Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700)

by Lochery, Neill

  7 Deepening Ties and Widening Divides

  In the spring of 1941, a Pan American Airways flight arrived at the airport in Rio de Janeiro carrying two American travelers. Their trip had been unusually quick; in 1941, in a sign of deepening ties with the United States, the Brazilian authorities had granted Pan Am permission to fly overland from the northern Brazilian city of Belém to Rio, a move that—along with the introduction of the airline’s faster, fully pressurized strato-clipper aircraft—had shortened the arduous trip from Miami to Rio from five to just under two days.1 After a journey that covered more than a thousand miles of Brazilian “virgin territory,” Rio appeared like “a beautiful pearl set in emerald,” wrote an excited passenger who had made the same voyage.2

  The Pan Am plane had first circled the city as if doing a lap of honor before descending rapidly onto the airport runway, built on a narrow strip of land adjacent to the bay. Most of the strato-clipper’s passengers were tourists on an organized eight-day air cruise, and they rushed to get out of the Rio heat by checking into the air-conditioned sanctuaries of the Copacabana Palace Hotel and the similarly luxurious Hotel Gloria. The two American gentlemen, however, had other plans. They headed straight to downtown Rio, where they immediately went to work.3

  The men worked for the coordinator of inter-American affairs—the charismatic American businessman and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller. Rich, handsome, ambitious, and with a sizable ego to match his many talents, Rockefeller had recently been assigned to the post to oversee America’s commercial, cultural, and public relations with the Latin American countries. He was also intent on making mischief with the State Department and the man he most loathed in its stuffy corridors, the undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles.

  Nominally, Rockefeller was working for Welles—at least, he was working on the Good Neighbor Program, whose name the undersecretary of state had coined, and which he still controlled. In reality, however, Rockefeller was following his own agenda and believed that he answered directly to President Roosevelt. Welles regarded Rockefeller as something of a loose cannon that could potentially do as much damage as good in the politically sensitive environment of Latin America. The region was central to Welles’s responsibilities, and although he was not against some limited cooperation between the State Department and Rockefeller’s office, he envisaged a secondary role for the coordinator of inter-American affairs. He certainly had no interest in watching as an upstart like Rockefeller wreaked havoc on US diplomatic efforts south of the equator.

  In private, neither Welles nor Rockefeller missed an opportunity to put the other man down, but from President Roosevelt’s perspective their enmity was an advantage. The president liked to set up competing lines of communication and responsibility so as to keep his underlings from becoming too powerful; indeed, one of the reasons the president had brought Welles to the State Department in the first place was so that he would compete with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, an enemy of Welles’s and a man Roosevelt regarded as a serious political threat. Sure enough, the secretary of state clashed frequently with his deputy, and the State Department was soon full of rumors—spread, no doubt, by Hull—about Welles’s sexuality and his conduct when under the influence of alcohol. Welles was a known alcoholic who was prone to committing acts of the most indiscreet nature when drunk.4 It was alleged that, in private, Hull would refer to Welles as “my fairy.”5 What most distressed Hull about Welles was his walk-in rights to the Oval Office, which were greater than those the secretary of state was permitted by the president.

  Another spider in the complex web of beltway politics was the American spymaster General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who also came to compete for influence in Brazil and who clashed, on various occasions, with Caffery, with Welles, and—most of all—with Rockefeller.6 Donovan headed the embryonic office of strategic services (OSS), America’s wartime intelligence agency, and he was convinced that Rockefeller would mess things up in Latin America unless he was reined in.

  The Donovan-Rockefeller conflict was essentially a turf war over specific areas of American policy toward Latin America. Donovan believed that the continent was crawling with Nazi agents and spies, and thought of it as America’s soft rear. He maintained that it made no sense for Rockefeller, who was in charge of commercial and cultural relations with Latin America, to also be responsible for American propaganda in such a vital area. As Donovan pointed out to President Roosevelt, the OSS oversaw propaganda operations in other parts of the world; his office should handle propaganda in the Americas as well.

  On this occasion, the president chose to back Rockefeller, forcing Donovan to promise to stay out of Latin America.7 In 1941, at least, Donovan kept his promise to the president, but later—when the United States entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor—the spy chief sent his own agents to the region, and soon thereafter found himself embroiled in further disputes with rival Washington agencies.

  Rockefeller did not always prevail in his clashes with other US officials. Once, when Sumner Welles felt that Rockefeller had overstepped his authority, he took his case to President Roosevelt; the president, feeling duty bound to back his officials at the State Department despite his personal admiration for Rockefeller, threw his support behind Welles and warned Rockefeller that he would have to do the same in future disputes.8 The young and energetic Rockefeller was a quick learner, however, and he vowed to avoid future run-ins with Welles by simply gaining presidential approval for his ideas and policies before revealing them to his immediate superior. Rockefeller did not intend to play second fiddle to anybody—least of all Welles, whose talents he felt were limited.

  Like his ego, Rockefeller’s ambitions were outsized. He came from one of America’s wealthiest families, and had connections that reached far beyond politics. His network extended to Hollywood’s movie industry, as well as the worlds of art and music, and his family’s companies—such as Chase National Bank (later Chase Manhattan) and the Creole Petroleum Corporation—were among some of the most powerful in the United States. Rockefeller wanted to grow his existing business ties with Latin America and find new opportunities in the region, yet that was not what mattered most to him. Rockefeller primarily wanted to make a difference; if America was dragged into the European war, he wished to contribute to the American war effort however he could, and preferably in a major way.

  Despite their differences, Rockefeller, Donovan, Welles, and Hull agreed on one point: Brazil was the major focus of American efforts in Latin America under the guise of the Good Neighbor Program. The country was never far from the minds of these competing American officials thanks to a number of factors, prime among them the strategic importance of Brazil’s northeastern coastline, which the United States wished to use as a base for its submarines; the threat of the Germans achieving a bridgehead on the American continent; and the potentially destabilizing effect of the large German immigrant population in the south of the country. Brazil also had a potentially plentiful supply of rubber, which the Americans badly needed for their war effort.

  The United States clearly had much to gain from developing new ties and deepening existing ones with Brazil. But there was another reason Brazil was important to the Allies. As one American put it, “Argentina is beyond the pale and we need to devote everything to help Vargas and Brazil.” By 1941, it was clear to any American observer that Argentina was unswervingly pro-Axis, and that the United States would have to look elsewhere to make potential diplomatic inroads in Latin America—and to make sure the fascist “disease” did not spread. As the other behemoth of Latin America, and as a natural competitor of Argentina, Brazil was a logical choice for an American client state.

  Rockefeller and his opponents Donovan, Welles, and Hull also shared a Brazilian interlocutor in Osvaldo Aranha. In many ways, Aranha represented the side of the Brazilian Estado Novo that Washington found most acceptable. None of the Americans had any time for Dutra, whom th
ey believed was leaning toward Germany in 1941, and whom they perceived as the biggest rival and most likely successor to Vargas, should the army force the president from power. Similar suspicions surrounded Góes Monteiro, although, as chief of staff of the army, Góes Monteiro met with American military officials more often than political policy makers in Washington.

  President Vargas remained somewhat aloof to US advances, and preferred for Aranha to act as Brazil’s contact point for all the various competing American agencies. The only American with whom Vargas liked to correspond directly was President Roosevelt; by early 1941 Vargas was coming to regard the US president as the best hope for achieving Brazil’s strategic goals. Vargas, it is fair to say, had learned from his experience negotiating with the Americans over the steel mill: it was only Roosevelt’s personal intervention that had pushed the various arms of the US government to cooperate with Brazil. As a result, Vargas was happy to leave it to Aranha to meet with lower-level US officials, and to intervene only when requested to do so by his minister of foreign affairs.

  As Rockefeller’s main contact in the Brazilian government, Osvaldo Aranha knew the two men whom the coordinator of inter-American affairs had dispatched in semisecrecy to Rio de Janeiro. Rockefeller had charged his employees Berent Friele and Frank Nattier with establishing the coordinator’s first permanent office in Latin America. Their job was to build as many business and cultural contacts for Rockefeller in Rio as they could. Both men were fluent in Portuguese, which would help their cause. So, too, would the good offices of Aranha himself, who had been informed in advance of the men’s mission, and who had promised to personally help in whatever way he could.

  The State Department in Washington understood that Friele and Nattier were in Rio, but Rockefeller had not informed the department of the true nature of their mission. Rather, he devised a complex cover story, telling his superiors that his two employees were on a fact-finding mission throughout all of Latin America and would not be remaining in the Rio area for any extended period of time. Still, it did not take long for Jefferson Caffery to work out the truth. He informed Welles at the State Department, but both men chose to watch and wait in the hope that Rockefeller would make a major mistake in Rio, thereby allowing the State Department to develop a strong case against the coordinator and take it up with the president.

  As it turned out, it was the development and dissemination of American propaganda—that most vexed of the commissioner’s prerogatives—that almost proved to be Rockefeller’s downfall. In an attempt to stem the tide of Axis propaganda in Latin America, Rockefeller’s staff came up with the idea of buying up huge swaths of advertising space in local newspapers across the region. The ads would highlight the virtues of travel to the United States with catch phrases such as, “come up and see us.” The real aim of the ads, however, was to take up space in the newspapers, thereby preventing the Axis powers from running their own advertisements. The scheme was also intended to channel some much needed dollars to Latin American governments that were struggling with their respective war economies.

  The advertising campaign was a disaster. Leaders throughout Latin America charged that the Americans were essentially bribing them, while those who had not received any revenue from the advertisements complained that they had been ignored. Others pointed out that the subject matter of the ads—tourism to the United States—was totally inappropriate given the lack of funds that most Latin Americans had for travel and given that US entrance restrictions made it very difficult for anybody from Latin America to get into the country. The most serious accusation, however, was that Rockefeller had authorized his staff to place ads in pro-Axis newspapers, thereby giving those publications crucial financial support.

  Welles and Hull took the issue to the president who, as he had previously warned Rockefeller he would do, supported his two State Department leaders. Rockefeller took the hint, and from that point onward informed the State Department in advance about all his projects and plans in Latin America. “It will slow you down, but what the hell,” Rockefeller conceded to a colleague.9

  By the spring of 1941, Rockefeller and Welles had developed a relatively cordial working relationship with a much healthier degree of cooperation. Tensions still arose from time to time, but the two men were able to resolve them without invoking the president. Wherever possible, however, Rockefeller continued to bypass the State Department and rely on his men on the ground in Rio. And in the spring of 1941, the office of the coordinator of inter-American affairs in Rio had grown significantly; whereas at first only Friele and Nattier represented Rockefeller in Brazil, by 1941 the office had amassed a staff of thousands, all working to expand their boss’s network of business and cultural contacts in the country.

  Rockefeller’s propaganda plans had backfired in a spectacular fashion, but he was correct in arguing that something needed to be done to counter the increasingly effective German propaganda in Brazil. The Germans were targeting all parts of Brazilian society despite the fact that, following Vargas’s attempts to curb Nazi activities in Brazil, much of Germany’s propaganda activity had been forced underground. The one exception was the press.10 Due to Vargas’s reluctance to close any newspapers, Brazil’s pro-German newspapers were able to continue expressing their views (and those of their patrons in Berlin) with impunity.

  German propaganda in Brazil followed three main themes, which Hitler’s ministry of information outlined as follows:11

  1. The threat of “Yankee Imperialism.”

  2. The menace of Communism.

  3. The victory of the Allies would lead to the introduction into Brazil of a color bar similar to that operating in the southern states of the United States.12

  Germany’s propaganda campaign in Brazil hinged on the country’s latent anti-American sentiment while also playing up the threat of communism, which had become a customary stalking horse for Nazi expansion throughout the world.

  As with most wartime propaganda, however, the impact of Germany’s efforts in Brazil was directly related to the military state of the war. By the spring of 1941, the German war machine controlled much of Europe, and while Great Britain had forestalled the immediate threat of a full-scale German invasion of the home islands, they remained vulnerable. As long as Germany’s stunning success continued, the ministry of information in Berlin could be sure that the Brazilian public would be increasingly receptive to German propaganda, in all of its many forms.

  The German embassy in Rio subsidized pro-German newspapers and monthly reviews. Though many of these had small circulations, their limited reach did nothing to calm the British, who were extremely concerned that the Brazilians were allowing them to circulate at all.13 In Rio, the Germans adopted the tactic of starting false rumors about Great Britain. On March 27, 1941, the foreign office in London asked the British embassy in Rio to investigate one such rumor, which claimed that Great Britain was boycotting Brazilian beef produce.14 The rumor proved false, but it still made its way into the local press, forcing the British embassy in Rio to carefully deny the story. As a British official in Rio explained to the foreign office, “I managed to calm feeling by favorable explanation, counter articles, and conversations. Nothing is now required except to buy from time to time from local firms, not only for publicity but also because their products are the only ones of the required standard.”15 German propaganda notwithstanding, the quality of Brazilian beef was high enough to ensure a steady British market.

  While Germany cunningly manipulated public discourse in Brazil in 1941, the Brazilian press took care not to print any article that was too anti-German in tone. The Germans’ continued military successes in West Africa had brought their army closer and closer to Brazil’s bulging Atlantic coastline, a development that inspired many of the country’s newspaper owners to adopt a cautious, wait-and-see approach to the war. Pro-German references even cropped up in the mainstream press, camouflaged as letters to the editor or in ed
itorials.

  The German propaganda effort may not have been eclipsing that of Great Britain and the United States, but it was nonetheless causing a great deal of anxiety in Washington and London. In Washington, the State Department charged Nelson Rockefeller with countering this German threat. Rockefeller’s newspaper advertisement campaign had proven disastrous, but he would soon devise propaganda projects that would have a far more positive impact on US-Brazilian relations.

  Rockefeller and John Hay (Jock) Whitney, the director of the motion picture division of Rockefeller’s office, made the brilliant decision to enlist Hollywood in the Latin American propaganda war. Rockefeller had personally recruited Whitney to head the motion picture division; in 1941 Whitney was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, having recently bankrolled the hugely successful 1939 picture Gone with the Wind. Working closely together, Rockefeller and Whitney had recruited many of Hollywood’s top names to help foster new ties between the United States and Brazil. Hollywood would quickly discover that there were huge amounts of money to be made out of the war.

  In something of a masterstroke, Rockefeller and Whitney persuaded Walt Disney to come on board America’s wartime efforts in Brazil by embarking on a goodwill tour of the country. In time, Disney’s Brazil visit would prove something of a prototype for trips by other American filmmakers; the State Department used their status as cultural icons to spread American propaganda in South America, and specifically in Brazil. But when Whitney first proposed the tour, Disney was skeptical. To be sure, the timing could not have been better for Disney, whose employees were in the process of striking for better working conditions. Disney was deeply hurt by the strike—he believed it was unjust and the strikers’ demands were unrealistic—but he was still hesitant to take on the goodwill tour. “I’m no good at that, I can’t do it,” Disney replied at first. “Then why not go down and make some pictures?” Whitney inquired. “Well, yes,” Disney said, “I’d feel better about going to do something more than simply shaking hands.”16