Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  North Carolina’s governor in the late 1950s was Luther Hodges, the former top manager of Marshall Field and Company’s textile mills. Hodges’s genteel corporate liberalism toward racial integration had won the admiration of northern liberals. Hodges realized that to attract northern industry and to promote stable development in the South, the rural reactionaries’ stranglehold on the region’s economy and politics had to be broken. As in Latin America, a huge migration of whites and blacks from the countryside had occurred; for the first time in the South, cities with populations of over 10,000 were growing faster than were towns with fewer than 10,000 people. Pressure for social and political reforms was mounting from disfranchised African Americans. If social stability that was conducive to long-term investment was to be achieved, reform had better come soon. If it came too late, the South’s instability might be even greater, from either violence by white reactionaries or from social changes more fundamental than business leaders could accept. Jobs had to be found for black as well as white workers, and Hodges looked to the federal government, as well as to northern businesses, to provide them, giving added impetus to the civil rights movement. North Carolina industry, with a growing labor surplus, would become more eligible for Pentagon contracts under the Pentagon’s “set-aside” procurement contracts for areas with persistent labor surpluses.

  During Hodges’s tenure as governor, North Carolina received a large slice of the Pentagon pie. After Kennedy came into office, the state enjoyed substantial increases in Defense Department purchases, and military wages and salaries increased more than in any other state in the South Atlantic region.17 But the state lacked the industrial infrastructure to really cash in or to grow the way its leaders, including the Belk family of Charlotte, wanted.

  To attract northern defense contractors, including Rockefeller ones, Hodges pushed for the desegregation of workplaces, the rational integration of the countryside into urban industrial needs, and an upgrading of the higher educational system.

  Hodges’s image as a genteel older Southerner who took a moderate course on desegregation, coupled with his success, convinced Kennedy that Hodges’s appointment as secretary of commerce would reassure both business and the Senate that the new Democratic administration was neither rash nor antibusiness. With Hodges on his team, Kennedy hoped to get support for reforms in foreign as well as domestic policy, for it would be by the Cold War—particularly his performance in Latin America—that he would be judged.

  Kennedy still preferred elected governments in the Third World that offered some hope for land reform and economic progress beyond the stagnation of the old landed aristocracies’ dictatorships. Elected governments were not only more palatable to his tastes; they also offered a benefit any psychological warfare expert would covet: legitimacy. Hodges, who, as governor, had also faced landed aristocrats opposed to mobile and free labor markets, was enlisted in the cause.

  Like Nelson Rockefeller, Hodges urged support for Kennedy’s first foreign aid bill. The Alliance for Progress, Hodges argued, could help fulfill corporate objectives in Latin America. It could also help achieve the aims of North Carolina’s textile industries, especially in dealing with foreign competitors like Colombia. There was only one problem, the same problem that had confronted American businessmen for a century: Latin American nationalism, whether political or economic, had its own agenda for development.

  One objective of the American textile industry was to restrict foreign imports, a goal dear to Hodges’s heart. The problem was that it ran counter to the desires of foreign exporters like Colombia to broaden their markets, especially in the United States. Somehow, Hodges had to resolve this fundamental contradiction.

  Complicating his task were Colombia’s growing economic woes. President Alberto Lleras Camargo was particularly anxious because prices for coffee—Colombia’s major export—had fallen during 1960, thanks to the recession in the United States, Colombia’s biggest coffee market. As export earnings declined, Colombia’s continued high debt payments to American and European banks and bond holders triggered inflation in that country. Lleras Camargo feared that this economic situation would give impetus to rural guerrillas who were sympathetic to the Cuban revolutionary example and bolster the stature of the “peasant republics” that still survived in Colombia’s central Andes. What Lleras Camargo needed—besides friendly American markets for exports—was immediate assistance. A comprehensive economic confederation with U.S. allies in the hemisphere, along the lines outlined by his friend Nelson Rockefeller in 1960—backed by U.S. arms, Green Berets, agricultural technicians, engineers, and money—seemed like the answer.

  And here lay the solution to Hodges’s political dilemma. There was one American family he knew he could count on to help deliver what they wanted for Colombia, just as this same family had helped deliver for North Carolina: the Rockefellers.

  By the middle of 1961, the Rockefeller interests had big plans for Colombia. Since the 1950s, Nelson’s IBEC had been exploring the potential of Colombia’s Cauca Valley, directly west of the peasant republics. IBEC’s profit-making ventures would be complemented by programs operated by its nonprofit arm, the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA).18

  IBEC had brought together twenty companies and banks shortly after Nelson’s 1958 election, to form the Colombian Finance Corporation to invest in Colombian companies. In 1959, IBEC had set up industrial-development offices and insurance brokerages in Bogotá, as well as a Colombian investment company. It also expanded its poultry operations in the Cauca Valley, which was the source of much of the cotton used by mills in Medellín, Colombia’s fastest-growing city in the central Andes. Medellín had once been a major coffee exporter and now was a major site of textile manufacturing, ironically putting the city on a collision course with North Carolina’s textile plants. In the absence of a significant lowering of the U.S. tariff wall, some of the city’s troubled entrepreneurs would invest in a new, more lucrative export: cocaine.

  The Rockefeller brothers could not have anticipated this new cash crop or the tragic violence it would bring to Medellín—and both Colombia and the United States. But they had always maintained that industrial growth was impossible for Latin America unless impediments to more trade with the United States and Europe were removed. Colombia’s economic well-being depended on access to the giant U.S. market. Although they encouraged diversification beyond traditional exports, Rockefeller investments nevertheless had to take these exports into account in calculating Colombia’s debt-carrying capacity for financing this diversification.

  For this reason, Nelson and David continued to promote freer trade between Colombia and the United States, Nelson, through a proposal for an economic confederation for the entire hemisphere, and David, through his idea of a Latin American Common Market that would include the United States and Canada. Such a trade bloc could help force European and Japanese competitors to accept terms of trade more favorable to American exporters and investors, or threaten to lock them out. But achieving it meant applying pressure not only on Washington, but on Latin America. And pressure meant not only overt force, but its subtler, covert form that the Rockefeller brothers had used with such skill abroad—propaganda. This time, however, their target was not intellectuals, but businessmen.

  Nelson’s cousin, Richard Aldrich, IBEC’s vice president who sometimes did undercover work for the CIA,19 joined eight other men to plan assistance to Latin American business allies in the field of propaganda. Representatives of fifteen companies met with the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency in October 1960 to discuss “an organized counterattack” against the arguments of both communists and nationalists who were opposed to more U.S. holdings in Latin America. Out of these deliberations came an organizing group that set up the Latin American Information Committee (LAIC), which was formally introduced to the business world at a dinner on the following May 1. LAIC’s executive director was Enno Hobbing, who switched back and
forth between the CIA and Time/Life assignments.

  Colombia, LAIC found, had a “large, well organized and experienced group of [American] private businessmen” working there. The country was also representative of the rest of South America. It had industrial cities; its export income relied primarily on one crop; and, of course, it had “in recent times been the scene of unrest and of considerable communist infiltration.”20

  In search of a model laboratory for “nation-building” in Latin America, the Kennedy administration focused the twin eyes of counterinsurgency—liberal reforms and military operations—on Colombia. Here, unlike Ydígoras’s Guatemala, was a government unsullied with the reputation of being a CIA creation. Here, unlike Somoza’s Nicaragua, was an elected government billed as a democratic alternative to both a dictatorial past and a communist future. And most important, unlike Brazil or Argentina, here was a reliable ally, Nelson Rockefeller’s old friend Alberto Lleras Camargo, who had backed the invasion of Cuba and challenged his neighbors to do likewise.

  Kennedy planned to visit Lleras Camargo that December. At the same time, Hodges, whose Commerce Department saw the Alliance for Progress as a vehicle for exports by American businesses, was eager to have Colombia as a customer for the goods of his home state. With Rockefeller interests already on line to facilitate “freer” trade between the two countries, everything seemed to fall into place.

  More than goods would be offered from North Carolina, however. Green Berets and William Cameron Townsend’s missionaries were also ready for service.

  *In 1962, Colonel Frank Lindsay, former deputy chief of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, was made Itek’s president.

  26

  MIRACLES DÉJÀ VU

  BEHIND THE LORD’S CALL FROM NORTH CAROLINA

  William Cameron Townsend was in Mexico in the fall of 1961 preparing for a banquet to honor the biggest Mexican benefactor of the Summer Linguistic Institute (SIL), Aarón Sáenz, when he received the Lord’s call from North Carolina.

  The Colombian ambassador would be in Charlotte over the weekend as the guest of honor at the state’s first international trade fair. He was staying with Henderson and Ann Belk.

  Cam’s sixty-five years had not dimmed his zeal for opportunity. He had learned long ago, since his first “miraculous” encounter with Mexico’s President Lázaro Cárdenas a quarter century ago, not to hesitate when the Lord intervened on his behalf.

  “I’ll be on the next flight out!” he said. “Tell the Belks and pray!”1

  The Alliance for Progress was proving fertile ground for Cam’s efforts to spread SIL throughout the tribal world. Since President John F. Kennedy took office, Cam had been shuttling back and forth between SIL’s Peruvian jungle base and Latin American capitals that were signing on, in some cases reluctantly, with the Alliance for Progress: Lima, Quito, Brasília, and Mexico City Next would be Bogotá.

  When Cam arrived in Charlotte, he found a bustling new financial domain, one increasingly dominated by Rockefeller banking ties and marked by the conspicuous presence of a new arrival, Laurance Rockefeller’s Eastern Airlines.2

  Charlotte was Luther Hodges’s selection as the site for a much-needed public relations boost for the state and for his position as secretary of commerce. Through this fair, Hodges hoped to use the Alliance for Progress to promote North Carolina’s products in Latin America. His tenure as secretary of commerce certainly needed some face-lifting. Since his return from promoting the Alliance in Mexico, Hodges’s attempts to restore government control over the business-dominated Commerce Department and to steer economic aid to depressed areas like his own state had gotten him and Kennedy into trouble. Wall Street had enough concerns about the administration’s massive aid program to Latin America; it did not need a domestic Alliance for Progress as well. From the beginning, Hodges’s maverick style had worried financial interests who had dominated the Eisenhower administration’s business policies. “You will never hear from me,” Hodges said at the outset, “that this country should do this or that simply because business wants it. What is good for General Motors may, or may not, be good for the country.”

  Two of the business community’s leading lobbies—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers—likewise frowned on Hodges’s preference for federal aid to depressed areas and for federal involvement in investment planning. They viewed investment of capital and the planning of it as the businessman’s prerogative. But if there had to be such ideological heresy, they preferred having the program under the old Commerce Department, where they might expect to exercise traditional influence and gain information on the government’s plans through the department’s Business Advisory Council (BAC).

  Above all, they wanted to avoid a separate government agency dedicated to economic development, as preferred by Kennedy’s more liberal social planners and by minorities, who traditionally were kept out of the loop of information and decision making. Hodges was put in the difficult position of trying to assure big business that Kennedy was not antibusiness, while trying to allay suspicions within the administration that the Department of Commerce would continue to be the instrument of corporate executives in the BAC. This was a delicate balancing act, with the future of the Commerce Department and the question of its autonomy as an ostensibly nonpartisan government agency teetering first one way and then the other.

  First, Secretary Hodges challenged the self-perpetuating leadership of the council. The BAC was made up of 174 executives of the bluest blue-chip corporations. Hodges challenged the BAC’s access to the federal government’s economic secrets. With Kennedy’s blessings, he asserted his right to appoint new members to the BAC and demanded a change in its rule barring the press from meetings.

  New York’s Morgan-dominated financial establishment had looked on Kennedy’s candidacy with as much suspicion as it did Nelson Rockefeller’s, and for much the same reason: fear of the rich maverick who played outside established rules. Memories were still painfully fresh of a similar financial squire who had been imbued with noblesse oblige: Franklin D. Roosevelt. They saw Hodges’s power move as Kennedy’s.

  The BAC did eventually agree to meet under more liberalized press rules and to allow more small-business representation. But that was as far as it would go. Hodges’s attempt to prove the integrity of the Department of Commerce only united big business in opposition. The BAC deserted Hodges en masse over the summer of 1961, severing formal ties with the department and renaming itself simply the Business Council.

  It was left to Rockefeller ally C. Douglas Dillon to try his hand at damage control. The treasury secretary urged Kennedy publicly to distance himself from Hodges’s position and to seek a reconciliation. By September 2, the president was having dinner with the BAC. On October 13, he lunched with members again. A week later he addressed the BAC still again. But he remained unsatisfied with the New York establishment. According to Arthur Schlesinger, he mused on the paradox that American labor leaders, who he thought were often individually mediocre and selfish, belonged to a movement that usually took the responsible side of great public issues, while American businessmen, though better educated and more often individually enlightened, seemed almost backward as a group on public policy. He understood better Roosevelt’s attitude toward business and wished the Cold War were out of the way so he could openly debate business on the future of the country.3 Neither Kennedy nor Hodges could anticipate that their attempted reforms would stir such animosity within the Eastern Establishment or that Kennedy’s long-awaited opportunity to debate business openly would never occur.

  The president’s visit to North Carolina and Secretary Hodges’s imminent arrival for the trade fair were the talk of Charlotte by the time Cam Townsend arrived. But Cam had not come to see a fair. He was, as ever, SIL’s roving ambassador, the proverbial seeker of open doors and heaven-sent opportunities. On his first night in town, he dined at a local country club with Colombia’s ambassador, Carlos Sanz de Santamar
ía.

  Sanz was no stranger to the United States or to the Helio Couriers used by Cam’s Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS). In 1960, he had accompanied Lleras Camargo to the United States, backing his president’s request for arms, advisers, and military helicopters. A U.S. military survey team that was sent to Colombia had recommended Helio Couriers as cheaper, “versatile light aircraft useful for anti-guerrilla activities.” But it was illegal to use U.S. grants to Latin American countries for domestic police or army internal security. Therefore, the U.S. Department of State recommended that Lleras Camargo purchase the Helio Couriers outright.4 In those pre-Vietnam days of the Cold War, the United States was sensitive to any suggestion that it was backing Latin American dictators or carrying out military interventions by proxy.

  No Couriers were ever sold directly to the Colombian government by Helio Aircraft, according to the company’s records.5 That did not, however, rule out sales to Colombia through a CIA proprietary company like King Hurley or Air Asia or leasing Helio Couriers through a private American third party like JAARS. And the goal of the Helio Couriers’ projected use—repression of rural revolts—required that any transaction be clandestine.

  Sanz de Santamaría at first listened to Cam talk about SIL’s work only as a courtesy to the Belks. He was more concerned about winning the goodwill of this powerful family and their friends in textiles than he was about missionaries.

  “We import tobacco now from North Carolina and some other products,” Sanz had told a breakfast party thrown for him by Irwin Belk, “but we were invited here to see what else you have. Eighty percent of Colombia’s imports are from the U.S.… Right now, we and other South American countries are not importing as much from this country as possible.”6 And if he could not get tariffs reciprocally lowered (Colombia exported a lot of coffee to the United States), perhaps he could get investments and capital.