by Gerard Colby
It was in this political climate that Nelson attended meetings of the National Defense Council and the Inter-American Defense Board, where he listened, fascinated, to geopolitical predictions of a postwar rivalry between the superpowers.
Rockefeller was a powerful name, but in these circles only one among many. Even the president, in his need for wartime cooperation in 1941–1942, had been obliged to defer to business leaders, such as U.S. Steel’s Edward Stettinius, in their preference for a slow conversion to military production. Big business was like a giant ocean liner whose course could be turned only with time, but once done, plowed a mighty wake and carried most of America’s businesses with it. Gradually, the larger meaning of Welles’s replacement by Stettinius as Hull’s undersecretary of state became apparent. Hull was a politician, not a direct representative of business. Stettinius, with a permanent power base, would have considerable influence on the president.
This was borne out a few weeks after Nelson’s Pan American Society dinner. On May 29, without inviting or even consulting the United States’ Good Neighbors, Hull announced the opening of the Dumbarton Oaks talks with Britain, the Soviet Union, and China on organizing the United Nations. Was the United States abandoning the inter-American system? Hull had already rejected the proposal by Mexican Foreign Minister Ezéquiel Padilla for an inter-American conference to mend the growing breach because Hull had not wanted to give Argentina a forum. The Latin Americans felt taken for granted. As the rent in hemispheric unity widened, Hull’s prestige in Washington quickly took on water. Nelson’s, conversely, continued to rise.
Rockefeller’s CIAA railroads tapped resources of Latin America using Indian and mestizo labor.
Source: CIAA Files, U.S. National Archives.
Nelson now did not just jump the sinking ship; he helped sink it. He met with Hull on August 19 and again proposed a full boycott of Argentine goods.
Hull said no.
Nelson then cheerfully proposed an exactly opposite alternative.
“We must call a conference of foreign ministers of all the American republics, put the Argentine situation up to them and be guided by their joint decision.”
When Hull again refused, Nelson argued for consistency in policy and returned again to the impossible alternative of the boycott.
“I believe it would help rather than harm the Administration in the coming election.”21 Hull wasn’t buying it.
With Hull ensnared in the contradiction between the impossible and the unsavory, Nelson struck home. He went directly to Roosevelt, demonstrating both his antifascist credentials over Argentina and his own freedom, unlike Hull, to act on Padilla’s proposal for a conference to affirm hemispheric solidarity.
Nelson charged that Hull had failed to come up with a way of giving concrete support to those nations that might suffer reprisals if they broke relations with Argentina. Nor had he developed any alternative machinery for establishing an overall Latin American policy. Moreover, the organization of the department around tasks meant that programs took on an ad hoc nature, leaving the regional “big picture” ignored and authority fragmented.
Roosevelt was impressed. It was Nelson’s breakthrough in showing the president that he had administrative capacities that might be useful beyond the CIAA. When Nelson suggested that he put his critique in the form of a formal memorandum, Roosevelt nodded his consent.
Nelson’s six-page analysis must have been a shocking blow to Cordell Hull, especially when the president approved the criticism by this man almost half his age and with only four years of political experience. It was tantamount to a vote of no confidence. Hull submitted his resignation three weeks later. Roosevelt accepted.
By mutual agreement, Hull’s departure was not announced until after the November elections. His replacement, Stettinius, was Harry Hopkins’s candidate.22 So was the president’s choice for assistant secretary of state for Latin America: Nelson Rockefeller.
12
PREEMPTING THE COLD WAR
IN SEARCH OF NEW ENEMIES
Nelson’s rise to power was not greeted warmly in Washington. Returning from Haiti, where he launched a rubber project that would displace some 100,000 people and end in disaster,1 he found that a political chill had gripped the capital. Liberal Democrats had been disappointed that summer when Roosevelt bent to pressure from southern delegates to the national Democratic convention and dumped Vice President Henry Wallace for the more conservative Harry S. Truman. Now, after solidly trouncing Thomas Dewey in the general elections, Roosevelt gave his liberal followers another jolt by appointing conservative businessmen to the four top positions in the State Department. Nelson shrugged off liberal complaints and eagerly readied himself for his new position.
At just thirty-six years of age, Nelson was now a prime mover in the destiny of an entire hemisphere. Even before his confirmation, he had begun to act with astonishing decisiveness. After consulting Mexico’s Ezéquiel Padilla, he got Edward Stettinius and the president to agree to revive Padilla’s proposal for an inter-American conference of foreign ministers in Mexico City. By excluding Juan Perón, he explained, terms for Argentina’s reentry into the inter-American system could be worked out with the other countries. The only problem was convincing them to come. Some South American governments might be afraid of offending Argentina; others, without the spirit of Latin American solidarity, simply might not want to come at all.
Nelson raised the problem with Costa Rica’s ambassador, Rafael Oreamuno, a friend from his Inter-American Development Commission. Oreamuno’s solution was simple: flattery. Personal contact with the new assistant secretary, so rare during the Hull era, would delight the ambassadors of three key countries. The right-wing government of Chile had become more cooperative as Germany’s fortunes declined; Colombia and Peru were already reliable allies.
On December 21, one day after his confirmation, Nelson Rockefeller, without the knowledge of President Roosevelt, committed the United States to a fateful course. Hosting the four ambassadors at luncheon, he made his pitch for a conference that would exclude Argentina. When the men raised their fears of Argentine reaction, Nelson promised military aid. When the men raised their fears of a Bolivia-type revolution, Nelson promised more military aid. The transformation of South America into an armed camp dependent on the United States was now one step closer to realization.
By the time they got to dessert, Nelson had their approval for the conference’s agenda. He then trotted off to all the other ambassadors from Latin America. One by one, Nelson “gave each the feeling of having been consulted and of having contributed to the plan.”2 They all came on board.
Nelson had big plans for the inter-American conference, exactly the kind of plans the State Department was worried about: turning a sphere of influence into a military alliance. Roosevelt endorsed regional agreements within the framework of the U.N. Charter. But he hadn’t decided what to do about military commitments beyond mere promises of “support.” Rockefeller arranged for Roosevelt to talk to former President Eduardo Santos of Colombia, a so-called moderate liberal.
But not a true liberal. Santos was actually the leader of the right wing of Colombia’s Liberal party; as president, he had resisted social reforms
Roosevelt was pale and tired when he greeted Santos on January 9. With Rockefeller by his side, Santos brought up the subject of military commitments by appealing to Roosevelt’s Wilsonian liberalism. Recent U.S. military aid to Latin America, he argued, encouraged military dictatorships that were prone to adventures and border wars. “The best hope for the future lies in the idea of President Wilson for a mutual guarantee of borders. Do you think that you or Secretary Stettinius might mention such an idea at the Mexican conference?”3
Roosevelt, knowing that Latin American memories of U.S. Marine interventions could be stoked alive, was reluctant. But he liked the idea of order, world order, hemispheric order. He turned the tables on Santos. Why shouldn’t Santos’s own government introduce a resolution a
long those lines? If it did, the United States would go along.
“I believe Colombia might introduce the resolution,” Santos said, “but we probably would want to have Venezuela join with us.”
“This is a wonderful example of the spirit of cooperation in the Western Hemisphere,” Roosevelt said. “I think I will discuss the principle with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta.”
He turned to Nelson. “Will you follow up on this talk for us?”4
Nelson was only too glad to do so, but the State Department’s International Division got wind of what was afoot and objected. Was Rockefeller building a voting bloc for the founding conference of the United Nations, scheduled for May in San Francisco, and one tied into a military pact? That would be 19 votes added to western Europe’s 9, against the Soviets’ expected 3 votes, blatant overkill. The Soviets would quickly size up this maneuver as “ganging up” on them. Rockefeller’s maneuver could sabotage years of work in building a delicate but effective wartime trust between the great powers. It could destroy exactly what the president was hoping to achieve—a United Nations, made effective by continued postwar cooperation among the Allies.
But Rockefeller had never conceived that such cooperation was even possible. He had read J. Edgar Hoover’s feverish reports on suspected communist subversion in Latin America. The war had created an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue within Washington. As the Nazis faded as a plausible rationale for every Indian miners’ revolt or resistance to rubber roads cutting into their forests, Nelson began to perceive that Russian hands would replace those of the Germans. As early as 1943, his fear had grown so acute that even Adolf Berle, who was not immune to fits of paranoia, had to steady Nelson’s keel by warning him not to take seriously charges that communists were sabotaging the Mexican railroads.
Cooperation with communists in Latin America, who could be seen only as puppets of the Soviet Union, was difficult enough to accept during wartime. After the war, it would be impossible, and Nelson once said so to Roosevelt. He simply did not agree with Roosevelt’s opinion that the evolution of the Soviet and American economies could create enough common ground to make a working arrangement feasible in the world. “My feeling,” he told Roosevelt, “is that the liberal leadership of this hemisphere should be provided by the United States and that it is not in the interest of any American country to have the people look to or be led by a nation outside the hemisphere.”5 National sovereignty could be ignored if countries strayed toward accepting peaceful coexistence, much less socialism.
To the horror of the State Department’s International Division, Nelson took this vision with him to the inter-American conference in Mexico City as the official leader of the U.S. delegation. There was no one to stop him. His immediate superiors were with the president at Yalta.
At the outset, Nelson broke the rules of diplomacy with typical flair. He turned the flight to Mexico into a junket for his Latin American friends, personally chartering a plane to take them all down as a group to promote “togetherness.” It was the kind of spendthrift flamboyance both his grandfather and father frowned upon. The State Department saw it as a paternalistic breach of protocol. But to Nelson it was simply fun.
On February 18, their plane landed at Mexico City. No sooner had the diplomats settled into their rooms than Nelson sent word that they should be careful what they said because their rooms might be bugged, like his.6 Even certain tables at popular restaurants, he warned, were wired. Meanwhile, Mexican students began demonstrating in the streets against Argentina’s exclusion from the conference. An aura of intrigue settled over the conference, making Nelson’s Latin American friends from Washington even more psychologically dependent on his leadership.
TRIUMPH AT CHAPULTEPEC
That something new was happening in Washington—especially to the Good Neighbor Policy—was indicated by the unusual composition of Nelson’s delegation. The official leadership was virtually all Republican. Nelson had also diluted the State Department’s influence by insisting on including a fifteen-member advisory group of his powerful personal allies in Congress, business, and labor.
If there were any doubts as to the Americans’ line of march, they were dispelled during the first days of the conference at Chapultepec, the same palace where Townsend’s missionaries had once dined with then-president Cárdenas. The conference’s direction had been decided in advance. Most of the 180 resolutions that had been prepared by the twenty countries to promote industrialization and improve their terms of trade with the United States died in committee for lack of U.S. support. Cuba’s popular resolution to emphasize state supervision of foreign investments was throttled. Brazil’s similar resolution also languished on the table. Chile’s visionary “American Industrialization Plan” was consigned to oblivion.
Dominating the American delegation’s concerns was the worry that the Great Depression would return with the end of the war boom. The United States had plenty of ideas, workers, and products. What it needed was markets. Nelson was looking, he said, for “frontiers.”
Edward O’Neal, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, was even more candid about the political implications of all this expansion of the Monroe Doctrine. “Let us spread it all over, let us run it into China, if necessary, and turn it around into Russia.” The farm surpluses “will wreck our economy, unless we can find sufficient outlets in foreign markets to help sustain the volume of production.”7
With rare unanimity of opinion, Rockefeller felt free to insist on an Open Door to the markets of the world, including Latin America, with commensurate influence on foreign governments, while demanding that the Western Hemisphere be closed to that world for the almost exclusive benefit of American interests.
At Chapultepec, therefore, Latin America’s resolutions on tariff protection met an early death. Instead, the U.S. delegation championed the improvement of roads as commercial arteries and health, sanitation, nutrition, and food-supply programs that supported the construction of the roads and the mostly extractive industries they served—all programs on which Rockefeller’s CIAA had focused during the war. Chapultepec, Aztec for Grasshopper Hill, was living up to its name; the day of the locusts had arrived.
Rockefeller’s CIAA highways, built to serve the U.S. war effort, became springboards for industrial and commercial penetration of Latin America.
Source: CIAA Files, U.S. National Archives.
The impact that these roads might have on the health and land tenure of Indians of the Andes and the Amazon was ignored. Dismayed officials from the Inter-American Indian Institute were not given the opportunity even to present their concerns.
Accordingly, the Indianists were unimpressed with Nelson’s overgeneralized approach toward sanitation and health problems. “Similar general health measures have been recommended on numerous occasions at previous congresses, especially intended to benefit white or Ladino peoples,” they protested. “Rarely have suggestions been made to benefit Indians specifically. The result: thousands of Indian groups with no medical services.”8
NELSON’S LATIN AMERICAN JUNTA
As the conference proceeded, it became apparent that a small group of Latin Americans were acting regularly in consort with Rockefeller. Mexican Foreign Minister Padilla was the most prominent. Backed by the United States, Padilla’s election as president of the conference was unanimous. Ecuador’s Galo Plaza was another helping hand, along with Colombia’s Alberto Lleras Camargo. Both men were destined for even closer collaboration with Nelson as the presidents of their countries and secretaries-general of the Organization of American States (OAS); Lleras Camargo would even become a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Both men would likewise help William Cameron Townsend establish the Summer Institute of Linguistics in South America.
Adolf Berle was also there. After Nelson’s appointment as assistant secretary of state, Berle was given Ambassador Jefferson Caffery’s job in Brazil. On taking over the embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Berle initiated a shake-up of
personnel with Rockefeller’s “full support.”9
At Chapultepec, Berle joined Lleras Camargo and Rockefeller in drafting a resolution designed to bring Argentina back into the fold.
Perón’s popular base was unshakable, and any inter-American meeting or economic pact would be severely weakened by the absence of Latin America’s most industrialized nation. Moreover, there was always the threat of Britain reestablishing an economic beachhead in South America through Argentina if Washington did not restore relations. Using Britain’s war plight to take over her holdings in Latin America had been a Rockefeller strategy for years. There were “good properties in the British portfolio,” a CIAA aide noted. “We might as well pick them up now.”10
Argentina’s enduring nationalism was another consideration. Without U.S. restraint, it might get out of hand, inspiring similar declarations of economic independence throughout the hemisphere.
The resolution was almost an open invitation. All Perón had to do was declare war on a practically defeated Germany and demonstrate that he was eliminating Axis influence.
Still, Berle was worried. He steered Nelson out of the hotel, away from any of the delegates, and walked him to a small park. He then offered some wise advice.
“The war is almost over and we don’t need them,” he said of Perón’s government. “They are still pro-Nazi and public opinion in the United States is not going to accept them. This conference has been a great success. You’re now sitting on top of the world, so don’t do anything to change that situation. Your desire for a united front in the hemisphere is sound and it is right to try to achieve it. But I think it would be a political error to rush into any negotiations with Perón.”
Nelson mulled over Berle’s words. But the temptation for a great diplomatic victory was too great. “Thanks,” he replied, “I’ll think about it.”11 But he had already made up his mind. He would take the risk.