Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Now that the war was almost won, John Foster Dulles, a leader in the U.S. delegation, was adamant that the Wilsonian ideal of an ordered world be realized. “That letter might wreck the conference!” he told Nelson in a hastily convened meeting in Stettinius’s penthouse.

  Dulles’s anger shook Nelson. A powerful Wall Street lawyer, Dulles was a pillar of the Republican party. Moreover, since defending Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick during the Fundamentalist Controversy of the 1920s, Dulles had emerged as a leader of Presbyterian modernists and now served on the Rockefeller-backed Federal Council of Churches’ influential Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Being criticized for doing “a most dangerous and damaging thing” by a man Nelson’s father trusted and respected almost shattered Nelson’s confidence.

  “I didn’t write it,” he whined. “Van wrote it.”

  “It makes no difference. It was extremely unwise.”23

  A battle erupted among the American delegates at their regular Monday meeting. Harold Stassen, a Republican, spoke to the heart of the issue. The proposal “would gut the international power by emphasizing regional authority.” The first U.N. negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks had emphasized Roosevelt’s conception of a U.N. General Assembly backed by “Four Policemen”—the Great Powers—to prevent regional trade alliances from crystallizing into aggressive military pacts.

  For Nelson, U.N. oversight was an intolerable restraint on the United States’—and his—freedom of action. The military alliance he envisioned coming out of the Chapultepec conference had to be unhindered if it was to maintain the stability of governments with which he was friendly. Now that the United States’ war boom was about to end, he was anxious about “unsettled conditions in Latin America.”

  Dulles would have none of it.

  But Vandenberg was adamant, raising again the prospect of Senate rejection of the U.N. Charter. At an impasse, Stettinius looked over his shoulder at the ghost of Woodrow Wilson and requested a six-day recess to allow the United States time to resolve its internal crisis.

  Washington, meanwhile, was in a furor. On the day before, VE Day no less, Truman had suddenly suspended all lend-lease aid to the Allies, including the Soviets. This, too, was the work of Nelson’s ally, Joseph Grew. Grew had prepared the order, and the new president had signed it without even reading its contents.24 It was an obvious grab for power. Grew was conducting a Cold War against the Russians on three fronts: in Latin America through Rockefeller, in the Far East, and in Eastern Europe through a cutoff of supplies. Grew hoped this cutoff of supplies would discourage the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe and any Soviet move against Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea.

  As it turned out, Grew’s suspension of lend-lease aid was viewed as overkill and would lead to his ouster before the year was out. The gaffe also hurt Nelson. Grew had been Nelson’s sponsor with Truman. The erosion of Grew’s position put added pressure on Nelson to find some solution to the impasse over the Act of Chapultepec. Realizing that he “was the one everybody was sore at,”25 Nelson used the interim to seek help. In desperation, he invited Harold Stassen to dinner.

  After long hours, they worked out a twist. The “right of self defense,” accepted at Dumbarton Oaks, was embraced as the rationale for including, not excluding, the Monroe Doctrine and Act of Chapultepec in Vandenberg’s proposal.

  Everyone was happy, so Truman had little choice but to accept, although this reversal of a previous agreement not to set up regional military pacts would surely mean Soviet objections—if not a walk-out—to any United Nations’ blessing of the Monroe Doctrine. Britain realized this fact and told the U.S. delegation that it was firmly opposed. With Western unity crumbling, Rockefeller and Vandenberg finally conceded. The specific references to the Monroe Doctrine and the Act of Chapultepec were struck from what became Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, although “collective self-defense” was left in, buttressed later with key clauses permitting “regional action,” opening the door for both sides of the Cold War.

  The irony of the United States having to explain to Latin Americans why the interventionist doctrine they had historically resented could not specifically be included in the U.N. Charter was apparently lost on Nelson; the Cold War seemed to iron out all such wrinkles of the past. But he did note the Latin Americans’ bitterness at the exclusion of the Act of Chapultepec. Only Truman’s pledge to meet with them in Rio de Janeiro in August to finalize a military pact won them over to a unanimous vote of approval.

  THE FALL

  Nelson was an isolated man when he returned to Washington in late June. He had to content himself with a voice from the past. “They make us very proud and humble,” his father wrote of the praises he had received from some of the Latin American diplomats and some newspaper clippings. Junior had issued a press statement in April urging people to pray for the success of the conference. The old man believed that his prayers had been answered.

  Ezéquiel Padilla, Mexico’s foreign minister, had similar delusions of success. But he paid highly for his friendship with Rockefeller. On his return to Mexico City, he was fired in disgrace, the Mexicans feeling that he had sold out his country to the United States.

  Closer to the Rockefellers’ hearth and office, Nelson’s boss, Secretary of State Stettinius, was also replaced. Truman had decided to appoint his trusted old friend from South Carolina, James Byrnes.

  In August, Nelson finally got his first audience with Byrnes. The real issue now was the Soviet Union and Argentine communists. With Germany’s defeat and Hull’s resignation, the focus of Nelson’s concern had shifted from Perón to Argentine leftists. Nelson saw Perón as a means of controlling them.

  To Rockefeller’s horror, the new U.S. ambassador to Argentina, copper heir Spruille Braden, disagreed. As far as he was concerned, Perón was a menace to business. Braden had arrived in Argentina in May just as Perón was seeking labor’s support in the free elections he had promised Rockefeller. Perón pledged never to use the army to crush strikes. As a result, all but a handful of Argentina’s local business, industrial, and banking associations signed a denunciation against him. That was enough for Braden. To him, where labor marched, communism would follow.

  Nelson decided that a conciliatory speech criticizing Perón might allow him to slip through the noose. He arranged to give a talk to Boston’s Pan American Society, an audience of conservative heirs of banking and mining fortunes and a few young liberals. He sent a draft of his speech to Byrnes for approval with a note urging that they discuss it.

  “What is it you want?” Byrnes crisply asked Nelson.

  “I want to talk about Argentina,” Nelson said, but Byrnes cut him off.

  “Frankly, there’s no use talking. The President is going to accept your resignation.”

  Nelson had just been fired, yet he insisted that he was going to speak on Argentina anyway.

  “You’ll no longer be Assistant Secretary.”

  Nelson was angry. In that case, he announced, he could make any speech he wanted to as a private citizen and “tell the whole story.”

  Byrnes did not need a scandal the first thing in office. He decided that “the President wouldn’t accept Rockefeller’s resignation until after the speech.”26 Nelson delivered his prepared text and got the rave reviews he expected from the New York Times. But it was too late. Nelson had to go, despite a personal visit to Truman. “I told him I didn’t want to resign,” he later recalled. “I said South America was too important.”27

  But that was precisely why Nelson had to go. The Democratic administration actually agreed with Rockefeller’s policy toward Argentina and would continue it. The military pact envisioned by Rockefeller came into being at the promised Rio conference, although delayed for two years. Eventually, after the hemisphere was ushered toward the founding conference of the Organization of American States in 1948, it became clear that Rockefeller had been sacrificed to preserve his own policy. Disliked in the State Department, mistrusted by the public, and a Republi
can to boot, Nelson was expelled from Washington at a time when his departure would be widely misinterpreted as a stiffening of U.S. policy toward Perón.

  Nelson never got over it. The thought that he, too, could be expendable seemed unbelievable. Almost twenty years later, he would still remember his meeting with Truman as something of a shock, repeating quizzically to friends, “He fired me!”28

  13

  LATIN AMERICA’S FIRST COLD WAR COUP

  THE JUNTA REGROUPS

  Nelson thought of his firing as a temporary exile from Washington. The next day he returned to the Manhattan seat of his family’s empire and convened a meeting of the prewar Junta. The wise old men answered the call. But it was the Junta’s new members from the CIAA who had the most impact.

  The CIAA’s lawyer, John Lockwood, became Nelson’s personal legal counsel, serving in much the same capacity as Thomas Debevoise had done for Nelson’s father. Lockwood was conservative, a voice of caution that balanced Nelson’s persistent ambition and enthusiasm for adventures.

  Frank Jamieson, however, was the most influential, mainly because his journalist’s ear was well tuned to public opinion, and he shared Nelson’s ambition for himself. The former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping had been Nelson’s propaganda czar at CIAA during the war, overseeing the radio broadcasts and magazines that CIAA’s Publications and Information Division produced for Latin America. Under Jamieson’s watchful eye, CIAA became the first official propaganda unit of the U.S. government, before the State Department’s Office of Facts and Figures and, of course, long before the CIA’s Voice of America.

  He was also a seasoned political operator, having managed Charles Edison’s successful campaign for governor in New Jersey. By the end of the war, Jamieson had, in effect, become Nelson’s campaign manager, a role he would play until his untimely death in 1960. Jamieson viewed Latin America as Nelson’s personal asset in politics; hewn to the nation’s mounting concern over communism, the Americas could be turned into stepping stones for Rockefeller’s triumphant return to Washington. If Nelson could no longer act officially, his wealth put him in a unique position to act in a private capacity, perhaps even regain some of the philanthropic luster that his power plays in Washington had tarnished.

  Berent Friele was the third new luminary in the group. During the war, he had been Nelson’s most important field general, overseeing the CIAA’s largest operation in Latin America: Brazil. Now he represented the focus of Nelson’s development program for the hemisphere: again, Brazil. A stalwart ally of the war effort, Brazil offered none of the political liabilities associated with Perón’s Argentina. Its comparatively lower level of development could be turned to Nelson’s benefit. Brazil held enormous industrial potential, with untapped resources in the Amazon states and in Minas Gerais. São Paulo offered a solid and familiar financial base on which to build. It was the perfect site for a model demonstration program. The largest country in South America could hold sway over the future of the entire continent. It was a measure of the great Rockefeller power that Friele, an influential voice in his own right in Latin America’s business world, was willing to give up his seats on the boards of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) and A&P’s subsidiary, the American Coffee Corporation, to follow Nelson.

  Making Brazil the springboard for renewing Rockefeller’s fame would not be easy. Nelson had enjoyed great prestige in Brazil during the middle years of the war. His efficient, effective sanitation and health programs were the only real U.S. successes in the Amazon basin. In contrast to the U.S. Rubber Development Corporation, which was made inept by sluggish transportation and a top-heavy wage structure that offered little incentive to labor, the Rockefeller name had symbolized wealth and economic progress in Brazil, even national pride, as Nelson’s Museum of Modern Art gave world acclaim to Brazilian artists. But then the CIAA’s operations and U.S. wartime purchases began to wind down, just when Nelson started to champion Perón.

  That was hard to take. Brazilians had fought with the Allied armies in Italy. Their ships had been sunk by U-boats, often directed by clandestine German radios functioning out of Argentina. They had allowed Pan American Airways to replace German airlines and dominate their skyways. The CIAA’s “industrial development” projects had helped funnel large sums of U.S. government funds to subsidiaries of American firms. Brazilians supplied the U.S. war machine with a large percentage of its quartz, manganese, iron, coffee, and rubber needs. Their government had allowed thousands of Brazilian peasants to be indoctrinated by CIAA films and be transported to the Amazon to harvest rubber for American factories. As Friele had predicted to Nelson two years earlier, Brazilian confidence in Americans plummeted when U.S. plans for Brazil’s development were gradually abandoned as the war ebbed. A wave of indignation swept through the country. By the summer of 1944, the anger had not subsided; it was growing throughout Latin America. Washington’s honeymoon with Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas was over.

  Fortunately for Nelson, he still had two great assets in Brazil in August 1945. One was an economic asset: Standard Oil, which controlled the distribution of petroleum in Brazil. And access to oil, the Brazilians knew, was the foundation of industrialization.

  But even more important was a political asset: his close friendship with the new U.S. ambassador, Adolf Berle.

  OIL ON THE MIND

  Nelson Rockefeller had owed much of his one great success as assistant secretary of state—the Chapultepec conference—to Adolf Berle’s skillful diplomacy. Berle, in fact, played a central role in the conference’s outcome.

  Berle had one great bargaining chip: oil. Brazil’s thirst for oil had been at the bottom of Vargas’s eagerness to see Rockefeller’s Orinoco Inland Waterways project come into being. That project would have enabled the vast Amazonian interior to tap the rich Oficina oil fields of Rockefeller’s Creole Petroleum without running the gauntlet of the German submarines that were waiting off the coast. When that plan was scrapped by the Americans, Brazilian hopes centered on an oil strike at Lobato, in the state of Bahia, and reports of oil seepages in the lower Madeira River region of the Amazon basin. But the wartime shortage of spare parts and the dense jungle had made exploration impossible. Now that the war was over, there was only one source for such a large capital investment—the United States—and only one company that already had a stake in Brazil: Standard Oil of New Jersey.

  Until the war, Standard Oil had little interest in exploring for oil in Brazil. It had been happily refining and processing Venezuelan and Colombian crude and selling it to Brazil at inflated prices. After the war, however, Standard Oil began taking a harder look at Brazil. Various reports by the CIAA—and even one by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—declared that Brazil had huge oil potential. The CIAA had received reports of “seepages” throughout the Amazon basin. Along Brazil’s Madeira River, the land literally smelled of oil.1

  Following the Chapultepec conference, Brazilian oil preoccupied Berle. “The oil thing is on my mind,” he noted. “There is a good small field located in Bahia, there may be more oil up in the San Francisco Valley. There is undoubtedly a field in Paraná, but it will be long to explore. There is probably a great deal of oil in Amazonas, but a terrible job both of finding and getting it out.…”

  There was a catch. Berle knew that “if the Brazilians wanted oil fast they could simply open the country to exploitation by the private companies.… But that does something else besides get oil—and that something else is not too nice.”2 If a nation lost control over its oil, it would also lose control over its destiny.

  This was the dilemma confronting President Vargas: Should he depend on American capital and expertise to develop Brazil’s oil at the risk of relinquishing Brazil’s control over its most precious natural resource?

  Vargas’s nationalist officials were deeply suspicious of American oil companies, and for good reason. The presence of a Standard Oil man on the Rubber Development Corporation
’s staff and Berle’s visit to him in Belém were no accidents. Dr. Harvey Bressler was known to Nelson Rockefeller. He was an oil geologist who knew “more about the Amazon Basin than any American,” the CIAA’s John McClintock had told Nelson in 1942.

  Berle’s arrival as Brazil’s ambassador also was clearly no accident. Not only Brazil’s oil, but also state-owned enterprises came under the ambassador’s close scrutiny. Berle met with President Vargas and urged him to replace the Brazilian managing director of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, the company that ran the state-owned government iron-ore complex at Itabira, Minas Gerais, with an American. It was hard for Vargas to refuse. American banks had a lien on the complex’s financial structure through Export-Import Bank loans arranged by Rockefeller’s Inter-American Development Commission.3

  Vargas did not want a confrontation. He agreed to replace the manager and have Finance Minister Souza Costa go over Berle’s charges of financial mismanagement. In return for these concessions and the promise of crude oil from Itabira, Berle agreed to try to get more refined oil and coal to Brazil, promising to see about using ships that had been requisitioned for Perón’s Argentina.4

  But Vargas remained opposed to any foreign control over exploitation of any of the Amazon’s resources. Preserving Brazil’s economic autonomy had always been a priority. But now, even his hand-picked successor, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, seemed to have fallen under the Rockefeller spell. As minister of war, Dutra had secured Rockefeller’s loans and lend-lease military aid, and with them the power and prestige that came with the Pentagon’s buildup of Brazil’s armed forces.