposed all foreign investment and who
were skeptical of the virtues of democratic government. In April
1961, Frondizi signed a treaty of friendship and consultation with
the president of Brazil, Janio Quadros, in the border city of
Uruguayana. This rapprochement with Brazil was part of
Frondizi's efforts to build a bloc of underdeveloped countries and
use foreign policy to further economic development. As explained
by his undersecretary for foreign relations:
Argentina is a Latin American country, that is to say, it is part
of a geographical area belonging to the underdeveloped con-
tinents of the world, but she has conditions of negotiations
that are very inferior to those of the other areas by virtue of
her lesser strategic significance.... Our present solidarity with
Latin America arises not only from the obvious traditional
sympathy by reason of blood and language, but also from
the sense that only action can call attention to our necessities,
as was demonstrated, to a small degree, by the partial suc-
cess achieved with Operation Pan-America (Tulchin,
forthcoming: Chapter 9).
The key to Frondizi's hemispheric policy was to be in his at-
tempt to arbitrate the growing differences between Cuba and the
United States. At the OAS meeting in Punta del Este, in January

1962, Frondizi joined in the general condemnation of the Cuban
regime, but opposed the imposition of joint sanctions. He hoped
the role of mediator would demonstrate Argentina's inde-
pendence of action and its influence in world affairs. This would
calm nationalists within the military who were nervous about
Castro's politics and calm those within the military, Frondizi's own
party, and the Peronist labor movement, who considered his ef-
forts to attract US investment a mark of subservience. In rebuffing
the Argentine initiative and increasing the pressure on Frondizi to
break relations with Cuba, the United States did force a rupture in
relations; but, as in World war II, it achieved its narrow, short-term
objective at the cost of playing into the hands of the more extreme
nationalists then contending for power in Argentina, in this case
the anti-democratic military looking for an excuse to get rid of
Frondizi.
The parallels with earlier episodes are striking. Frondizi
publicized his efforts to mediate between Cuba and the United
States, just as he publicized his support for the Alliance for
Progress. Washington acknowledged only the first. In September
1961, the US government made public a batch of documents pur-
loined from the Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires that purported to
show the links between Cuba and Argentine officials. Frondizi
reacted strongly, characterizing the documents as forgeries,
denouncing a Cuban exile group for their interference in Argen-
tine affairs, and complaining to the US government about un-
friendly pressure to influence normal relations with another
sovereign nation. This firm defense of Argentine sovereignty
helped Frondizi for a little while, but it did not win him any new
permanent allies. The combination of pressure from the United
States and from his own military forced him to break relations with
Cuba in February 1962, virtually upon his return from Punta del
Este, and led, in the space of little more than a month, to his ouster.
The military golpe stimulated an angry response from the
Department of State. Officials there called upon the president to
make a public statement condemning the coup. DeLesseps Mor-
rison, the US ambassador to the OAS, opposed such a move. He
considered Frondizi an unstable troublemaker. To win support for
his position, he went up to Capitol Hill and got key senators to
talk to the president. There was no public condemnation of the
Argentine military. To make the point clearer, just four months

later, the administration took a vigorous unequivocal stand against
the military golpe that overthrew Peruvian President Manuel
Prado. Kennedy announced that the Alliance had sustained a
"serious set-back." The military's action, had "contravened" the
common purposes of the inter-American system. Prado was con-
sidered a team player on the Cuban issue. A year later, Morrison
again played an important role in defining the uncompromising
position which Washington assumed to deal withJoao Goulart, in
Brazil. In 1964, Goulart was overthrown by the military, who then
proceeded to wield power for nearly twenty years. Roberto Cam-
pos, a conservative economist and participant in the events,
criticized the United States for weakening already unstable
regimes. Kennedy and his advisers did not like instability (Baily,
1976: 95-105; Parkinson, 1974: chapters 7-9).16
Closer to home, and closer to Cuba, Kennedy had declared the
Dominican Republic the "showcase" of the Alliance. However, it
was there that an episode occurred that strained the patience of
the US government as much as any other. Juan Bosch, a social
democrat who had been in exile for many years, returned to lead
the Dominican Revolutionary Party and, in 1962, appeared to have
won the first free election in more than thirty years. Bosch was a
charismatic speaker with a strong populist bent, and he
denounced US imperialism in many speeches throughout the is-
land and the Caribbean. Many in Washington considered him a
dupe of the regime in Cuba, if not of the Soviet Union. Others
thought him misguided or, simply, inefficient. In any event, they
believed he would not be able to maintain stability in the island
republic. The US government expressed its dissatisfaction, but
continued to provide his regime with significant quantities of aid.
At the same time, however, members of the US military advisory
group maintained extremely close relations with their counter-
parts in the Dominican military, many of whom had been officers
under Trujillo and who had little sympathy for democratic forms
of government. Bosch proved unable to consolidate his power
and was overthrown in a bloodless coup in 1963. The Kennedy
administration considered its options and chose to remain inac-
tive.
By mid 1963, the Kennedy administration had lost patience

with the policy of intervention to support democracies in Latin
America. The president was convinced that the Latins were not
with him. He was supposed to be the leader of a multilateral ef-
fort to defend democracy, but he found that most of the Latin
leaders who had encouraged his activitism would not back US ac-
tions in the hemisphere designed to support democracy. The
United States, through its policy of non-recognition and its policy
of political intervention in support of democracy, found itself iso-
lated in the hemisphere and subject to increasing criticism. Fur-
thermore, Kennedy was not convinced, nor were his advisers, that
the activist policy in support of democracy contributed to stability
in the hemisphere. There was a rising tide of comment that sug-
gested that it was undermining stability, and stability, he was con-
vinced, was the root cause of subversion. The belief in diversity
had all but disappeared.
At the same time, there were events elsewhere which were
throwing Kennedy's hemispheric policy into doubt. There were
the quickening events in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam and
Laos. The Soviet Union took a particularly hard line in its confron-
tations with the United States in 1961 and 1962, as if to test the
new president. The high point of this pressure came in October
with the Cuban missile crisis. There was significant and wide
debate within the United States concerning national security
doctrine, which had its echo in hemispheric policy, in the in-
creased concern over political stability. In the Congress as well,
there was an ever more insistent questioning of public aid as an
instrument of foreign policy.
The commitment to democracy, ambivalent from the start, was
undermined fatally by Washington's profound, persistent faith in
counterinsurgency. This faith formed part of the broad rejection
of nuclear deterrence strategy, dominant during the Eisenhower
administration. Kennedy, as a member of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee, had cited the limitations of massive retaliation
for dealing with "brush-fire wars" which were "nibbling away at
the fringe of the Free World's territory and strength, until our
security has been steadily eroded in piecemeal fashion" (Ken-
nedy, 1960). He adopted with enthusiasm the flexible response
approach of Maxwell Taylor, which shifted some of the burden of
defending the country away from nuclear weapons and onto con-
ventional forces. An important component of Taylor's formula for
defense was the concept of counterinsurgency, which advanced
new ways to fight the brush-fire wars which concerned Kennedy

(Taylor: 1960). The major appeal of flexible response to the New
Frontiersmen was that it purported to be an innovation in strategic
thinking without jeopardizing their credibility with the US public
as tough-minded realists. After winning the closest presidential
election in history, Kennedy was always sensitive to the currents
of public opinion, and he almost certainly kept in mind Henry
Luce's warning, passed on to him by his father, "if he shows any
weakness in defending the cause of the free world [i.e., anti-com-
munism], we'll turn on him...we'll have to tear him apart" (Hal-
berstam, 1972: 18; Lieuwin, 1964: 124).
Counterinsurgency was considered a response both to
Khrushchev's boast that the Soviet Union would win the war for
the Third World and to Castro's strategy of world revolution. The
United States countered with a multi-faceted approach involving
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Inves-
tigation (FBI), police training, and the use of AID public safety
program (Blasier, 1976: 246). As Michael Shafer has shown recent-
ly, the policy was a misapplication of a paradigm aimed at the
Soviet Union, based on a misperception of reality in the Third
World, and even deliberate distortion of the analysis of the results
of the policy's application (Shafer, 1988).17 However, at least until
1967, when Che Guevara was hunted down and killed in Bolivia,
it was hard to deny the paradigm. Everyone appeared to live ac-
cording to its rules - the Cubans, the Soviets, the Chinese, and,
of course, the Vietnamese.
According to Walt Rostow, counterinsurgency was an essen-
tial ingredient in the strategy of nation-building. As he told a
graduating class of Green Berets at Fort Bragg, in 1961,
Your job is to work with your fellow citizens in the whole
creative process of modernization. From our perspective in
Washington, you take your place side by side with those
others who are committed to help fashion independent,
modern societies out of the revolutionary process now going
forward. I salute you as I would a group of doctors, teachers,
economic planners, agricultural experts, civil servants, or
those who are now leading the way in fashioning new na-
tions and societies (Rostow, 1965: 115-116).
The result was a painful confusion within the government as
to the priorities of its Latin American policy. For example, in
country after country, the military advisory group was poised to

defend the free world while the Department of State and the exe-
cutive attempted to coax reformist regimes into constructive chan-
nels of cooperation. In El Salvador and the Dominican Republic,
the result was civil war, in which the United States was implicated
on the side of reaction, and serious undermining or questioning
of the United States claim to support democracy and social justice
in the hemisphere.18 After 1963, when Thomas Mann became the
dominant force in the formulation of US policy toward Latin
America, his severe doctrine of official nonintervention had the
effect of giving even greater prominence or influence to the
security forces operating in each country.
The Johnson Administration
Kennedy's assassination, in November 1963, seems to have

triggered a shift in US policy. The timing of the changes suggests
the influence of personality in the direction policy takes. Where
Kennedy was dynamic and charismatic and operated with a high
degree of rhetorical flourish, Lyndon B. Johnson was none of
those things. His political strength always had been quiet
manipulation or massaging of groups, the brilliant orchestration
of political forces, particularly in the Congress. Johnson had little
interest in the concerns which underlay the Alliance for Progress
and, in a series of very swift personnel changes, removed all of
the warriors who had fought with Kennedy in the Quixotic
episode of the Alliance. He replaced them with professionals who
adopted a more formal, cautious approach to the region. There-
after, he left policymaking to those advisers, much the way Eisen-
hower had. He never attempted to achieve the same command of
detail as he did on domestic issues, nor did he evidence the same
intellectual interest that Kennedy had in the foreign policy issues
themselves.19
While it is tempting to explain the changes in US policy during
the 1960s in terms of presidential personality and leadership, there
is an accumulation of evidence which suggests that the Alliance
for Progress would never have worked, and that Kennedy himself
had become disillusioned with the Wilsonian policy of interven-
tion on the side of democracy. The basic concerns of the Cold War
were as high on his agenda as they were on Johnson's. Would
Kennedy have intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965? We

cannot say with any certainty. We can say, however, that the
episode was a spasmodic response to domestic political concerns
over "another Cuba" (Langley, 1982; Tulchin, 1967). Kennedy was
at least as vulnerable as Johnson to such domestic pressures.
Those advisers who might have taken a different view of reformers
in the Caribbean than did the military advisers, Thomas Mann and
the others around Johnson, had been cowed and chastened by
the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy gave no more evidence thanJohnson of
his ability to use the nation's power in a restrained manner. His
disposition to cooperate with Latin American nations, the most
distinguishing feature of his policy, had begun to weaken by 1963.
If anything, Kennedy was even more in thrall to the paradigm of
counterinsurgency and stability than was Johnson. On balance,
Kennedy supporters who would have us believe things would
have been different had he lived make an unconvincing case.
In any event, the episode in the Dominican Republic effective-
ly brought to an end any effort during the decade for multilateral
cooperation. Following that intervention, the nations of Latin
America were no longer willing to deal with the United States
within the framework of the OAS. The OAS was considered a tool
of US policy, even though, ironically, PresidentJohnson held the
lowest opinion of that organization. He is reported to have said
that the OAS was so ineffective it couldn't "pour piss out of a boot
if the instructions were written on the heel." The Dominican in-
tervention marked a great break in hemispheric relations. It
marked an end to efforts on the part of the United States to
cooperate within multilateral agencies in an effort to bring about
social change. It marks a break on the Latin American side as well,
particularly in the willingness to cooperate with the United States.
That lack of confidence in the United States is a legacy with which
the US must still live today.
Of course, as the decade wore on, events outside the hemi-
sphere came to assume transcendent impoitance in US policy
planning, so thatJohnson, having once broken away from the lead
of John F. Kennedy, was content to leave the hemisphere to its
own devices. He maintained the high level of direct public aid,
but, in effect, Latin America returned to the position of low priority
on the US policy agenda which it had held prior to 1958. Events
in Asia, beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin episode, quickly took
the attention of the US administration away from the Western

Hemisphere and skewed US policy so as to redefine national
security in terms of the experience in southeast Asia. After 1966,
US foreign policy debate focused so obsessively upon events in
Asia as to change totally the perspective on national security
which had shaped policy since World War II. That obsession so
haunted PresidentJohnson that it finally drove him from office. It
continued to haunt his successor, Richard Nixon, and his principal
adviser, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger believed the war in Vietnam
threatened the delicate world balance of power, and he sought to
restore the normal balance by bringing an abrupt end to the war,
almost at any price. The balance which Kissinger had in mind, and
toward which he worked during his years in Washington, was a
traditional view of global power, one in which Latin America was
viewed as insignificant so far as US strategic thinking was con-
cerned.
There is an anecdote which captures the dilemma of Latin
America as the subject of US policy. After retiring as Secretary of
State, Henry Kissinger was much in demand as a speaker and
public figure. One of his speaking engagements was in Buenos
Aires (Argentina) during the last years of the military dictatorship.
His visit was a big story in Buenos Aires. In an interview with a
weekly feature magazine, Siete Dfas, Kissinger was quoted as
saying, "Argentina is a fascinating country. It is a pity that I didn't
pay any attention to it while I was Secretary of State." He might
have said the same thing about Latin America as a whole.
CONCLUSION
Y THE END OF THE DECADE, the United States was t

ly embittered by the threats to its security from within
sphere, and by the sense of having its sphere of influenc
and destroyed by external influences without any con
cooperation from the other nations in the hemispher
other hand, from the Latin American perspective, their
from the United States had become so complete that ther
most no disposition on their part to cooperate with t
States in multilateral efforts nor to sympathize with the
tion of national security issues. Another consequence of
of the decade was that the issue of development had
central to discussion of foreign policy and, more specifically, to

discussion of national security, although there remained a glaring
asymmetry in the perception, north and south, of the linkage be-
tween the two. Latin America was poor and getting poorer. During
the decade, the income of the developed countries increased 43%
while the income of the developing countries increased only 27%
(Baily, 1976: chap. 1). They expressed their disillusionment with
the United States and their conviction concerning the necessity for
development in the public statements following the meeting at
Vifia del Mar in May 1969.
Although its influence was already on the wane by the end of
the 1960s, Castro's Cuba was still seen by many in Latin America
as an alternative model of national development. The fierce, al-
most compulsive US rejection of Cuban initiatives, wherever they
might be encountered, contributed, by the end of the decade, to
another consequence which would have staggered Kennedy or
Johnson, had either of them understood it: the United States was
seen by many people in the hemisphere not as a force for change,
reform, and democracy, but as a counter-revolutionary power, a
reactionary force in hemispheric affairs. That is perhaps the most
painful irony in the evolution of United States-Latin American rela-
tions in the decade of the 1960s. Having begun as the spokesman
of change, in a ringing challenge to the nations of the hemisphere
to join in a cooperative venture to seek the benefits of progress
and democracy, the United States had ended the decade as a blind
opponent of progressive regimes and an equally blind supporter
of military regimes, whose only claim to legitimacy was fervent
anti-communism and the violent suppression of dissidents. The
reasons for this change were (1) the confusion between the short-
term goal of anti-communism and the long-term elimination of
conditions assumed to invite communist subversion, (2) an in-
ability to use power in a restrained manner, and (3) an inability to
consider the region's development except as an element in the na-
tional security of the United States alone, rather than in the broader
context of the entire hemisphere.
Today, US policy toward Latin America continues to be
hamstrung, as it was in the 1960s, by failure to take the history and
contemporary reality of the region into account; by the persistent
imposition of bipolar dichotomies on situations in the hemisphere
which cannot be understood adequately, nor dealt with effective-
ly, in terms of those dichotomies; and by the persistence of the

Wilsonian assumption that everybody should become, or want to
become, like the United States. Current realities in the region sug-
gest that the United States needs to come to terms with Latin
America as it is, rather than continue to ignore it, or attempt to
mold it in its own image. Further, the United States needs to ap-
preciate the important differences which have divided the hemi-
sphere and which have made a mockery of efforts to maintain a
semblance of Pan American cooperation. The desire for change,
for development, characterizes all nations in the hemisphere.
While most proclaim their devotion to pluralistic democracy, the
fact remains that development and solving the most pressing so-
cial and economic issues take precedence over concern for politi-
cal or institutional niceties. At the same time, all nations in the
hemisphere want to achieve development without falling further
into dependency upon the United States. Dignity and autonomy
of action are goals high on the list of any nation's set of priorities.
There is a desperate quality to the quest for a viable hemis-
pheric relationship because the OAS continues to be ineffectual,
while the debt crisis continues to stifle every economy and inter-
national commodity prices remain at depressed levels. The Cuban
model of development, so attractive in the 1960s, is virtually ex-
hausted. The experience of Nicaragua's revolutionary regime has
demonstrated that outside help, so vital to the survival of the
Cuban economy, is no longer available. The Soviet Union has
declared repeatedly, and confirmed by its actions, that it considers
the contest for the Third World to have been won by the West.
Revolutionary, or reformist, regimes which seek to restructure the
distribution of resources within their societies will have to come
to terms with the United States or subject their citizens to
prolonged periods of sacrifice and hardship.
The United States has an opportunity for constructive work in
the hemisphere that is as inviting as any since the beginning of the
1960s. However, to seize the opportunity, it is necessary for the
US to abandon the extreme caution of its funding agencies and
return to program aid, rather than narrow project aid. More
generally, it is time for the United States to leave behind the ar-
rogant, positivistic Wilsonianism which has led it to impose its way
on others. Finally, it is necessary for the US government, once and
for all, to shuck off a myopic, distorted view of the world as a
bipolar struggle for power with an evil empire which is constant-

ly seeking to undermine US security. The world has changed since
1950 -and since 1960. To deal effectively with the new configura-
tion in power relationships, the United States must recognize the
diversity of a multipolar world, as well as the legitimate aspira-
tions of the peoples in Latin America, and work with them to reach
their goals. Only in that way will the United States be able to
protect its security and preserve its own way of life.
NOTES
1. For a description of the foreign policies of various Latin America
nations in the 1970s, see Mufioz and Tulchin (1984).
2. This process is described in great detail in Tulchin (1971).
3. This episode is dealt with in great detail in Tulchin (forthcoming)
and it is also the subject of the volume edited by DiTella and Watt (198
4. There had been concern with Bolshevism earlier, shown b
Secretary of State Kellogg in Mexico and Central America, in 1926-1928
and by Secretary of State Hull in Cuba in 1933, but neither seriously an
ticipated that the Soviet Union would enter the Caribbean through such
means. They were concerned with instability and the threat to US prope
ty and US hegemony.
5. On the Guatemala episode, see the summary discussion and sou
ces cited in Rabe (1988).
6. For a general discussion of these issues, see Packenham (1971).
7. In an early review of policy, a listing of US objectives in Lati
America indicated that all of these were of concern, but, at that point,
the precise relationship among them was not specified (NSC, 1953).
8. These initiatives are recounted in Parkinson (1974). For another
perspective, see Baily (1976).
9. Quotation originally appeared in The Department of State Bulletin
54, 6 June 1966, and was quoted by Shafer in his book.
10. For the critical liberal arguments that influenced policy, see
Bowles (1956), Hertzberg (1954), Schlesinger (1960), and Niebuhr
(1961). For a recent analysis of the relationship between national security
and foreign policy, see Schoultz (1987).
11. This is the same argument that would be used to justify training
Latin American military leaders in the US. It remains in use to this day,
although there is considerable public debate as to its validity.
12. For a convenient summary of the Alliance, see Levinson and de
Onis (1970) and IESC (1973). The social science literature that gropes
toward this linkage is vast; for an example, see Almond and Coleman
(1961).
13. For Latin American disagreements, see Hispanic-American Report
(1962).
14. Kennedy frequently spoke of "tests of nerve and will" that he

believed the Soviets had in store for the United States, and thus he sought
to maintain an image of toughness in conducting foreign affairs (see
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1962: 625).
15. These episodes can be followed in the pages of the New York
Times(1962) 29 January to 29 August; see also Johnson (1978: 350).
16. For detailed analyses of the golpe and US involvement, see Black
(1977) and Parker (1979).
17. Critical to an understanding of this paradigm is the evolving view
of the military in the Third World, from predatory ally of the oligarchy
to agents of change and development.
18. On El Salvador, see Montgomery (1983). For a good summary of
the episode in the Dominican Republic and citation of the standard sour-
ces, see Langley (1982). Blasier (1976) suggests that the threat to US
private investments has played too large a role in shaping United States
response to reformist regimes in the hemisphere. He gives as examples
the expropriation of IPC in Peru, the sugar companies in the Dominican
Republic, and others. Blasier also says that our fear of action by the great
power rivals motivates the response of the United States, even though
Soviet help to the regimes in question, other than Cuba, has been minor.
In several cases, we have forced reformers to turn to Eastern Europe for
aid or arms because the United States refused to provide one or the other
or both.
19. For an introduction to the rapidly growing literature on the
Johnson administration, see Sigelmann (1986), Matusow (1985), Divine
(1981) and Conkin (1987).
20. For a recent, cogent statement of the asymmetry in national
security perspectives between Latin America and the US, see Muioz
(1986). The Inter-American Dialogue has been an effort to improve com-
munication and correct perceptions on both sides.
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The United States and Latin America in the 1960s

Author(s): Joseph S. Tulchin

RESTROSPECTIVE CONSIDERATION OF UNITED STATES rela-

By contrast, no one seems interested in celebr

Joseph L. Tulchin is Professor of History and Direct

in this country and elsewhere in the hemisphere, and an underly-

another victim of the severe distortions of the global framework

REGIONAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES were ne

1920s, the United States government worked to devise a policy

in amounts, dictated by the Allies themselves. Even Argentina sold

but they insisted that membership in the community could not be

Americans to leave the security of the hemisphere to the United

Because of perceived political threats from the USSR in various

Perhaps the most influential academic argument for the use of

Castro was bound to win. On 31 December 1958, Fidel marched

All of these events, coming together, convinced the United

was particularly energetic in his attacks on the Republican failure

UNITED STATES UNDER KENNEDY AND

The Kennedy Administration

this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of

Part of the stimulus to merge the two approaches to the Third

promised to contribute to change, both political and economic, at

John F. Kennedy committed the United States to a decisive role

derdeveloped world. It was an outgrowth of the global contain-

contrary to national security interests. Instead of forestalling the

linkage were not so apparent then as they became in the elabora-

After Peron was deposed in 1955, the first democrat

economic growth by massive investments in infrastructure, much

United States. At the OAS meeting in Punta del Este, in January

Argentine military. To make the point clearer, just four months

By mid 1963, the Kennedy administration had lost patience

new ways to fight the brush-fire wars which concerned Kennedy

country after country, the military advisory group was poised to

The Johnson Administration

Kennedy's assassination, in November 1963, seems to have

Kennedy have intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965? We

the attention of the US administration away from the Western

Y THE END OF THE DECADE, the United States was t

central to discussion of foreign policy and, more specifically, to

ly, in terms of those dichotomies; and by the persistence of the

bipolar struggle for power with an evil empire which is constant-

14. Kennedy frequently spoke of "tests of nerve and will" that he

BAILY, S. (1976) The United States and the Development of So

BERLE JR., A. (1959) "Latin America: The Hidden Revolution." Repo

BLASIER, C. (1976) The Hovering Giant: US Responses to Revolut

BOWLES, C. (1956) American Politics in a Revolutionary World.

DILLON, D. and M. MANSFIELD (1960) "What Kind of US Aid for Latin

GREEN, D. (1971) The Containment of Latin America. Chicago, IL:

HERTZBERG, S. (1954) "Crisis in United States Foreign Policy." Com

HIRSCHMAN, A. (1963)Journeys toward Progress: Studies of Econom

JOHNSON, G. (ed.) (1978) The Kennedy Presidential Press Confer

LEVINSON, J. and DE ONIS, J. (1970) The Alliance that Lost its W

MUNOZ, H. (1986) "Las Causas del Auge y la Declinacion del Sistema

New York Times (1962) 22 January: 1.

PACKENHAM, R. (1971) Liberal America and the Third World: Political

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1961. (1961)

RABE, S. (1988) Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of

ROSTOW, W. (1965) "Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas," pp.

_ (1960) Kennedy or Nixon: Does it Make a Difference? New York,

SCHOULTZ, L. (1987) National Security and United States Policy toward

SHAFER, M. (1988) Deadly Paradigms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-

SIGELMANN, G. (1986) "LBJ and His Interpreters." Social Science

TAYLOR, M. (1960) The Uncertain Trumpet. New York, NY: Greenwood