A Thousand Days
Page 91
In the end he traveled more miles in the campaign of 1962 than Eisenhower had in 1954 and 1958 put together. His central theme was to establish the difference in domestic policy between the two parties. “We have won and lost vote after vote by one or two or three votes in the Senate, and three, four or five votes in the House of Representatives,” he would say, “and I don’t think we can find jobs for our people, I don’t think we can educate our younger people, I don’t think we can provide security for our older citizens, when we have a party which votes ‘no.’” He would conclude with sharpening voice and stabbing hand: “And that’s why this election is important.”
XXIX
Battle for the Hemisphere
1962 HAD NOT BEEN A BAD YEAR: the Berlin crisis over, a settlement in Laos, aggression checked in Vietnam, the Congo straightening out, favorable developments in the rest of Africa, United States Steel chastened, expansion resuming in the American economy. But the problems of the western hemisphere remained acute. “I regard Latin America,” the President said early in 1963, “as the most critical area in the world today.” The Alliance for Progress, announced with such hope in the brisk March of 1961, had offered Latin America the possibility of a democratic revolution. But in many countries the practical foundations of the Alliance were shaky. Moreover, since the Alliance by its very existence warned Fidel Castro that he could no longer count on the Latin American states falling to Marxist revolution of their own weight, the Fidelistas and their communist allies were redoubling their efforts to disrupt the democratic effort and seize the energies of change for themselves. The struggle for the future of Latin America was well joined—and the outcome thus far indeterminate.
The President sought to place our hemisphere policy in the ablest possible hands. Adolf Berle as chairman of the Task Force on Latin America continued to recommend the creation of the post of Under Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, controlling both political and economic lines of policy; but this was predictably opposed by the State Department on bureaucratic grounds. When Thomas Mann left Washington shortly before the Bay of Pigs to become ambassador to Mexico, Kennedy wanted to persuade some figure of public consequence to take his place as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. The search was frustrating and lost many valuable weeks. During this time the daily conduct of Latin American affairs remained in the hands of the permanent government—blasé officials in the State Department and the aid agency who believed that they alone understood the Latinos and dismissed the Alliance for Progress as a slogan left over from the presidential campaign.
They were decent and hard-working people. But their uncritical commitment to the conceptions of the fifties—to conservative regimes in politics and to private initiative and technical assistance in economics—hardly equipped them to compete with Fidel Castro for the allegiance of a continent in revolutionary ferment. And, as they began to realize that the new President meant business, they seemed to feel threatened by the new policy, as if they feared it would swallow up their own responsibilities and sense of significance. “To get democratic change in Latin America,” one of the few Kennedy appointees to the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs told me in June, “you must have people committed to democratic change. Among this group there is no joy, no purpose, no drive. “What’s the headache today?’ is their attitude. They form a sullen resistance to fresh approaches. They have no realization of the forces at work in Latin America today. They are uninterested in the intellectual community or the labor movement or the democratic left. All they do is sit around the table discussing things. When something comes up, they talk for hours and end up with ten reasons for doing it and twelve for not doing it. . . . We are striving for a new look in Latin America. But if our operating people exhibit the same old attitudes and use the same old clichés, we are going to look in Latin America like the same old crowd.”*
1. THE CHARTER OF PUNTA DEL ESTE
The conviction among the bureaucrats that, if only they sat tight, the Alliance for Progress would go away left the initiative to the White House, to Berle’s Task Force, increasingly isolated within State, and to the Treasury Department, where Douglas Dillon’s long and enlightened interest in Latin America now had the able support of Assistant Secretary John Leddy. It was this situation which led in the spring to the stream of complaints from the State Department, respectfully reproduced in the New York Times, about ‘meddling’ in hemisphere policy. It can be flatly said that without such meddling there would have been no Alliance for Progress.
The Alliance rested on the premise that modernization in Latin America required not just injections of capital or technical assistance but the breaking of the bottlenecks of economic development through reform of the political and social structure. It was formally organized in August 1961 at an Inter-American Economic and Social Council conference held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. In his message to the conference Kennedy defined his conception of the occasion with great clarity. “We live in a hemisphere,” he said, “whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful forces of the modern age—the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man. We meet to carry on that revolution to shape the future.” This meant “full recognition of the right of all the people to share fully in our progress. For there is no place in democratic life for institutions which benefit the few while denying the needs of the many, even though the elimination of such institutions may require far-reaching and difficult changes such as land reform and tax reform and a vastly increased emphasis on education and health and housing. Without these changes our common effort cannot succeed.” No President of the United States had ever spoken such words to Latin America before. He concluded with an appeal for the participation “of workers and farmers, businessmen and intellectuals and, above all, of the young people of the Americas.”
Douglas Dillon, the head of the United States delegation, struck the same note. “This is a revolutionary task,” he told the Latin Americans, “but we are no strangers to revolution. . . . The fruits of the American revolution have not yet been extended to all our people. Throughout the hemisphere millions still live with hunger, poverty and despair. They have been denied access to the benefits of modern knowledge and technology. And they now demand those benefits for themselves and for their children. We cannot rest content until these just demands are met.”
Che Guevara was there too, smoothly arguing the case for the competing revolution. Some Latin Americans, indeed, wanted to include Cuba in the Alliance. But others, led by Pedro Beltrán of Peru, the conference’s chairman, countered the Cubans with a Declaration to the Peoples of America placing the principles of the Alliance in a firm context of representative democracy and political freedom. Richard Goodwin, who had helped Dillon and Leddy organize the United States position, collaborated in writing the Declaration; and Beltrán, working with Arturo Morales-Carrión and Lincoln Gordon of the United States delegation, marshaled an overwhelming vote in its favor. In the meantime, Leddy negotiated the economic provisions of the Charter with the Latin Americans, and Philip Coombs, whom Kennedy had brought from the Ford Foundation to become Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, worked hard in pushing through a crucial resolution on a ten-year education plan. Word soon went round the conference that there were only “two left-wing governments present—Cuba and the United States,” and the confrontation between Guevara and Dillon in the last session gave the meeting its moment of drama. Guevara told the Latin Americans that they had Castro to thank for this sudden offer of massive United States aid. Observing that Cuba was in sympathy with many of the Alliance’s objectives, he said that, as the instrument of imperialism, the Alliance was bound to fail; Cuba would therefore abstain. Guevara’s moderation was itself striking evidence of the Alliance’s initial appeal. Dillon was cool and effective in rebuttal. Then twenty American republics pledged themselves to a series of quite startling goals:
To improve and strengthen democratic institutions through appl
ication of the principle of self-determination by the people.
To accelerate economic and social development. . . .
To carry out urban and rural housing programs to provide decent homes for all our people.
To encourage . . . programs of comprehensive agrarian reform, leading to the effective transformation, where required, of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use; with a view to replacing latifundia and dwarf holdings by an equitable system of property. . . .
To assure fair wages and satisfactory working conditions to all our workers. . . .
To wipe out illiteracy. . . .
To press forward with programs of health and sanitation. . . .
To reform tax laws, demanding more from those who have most, to punish tax evasion severely, and to redistribute the national income in order to benefit those who are most in need, while, at the same time, promoting savings and investment and reinvestment of capital. . . .
To maintain monetary and fiscal policies which . . . will protect the purchasing power of the many, guarantee the greatest possible price stability, and form an adequate basis for economic development.
To stimulate private enterprise. . . .
To find a quick and lasting solution to the grave problem created by excessive price fluctuations in the basic exports. . . .
To accelerate the integration of Latin America. . . .
To this end the United States will provide a major part of the minimum of 20 billion dollars, principally in public funds, which Latin America will require over the next ten years from all external sources in order to supplement its own efforts. . . .
For their part, as a contribution to the Alliance for Progress, each of the countries of Latin America will formulate a comprehensive and well-conceived national program for the development of its own economy.
The Charter of Punta del Este was a summons to a democratic revolution—nor was revolution a word feared by the architects of the Alliance, even though it continued to dismay the Department of State. Of course most of the governments endorsing this summons were far from revolutionary. Some no doubt joined because they considered American aid worth a signature; others because, as President Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia once put it, “In Latin America, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, political leaders have the habit of carrying revolutionary statements beyond the point to which they are really prepared to go.” The American negotiators had no illusions about the mixture of motives, nor did they suppose that setting fine words down on parchment would have magical effects. But they knew that the commitment of twenty governments to this unprecedented set of goals strengthened those in each country who sought democratic progress.
This included the government in Washington. The trip to Vienna, the Berlin crisis, the debate over nuclear test resumption, the reform of the aid program—all the problems of the summer of 1961 had further slowed the reorganization of our own Latin American management. Failing to find an outsider of sufficient stature as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, the President in July appointed Robert F. Woodward, an intelligent and liberal-minded career officer, wholeheartedly devoted to the Alliance, then serving as ambassador to Chile. Berle, his assignment valuably completed, resigned. In the fall Kennedy sent Richard Goodwin over to serve as Woodward’s deputy. In the White House the President himself, with some help, after Goodwin’s departure, from Ralph Dungan and me, continued to keep an exceedingly vigilant eye on hemisphere developments.
The search for a man to run the United States contribution to the Alliance took an even longer time. It was universally assumed that the effort would be set up within the Agency for International Development. In retrospect, this was very probably a mistake. If the Alliance had been established, like the Peace Corps, as a separate agency, the resulting status and independence would, I believe, have increased its effectiveness. But the proponents of bureaucratic tidiness won out. Finally in November, Kennedy appointed as AID Deputy for Latin America Teodoro Moscoso, who had been Economic Development Administrator under Governor Luis Muñoz Marin in Puerto Rico and was now ambassador to Venezuela.
He could have found no one more deeply dedicated to the spirit of Punta del Este. The Puerto Rican experience, indeed, was an important source of the ideas behind the Alliance. Puerto Rico had been the last triumph of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rexford G. Tugwell, whom Roosevelt sent down as governor in the years when Dr. New Deal was giving way to Dr. Win-the-War in the United States, had lent strong and imaginative support to Luis Muñoz Marín, the statesman of ability and vision who in 1940 led a peaceful democratic revolution in Puerto Rico. From a “stricken land,” as Tugwell used to call it, Puerto Rico was being transformed into a thriving community. During the fifties it provided both a refuge and something of an inspiration for democratic Latin Americans exiled by their own countries. Muñoz, convinced that these progressive leaders offered the best hope for the continent, now argued forthrightly that in the long run only the democratic left could make the Alliance work. They constituted the one group “which wants it to succeed in its entirety . . . the group which seeks social advances and higher living standards for all the people in a framework of freedom and consent . . . the only non-totalitarian element which understands the depths of the revolutionary ferment in Latin America and which can provide responsible leadership to shape this revolution into constructive channels.” The “well-meaning democratic conservatives,” Muñoz added, “men whom we can often respect, have no real grasp of this revolutionary surge, and are therefore powerless to compete with the totalitarians.” This was Moscoso’s judgment too, and within the State Department Arturo Morales-Carrión, an historian who had been Muñoz’s Undersecretary of State in Puerto Rico and was now a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, expounded the same viewpoint with discriminating wisdom.
2. THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
Muñoz’s formulation was a succinct statement of the philosophy implicit in the Punta del Este Charter. Though the Alliance included dictatorial regimes like those of Stroessner in Paraguay and Duvalier in Haiti, its principles were progressive democratic principles and its affinities were with progressive democratic governments. Adolf Berle made the point in his final report as chairman of the Task Force:
The present struggle will not be won, and can be lost, by opportunist support of transitory power-holders or forces whose objectives are basically hostile to the peoples they dominate. Success of the American effort in Latin America requires that at all times its policy be based on clear, consistent, moral democratic principles. I do not see that any other policy can be accepted or indeed stands any real chance of ultimate success. The forces sweeping Latin America today demand progress, and a better life for the masses of their people, through evolution if possible, or through revolution if that price must be paid. A preponderance of these forces want the resulting forms to provide liberty, rejecting tyranny whether from the right or from the left.
In Latin America the democratic left comprised two major strains: the partidos populares, which had battled for social democracy in various countries of Central and South America since the Second World War under far-sighted men like Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and José Figueres of Costa Rica but which now was becoming a little the movement of an older generation; and the Christian Democrats, emerging as a significant force in Chile and Venezuela and appealing to younger people in other countries. In Venezuela the two strains combined in support of the Betancourt government. For this and other reasons, some of us in Washington saw Venezuela as a model for Latin American progressive democracy (remembering always that its oil revenues gave it a margin of wealth the other republics lacked). Betancourt, who had spent a good share of his exile in Puerto Rico, had brought back to Venezuela plans and institutions derived from the Puerto Rican experience. A rugged fighter for democracy, he was hated by both right and left: Trujillo’s assassins had tried to kill him, and Castro’s terrorists were seeking now t
o destroy his government. For Betancourt the Alliance exactly filled the continent’s need. “The communist threat to Latin America,” he used to say, “is very serious. What makes it so is the economic plight of the vast majority of the 200 million persons who live below the Rio Grande.” The communists, he added, naturally detested his own regime “because we are carrying out the type of social action that strips the communists of support and followers.” The reactionaries disliked his type of social action for opposite reasons; and, as Betancourt wrote Kennedy in the spring of 1962, “We are hitting both groups, reactionaries and Communists, in earnest and in depth, in conformity with the constitution and the law. . . . The impatient ones would like us to go beyond the written law—and even beyond the unwritten but overriding law of respect for human dignity. I will not, however, deviate from the course laid down for me by the fundamental law of Venezuela and by my own conscience.”
No one in Washington understood this course better than the President. He wholly accepted the thesis of the democratic revolution and therefore on his first presidential trip to Latin America in December 1961 chose to visit two presidents notable for their commitment to progressive reform—Betancourt in Caracas and Alberto Lleras Camargo in Bogotá. A good deal of anxious consideration preceded this journey. People in the State Department, recalling the Nixon tour three years before, wondered whether Kennedy might not be inviting unnecessary risks. Goodwin and Morales-Carrión, however, argued strongly for the trip, and Kennedy himself characteristically shrugged and decided to go ahead. Jacqueline, tuning up her Spanish for the occasion, went with him. When the presidential plane flew into Caracas, Kennedy, remembering Goodwin’s assurances, said drily, “Well, Dick, if this doesn’t work out, you might as well keep going south.”