A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Because population has been growing faster than output in recent years, Latin America has begun to lose ground in the struggle for development. . . .

  The Soviet Union, in association with Cuba, is exploiting the situation and providing the U.S. with unprecedentedly serious competition. . . .

  Time is running out for the parties of the middle-class revolution. . . . The democratic parties . . . have thus far failed to deliver the goods to the satisfaction of the younger and more impatient members of the middle and working classes.

  Latin America is waiting expectantly for new initiatives in Washington. . . . The Inaugural Address evoked particular admiration. People are looking on J.F.K. as a reincarnation of F.D.R. To a surprising degree, the slate has been wiped clean of past neglect and error. The atmosphere is set for miracles. There is consequently real danger that the intensity of present expectations may lead to future disappointments.

  My report only added one more document to the intensive review of Latin American policy which was already under way. The work of reassessment had had its furtive beginnings in the lower levels of the Eisenhower administration. John Moors Cabot, as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, fought in 1953 for a hemisphere program of economic assistance and social reform. But George Humphrey and his Treasury Department denounced the whole idea, and Cabot, discouraged, resigned to return to the field. His successor, Henry Holland, better fitted the Dulles-Humphrey mood. A doctrinaire apostle of ‘free enterprise,’ he passionately opposed, for example, United States loans to public undertakings in Latin America, and he feared that, if the progressive democrats came to power, they would curtail the power and disturb the confidence of businessmen, as they had in the United States under the New Deal. It was Holland who tried to keep Rómulo Betancourt from finding refuge in Puerto Rico. After Holland left the government to take advantage as an international lawyer or contacts he made as Assistant Secretary, he was followed by R. R. Rubottom, Jr., a Foreign Service officer of temperate but cautious views.

  In the meantime, Milton Eisenhower was emerging as a beneficial influence on hemisphere policy. His education, it must be confessed, was slow. When his brother sent him on a trip south in 1953, he was still the prisoner of ‘free enterprise’ orthodoxy. But this trip made him for the first time dimly aware that the modernization process might require some changes in social structure, though, as he later wrote, “Except for an uneasiness and a feeling of compassion, I did not relate this [need for social reform] to what we were doing and should do officially.” Nonetheless, education had started; and he gained an able and resourceful ally when Douglas Dillon came back from Paris in 1957 to be Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs.

  Though Dillon knew little about Latin America, he soon received his baptism of fire at a conference of hemisphere finance ministers in Buenos Aires in the fall of 1957. Examining the Treasury position papers before the conference, he was struck by their complacent negativism: Inter-American Bank, NO; commodity agreements, NO; development assistance, NO. The State Department was not much better. Its Latin American experts, supposing the Korean War’s boost to raw material prices to be permanent, said that Latin America was too prosperous to require external assistance. Three hard weeks at Buenos Aires convinced Dillon that Washington’s diagnosis of the hemisphere was badly wrong. On his return to Washington he began to agitate for new policies.

  Plenty of ideas lay at hand. Since 1948 the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) had conducted studies of Latin American development and, under the inspiration of Raúl Prebisch of Argentina, had worked out a number of far-reaching plans—to all of which, however, the State Department had been systematically hostile. In June 1958 President Kubitschek of Brazil put a set of proposals together in a convenient package under the label Operation Pan America. Operation Pan America laid much emphasis on the old scheme of an Inter-American Bank, and this struck Dillon as a good place to begin. In August 1958 President Eisenhower was slated to speak before the United Nations General Assembly. C. D. Jackson, who came down from Time, Inc., to work on the speech, wanted Eisenhower to advocate a middle eastern bank as a device to propitiate the Arab world. Dillon argued that the United States would be in an untenable position if it favored such an institution for the Middle East while opposing one for Latin America. He managed thereby to outflank the Treasury and induce Eisenhower to end United States resistance to the Inter-American Bank. Dillon also, with the concurrence of Thomas C. Mann, a Foreign Service officer who had come in as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, set up study groups to examine the question of stabilizing commodity prices, though United States participation in such agreements was still excluded as a sin against free enterprise.

  The combination of Dillon, Milton Eisenhower and, in 1959, Fidel Castro finally began to have its effect. The Cuban Revolution convinced Dillon that the United States simply could not go into another hemisphere meeting without solid recommendations of its own to lay on the table. When President Eisenhower returned from his own Latin American trip early in 1960, Dillon persuaded him in June to take a new step and propose American assistance in establishing a hemisphere fund for social progress. This fund, to be administered by the Inter-American Bank, would in effect create a ‘soft loan’ window for housing, land settlement and use, water supply, sanitation and similar social purposes, to go along with the ‘hard loan’ window for economic development. Congress rushed through a bill authorizing a contribution of $500 million to a Social Progress Trust Fund just in time for Dillon to make the offer to representatives of the OAS nations at Bogotá in September. He encountered the usual Latin American skepticism about the idea of ‘social development,’ but finally induced them to go along.

  2. ORIGINS OF THE ALLIANCE

  In his effort to get the Social Progress Trust Fund authorization through the Congress before the OAS delegates assembled at Bogotá, Dillon talked individually to the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the summer of 1960. When he called on John F. Kennedy, he found ready support, tinged perhaps by regret over the loss, or at least dilution, of a promising campaign issue.

  Kennedy’s Latin American interest went back to a tour of South America twenty years earlier. During most of the fifties he had shared the common Washington preference for the problems of Asia until the ferment at the end of the decade—and especially Vice-President Nixon’s disastrous trip—renewed his interest in the western hemisphere. Obviously, if the Vice-President were stoned and spat upon in South America, even if one allowed for Nixon’s capacity to arouse personal animosity, the position of the United States had declined a good deal since Good Neighbor days. In a speech in Puerto Rico at the end of 1958, a few days before Fidel Castro entered Havana, Kennedy urged that Latin America be given a new priority in United States foreign policy. He warned against the illusion prevalent in North American discussions “that all Latin American agitation is Communist-inspired—that every anti-American voice is the voice of Moscow—and that most citizens of Latin America share our dedication to an anti-Communist crusade to save what we call free enterprise.” And he endorsed a number of specific proposals, including the Inter-American Bank, commodity agreements, loans to encourage land reform and the enlargement of programs of cultural and educational exchange.

  Critics of the Eisenhower Latin American policy had been making such points for some time. Perhaps the most influential was Adolf Berle, who, after playing a role in the creation of the Good Neighbor policy, had served Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of State and as ambassador to Brazil. More than anyone else, Berle provided the link between the Good Neighbor policy and the Alliance for Progress. His experience in Brazil, where he helped in 1945 to set off the train of events leading to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship, convinced him that the Good Neighbor policy could not survive as a diplomatic and juridical policy alone. The principle of absolute nonintervention, he felt, did not exhaust the policy; it could onl
y be the first phase in its unfolding. If Good Neighborism did not mean a set of democratic ideas, it would be no more than a policy of sanctifying economic stagnation and political tyranny—a result that would injure the moral position of the United States without furnishing strategic security.

  These ideas, in Berle’s view, implied not only guarantees against aggression, whether from within the hemisphere or without, but the assurance of basic rights, including the freedoms of expression and political opposition, and the commitment to an economic program which would raise mass living standards. Only these positive elements could create a genuine inter-Americanism based on a community of confidence, not just among governments (which was what nonintervention achieved), but among peoples.

  This evolution of the Good Neighbor policy, Berle well understood, required the emergence in Latin America of political leaders and parties committed to democratic objectives. During the forties and fifties, when the State Department was ignoring or harassing Latin American democrats, Berle made it his business to keep in close touch with men like Betancourt and Figueres. In this effort, he worked closely with Luis Muñoz Marín, the remarkable governor of Puerto Rico. Together they developed a network of unofficial relationships with the partidos populares of Latin America. Kennedy, whose friendship with Muñoz began with the Puerto Rican trip of 1958, fell heir to these ideas and relationships.

  Kennedy’s man on Latin America was Richard Goodwin. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1958, Goodwin came to Washington as law clerk to Justice Frankfurter. He then joined the staff of the House Commerce Committee for its investigation of the television quiz scandals; it was Goodwin who persuaded Charles Van Doren to confess that the quiz shows had been fixed. He went over to Senator Kennedy’s office in the fall of 1959 and quickly made himself indispensable. Some, especially in these early years, found his personality, in a favorite Washington word, abrasive. He was certainly driving and often impatient; those whom he overrode called him arrogant. But he was a man of uncommon intelligence, perception and charm. Above all, he had immense facility, both literary and intellectual. He soon proved himself more skilled in writing for Kennedy than anyone but Sorensen; and he also showed himself able to take on any subject, however new and complicated, master its essentials with rapidity and precision and arrive at ideas for action. Kennedy liked his speed, wit, imagination and passion.

  Goodwin’s friendship with Karl Meyer, who wrote editorials on Latin America for the Washington Post, had given him an acquaintance with hemisphere problems and personalities even before he met Kennedy. During the campaign the candidate repeatedly cited Latin America as a signal Republican failure in foreign affairs. When the time approached for a full-dress exposition of Kennedy’s own Latin American views, Goodwin was charged with preparing a draft, presumably for delivery at the Alamo. On a campaign bus rolling through Texas in September 1960, he tried to think of a phrase which would express for Kennedy what the phrase Good Neighbor policy had expressed for Roosevelt. As he brooded, his eye happened to catch the title of a Spanish-language magazine which someone had left on the bus in Arizona. The magazine, published by the Alianza Hispano-Americana in Tucson, was cabled simply Alianza. Kennedy agreed that “alliance” should be part of the phrase; but alliance for what? Goodwin telephoned Karl Meyer for suggestions. Meyer then called Ernesto Betancourt, a Cuban who had supported the Castro Revolution but had subsequently broken with Castro and was now working at the Pan American Union. Betancourt proposed two possibilities: Alianza para el Desarrollo—Alliance for Development; and Alianza para el Progreso—Alliance for Progress. When Meyer reported this, Goodwin laughed and said that Kennedy could not possibly pronounce Alianza para el Desarrollo. Moreover, “progress” had the advantage of being essentially the same word in both languages.

  3. THE LATIN AMERICAN TASK FORCE

  Instead of giving the Latin American speech in September at the Alamo, Kennedy gave it in October in front of the county courthouse in Tampa, Florida. Finding himself before a restless outdoor crowd, he did not deliver all the prepared text; but when he finished, he told Goodwin that he considered it a most important speech and wanted it released in full as a statement. The speech reached its climax when Kennedy declared his belief “in a Western Hemisphere where all people—the Americans of the South and the Americans of the North—the United States and the nations of Latin America—are joined together in an alliance for progress—alianza para progreso.” (In the interest of euphony, Goodwin had excised “el” from the phrase; eventually the grammarians of USIA insisted on its restoration.) The Alianza would mean, Kennedy said, “a great common effort to develop the resources of the entire hemisphere, strengthen the forces of democracy, and widen the vocational and educational opportunities of every person in all the Americas.” It would also mean “constant consultation” with Latin American nations on hemisphere and world problems.

  More specifically, the Alliance would involve a number of departures in United States policy:

  —“unequivocal support to democracy” and opposition to dictatorship

  —provision of “long-term development funds, essential to a growing economy”

  —stabilization of “the prices of the principal commodity exports”

  —aid to “programs of land reform”

  —stimulus to private investment and encouragement to private business “to immerse themselves in the life of the country . . . through mixing capital with local capital, training local inhabitants for skilled jobs, and making maximum use of local labor”

  —expansion of technical assistance programs

  —enlargement of information and student exchange programs

  —an arms control agreement for the hemisphere

  —strengthening the OAS

  —the appointment of ambassadors who understood and cared about the problems of Latin America.

  The Tampa speech summed up Kennedy’s thinking on Latin America before the election. But he himself did not feel that the speech had gone nearly far enough; and his letter of November 18, 1960, to John Sharon had expressed his sense of urgency about the need for dramatic new recommendations. In the meantime, Goodwin had begun the work of setting up a Latin American task force. Berle agreed to serve as chairman; the other members, besides Goodwin, were Arturo Morales-Carrión and Teodoro Moscoso from Muñoz’s government in Puerto Rico and three professors—Lincoln Gordon of Harvard, who had worked in the Marshall Plan, Robert Alexander of Rutgers, who was an expert on the democratic left in Latin America (and had attended the Havana conference in 1950), and Arthur Whitaker of Pennsylvania, a sagacious Latin American historian.

  The task force submitted its report early in 1961. The problem, it said, was “to divorce the inevitable and necessary Latin American social transformation from connection with and prevent its capture by overseas Communist power politics.” The communist objective was obviously “to convert the Latin American social revolution into a Marxist attack on the United States itself.” The report gave a somber picture of the communist threat, which, it concluded, “resembles, but is more dangerous than, the Nazi-Fascist threat of the Franklin Roosevelt period and demands an even bolder and more imaginative response.”

  The task force emphasized the danger of armed rebellion and guerrilla warfare in the Caribbean and Andean countries. Since “good wishes and economic plans do not stop bullets or hand grenades or armed bands,” the United States must be prepared to offer the military support necessary to defend, for example, the Betancourt regime in Venezuela. But military action alone could not stop communism. Democracy was weak in Latin America in part because the United States “has stated no clear philosophy of its own, and has no effective machinery to disseminate such a philosophy.” It was useless to try to “stabilize the dying reactionary situations.” A first task of the new administration must be to formulate a positive democratic philosophy; and, since the United States role could only be supplementary, particular effort must go to working with the i
ndigenous democracy of Latin America—“coordinating and supporting the widespread democratic-progressive movements . . . pledged to representative government, social and economic reform (including agrarian reform) and resistance to entrance of undemocratic forces from outside the hemisphere.” Political movements desiring social transformation and intensified cooperation with the United States “should be known to have the good-will and support of the United States, just as every Communist group in Latin America is known to have the support of Moscow or of Peiping.” To accomplish this, the report proposed the formation of “a coordinating center for a Latin American democratic-progressive front.”

  Within the State Department, the principal officer in charge of relations with Latin America should have the rank of Under Secretary. In the economic field, Washington must offer “a long-range economic plan for the whole hemisphere,” based on “integrated development programs covering several years in advance, prepared first on a national basis . . . and then combined into a region-wide effort.” These programs should contain targets for the basic areas of industrial, agricultural and public development as well as measures for achieving internal financial and external payments balance. While private enterprise “has a major part to play,” the United States should give greater relative emphasis to indigenous as against foreign capital and end its “doctrinaire opposition” to loans to state enterprises. The hemisphere is large enough “to have diverse social systems in different countries. . . . Our economic policy and aid need not be limited to countries in which private enterprise is the sole or predominant instrument of development.” The government should make clear that private enterprise “is not the determining principle or sole objective of American policy.”