by Gerard Colby
But Nelson had one thing Donovan did not: friends in the Democratic party who were in the president’s inner circle. These friends persuaded Roosevelt to get some more opinions.
Adolf Berle was only too happy to give his. Berle believed, with some cause, that Donovan was a usurper of power, including his own as founder of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence.
Berle enlisted the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who threw his formidable weight behind Nelson. At Berle’s suggestion, Roosevelt had given Hoover power to establish a “Special Intelligence Service” that would extend FBI activities throughout Latin America.
Donovan never really had a chance. Roosevelt acceded to the demands of vested interests, including Nelson’s domain over psychological warfare. “I continue to believe that the requirements of our program in the [Western] Hemisphere are quite different from those of our programs to Europe and the Far East,” the president wrote Donovan. “In order that information, news and inspirational matter going to the other American republics … may be carefully adapted to the demands of the Hemisphere, it should be handled exclusively by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in cooperation with the Department of State.”5
Donovan did not talk to Rockefeller for two years.
This was the last serious challenge to Nelson Rockefeller’s power over Latin American affairs during the war. Donovan would have to content himself with control over the intelligence and paramilitary operations in the war theaters through the newly created Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
The OSS’s Latin American Division was restricted to passing on information on Axis sympathizers to the FBI and the CIAA for them to follow up in their counterintelligence and economic warfare programs or financially supporting CIAA’s propaganda efforts.
THE BUSINESS IMPERATIVE
Of all U.S. agencies, the CIAA may have been the most prepared when war actually came. Throughout Latin America, the CIAA team was headed by efficient business executives. With their hands already on the levers of local power, such businessmen facilitated the CIAA’s transition to wartime operations. But Nelson paid a price for this readiness: He had already gained a reputation for being politically too timid in his economic programs, too oriented toward American businesses and not enough toward the economic needs of the countries in which they functioned.
“Most problems,” one CIAA staff member remembered, “were approached from a business point of view at first. They reflected a viewpoint … that you mustn’t do anything to disturb business. Whenever anybody had a new idea, Rockefeller’s first reaction was to ask whether it would hurt business—not his own personal business, mind you, but the business community generally. Only Pearl Harbor changed all that.”6
Rockefeller’s CIAA influence over Latin America’s press during World War II was extensive.
Source: CIAA Files, U.S. National Archives.
The accusation was untrue. Nelson was just as pro-business after Pearl Harbor as before. In fact, the CIAA became one of the largest and most glamorous bureaucracies in Washington, with art exhibits, university professors, dancers, singers, and authors touring in almost every country in the hemisphere, coordinated by branch offices in every U.S. embassy in Latin America.
At first glance, the programs appeared merely to emphasize the need for cultural ties. Behind this concern for cultural ties, of course, was business. Nelson, who initially was told that his annual budget would be about $3.5 million, had spent $140 million by 1944. He could have never gotten approval for such expenditures if his activities were only the cultural events most people saw. Underpinning these activities was a hidden economic agenda: drawing Latin America into the economic matrix of the war-supplies programs being run by corporate leaders.
The “coordinating committees” that the CIAA set up in Brazil and elsewhere were “composed of the biggest businessmen,” a State Department official complained. “They have very definite ideas as to what our general policy should be and in general their ideas have been the most reactionary.”7
Josephus Daniels was equally worried.
“I believe,” he wrote Roosevelt, “that entrance into this war by the United States would witness the return of the forces of privilege in control of our government, as occurred after the war of 1914–1918, and all the reform measures which have been obtained at a great price will be dethroned, … with monopoly strongly entrenched in business, manufacturing, finance and government.”8
Perhaps more than anyone, Nelson Rockefeller represented those forces. Besides assistants from the immediate Rockefeller financial group, CIAA’s top positions were filled with captains of industry like financier and movie producer John Hay Whitney; Texas cotton king Will Clayton (who worked with CIAA’s Raw Materials and Commodities Division); and Otis Elevator’s exports manager, Percy Douglas. Business expertise came not only into the CIAA, but out of it as well. Assistant Coordinator John C. McClintock, for example, helped United Fruit run its vast plantations in Latin America after the war, often serving as a liaison with the CIA. Investment banker Paul Nitze was director of the CIAA’s financial division; representing Nelson on the Board of Economic Warfare gained him expertise in metals and minerals purchases that he later took to the War and State departments as an armaments expert.
Nelson’s four brothers were fully supportive, particularly Laurance, who was always Nelson’s closest ally in both personal and business affairs.
As in so many other things since childhood, Laurance was, in a sense, Nelson’s junior partner. By devoting himself almost exclusively to investments, he became Nelson’s arm in the business world. Laurance shared Nelson’s interest in venturing beyond the family’s traditional preoccupation with oil. In 1938, he made the first modest move by his generation to diversify the Rockefeller fortune, joining a syndicate being organized by World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker to purchase Eastern Airlines from the Du Pont interests. Laurance put only $10,000 into the venture pool, but it was the first step toward eventually becoming Eastern’s largest stockholder.
Laurance learned from Nelson and other sources the importance that aviation would hold for penetrating the interior of South America. So with another $10,000, he backed an engineer named James S. McDonnell. McDonnell was gearing up for production of a newly designed warplane in anticipation of orders from the War Department.
Laurance by then could see both Nazis and profits approaching over the horizon. Wanting to take advantage of opportunities created by the void of British capital and the British sale of corporate holdings in Latin America, he took an air tour of South and Central America in March 1941, after which he bought a controlling interest in 1.5 million acres of prime agricultural land on the Magdalena River in Colombia. Laurance’s interests ranged from harvesting rich mahogany timberlands to building a hotel on the projected Pan-American Highway to raising cattle,9 complementing Nelson’s own newly acquired ranch in Venezuela, Monte Sacro, once owned by Simon Bolivar.
But it was in aviation that Laurance’s entrepreneurial passions melded most directly with Nelson’s political designs for Latin America—and into direct confrontation with German corporate expansion in Latin America.
THE SECRET WAR FOR THE SKIES
In April 1939, when Adolf Berle was gathering his forces to “clear out” the German airlines from Latin America, Laurance Rockefeller was invited to lunch by Robert W. Johnson, founder of Johnson & Johnson drug company. In itself, there was nothing unusual about a corporate official meeting with one of the Rockefeller boys. But what Johnson had to say to Laurance was.
Johnson & Johnson did a large business in South America. Its greatest competitors were German companies, particularly Bayer. Like most drug companies, it depended on the Amazon to supply most of the plants used in the drugs it manufactured. It also had two manufacturing subsidiaries in Brazil and Argentina, run with army-like precision by a West Point graduate with a penchant for intelligence gathering named John Caldwell “J. C.” King.
Johnson w
as worried about reports of a growing German corporate presence in Latin America. German airlines had greatly increased their trunk and local services in Latin America. Recognizing that Latin America could become a source of raw materials second only to southeastern Europe, Berlin had spurred an enormous growth of trade. Latin Americans had found this trade a welcome relief from the fall in Anglo-American purchases during the depression. By 1940, many Latin American countries were selling twice as much to Germany as Germany sold to them.
The Good Neighbor Skyway, promoted by the Rockefeller-backed Inter-American Escadrille’s 1940 flight around Latin America, had objectives beyond those pushed in this map—airplane sales and tourism. Among the hidden goals were the creation of local aviation clubs with ties to American aviation companies and sympathies for the United States, the replacement of German corporate influence over Latin American aviation, and the integration of Latin America into the United States’ hemispheric air defense system and the Allies’ global air supply system.
Source: Rockefeller Archive Center.
German airplanes were among the more expensive finished goods sold to Latin America. These sales helped redress Germany’s trade deficit with the hemisphere while increasing Latin American dependence on German technology and parts. It also allowed the Nazis to score propaganda victories.
For this reason Johnson had revived a little-known organization called the Inter-American Escadrille, a trade association of American airline executives promoting the expansion of civil aviation in Latin America. Founded in 1934, the Escadrille had floundered until 1939, when the outbreak of the European war opened a window of opportunity for American companies seeking some way to stop growing German competition in the hemisphere’s skies.
Johnson outlined a plan to send an airplane on tour of Latin America to boost the growth of civil aviation with ties to American aviation. As a director of Eastern Airlines, would Laurance help with an endorsement?
Laurance did more. He joined the Escadrille’s board of directors, which soon emerged as a powerful lobby. Adolf Berle had already taken the initiative against the German airlines. By 1942, Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil would remove Germany from South American skies. In its place would be American, or American-financed, airlines, including Pan American Airways, Lloyd Bolivian Air, and Avianca.
What made smooth transitions of ownership practical was the intensive training of Latin American pilots, technicians, and managers inspired by the Inter-American Escadrille. And behind this training was the Rockefellers.
On March 5, 1941, Nelson smiled for photographers as he shook hands with General Frank McCoy of the Foreign Policy Association and other members of the crew before the Escadrille plane left Washington for Latin America.
The trip was a publicist’s dream. Everywhere they stopped, the Escadrille team was toasted by local government officials and executives of American companies doing business there. Air clubs were formed into “wings,” with each country’s chief of state named honorary chairman. At a reception in the home of a vice president of an American gold mining company in Nicaragua, glasses were raised to the health and happiness of “Frank [Roosevelt] and Tacho [Somoza], the two champions of inter-American solidarity.” The toasts were always the same, whether it was Ubico of Guatemala or Camacho of Mexico, and they all created an atmosphere conducive to the expulsion of German companies.
Nelson appropriated $50,000 to help bring hundreds of Latin American students to the United States to be trained as pilots, mechanics, and engineers. The air forces of Latin America were integrated into a coordinated coastal defense plan worked out by the War Department at its new Pentagon headquarters in Washington.
In 1945, amid State Department charges that the Escadrille was being used as a “high pressure group to sell airplanes”10 to Latin America, Nelson ceased all CIAA funding. But then the job was complete.
Laurance, resigning from Escadrille’s board to accept a commission to help run the navy’s aviation buildup and later oversee aircraft production in California, was candid. “The work of the Escadrille has been assisted by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and other government agencies and now seeks the cooperation of manufacturers who have an interest in the post-war market for United States aircraft products in Latin America.”11
Beyond testimonials, the Escadrille’s officers accrued nothing. The program, abandoned to its boosters, quickly died. Meanwhile, some leaders of Escadrille’s local country “wings” returned from training in the United States to work for the local subsidiary of Pan American. For it would be Pan Am—and Laurance Rockefeller’s Eastern Airlines in Puerto Rico and Mexico—that would reap most of the harvest of Latin America’s skies.
WINGS OVER THE AMAZON
The vast Amazonian heartland of South America would also be harvested. One of the glaring problems the Escadrille’s flight revealed in early 1941 was the absence of airfields. In addition, crews dreaded the jungle, with its boa constrictors, piranhas, jaguars, and “fleas that crawl right into the flesh under the skin and raise young ones there.”12
But their greatest fear was the silent, unseen presence of tens of thousands of armed Indians roaming beneath the endless green canopy.
The greatest of the jungle’s known natural resources was rubber. What had once built fortunes (and an opera house) in the middle of the jungle had, over the past thirty years, suffered a steep decline after Amazonian seeds had been smuggled out of Brazil to British plantations in the Far East. Now, with the war, these British plantations had been overrun by Japanese troops, and the Amazon’s abandoned wild rubber trees were once again in demand. Washington hurriedly set up the Rubber Reserve Corporation and assigned Nelson Rockefeller the task of ensuring safe, healthy, and thereby productive working conditions for armies of harvesters.
Of all the rubber-bearing countries whose borders melted into the Amazon’s Green Hell, Peru had rulers with seemingly the least antipathy toward American ambitions. The restlessness of Peru’s Quechua Indians in the American-owned silver, zinc, and copper mines and the impoverished villages of the Andes required President Manuel Prado to find some solution to his country’s pressing economic problems. He believed that he found it in the Amazon frontier. Not only did the Amazon hold rich reserves of rubber. Here also were some of the world’s largest stands of timber that, if cleared, could end Peru’s dependence on foreign suppliers for 95 percent of her lumber.13
But, above all, here was oil. In 1939, oil was struck at the Ganso Azul (Blue Goose) Dome near Pucallpa, a small town on the Ucayali River, a tributary of the mighty Amazon. Prado, who hailed from a powerful Lima banking family, dreamed of a new frontier of farms and subterranean riches sending back oil, cereals, beef, and even leather from a tanning industry built out of the jungle’s deer, peccary, and alligators. All he needed was a road across an Andean mountain range averaging 13,000 feet high.
Conquering the Amazon was not a new dream for Peru’s rulers. It had already inspired a war with Colombia in a futile effort to seize that country’s strategic (and only) port on the Amazon, Leticia. Another more successful war had been fought in 1941 with Ecuador over jungle believed to cover oil. But oil at the Ganso Azul field was not mere conjecture. It was real. And Prado knew that it was the only proved source of petroleum in the entire Amazon basin. It would be needed for any rubber program that the United States launched in the Amazon, including one in Brazil.
The only thing standing in Peru’s way was roads—there weren’t any. Prado’s predecessor, dictator Oscar Benavides, understood that “without roads, commerce is asphyxiated, industries lead an anemic existence, the farmer lives under constant worry about the fluctuations of foreign markets, because for him the internal market is inaccessible.”14 Prado agreed, but he added a new twist in their direction, pointing them east instead of west, to the Amazon, the new frontier. He had only to get the Americans, who already had $81.5 million in direct investments in Peru and owned another $54 million worth of Pe
ruvian bonds,15 to build his road to the Amazon.
On January 21, 1942, Nelson Rockefeller received a note from President Roosevelt about Peru. The president wanted the United States to assist the development of Peru’s economy and set up cultural exchanges.16 Rockefeller replied that the CIAA was contemplating a bilingual language project through the Peruvian-American Association.17 Before the year was out, Nelson would also arrange funding for a new trans-Andean highway to Pucallpa, passing within fifteen miles of the Ganso Azul oil field, to which a service road was built.
Peru had already agreed in principle to stimulate rubber production. Now Prado agreed to sell all Peru’s surplus rubber and allow the U.S. Rubber Reserve Corporation to launch a $1.2 million program to increase the production of wild rubber. In May, Prado authorized U.S. construction of an airport at Iquitos, the Amazon’s last deepwater port capable of handling oceangoing ships. To organize the collection of rubber, the Peruvian Amazon Corporation was founded.
Now all that remained was to find some way of dealing with the Indians who stood in the way. One organization was already becoming known in Lima, having been promoted by Mexico’s ambassador to Peru, Moisés Sáenz.
Its name was the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
9
THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT
FORGING THE LINGUISTIC WEAPON
Washington was a blur of bustling uniforms in 1943 when Ken Pike arrived at CIAA offices carrying his mentor’s dream of an Amazon conquered for Christ. Cameron Townsend wanted the young linguist to go to Peru to convey his vision of Amazonian tribes pacified by the Word of the Bible. The American Bible Society had offered Pike the perfect opportunity by asking him to do a field survey of Indian languages in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. But Pike, doubting his own abilities, had hesitated—until Uncle Cam insisted.