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A Thousand Days

Page 22

by Arthur M. Schlesinger


  The showdown came over the interpretation of the Bolivian revolution of 1943. The Latin American reports, faithful to the current party line, described the MNR uprising against a conservative, pro-Allied government as a simple pro-Nazi putsch. It seemed more complicated than that and, reinforced by talks with Latin Americans around Washington, I wrote about it rather as a social-revolutionary explosion against intolerable economic conditions and a government dominated by the owners of the tin mines. The chief of the section protested; and I was instructed thereafter either to use the reports from the Latin American desk or nothing at all. This decision was made on orthodox bureaucratic grounds, for obviously order could not be maintained if the editor of the weekly bulletin were free to second-guess the experts. However, I had the eventual satisfaction of knowing that Maurice Halperin, the chief of the Latin American section, was indeed a member of the Communist Party who, after the war, took refuge behind the Iron Curtain.

  This immersion in hemisphere affairs called my attention to the conspicuous omission of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. Roosevelt had, of course, wrought a revolution in hemisphere relations. His affirmation of ‘nonintervention’ and of the juridical equality of the American republics, as well as his sponsorship of the New Deal at home, had disposed Latin America for the first time to trust United States leadership. The evident concern of Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Adolf Berle and others had created bonds of confidence—almost of affection—unprecedented in the history of the hemisphere. Yet, though Latin Americans trusted Roosevelt, among other reasons, as the champion of democratic reform, the Good Neighbor policy did not, as such, call for an extension of the New Deal to the hemisphere; it was primarily diplomatic and legal in its emphasis. Except for the Export-Import Bank, it lacked an economic dimension. Politically Roosevelt even found it compatible with personal amiability toward Latin American dictators.

  During the war Nelson Rockefeller, as coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, began to develop the economic implications of the Good Neighbor policy, initiating the first technical assistance programs. It was an imaginative and promising start; but after the war it all lapsed (at least as a public effort: Rockefeller tried in various ways to sustain it himself privately). The United States government, preoccupied first with the recovery of Europe and then with the Korean War, forgot Latin America—a bipartisan error pursued with equal fidelity by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Between 1945 and 1960 the single country of Yugoslavia—a communist country at that—received more money from the United States than all the Latin American countries put together.

  I was among those who watched these developments with increasing concern. In 1946 I wrote in a piece for Fortune: “All across Latin America the ancient oligarchies—landholders, Church, and Army—are losing their grip. There is a groundswell of inarticulate mass dissatisfaction on the part of peons, Indians, miners, plantation workers, factory hands, classes held down past all endurance and now approaching a state of revolt,” What should United States policy be? “Many facets of the complex South American problem,” the article suggested, “are not accessible to U.S. policy. One facet is accessible—the economic; and one way in which the U.S. can take action to check Peronismo and Communism is to develop and execute coordinated measures of its own to deal with economic unrest in Latin America. . . . We now must improve and extend the wartime achievements in the fields of industrialization, nutrition, public health, and education.” I added that “our most reliable support in Latin America” came from progressive democratic parties like APRA in Peru, Acción Democrática in Venezuela and the left wing of the Liberal party in Colombia.*

  In 1950 the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom invited a number of politicians and intellectuals from North and South America to a conference in Havana. The Association was operated out of New York by a devoted woman, Frances Grant, who for years ministered to Latin American democrats (she was fiercely anti-communist and anti-fascist), applauded them in power and sustained them in exile (which was most of the time) and did her best to awaken the American liberal community to the existence of the seething continent to the south. The American delegation, of which I was a member, also included such people as Clifford Case, later Senator from New Jersey, Congressman Chet Holifield of California, Norman Thomas, Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Serafino Romualdi of the American Federation of Labor, Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union and James Loeb, Jr., of Americans for Democratic Action.

  I was enchanted by Havana—and appalled by the way that lovely city was being debased into a giant casino and brothel for American businessmen over for a big weekend from Miami. My fellow countrymen reeled through the streets, picking up fourteen-year-old Cuban girls and tossing coins to make men scramble in the gutter. One wondered how any Cuban—on the basis of this evidence—could regard the United States with anything but hatred. We held a number of long sessions in the Hotel Nacional marked by the Latin addiction to interminable oratory; and we had more profitable talks with Latin American leaders over the luncheon table or in the bar. It was then that I first met José Figueres of Costa Rica, who two years before had repelled the first serious communist attempt to seize a Latin American government. I also met eminent figures exiled by their own countries, notably Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni of Venezuela and Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic. Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende, who fourteen years later would compete for the presidency of Chile, were there; so too was German Arciniegas, the Colombian historian, and Aprista leaders from Peru. Though memories of Yanqui imperialism had not died, these Latin American democrats had by no means given up on the United States. They cherished the hope that the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt would someday revive and that the influence of the United States would go to the support of progressive democracy in Latin America. A few years later I spent some time with Adolf Berle in Costa Rica as a guest of President Figueres, an experience which further strengthened my faith in a progressive democratic solution in the hemisphere.

  This view found little support in the United States in the fifties. The stimulus to raw material prices provided first by the Second World War and later by the Korean War made it easy to argue that Latin America had no basic economic problems. The Eisenhower administration was thus able to relax in the comfortable doctrine that private investment by itself would bring about development in Latin America, as they supposed it had done in the United States; that government aid should be confined to military and technical assistance; and that the way to enable private investment to do its job was to back governments which would foster a ‘favorable’ investment climate by leaving private business alone, guaranteeing investors, especially foreign investors, full and unrestricted returns and insuring monetary stability. This meant, of course, right-wing governments; and it was this thesis, rather than an innate preference for dictatorships, which sent Vice-President Nixon to Havana to praise the “competence and stability” of the Batista regime and moved President Eisenhower himself to award the Legion of Merit to dictators like Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela (for, among other reasons, his “sound foreign-investment policies”) and Manuel Odria of Peru. (When the Vice-President visited these last two countries in the spring of 1958 after their dictators had been thrown out, he became the victim of Washington’s identification with the detested regimes.) The insistence on monetary stability before all else received the ardent support of the International Monetary Fund, which imposed deflation on a number of Latin American states as the condition for IMF loans.*

  The theory of development as an act of immaculate private conception was founded, among other things, on a considerable ignorance of the history of economic development in the United States itself. In the first half-century of our own history government had played a relatively active role in building the turnpikes, canals, harbors, railroads and schools which made subsequent economic expansion possible. When
what economists unhappily term ‘social overhead capital’ or ‘infrastructure’ is the great need, public investment becomes a necessity, since private capital will not go into these areas of low return. As for Washington’s insistence on fiscal purity, this was perhaps a trifle unseemly on the part of a nation which had financed so much of its own development by inflation, wildcat paper money and bonds sold to foreign investors and subsequently repudiated. If the criteria of the International Monetary Fund had governed the United States in the nineteenth century, our own economic development would have taken a good deal longer. In preaching fiscal orthodoxy to developing nations, we were somewhat in the position of the prostitute who, having retired on her earnings, believes that public virtue requires the closing down of the red-light district.

  The policy of the fifties not only violated our own national practice; it was also manifestly inadequate to the problems of Latin America, and it reinforced the cherished Latin conviction that the essence of the United States purpose was economic imperialism. Its result had been to place our position in extreme jeopardy throughout the hemisphere. And the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba was transforming a failure of policy into a threat to security. This was the situation which the President feared and into which he was now asking McGovern and me to look.

  3. HEMISPHERE RECONNAISSANCE: I

  We left Idlewild Airport in New York on the evening of February 12. I had known McGovern only slightly, but I admired his record as a Congressman from South Dakota and had regretted his defeat in the senatorial contest the autumn before. Like everyone else (it seemed) in the Kennedy administration, he was five years younger than I—a fact which continued to disconcert one who had long been accustomed to regarding himself as the youngest man in the room. His training as an American historian—he was a Northwestern Ph.D.—established an immediate bond. His modest and diffident manner concealed deep liberal convictions, a sharp intelligence, an excellent sense of humor, a considerable measure of administrative drive and unusual physical courage.

  As we flew south through the night, I managed, through astute cross-examination and over many drinks, to drag from him an account of his experiences as a bomber pilot in the 15th Air Force in Italy. On one mission to bomb the Skoda ammunition works at Pilsen an engine had cut out an hour short of target. McGovern decided to go ahead just the same; then, as they were over target, a second engine failed. After dropping the bombs, the plane—the Dakota Queen—headed back to the base six hundred miles away, losing altitude at the rate of 100 feet a minute. When they hit the Adriatic, they were down to 600 feet. The crew threw everything movable overboard to lighten the plane. At this point one of the engines burst into flame. After a moment of total despair, the island of Vis suddenly appeared through the clouds. Though Vis’s short airstrip was intended for fighters, not for bombers, McGovern immediately gave the order to prepare for an emergency landing. With the fire getting closer to the gasoline wing tank each second, everyone knew that there would be time for only one pass at the field. While the crew sweated and prayed, McGovern coolly brought the plane in—a feat for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He flew thirty-five missions before the war was over. On his last mission, his plane, crippled by flak over Linz in Austria, limped back to base, its landing mechanism jammed, and finally came down with parachutes flaring out from the stanchions beside the waist hatch to brake the landing, despite which ingenuity it turned over at the end of the runway. Five days later the war ended in Europe, and McGovern went off to graduate school.

  Our mission began in Buenos Aires. Though President Arturo Frondizi had been elected as a nationalist and a radical, his administration had become increasingly pro-United States in its foreign policy and pro-laissez faire in its domestic policy. The change in foreign policy was especially striking. Historically Argentina had resisted United States leadership in the hemisphere, always seeking to play off Europe—whether Great Britain, the League of Nations or even Nazi Germany—against Washington’s attempts to promote an inter-American system. But the days when Argentina could aspire to an independent role were over. In recent years Brazil had so far outdistanced her in every respect that no realistic Argentine could any longer suppose that his country was competing with Washington for dominance in the hemisphere. Frondizi, relieved of this traditional antagonism, was the most pro-American president in Argentine history.

  The shift to laissez faire was more puzzling, though it was in part a response to the economic orthodoxy of the Eisenhower administration and the International Monetary Fund. When we met with Alvaro Carlos Alsogaray, the Minister of Economy, he thundered at us across the conference table about the virtues of his ‘free enterprise’ policies. These policies had in fact brought Argentine national income down 10 per cent and real wages as much as 30 per cent (as a consequence of the termination of overtime rates and food subsidies) and had produced much stagnation and unemployment—and one wondered at Alsogaray’s self-satisfaction. Or, if the performance was for our benefit, one wondered whether he understood that there had been a change of administration in Washington.

  We found Frondizi a not unimpressive figure, with large, lustrous brown eyes behind enormous horn-rimmed glasses, giving the impression of much shrewdness, caginess and self-control. He had rather the manner of a sharp Italian lawyer in New York who had been associated with Tammany but was about ready, if it seemed advisable, to join the Reform Democrats. As we talked, a delegation of school girls passed through the office; he apparently appeased his constituents by offering them the privilege of seeing him at work.

  Frondizi was skeptical about Food for Peace and, indeed, about ‘social investment’ in general. This was a common Latin reaction to the program launched in 1960 at Bogotá providing for a Social Progress Fund and increased investment in housing, education and other forms of welfare. Frondizi argued that development required hard capital investment in heavy industry; if this were done, the new wealth produced would take care of the social problems. A continent-wide program of basic economic growth, he said, was the only way to save the hemisphere from communism.

  This observation gave me the opportunity to pursue my mission for the President and raise the question of Castro. Frondizi indicated that he regarded the Cuban regime as essentially communist but added: “Castro is not the fundamental question. The elimination of Castro will not solve the underlying problem. What is required is an attack on the conditions which produced him. If he is eliminated and these conditions are left unchanged, new Castros will arise all over the continent.” We agreed but tried to point out that social and economic reform, however desirable, would not counter the existing threat which Castro posed to hemisphere unity. What kind of measures against Castro, we asked, was the Organization of American States likely to support? He became exceedingly obscure, saying at last that it would be hard for the OAS to act because a number of nations—Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Brazil—would hesitate to endorse anti-Castro measures for fear of domestic political repercussions. He gave no hint as to what Argentina might do, though we knew, of course, that Argentina had declined to go all the way with the OAS sanctions against the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In general his position was that little could be done about Castro except to press for long-range development.

  Buenos Aires itself was depressing. It seemed characteristic that the remarkable writer, Jorge Luis Borges, whom I had been particularly eager to meet, should be receiving $60 a month as director of the Biblioteca Nacional—less, as he bitterly remarked, than a street cleaner. In general, the government appeared weary and lacking in imagination or energy. When we went on to Brazil, the contrast was spectacular. Under Juscelino Kubitschek, the retiring president, the sheer momentum of growth had charged the nation with a certain economic dynamism. That growth could hardly have been more vagrant, disorderly and undisciplined; a Brazilian economist described Kubitschek to us as “the playboy of economic development.” Yet Brazil, while defying the orthodoxies of public fin
ance and defrauding the International Monetary Fund, could show as a result not only inordinate inflation and inordinate graft but a solid increase in its industrial base and national output. Wild as it all was, it somehow seemed better than the stagnation of Argentina; but one wondered whether a middle course might not be possible.

  The hope was that the new president, Janio Quadros, would provide this middle way. He had been a tough administrator as governor of the state of Sao Paulo, and his inaugural address of a few days before displayed a clear understanding of the fiscal mess he had inherited from Kubitschek. The atmosphere in the new government was bracing and hopeful. Our Food for Peace discussions elicited a concrete response. It was like meeting a crowd of young New Dealers after talking to the Treasury Department in the days of Andrew Mellon. Following a day of talks in Rio, we went on to Brasilia to see Quadros.

  On the plane Ambassador John Moors Cabot said, “I get very irritated when people blame the problems of Latin America on the United States policy. Of course, I have had my disagreements with and disappointments over some of the things we have done. But the main trouble does not lie in the United States; it lies in Latin America. The source of the difficulty is that the haves in Latin America do not realize that their day is over. The selfishness and blindness of the oligarchies in these countries is the reason why a storm is brewing.”

  We drove through the impersonal and sinister streets of Brasilia, that terrifying preview of a collectivist future, and stopped at the presidential office. Sitting behind a desk in a room with all curtains drawn was a smallish man with trim, precise features. His popping eyes, heavy glasses and aggressive black mustache made Quadros look disconcertingly like a leaner Jerry Colonna; but he radiated a contained energy, and his reactions were swift and incisive. A steel engraving of Lincoln hung on the wall inscribed by Lincoln himself; it was a gift of Nelson Rockefeller.

 

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