by Ted Sorensen
In each of these speeches and messages the emphasis was the same: on the need for more self-help as well as American help, for ending injustice as well as poverty, for reform as well as relief.
Our unfulfilled task is to demonstrate…that man’s unsatisfied aspiration for economic progress and social justice can best be achieved by free men working within a framework of democratic institutions…. Let us once again transform the [Western Hemisphere] into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts.
The Alianza, he added a year later to a similar gathering, “is more than a doctrine of development…. It is the expression of the noblest goals of our society.”
During the course of that first year, funds had been provided by the Congress. An August meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council at Punta del Este, Uruguay, had adopted the official charter of the Alianza para el Progreso. A host of New Frontiersmen—including Berle, Schlesinger, Goodwin, Stevenson, Dillon and others, in addition to the usual foreign policy and foreign aid officers—had advised on policy or attended conferences south of the border, producing some dismay among the State Department professionals and some disarray in the continuity of policy, but more activity and interest in Latin America than that region had ever seen. The debacle at the Bay of Pigs had temporarily soured relations, but after his first bristling reaction, the President had once again stressed positive goals. He had begun work on a coffee stabilization agreement, sent more Peace Corpsmen south than to any other continent, increased Food-for-Peace shipments, created a new training institute, appointed a separate Alliance for Progress coordinator in the AID program (Puerto Rican leader Teodoro Moscoso) and made a dozen other beginnings.
But the Alliance was slow getting started, and not without reason. With a rate of infant mortality nearly four times our own, a life expectancy less than two-thirds of our own, a per capita annual product less than one-ninth of our own, an illiteracy rate of 50 percent, a lack of schools and sanitation and trained personnel, runaway inflation in some areas, shocking slums in the cities, squalor in the countryside, and a highly suspicious attitude toward American investments, where were we to begin? The task, said the President, was “staggering in its dimensions,” even for a ten-year plan; and in the months that followed he was himself staggered by its sheer size. He felt “depressed,” he said at one news conference, using a word rare in his vocabulary,
by the size of the problems that we face…the population increases, the drop in commodity prices…serious domestic problems…. The Alliance for Progress…has failed to some degree because the problems are almost insuperable, and for years the United States ignored them and…so did some of the groups in Latin America…. In some ways the road seems longer than it was when the journey started. But I think we ought to keep at it.
He kept at it. But what disturbed him most was the attitude of that 2 percent of the citizenry of Latin America who owned more than 50 percent of the wealth and controlled most of the political-economic apparatus. Their voices were influential, if not dominant, among the local governments, the armies, the newspapers and other opinion-makers. They had friendly ties with U.S. press and business interests who reflected their views in Washington. They saw no reason to alter the ancient feudal patterns of land tenure and tax structure, the top-heavy military budgets, the substandard wages and the concentrations of capital. They classified many of their opponents as “Communists,” considered the social and political reforms of the Alianza a threat to stability and clung tenaciously to the status quo. Kennedy at all times kept the pressure on—stirring the people in his trips to Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica, using what influence he had through the OAS and AID to give preference to those governments willing to curb the holdings and privileges of the elite. It was a revolution, he said over and over, and “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
The President and his advisers were less consistent, however, on their attitude toward military takeovers. Kennedy deplored the arrest of fellow Presidents with whom he had visited, the suspension of civilian rule and the consequent interruptions in the progress of the Alianza. “We are opposed to military coups,” he said, “because we think they are self-defeating…for the hemisphere.” He recognized, however, that the military often represented more competence in administration and more sympathy with the U.S. than any other group in the country. To halt work on the Alliance in every nation not ruled by a genuine democracy would have paralyzed the whole program. Some military usurpers in Latin America, moreover, like those in Burma and Korea, were neither unpopular nor reactionary; and those able and willing to guide their countries to progress he wanted to encourage. Unfortunately, he had learned, many of the more progressive civilian governments in Latin America (as elsewhere) were less willing or less able to impose the necessary curbs on extravagant projects, runaway inflation and political disorder. They were more likely to frighten away local and foreign investments and to ignore the less vote-worthy rural populations.
A succession of military coups in Latin America thus presented a puzzle. To try to prevent them by sending in the Marines, he said, “is not the way for democracy to flourish.” He attempted to impose conditions—such as free elections within a specified period and adherence to constitutional forms—but his policy was neither consistently applied nor consistently successful. Both economic aid and diplomatic relations were cut off, restored or not cut off without any discernible pattern in a situation which itself had little discernible pattern.
A special case was that of the Dominican Republic, where the May, 1961, assassination of long-time military dictator Trujillo (whom Kennedy had excluded from all Alianza arrangements) produced endless unrest and dissension. The advice of American diplomats and the sight of American warships helped keep the Trujillos out and bring a democratic government in. But the first legitimately elected President in a generation, Juan Bosch, proved too weak to prevent the continuation of coups and countercoups.
The opposite threat to a military coup was takeover by the followers of Castro or Communism. Kennedy sought joint action against the exportation of weapons and agents from Cuba to the rest of Latin America. He succeeded in increasingly isolating Castro politically and economically from his neighbors. He had under study in 1963 a possible new document to modernize the Monroe Doctrine as a declaration against further Communist penetration of the hemisphere. But he also recognized more clearly by 1963 that “the big dangers to Latin America are…unrelated to Cuba…[including] illiteracy, bad housing, maldistribution of wealth, balance of payments difficulties, the drop in the price of their raw materials…[and] local Communist action unrelated to Cuba.” “If the Alliance is to succeed, we must…halt Communist infiltration and subversion,” he said in Miami on November 18 of that year, but “… these problems will not be solved simply by complaining about Castro [or] Communism.”
Despite these many problems, the Alliance made progress, and Kennedy was greeted wildly on his trips below the border. Jacqueline generally accompanied him; and her presence, he remarked before one trip, was insurance of both a big crowd and safe treatment. He received both. He was pleased by the enthusiasm that greeted her, and saddened that the entire continent should regard with astonishment her willingness to be kissed on a visit to a home for orphans. Near Bogotá, Colombia, in 1961, the President stood in an open field to dedicate a future Alianza housing project. Little more than a year later, he received a grateful letter from the head of the first family to be housed in that project, Señor Argemil Plazas Garcia, concluding “We are very happy to…no longer be moving around like outcasts. Now we have dignity and freedom.”
Greater dignity and freedom had also been accorded to one out of every four school-age children in Latin America with an extra food ration, to tens of thousands of farm families resettled on their own land, and to thousands of others with new housing or new schoolrooms or new textbooks. More important in the long run were the
beginnings of long-range reform: the creation of central planning agencies, slightly improved tax laws and administration, some improvements in land use and distribution, the submission of detailed development programs to the OAS, and greater local efforts to provide education, housing and financial institutions. Ten of the nineteen nations surpassed Alliance targets in annual economic growth.
Nevertheless reality did not match the rhetoric which flowed about the Alliance on both sides of the Rio Grande; and the President had constantly to answer the skeptics and doubters. “Despite dangers and difficulties…the obstacles, the resistance…the pace,” he said on November 18, 1963, “I support and believe in the Alliance for Progress more strongly than ever before….I do not discount the difficulties…but…the greatest danger is not in our circumstances or in our enemies but in our own doubts and fears.”
THE APPROACH TO DIVERSITY
Among those complaining about the Alianza in both North and South America were those objecting to Kennedy’s willingness to aid nationalized industries and to aid nations expropriating (for compensation) American-owned industries. This was not only a problem in Latin America. Similar opposition was encountered to his aid projects in India (the Bokaro steel mill), Ghana (the Volta Dam project) and elsewhere. Hostility in the Congress to aiding many of these countries was further heightened by their pursuit of foreign policies as inconsistent with ours as their domestic economics. Many of them sought aid from the Soviets as well as from the Americans. Many former colonies automatically adopted anti-Western postures.
The President shared in the irritation caused by neutrals who loudly condemned America’s defense of Vietnam but looked the other way when India seized Goa or merely wrung their hands when China invaded India. He was not blindly courting the neutrals at any cost. He had supported the Angolan nationalists against Portugal only after the Afro-Asians toned down their UN resolution;3 and he had authorized U.S. participation in the Volta Dam project, in one of his very closest decisions, only after attaching strict economic conditions. He was particularly angry when the 1961 conference of neutrals at Belgrade, asserting to speak for “the conscience of mankind,” passed the usual resolution against Western colonialism but timidly failed to condemn the Soviets for suddenly resuming nuclear testing. His anger was reflected in a statement issued at that time upon the signing of the foreign aid bill. The administration of the bill, said Kennedy coldly, “should give great attention and consideration to those nations who have our view of the world crisis.” But the anger passed, and he was soon explaining that
Our view of the world crisis is that countries are entitled to national sovereignty and independence. That is all we ever suggested. That is the purpose of our aid…. That is a different matter from suggesting that, in order to be entitled to our assistance…they must agree with us, because quite obviously these people in the underdeveloped world are newly independent, they want to run their own affairs, they would rather not accept assistance if we have that kind of string attached to it.
He did not insist that every nation be marked as either Communist or anti-Communist, or even be interested in the cold war. Neutralism he said, had been “part of our own history for over a hundred years,” and he regarded its practice by many struggling new nations as “inevitable” rather than “immoral” (the term once applied by John Foster Dulles). “We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view,” the President had said in his Inaugural. “But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom.” Allies such as Pakistan at times complained that he was equally friendly with neutrals such as India. But inasmuch as the purpose of our alliances was to preserve the independence and safety of nations, he saw no reason to treat less favorably any nation in which that purpose was best served by a course of nonalignment. The Soviets had long wooed the neutrals assiduously and Kennedy had no desire to withdraw from the competition. European Allies also complained early in 1961 when he quietly abandoned the State Department’s former policy of referring all new foreign aid applicants from Africa to their former masters first—and complained even more when Mennen Williams endorsed the slogan of “Africa for Africans.” “I don’t know who else Africa should be for,” commented the President drily.
Nor did he try to fix an aid recipient’s domestic policy. Although he did seek basic reforms in the efforts of other countries to make use of our funds, he knew that our own system could not be universally imposed or accepted in a world where most of the people “are not white…are not Christians…[and] know nothing about free enterprise or due process of law or the Australian ballot.” All must adopt their own system, and their freedom to do so was the heart of his policy. Without specifically contradicting Wilson’s phrase of “a world made safe for democracy,” he began in 1963 to refer in his speeches to “a world made safe for diversity.” That single phrase summed up much of his new thinking in foreign policy.
In time most of the neutralist leaders came to respect Kennedy’s concepts of independence and diversity and to respect the man who put them forward. They recognized that a subtle shift in attitude had aligned the United States with the aspirations for social justice and economic growth within their countries—that land distribution, literacy drives and central planning were no longer regarded in the U.S. as Communist slogans but as reforms to be encouraged and even specified by our government—that this nation’s hand was now more often extended to leaders with greater popular backing and social purpose than the “safe” right-wing regimes usually supported by Western diplomats—and that the United States had a President who both understood and welcomed the nationalist revolution and believed that the most relevant contributions from his own country’s experience were not its concepts of private property or political parties but its traditions of human dignity and liberty.
The student groups, the trade unions and the nationalist parties of Africa, Asia and Latin America began to soften their anti-American slogans. Their UN delegations began voting more often with ours. Guinea’s Premier Sékou Touré, once written off as a pro-Soviet, assailed the Communist embassies for plotting in his country and welcomed U.S. AID and Peace Corps delegations. Even Indonesia’s Sukarno, Ghana’s Nkrumah and Egypt’s Nasser at times softened their denunciations of American imperialism when that kind of rhetoric seemed less helpful either at home or in the Afro-Asian world.
These were at times uncomfortable friends for an American President, and the Congress was critical of continuing aid. But Kennedy believed that his policies had enabled him to retain some influence on the actions of these neutrals and caused their leaders to exercise some restraint. Kennedy’s personal prestige helped induce Sukarno to free a CIA pilot downed years earlier in an attack on his government. It helped persuade Nasser to hold back anti-Israel fanatics in the Arab League. Nasser liked Kennedy’s Ambassador, John Badeau, and he liked Kennedy’s practice of personal correspondence (Kennedy put off, however, an invitation for a Nasser visit until improved relations could enable him to answer the political attacks such a visit would bring from voters more sympathetic with Israel). Sukarno liked the Peace Corps, and—despite a bruising verbal exchange with the Attorney General—he hoped for a visit from the President. To dismiss or denounce these men for every foolish thing they said or did, to cut off our aid or food shipments every time they aroused our displeasure, Kennedy said, would only play into the hands of the Communists.
He was also desirous of using our aid and trade policies “to develop whatever differences in attitude or in tempo may take place behind the Iron Curtain,” specifically in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Communist bloc was not a monolith in the sixties, if it ever had been, and he wanted to encourage every nationalist strain present. Relations with the Poles and Yugoslavs fluctuated, but that was better than a posture of complete hostility on their part. He was willing to take the political heat of welcoming Yugoslav President Tito to the White House, even though Tito’s relations with Moscow had improved; he acted swiftly to se
nd medical aid to the victims of an earthquake at Skopje; he greeted a Polish boys’ choir in the flower garden; he sought economic aid for both countries; and he fought with the Congress over his insistence that it grant both countries the same tariff treatment it gave to all others. He fully sympathized with his Ambassador to Yugoslavia, George Kennan, who resigned because of the “contradictory, unproductive and unsatisfactory” mishmash the Congress had made out of Kennedy’s Yugoslav policy.
All in all, this was a sophisticated approach to foreign affairs: helping some Communist nations but not others, befriending neutrals as well as allies, financing socialist projects as well as private, aiding some revolutionaries and some reactionaries, and approving of some one-party governments but not of others. It was too sophisticated an approach for those elements in the country and Congress whose solution to all problems continued to be the withholding of our aid on grounds of misbehavior. “These countries are poor,” the President stressed once again in his final news conference of 1963, “they are nationalist, they are proud, they are in many Cases radical. I don’t think threats from Capitol Hill bring the results which are frequently hoped….I don’t regard the struggle as over and I don’t think it’s probably going to be over for this century.” Then he summed it all up rather simply; “I think it is a very dangerous, untidy world. I think we will have to live with it.”