Yet a harsh and uncomfortable reality has long lain beneath all the glory of the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. The U.S. intervention demonstrated the fragility of Peace Corps independence. Throughout the crisis, President Lyndon Johnson made it clear that he regarded the Peace Corps as an instrument of his policies. He tolerated the Peace Corps, in fact, largely because it served to show the soft side of a harsh, bellicose United States. The vaunted independence of the Peace Corps was at best ambivalent, at worst a sham.
Frank Mankiewicz, the director of Peace Corps operations in Latin America, filled a significant role during the crisis. A Los Angeles lawyer who was the son of Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and the nephew of All About Eve director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, he had become a luminary of the early Peace Corps and one of the most fervent advocates of the employment of Volunteers as community development workers—the main job of the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. Mankiewicz believed that community development Volunteers could become “a revolutionary force” that would give the masses of poor peoples in Latin America “an awareness of where the tools are to enable them to assert their political power.” His belief in community development remained unshaken, even strengthened, but the Dominican invasion disillusioned him about the independence of the Peace Corps and made him unhappy in his work.
Mankiewicz had long taken a pledge of Secretary of State Dean Rusk at face value. Soon after the creation of the Peace Corps, Rusk cabled all ambassadors in countries with incoming Volunteers, “The Peace Corps is not an instrument of foreign policy because to make it so would rob it of its contribution to foreign policy.” But the Dominican crisis clouded that. Mankiewicz was continually pressured to shut off the comments of Volunteers to U.S. reporters. “I got a sense that when push came to shove,” he recalled recently, “that while it might not be an instrument of U.S. policy, it sure would not be an instrument against U.S. policy.” Mankiewiz left the Peace Corps a year later to become the press secretary of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Perhaps Mankiewicz expected too much. Even in its beginnings, the Peace Corps did not demonstrate total independence. It is true that President Kennedy, at the insistence of Sargent Shriver, ordered the CIA to keep its hands off the Peace Corps and make no attempt to infiltrate the staff or Volunteers. And Shriver bravely resisted all pressure from his brother-in-law to send Volunteers to newly independent Algeria as a way of getting a U.S. foothold there after its long war with France.
But there were also moments when Shriver felt forced to bow to political pressure. In December 1962, Shriver announced that the Peace Corps would shift its emphasis and start assigning more Volunteers to Latin America than to any other region. Although Shriver would not acknowledge it, the Peace Corps was obviously meshing its policies with the White House campaign to shore up Latin American democracies against Fidel Castro’s influence.
In August 1961, several members of Congress demanded that Shriver dismiss a Peace Corps trainee who had been thrown out of a Rotary Club meeting in Miami during the showing of the movie Operation Abolition. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had made the movie in an attempt to prove that riots against the committee in San Francisco a year earlier were inspired by communists. Showings of the movie were often met by youthful protests throughout the country, and Charles Kamen, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Brandeis University, was ejected, according to club officials, for laughing and applauding at the wrong times. This happened before Kamen was invited to enter training at Penn State University for the Peace Corps in the Philippines.
Shriver refused to heed the congressional calls to dismiss Kamen immediately. “The integrity of the selection process was at stake,” the Peace Corps declared proudly in its First Annual Report. “The Peace Corps took the firm position that if it reacted to pressures or pressure groups in the determination of who should or should not be a Volunteer, the fundamental selection concept of the Peace Corps—that of selection based on merit—would be destroyed with disastrous consequences.”
Despite these high-minded sentiments, Shriver overruled his selection officials when they found Kamen qualified to serve with the Peace Corps in the Philippines. Shriver felt he could not afford to offend members of Congress while the bill authorizing the Peace Corps was still pending. He secretly ordered that selection officials change their decision and reject Kamen or, in Peace Corps jargon, “select him out.” There was dismay among the senior staff in Washington when they realized what had happened.
For the Peace Corps in 1965, the Dominican crisis followed two story lines. One played out in the Dominican Republic, especially the capital, Santo Domingo. The other played out in Washington. There were 108 Volunteers in the country, 34 of them in Santo Domingo. The Santo Domingo contingent comprised 25 urban community development workers and 9 nurses operating clinics. All worked in the barrios, the poorest neighborhoods of the city.
No one from the Peace Corps took part in the deliberations about Dominican policy in Washington. But two former Peace Corps officials played important roles. One was Bill Moyers, who had been deputy director of the Peace Corps before the assassination of President Kennedy. His old boss, Lyndon Johnson, had pulled him into the White House, and now he was a trusted special assistant to President Johnson, taking part in most White House deliberations.
The second was Jack Hood Vaughn, who had preceded Mankiewicz as director of Peace Corps operations in Latin America. Vaughn was now assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, an office he had held for only a few weeks when the crisis erupted. Johnson would later name Vaughn to succeed Shriver as director of the Peace Corps, and the Dominican crisis would have a good deal to do with putting Vaughn there.
The Dominican troubles were rooted in the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Juan Bosch, an exiled writer who had opposed Trujillo for many years, was elected president, taking office in February 1963. But seven months later, the old guard of the military, the backbone of the Trujillo dictatorship, overthrew Bosch in a bloodless coup and eventually set up a military-backed government with a civilian president, Donald Reid Cabral, in charge.
Since President Kennedy had regarded the Bosch administration as a showcase for new democracy in Latin America, he broke off relations and withdrew all U.S. aid programs (except the Peace Corps). But this break lasted only a few weeks. Soon after Kennedy’s death, President Johnson resumed diplomatic relations on the strength of a promise by the new Dominican government to hold national elections in 1965. Although Reid Cabral’s government was unpopular, American diplomats and military officers maintained friendly relations with him. In fact, they did not grasp the extent of his unpopularity.
On April 24, 1965, junior officers of the Dominican army staged a countercoup, overthrowing Reid Cabral while demanding a revival of constitutional government and the return of Juan Bosch as president. Colonel Caamaño emerged as the leader of the rebels or constitutionalists. Crowds took to the streets chanting the name of Juan Bosch for hours. The American embassy had no inkling of the countercoup ahead of time and no links with Colonel Caamaño and the other rebel leaders. In fact, Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett Jr. was visiting his mother in Georgia when Colonel Caamaño and his associates rose up.
Large right-wing elements of the army and air force, who did not want Bosch back, resisted the countercoup, and Santo Domingo was soon engulfed in civil war. The leader of these senior officers was Brig. Gen. Elias Wessin y Wessin, who had led the overthrow of Bosch in the first place. Most of the population of Santo Domingo, many armed by the rebels, appeared to support the counter coup, and it is likely that Colonel Caamaño’s forces would have defeated General Wessin’s forces and Bosch returned to the presidency if the United States had not interfered.
In fact, the U.S. intervention astounded many Peace Corps Volunteers, for they had assumed that if th
e United States did send troops, it would be to assist the rebels who were demanding the return of the democratically elected president. But the ignorance of the U.S. embassy and the White House about Caamaño and his fellow plotters led to fears that they were communists, or influenced by communists, or susceptible to manipulation by communists.
In their ignorance, the Americans reinforced each other’s suspicions. It was the height of the Cold War. Fidel Castro had come to power in Cuba only six years earlier. The Cuban missile crisis—with the United States and the Soviet Union edging to the brink of war until Moscow finally removed its missiles from Cuba—had taken place only two years earlier. President Johnson was determined not to allow another Castro Cuba to emerge in the Caribbean. Bosch was regarded as an ineffective intellectual who would surely fall under the control of the supposedly communist rebels if he returned to the Dominican Republic. Johnson did not want him back.
Johnson ordered more than five hundred Marines into the Dominican Republic, supposedly to evacuate Americans and other foreigners. But once that job was done, the Marines stayed and, in fact, were augmented by Army paratroopers. By the end of the first week of May, there were almost 23,000 U.S. troops in the Dominican Republic.
It was a shocking moment for Latin America. The United States had supposedly given up those early-twentieth-century days when it mounted military expeditions to Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico to restore order, collect debts, and punish bandits. President Franklin Roosevelt had pulled out the last American occupation troops soon after he took office in 1933 and initiated a Good Neighbor policy. Even the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961 had been a CIA-assisted and financed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, not a blatant U.S. military intervention.
Johnson justified the Dominican invasion as a defensive blow against communism. He told the American public that the revolution by the colonels had taken “a tragic turn,” with communists assuming “increasing control.” While insisting that the United States supported no leader or faction in the Dominican Republic, the president said, “Our goal . . . is to help prevent another communist state in this hemisphere.”
But the United States was hardly neutral. There is no doubt that the U.S. troops squelched any chance for victory by the Bosch supporters. The United States pressured the right-wing military to create a junta with a general less reactionary than Wessin y Wessin in charge, and the Americans then surreptitiously aided the right-wing troops in hopes that they could put down the rebellion by the Constitutionalists and their civilian supporters. But this junta failed both in squelching the rebellion and attracting popular support.
Almost every action of the Americans, ostensibly there to save lives, served to hurt the rebels and strengthen the right-wing junta. The Americans seized the Duarte Bridge that the rebels were attacking as a gateway to their enemy. The bridge crossed the Ozama River that separated the city of Santo Domingo from the area that housed the military camps of the anti-Bosch troops. After pushing the rebels back, the Americans set down an “international security zone” across downtown Santo Domingo that kept the Bosch rebels within the populous southern barrios of the city. Even when a cease-fire was signed, the Americans helped the anti-Bosch troops with supplies, military advice, and access to positions on the other side. This eventually led to occupation of the northern sections of Santo Domingo by the right-wing troops.
The Johnson version of events in the Dominican Republic bore little relation to what the Volunteers saw and heard around them. Kirby Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Volunteer from Bedford, New York, kept a detailed diary during those violent days, and it makes clear that many Volunteers lived in a milieu that welcomed and supported the pro-Bosch coup.
Jones had achieved a good deal in his fifteen months in Santo Domingo. He had been told while training for urban community development that if you “inject a foreign element into a community, stuff happens,” and stuff had happened on his watch. Jones and his fellow Volunteer, Joe Morrison from Buffalo, began by organizing eight- and nine-year-old kids into baseball teams. The games soon attracted older brothers who formed teenage and youth teams, and the teams turned into social clubs. Parents and other adults came to some of the meetings, and in a few months, Jones and Morrison could boast that their baseball teams had evolved into a community association.
In their first political action, the members of the association, with the help of the Volunteers, trudged to the offices of the mayor and petitioned him to give their streets names and put numbers on their homes. Without these, the barrio had not been able to receive normal mail. The mayor agreed. One of the new streets was named Calle Cuerpo de Paz. Pleased with this triumph, the association planned new campaigns for paved streets and running water in the barrio.
Jones had taken on an extra job on Saturdays. He and a Volunteer nurse telecast a public health program every week on Radio Santo Domingo. But when he showed up on Saturday, April 24, 1965, his Dominican boss shooed him away. “There’s no program today,” the boss said. “The equipment isn’t functioning.” This station official obviously knew what was coming. The rebel officers seized Radio Santo Domingo later that day, igniting the revolution and civil war.
When the fighting erupted, the Peace Corps decided that the Volunteers in Santo Domingo would be safest remaining in their barrios where people knew them well. But the barrios became a kind of battleground. “The streets began filling up with guys with guns,” Jones recalled years later. “A lot of the guys with guns had been playing on our baseball teams the week before.” The rebellious fighters and their supporters in the barrios did not harm the Volunteers. But planes of the anti-Bosch Air Force bombed and strafed the barrios. “Am back in my house,” Jones wrote in his diary, “lying in bed, listening to all machine guns and rifles going off all around.” “Flares are going up to light the sky,” he wrote the next day. “Vigilantes are roaming around. I’m alone and a bit scared.”
Communication with Peace Corps headquarters was very difficult. Jones had no phone. Only one phone existed in the whole barrio, in the home of a police officer. Peace Corps staffers drove through the barrios from time to time with messages and news. The Volunteers were impressed by the bravery of Associate Director Roberta Warren, a twenty-four-year-old former Volunteer in Peru. Warren, who was known by her family nickname of B. J., would show up in her jeep during some of the most embattled hours. Word reached Jones on the fifth day that the Volunteers should head to the closest hospital. Jones and Kay Deming, another Volunteer in the barrio, pasted red crosses on their Peace Corps medical kits, as if they were hospital workers, and hitched a ride to a hospital.
At the hospital, Jones carried the wounded from an ambulance to the doctors and carried bodies from the wards to the morgue. He held a patient down while doctors performed a tracheotomy. He folded bandages and carried in the meager supplies that were delivered occasionally. “Saw eight-year-old girls,” he wrote, “shot through the back, breast, legs, lying on beds, crying for their mothers, suffering—for what?”
“In the hospital,” he went on, “there are no lights, no water, no food, no linen, no medicines, just a few exhausted doctors, many lazy nurses, five PC [Peace Corps] nurses that do everything, [Volunteers] Steve and I, Elaine, Fran, Karen—an incredible mess.” The scenes grew more horrifying. “A little girl was brought in with her face blown up and hand half cut through.” After a few days, Jones “knew I’d had it. I could not take this any more.” Bob Satin, who ran the Peace Corps program in the Dominican Republic, agreed that he should leave the hospital.
Jones joined several other Volunteers at the Hotel Embajador in the security zone that had been carved out by the U.S. troops. The Volunteers drove trucks carting food from CARE into the isolated barrios. A CBS crew accompanied Jones on one trip to tape a segment for Walter Cronkite’s evening news show. The rebel soldiers in a barrio imposed order on the hungry, anxious crowd and distributed the food. Jones
did not try to hide his familiarity with the rebel soldiers from the CBS camera. That kind of scene, however, would trouble some Americans who had been told by their president that the rebels were Castro Commies and thus enemies of the United States.
The Embajador was the headquarters for many American journalists covering the war, and Volunteers, including Jones, talked freely with them. The journalists also sought out the views of the young Americans elsewhere in Santo Domingo and the Dominican Republic. The result was an ample amount of publicity for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.
Some of it was welcomed in Washington. Satin, the thirty-four-year-old Peace Corps director, was hailed as a hero in news dispatches. Wearing his white panama hat and a yellow anorak, Satin was able to drive in and out of the rebel areas without harm. On one trip, he spotted two wounded Marines and persuaded the rebels to release them to his care. On another occasion, the rebels notified U.S. military authorities that they would let several captured Marines go if Satin drove into the zone to pick them up. In all, Satin brought back six U.S. servicemen and the bodies of two others to the American lines. He also served as a kind of neutral go-between, setting up a meeting between rebel leader Caamaño and U.S. negotiators. Satin received a letter of commendation from the Secretary of the Navy for his heroics during the crisis.
Some Volunteers were troubled by Satin’s role. In his diary, Jones complains that Satin has been acting as a “big cheese” instead of concerning himself with the Volunteers. Jones doubts whether acting as the intermediary between Caamaño and the U.S. embassy is a proper Peace Corps role. He contrasts Satin with other members of the staff who “have risked their personal safety to protect the PCVs.” Some staff members also felt troubled by Satin’s activities. “He had the idea that his responsibility was to his country,” Warren said recently. “I thought that his responsibility was to the 120 Volunteers.”
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