Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  By now the foundation’s Cold War destiny was set in stone. A new crop of trustees, with decidedly political careers and personal ties to Nelson, John, or Laurance’s wartime activities, appeared.

  John J. McCloy had been appointed to the board in 1946. He had previously been assistant secretary of war and a senior member of John 3rd’s intelligence group, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC).

  Robert H. Lovett joined the foundation’s board in 1949. Formerly Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of war for air, he was Truman’s undersecretary of state from 1947 to 1949. Lovett did not resign when he returned to Washington in 1950 as deputy secretary of defense. Neither he nor anyone else on the board accepted that there might be any conflict of interest between the mission of the foundation and the mission of the Pentagon. Indeed, by then there was none.

  Also in 1949, Charles B. Fahs became head of the foundation’s division of humanities. He was a former OSS officer and had worked for the State Department in the Far East. For his assistant, Fahs chose another OSS veteran and former staff officer of the Board of Economic Warfare, Chadbourne Gilpatrick. Gilpatrick’s ties to the intelligence community were impeccable. He moved to the foundation directly from the CIA.17

  Finally, as if to seal the foundation’s marriage with the State Department, 1950 marked the election of the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Dean Rusk, to the board. Rusk’s sponsor, State Department Special Consultant John Foster Dulles, was elected chairman of the board.

  THE INTELLIGENCE FACTOR

  In the summer of 1950, there were few men in political life who had the independence of mind and the fortune to counter the prevailing wisdom of budget restraint and Atlanticist strategy and to advocate an aid program for the Third World.

  Nelson Rockefeller was one of those few. Of all who testified for the International Development Act, no one had more experience running health, education, and cultural programs as an intelligence-gathering operation and psychological warfare than he. Moreover, he had just returned from helping now-President Galo Plaza with an IBEC planning survey in turbulent Ecuador. However, the timing was bad. The American position in Korea was in a state of emergency. Despite the CIA’s warning of impending hostilities, General MacArthur had not taken precautions. Troops of the People’s Republic of Korea, exiled in the north since 1946, were defeating Syngman Rhee’s army. After Seoul fell, no one wanted to listen to Rockefeller talk about aid to Latin America—not congressmen; not the president; not the press; and, therefore, not the American people.

  Nelson was despondent. He would have remained so, had Latin Americans not inadvertently intervened, in the most shocking way, on his behalf.

  16

  THE LATIN ROAD TO POWER

  REVOLUTION RESURRECTS A CAREER

  Washington was unseasonably warm on the afternoon of November 1 as Harry Truman stripped to his underwear and crawled between the sheets of his bed in Blair House for a nap. The president had moved into the vice presidential residence two years before while the White House was being remodeled, and the Secret Service was not happy about it. The house was on a busy street, its ground-floor windows exposed to passing pedestrians, cars, and trucks. Despite uniformed White House guards in sentry booths and two agents with submachine guns behind the front doors, the house was a Secret Serviceman’s nightmare.

  That day, two neatly dressed men approached the house. Both carried weapons.

  Oscar Collazo, the taller of the two, had never fired a gun in his life. But that did not matter to him. He was ready to die if that was what it took to draw attention to what was happening in his homeland, Puerto Rico.

  Collazo was one of the thousands of Puerto Ricans who had come to the United States in the 1940s in search of a better life. Their island was not a happy place. Since 1898, Puerto Ricans had lived under the colonial domination of the Colossus of the North, the United States. Every aspect of their life—social, political, economic, and legal—came under the purview of North American colonial administrators. Judges were appointed by the White House; courts were conducted in English; and all appeals were relegated to the federal court in Boston, home of the earliest American investors in Caribbean fruit, sugar, and tobacco.

  By the late 1930s, fifty-one corporations, mostly American, controlled 249,000 acres, or 11.3 percent, of the island’s land. By World War II, another 13 percent of Puerto Rico’s arable land was under the control of the Pentagon for use as military bases. Meanwhile the CIAA-backed Puerto Rican Industrial Development Corporation, organized in 1942 under a bright young man named Teodoro Moscoso, tried feebly to reduce unemployment by building a few small factories to produce cement, paper, glass, and shoes.

  With peace and cutbacks in U.S. funding came economic ruin and political unrest. More than 400,000 Puerto Ricans had fought in World War II in U.S. uniforms; in return, many hoped for independence. In 1945, responding to this sentiment, the Puerto Rican legislature formally requested that “the colonial system of government be ended” and that “free and democratic elections” be held. The following year, as the State Department pressured its European allies to end formal colonial rule and erect a Free World as a bulwark against Communist criticisms, President Truman named a Puerto Rican as governor of Puerto Rico for the first time; the next year he signed a law permitting the first popular election of that office.

  Luis Muñoz Marín handily won the governorship, promising prosperity from a renewed economic alliance with the United States called Operation Bootstrap.

  Many Puerto Ricans were not convinced the new industries would find jobs for displaced farmers, seasonal sugar plantation workers, and ruined craftsmen, and voted with their feet. The migration to New York became a flood; in 1940, fewer than 70,000 Puerto Ricans lived on the U.S. mainland; by 1950, the number was 300,000. One of the Nationalists who had left was Oscar Collazo.

  Collazo had been elected president of the Nationalist party’s branch in New York City, when, in late April 1950, as the Korean crisis was mounting, an urgent message arrived from Nationalist headquarters in San Juan. The secretary of defense had just visited U.S. base commanders on the island. The Nationalist headquarters claimed that the secretary had instructed the commanders to insist that Governor Muñoz Marín repress the Nationalist party and arrest its leaders or, if that was politically unfeasible, assassinate them. Whether true or not, Collazo took this as a real possibility. The immediate stakes were high for the United States in Korea, and American lives—and objectives in Asia—hung in the balance. Troops from Latin America would be needed, and resistance in Puerto Rico was no example to set for the hemispheric alliance.

  Over the next six months, tensions rose steadily on the island. The Nationalists charged that while Muñoz Marín was shedding the trappings of political colonialism, Moscoso’s Operation Bootstrap was taking Puerto Rico into deeper economic neocolonialism; Muñoz Marín’s proposed commonwealth status, they believed, would end all hopes for national sovereignty.

  If low wages and fewer labor rights were too high a price to pay for continued political domination by the United States, the drafting of Puerto Rican youths to fight in Korea seemed intolerable. The Nationalists had succeeded in getting Puerto Rico’s legal status placed on the agenda of the scheduled 1951 meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), the inter-American alliance on which the Pentagon was hoping for reinforcements for the Korean War. In doing so, they also succeeded in rousing Washington’s wrath.

  On October 27, just as Washington learned that Chinese troops had entered the Korean War, police began arresting Nationalist leaders in Puerto Rico. Demonstrations and armed revolts erupted in cities and villages across the island following a police raid on the farm of the mother of Nationalist party leader Albízu Campos that left three leaders dead.

  In response, battalions of U.S.-trained National Guardsmen led by tanks thundered through villages and towns, easily blasting away Nationalist resistance with bazookas, cannon, and mach
ine guns. The fighting would rage for six more days, the casualties reaching into the hundreds, before the revolt was crushed.

  In Manhattan, Collazo resolved to act. Angry that the U.S. press ignored the mass arrests and blandly repeated the White House’s claim that the revolt was “civil war,” rather than an anticolonialist revolt, Collazo thought that only a direct action could expose the U.S. role and stop a slaughter.

  With another Nationalist, Griselio Torresola, he bought railroad tickets to Washington. The tickets were one-way; neither man expected to return alive.

  President Truman was napping upstairs when he heard gunshots in the street below. Collazo had taken the lead in drawing the guards’ fire by launching the assault. As he did, Torresola attacked the west sentry booth, unloading his gun into two guards and racing up the steps to the front door of Blair House. But a guard, dying, squeezed off a shot, killing Torresola. A volley of gunfire cut down Collazo. Truman watched it all from an upstairs window.

  As soon as Nelson Rockefeller heard of the assassination attempt, he wired the White House of his concern for Truman’s safety. It was the kind of personal touch Harry Truman appreciated.

  Truman now took another look at Nelson. On the day the insurrection had begun, Nelson had been recommended for appointment as chairman of the mandated Public Advisory Council for the Point IV Program.1 The recommendation languished in the limbo of the State Department’s bureaucracy. But on November 22, Undersecretary of State James Webb, by 1952 a director of Laurance Rockefeller’s favorite jet-fighter manufacturer, McDonnell Aircraft, advised Truman to appoint Nelson chairman of the International Development Advisory Board (IDAB). This time, Truman agreed.

  For once, Nelson played a cool hand. Even though this was his first chance in five years to come out of the cold, he did not immediately accept the appointment. He wanted more; he wanted a mandate to make a broad study of foreign aid, beyond technical aid and beyond Latin America.

  Nelson’s experience as a successful foreign-aid entrepreneur was too valuable to risk losing. With the Korean War raging and the insurrection in Puerto Rico still smoldering, Truman needed the Republican heir on board. He agreed to the study, permitting Nelson to select his own staff so a report could be ready by the following February.

  Nelson knew just the people to put together the report, and just the place: Grandfather’s old town house on West Fifty-third Street.

  THE ARCHITECT OF FOREIGN AID

  It was like a homecoming. Many of Nelson’s cronies were back, along with some new blood. Louis Strauss, Laurance’s new adviser in Room 5600, was the most important face in the group. He filled the vacuum left by many of Junior’s deposed Old Guard, charting an investment course that led beyond oil to arms and energy industries, particularly nuclear energy.

  Nelson benefited directly from Strauss’s expertise. He used Strauss to negotiate a renewal of Rockefeller Center’s lease with Columbia University. He also drew on Strauss’s knowledge of banking for his IDAB report. In Strauss, Nelson found the vision to move the family fortune away from oil and banking into the new high-tech industries, and he hoped to integrate this move into the global scheme IDAB was formulating. It was simply Nelson’s way of putting capital to “good use.”

  In this larger sense, Nelson was searching for meaning. He hoped to strike a balance between the private and public sector in foreign aid, the private sector taking what was profitable, the public, what was necessary. He strove to find an approach toward development that integrated capital, government, and labor into a unified Cold War strategy.

  Nelson’s report for the IDAB, Partners in Progress, gave the technical-aid people what they wanted—a recommendation for $500 million. Predictably, Nelson wanted more, including a doubling of the $1 billion then invested each year by American corporations in the Third World, U.S. taxpayers’ assumption of losses incurred by American businessmen when foreign currencies fell in value, an International Finance Corporation to modernize methods of marketing securities to local elites and facilitate corporate investments, bilateral tax and commercial treaties, and exemptions from income taxes on all corporate earnings abroad.

  Finally, Nelson wanted all foreign-aid programs, including the Marshall Plan, centralized under a single agency, which he called the Overseas Economic Administration. He defended all these proposals by beating the drum of the Cold War. “The issue really is … economic development versus economic subversion.”2

  These maps in Partners in Progress, the presidential report issued in 1951 by IDAB under Rockefeller’s leadership, emphasized the importance of Latin America and other underdeveloped areas as sources of resources for U.S. corporations during peacetime as well as during crises such as the Korean War.

  Source: Nelson Rockefeller, Partners in Progress: A Report to President Truman by the International Development Advisory Board (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company Publishers, 1951).

  Linking all these proposals was Nelson’s renewed drive for regional military pacts. Countries’ receipt of U.S. aid would be conditional on their joining Washington’s local military alliance: “We should also expect the Administrator to give priority to those nations cooperating with the other free peoples in mutual defense against aggression.”3

  This administrator would rule over a new International Development Authority that would centralize all foreign aid programs. The central administration in Washington would operate under contract with the World Bank.

  It would have made Grandfather’s head spin. No one doubted whom Nelson had in mind for the administrator.

  Nelson’s blueprint reached across oceans, even to the oil-rich Middle East. Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates Valley, properly irrigated and fertilized, could “absorb the 750,000 Arab refugees from Palestine, at present the gravest source of unrest in the Middle East.”

  The Amazon was claimed to have a “2,000 mile long stretch of fertile valleys and plateau land,” which could “open up a new major source of food for the entire Continent, as well as a home for settlers from the most densely populated areas of Western Europe.”4

  Many Democrats recognized in Nelson’s proposal for another superagency an attempt to reincarnate the CIAA, only worse: independent of the State Department and with global economic authority. It would even absorb Averell Harriman’s Economic Cooperation Administration, the famous Marshall Plan in Europe. Harriman would not even let Nelson personally hand in the report to Truman. He delivered it himself, looking every bit like an undertaker bearing his wares.

  Nelson was cheered by a note from the president a few days later stating how impressed he was and summarizing the report’s salient points. But Nelson could not shake off the suspicion that Truman had not even read the report, much less drafted the letter. He knew how easy it was to get an overworked president’s signature.

  His later suggestions that Harriman sabotaged any serious consideration of the report were unfair.5 The report was circulated widely within the administration. The problem was that no one liked it. Many took it as another Rockefeller grab for power.

  Confronted by stony silence from the Administration, Nelson was frantic at the possibility of another exile. He swung to the right, putting more emphasis on the military aspect of foreign aid. He decided to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was considering the Mutual Security Act. It was his last chance, and he came to the Hill with a platoon of aides and a prepared statement. His performance was vintage Rockefeller. He spoke authoritatively as aides propped up huge charts showing a growing gap since 1899 between the U.S. share of the world’s production of industrial goods and its share of the world’s known raw materials.

  In the postwar era, he explained, with the Soviet Union still rebuilding and the industrial strength of Europe not yet recovered (despite the Marshall Plan), the United States was producing 50 percent of the world’s industrial goods, but only 33 percent of its raw materials. “The question is from where do we get the raw materials we import? The answer is that 73 percent o
f our needs for strategic and critical materials comes from the underdeveloped areas.”6

  Rockefeller identified the Third World as the source for most of the manganese and antimony used by American companies to, respectively, toughen steel and manufacture medicines. Latin America alone supplied all the antimony imported into the United States and 22 percent of the manganese, a percentage that would soon grow as huge manganese deposits in Brazil’s Amazon and western Mato Grosso frontier were mined by Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel.

  Source: Partners in Progress.

  Military alliances, such as those that grew out of the Act of Chapultepec, offered only one side of the United States’ ability to wage war, he noted. The other side faces within, toward the people who produce these resources for export to the United States. And here was where the human side of the face of Mars had to be shown. Nelson turned to the Amazon for his key example. “For instance, you could not get rubber out of the Amazon during the last war because of disease, sickness and lack of food.… There is an interrelationship between all these factors, particularly in the underdeveloped areas of the world.”7

  And to coordinate the necessary aid projects, you need an administrator to oversee a unified Overseas Economic Administration.

  It was his last appearance on the mutual-security bill. Nelson’s pitch for his own agency was at loggerheads with the administration’s plans. Worse, no one with memories of Nelson’s maverick style wanted to deal with him again. By the end of October, he realized the fight was over. He would not be appointed to head the new aid agency. To save face and to claim that his job was done, he made an appointment to hand in his resignation.