The critics may be too harsh on Satin. He felt that he could perform useful and peaceful service as one of the few U.S. officials trusted by the rebels. In the early stages of the war, so many American diplomats were away from the embassy that as the senior official on the scene, he surely knew more about the rebels than any other American in the embassy.
Ambassadors regard the Peace Corps director as part of the “Country Team,” like the AID director, U.S. Information Agency director, CIA station chief, commercial attache, military attache, and representatives of other agencies. The team meets periodically with the embassy’s top diplomats, usually once a week. In the event of a crisis, the ambassador expects all members of the Country Team to take part in dealing with it. The ambassador usually assumes that he or she has some authority over the Peace Corps director, especially in a crisis. During the Dominican invasion, Satin assumed he was performing his duty as part of the Country Team.
The issue raised by Satin’s critics is one that will come up often in Peace Corps history. Can the Peace Corps really go its own way overseas? How much can the Peace Corps divorce itself from the embassy? Peace Corps independence is not unlimited. But the nature and extent of the limits are often ambiguous.
Although Washington officialdom hailed reports about Satin, they did not appreciate news reports with Peace Corps quotes that echoed the Dominican antipathy toward the U.S. invasion. Nurse Alice Meehan told the Washington Post that the invasion “has set back the image of the United States that we were trying to build by fifty years.” Joan Temple, a twenty-four-year-old nurse from Trimont, Minnesota, told the Chicago Daily News, “I don’t think the people are opposed to the American people, but many of them are against the American government. Some of them will bring you a baby or someone else who’s been shot. They’ll say it was shot by Marines and they’ll ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’” She said this happened even when the wounds were probably caused by anti-Bosch Dominican soldiers.
While many Dominicans did not let their anti-Yankee feelings get in the way of their admiration for the Volunteers, some lumped all Americans together. “Our pupils are scared to work with us,” a Volunteer teacher in a small provincial town in the Dominican interior told the Washington Post. “It isn’t considered proper now to associate with Americans.”
Some Americans were upset by the news reports of the Peace Corps’s continued work in areas controlled by Dominicans fighting the U.S. invasion. The Richmond News-Leader complained about Volunteers “giving aid and comfort to an enemy at the same time the enemy’s troops are still shooting at American soldiers in the streets of Santo Domingo.” Warren, the associate director of the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, defended the humanitarian work of the Volunteers. “We are giving whatever help we can to anybody who needs it—without asking their politics,” she told the New York Times, “and most of us have been accused of being Communists by the GIs.” A correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune wrote, “This is a war in which the U.S. War Corps is at odds with the U.S. Peace Corps.”
The ubiquitous quotes from the Volunteers irritated the Johnson administration. There evidently had been very little pressure to remove the Volunteers after the fighting erupted. Satin had persuaded Washington that the Volunteers were safe so long as they remained among the Dominicans who knew them. Moreover, he offered to evacuate any Volunteer who wanted to leave. Only a handful accepted. From the point of view of the administration, the Volunteers were a useful symbol. The Peace Corps was very popular in the Dominican Republic, and its continued presence might help persuade Dominicans and, in fact, other Latin Americans that, despite the military intervention, the United States harbored only the best intentions toward the country.
The issue was raised at a meeting of the Dominican Republic task force in the White House on May 6. Participants included Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms, Undersecretary of State Thomas Mann, Bill Moyers, Jack Vaughn, and several other policymakers. The group, according to the minutes, “discussed the problem of the Peace Corps people in the Dominican Republic who are giving interviews that are damaging our interests.” Moyers assured everyone that Sargent Shriver was dealing with the problem, but that did not end the discussion.
“While the group saw certain advantages in bringing the Peace Corps back to the U.S.,” the minutes went on, “they also saw a number of disadvantages—e.g., Peace Corps people would hold their interviews in the U.S., which would also hurt; it would be a blow for the Peace Corps people all over the world if we quashed their right to speak freely.”
In the end, the task force decided to “leave them there” but added “we should give the Peace Corps people some background on the Dominican situation.” Bundy suggested that John Bartlow Martin, the magazine writer and former ambassador to Santo Domingo, and Harry Shlaudeman, the Dominican desk officer at the State Department, talk to the Volunteers.
But Moyers and Shriver decided it was best to send one of the Peace Corps’s own, and Frank Mankiewicz was selected for the job. “You’d better go down there and shut those guys up,” Moyers told him, “or the President’s going to pull them out.”
Moyers invited Mankiewicz to lunch at the White House, and, when they finished, they were summoned to the living quarters, where President Johnson was lunching with some guests. Undersecretary of State Tom Mann joined the group. A fellow Texan and probably the president’s most influential advisor on the Dominican crisis, Mann told Johnson, “The whole problem, Mr. President, is left-wing newspapers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New York Herald-Tribune, which always take the Communist side.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mankiewicz recalled years later, “but I did believe it.”
Mankiewicz’s view of the intervention was colored by the reports he had read from Satin and his own understanding of the problems of Latin America. Later, his view would be reinforced by his conversations with the Volunteers in the Dominican Republic.
“I was very disturbed about the Dominican intervention,” he recalled. “It seemed to me wrong in every way, particularly since I’d been reading all the cables . . . . It was clear to me from the beginning that we were putting those troops in not to preserve order, but to . . . put the right-wing military back in power . . . . I thought we were on the wrong side . . . politically and spiritually.”
After he arrived in the Dominican Republic, he was astonished at the lack of contact between U.S. officials in the embassy and the pro-Bosch rebels in the Dominican army. He was just as struck by how little embassy officials, unlike the Volunteers, understood the masses of poor Dominicans who supported the rebels. He attended some of the U.S. military briefings for the press and was shocked by their dishonesty.
“It turned me off on Vietnam,” Mankiewicz said. “I mean I had no particular thoughts about Vietnam until around May or June of ’65. I didn’t like it too much, I was a little suspicious, but I really didn’t like a lot of the people who were so strongly in opposition, and I felt there must be something to the government’s argument. And then I went to the Dominican Republic and I saw Army spokesmen saying what was happening when, in fact, precisely the opposite was happening. I saw the mentality and the spirit of the State Department and AID and the military guys . . . . And it suddenly occurred to me that maybe they weren’t telling the truth in Vietnam, either.”
Mankiewicz was obviously a reluctant censor. But he met with about twenty Santo Domingo Volunteers in the abandoned Catholic girls’ school that had become Peace Corps headquarters during the war. The school straddled both the U.S.-controlled security zone and the rebel-controlled southern barrios of the city. Mankiewicz warned Volunteers that President Johnson would probably withdraw the Peace Corps from the Dominican Republic if there was another rash of anti-intervention quotes from the Volunteers. He urged them to stop talking to reporte
rs.
The numbers of published Volunteer quotes diminished after that, though this may have been due more to lack of press interest than to Volunteer discretion. In any case, the discretion was never strong enough to satisfy critics of the Peace Corps in Washington. In late May, a month after the invasion, Volunteers sent a letter to the White House that surely would have closed down the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic if it had been published. The letter, addressed to the president of the United States, was signed by thirty-two Volunteers.
The letter accused U.S. military forces of backing the rightist military juntas against the rebel or constitutionalist forces that “have overwhelming popular sympathy.” The Volunteers said that the U.S.-imposed cease-fire had “stopped the ‘rebels’ on the threshold of victory, and allowed junta forces, in violation of that cease-fire, to eliminate mercilessly ‘rebel’ control of the northern part of the city.”
On top of this, the Volunteers made it clear they did not agree with Johnson’s main rationalization for his invasion. Their letter accused the United States of perpetuating “the junta’s generalization that the full ‘rebel’ movement was communist.”
The Volunteers supported what they called the Johnson administration’s “diplomatic efforts to form a government acceptable to the true Constitutionalist Movement.” By this time, the United States was trying to create a caretaker government that would be accepted by both sides in the war. But the letter set down a catalogue of examples where U.S. military actions, by favoring the right-wing forces, veered in a different direction from the diplomatic maneuvering. “We urge your immediate attention in making our military actions consistent with our diplomatic efforts,” the Volunteers said.
In a covering note to Shriver and other Peace Corps officials, the Volunteers said they would release the letter to the press if they felt it was ignored by the president. Two days after the letter was sent, Mankiewicz was dispatched to talk the Volunteers out of going public.
The letter was drafted by Kirby Jones and two other Volunteers while they were in Puerto Rico for what is known as their “termination conference.” The Peace Corps holds these conferences whenever a group of Volunteers nears the end of a two-year tour. The Volunteers, meeting with officials from Washington, sum up their accomplishments and problems, and make recommendations for future programs. In this case, the conference was held in Puerto Rico because of the war.
Mankiewicz was persuasive. “To say the least,” Jones wrote in his diary, “he made a masterful presentation of his position . . . . Frank started off by complimenting us on the letter, saying that it was very well received and that the message had indeed reached the President, and that if this is what we had wanted to accomplish, we had succeeded.” Mankiewicz did not say that Johnson had actually read the letter, and there is no evidence now that he had. It is possible that Moyers or other aides kept it from him.
Mankiewicz then presented his argument for withholding the letter from the press. “He pointed out the fact,” Jones wrote, “that in other countries there were also military juntas and strong executives who might interpret the letter as the PC [Peace Corps] actively participating in revolutions and that the PCVs [Peace Corps Volunteers] in their respective countries were working to overthrow them. This, in turn, might very well result in the retiring of PC from quite a few countries.” Jones thought that Mankiewicz’s argument was sound.
Not every Volunteer agreed. “I had nothing but contempt for Frank Mankiewicz,” Lynda Edwards, a Volunteer in Santo Domingo, told writer Karen Schwarz. “I had heard him say more than once that if there was ever a revolution, he expected to see the Volunteers on the barricades. I later understood that he was keeping us from getting kicked out, but at the time I thought he was a hypocrite and a windbag. It must have been very difficult for him to ask us not to give the letter to the press.” In the end Mankiewicz prevailed, and the Volunteers agreed not to release the letter.
Five months later, McGeorge Bundy sent a memorandum to Lyndon Johnson that reflected a blatant attempt at politicization of the Peace Corps. The document provides clear evidence that the White House and the State Department intended to oversee Peace Corps programming in the Dominican Republic to make it serve U.S. foreign policy and public relations.
“I know you have been cautious on this,” Bundy wrote, “but I believe myself it is now time to act. The Peace Corps is popular in Santo Domingo, and if it behaves with proper discipline, it can be a very useful balance to more hardheaded activities which clearly will be necessary as we go ahead.”
Bundy proposed almost a doubling of the Peace Corps program to 210 Volunteers—80 in community development, 50 in public health, 50 in rural elementary schools, and 30 in town administration. He recognized the administration’s irritation with the tart comments of the Volunteers to newspaper reporters after the intervention. But he said he had discussed the problem with Mankiewicz, who is “smart and good on the political problems involved.”
“I have his assurance,” Bundy went on, “that he will make a special effort himself to ensure that Volunteers understand the sensitive nature of their work. After all, it is quite simple: if they start criticizing U.S. policy down there, they will simply shut down the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and give the whole operation a bad black eye.”
Bundy asked, “Can we go ahead?” Johnson replied yes, but “subject to Bill Moyers’s supervision.”
This was an outrageous involvement of the White House in the placement of Volunteers in a country. The White House did not completely usurp the responsibility of Peace Corps programmers and attempt to assess the Peace Corps needs of the Dominican Republic itself. Bundy’s figures were based on a report sent to him by Mankiewicz two weeks earlier. But the episode reflected an unprecedented decision by the president to approve a suitable number of Volunteers, not because they were needed for economic development but because they were needed to balance the “more hardheaded activities” of the U.S. troops.
The Peace Corps, however, was a willing victim, and its leaders, especially Shriver and his deputy, Warren Wiggins, went overboard in their zeal to serve the president by trying to bloat the numbers of Volunteers in the Dominican Republic. At one point, they had even contemplated sending more than a thousand Volunteers there.
This plan stemmed from some fanciful remarks by Teodoro Moscoso, the former coordinator of the U.S. Alliance for Progress, the vast Kennedy program of assistance to Latin America, and Jaime Benítez, the chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico. They had remarked that there ought to be as many Volunteers as soldiers in the Dominican Republic; in short, that the U.S. Peace Corps should be as large as the U.S. War Corps. Since Johnson had dispatched more than 20,000 troops, their musings about a balance between soldiers and Volunteers were obviously exaggerated to make a point. But they did believe that a “massive Peace Corps involvement” could help stabilize the Dominican Republic. The Moscoso-Benítez idea was immediately embraced by Peace Corps officials obsessed with numbers. They began to talk of proving the Peace Corps “can make a difference” by rushing in quantities of Volunteers that made the largest Peace Corps programs elsewhere seem piddling. Mankiewicz said that between 500 and 1,500 could be dispatched within a year, and “Operation 1500” was launched.
But the plan was absurd. The little Caribbean country could not absorb that many Volunteers. Former Dominican Volunteers working in Washington opposed the expansion. The staff in Santo Domingo felt foolish trying to persuade Dominican officials to request such large numbers of Volunteers. “It was a ridiculous exercise,” says Warren, “and I was embarrassed.” According to a study written a decade later by Peace Corps officials Kevin Lowther and C. Payne Lucas, the Dominican director of community development “could barely contain his laughter” when he was pressured to sign an official request for several hundred community development Volunteers. “I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever hea
rd,” he said later.
Operation 1500 collapsed of its own inanity. When evaluator Jack Rosenblum arrived in the Dominican Republic a year after the invasion, there were only seventy Volunteers in the country—a third as many as Bundy proposed, and even fewer than the number at the time of the invasion. Volunteers were still popular. In one rural area where Volunteer Casey Case worked, youths had organized an anti-U.S. march with a banner demanding, “Yankees Go Home but Casey Stay.” Rosenblum wrote that almost all the Volunteers, even those who arrived afterwards, spoke of the U.S. intervention “with great bitterness.”
But with the fighting over, Rosenblum noticed some troubling signs about the relations between the Volunteers and the U.S. soldiers. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “of thirsty PCV boys ambling across the street for a 15¢ American beer at the army base or of lonely PCV girls dating GIs tends to create confusion in the Dominican mind about the autonomy and separate identity of the Peace Corps.” That problem would have been exacerbated, of course, if 1,500 Volunteers had arrived in the Dominican Republic.
The troops would not be a Peace Corps problem very long. The last U.S. troops departed in September 1966. The United States had succeeded in putting together a caretaker civilian government, acceptable to both sides, which paved the way for new elections. In those elections, held in May 1966, Joaquin Bellaguer, who had once served the Trujillo regime, defeated Bosch. The Johnson administration decided it was safe to pull out all the troops four months later.
It was easy for Lyndon Johnson to regard the Peace Corps as an instrument of his foreign policy. After all, Peace Corps operations were paid for by congressionally appropriated U.S. funds, and the officials who ran the Peace Corps served at his pleasure. He understood that the Peace Corps deserved some independence, but not enough to get in the way of what he regarded as patriotism.
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