by Gerard Colby
He believed that he had already trounced the State Department’s International Division in the battle over the conference’s most important resolution, the one authorizing a regional military pact and a conference to implement it. Knowing small countries could not meet the onslaught of modern armies like those of Germany, Nelson’s CIAA had already concluded that the purpose of U.S. military aid was to help “maintain internal order against revolutionary disturbance.”
The U.S. generals at Chapultepec were adamant in their demands for an inter-American exchange of weapons. They were confident that distributing surplus U.S. arms through the military aid program would make Latin America’s armed forces dependent on the United States. With military training programs came additional benefits that fell more properly within the purview of psychological warfare—and they were good business for a burgeoning war industry. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson commented on Army Air Force General “Hap” Arnold’s plan to send warplanes to Latin America, the program “seemed wise and helpful and would tend to cultivate good relations with the South Americans which might prove very profitable to our aviation industry in the future.”12
Nelson seized the moment offered by the Pentagon to confront the State Department’s misgivings about creating a military pact that considered an attack against any American state an attack against all. Such a pact would violate the recent agreement at Dumbarton Oaks to refer all international disputes first to the proposed United Nations organization. The Soviet Union had signed the accord and would undoubtedly feel betrayed. Rockefeller’s regional military pact might inspire the Soviets to do likewise, undermining the effectiveness of the United Nations; worse, it might destroy the U.N. founding conference itself, set for April in San Francisco. “If you’re going to work against the agreed position of our delegation and the agreed position of the State Department, you better go on back to Washington,” Nelson thundered at a State Department representative in front of Stettinius, just back from Yalta. The State Department representative remained silent.
To add insult to injury, Rockefeller insisted upon a unanimous vote of approval by the U.S. delegation. He then signed the Act of Chapultepec for the United States.
On the night of March 6, two days before the end of the conference, Nelson showed up at Padilla’s home. Through Rockefeller’s support, Padilla had been unanimously elected chairman of the conference, giving Nelson effective control of the chair. Now he wanted Padilla to endorse the drafted invitation to Argentina. Padilla made a few changes and signed it. The resolution swept through the conference the next day. Nelson had fired one of the first shots of the Cold War.
Mexico’s ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas was beside himself. He roared his disapproval of Rockefeller’s inter-American system, calling instead for solely Latin American economic collaboration. He was convinced that the United States would dominate the system economically and draw Latin America into its military adventures abroad.
Cárdenas was not alone. Other veterans of confrontations with prewar Washington also were alarmed. Mexican labor leader Lombardo Toledano charged his government with “subordinating the Latin American bloc to the aims of the United States State Department.” He called Rockefeller’s regional pact “the final adoption of the Monroe Doctrine which would leave the Latin American republics at the mercy of the United States.”13
Washington reacted differently. Secretary of War Stimson promptly authorized negotiations for postwar arms sales and training programs.
ROOSEVELT’S CRUCIAL DECISION
Franklin Roosevelt was obviously dying when Nelson showed up at the Oval Office for lunch on March 16. The president’s trip to Yalta had drained his last stubborn energies.
But Roosevelt had shown surprising vigor during the Yalta negotiations. He got Stalin’s assent to Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership of China, abandoning Mao Tsetung, on whom Stalin had little influence. He obtained a Soviet commitment to allow free elections in Eastern Europe, to meet in San Francisco to draw up a charter for the United Nations, to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany capitulated, and to reaffirm the principles of the Atlantic Charter that called for the formation of provisional governments in Eastern Europe with broad political representation.
Besides losing territory, Germany would be de-Nazified and disarmed, war crimes trials would be set up, and harsh reparations would be paid, Roosevelt agreeing to the Soviet Union’s estimate of $20 billion worth of damage to its own territory and people.
There was also the familiar Anglophile motive for imposing a harsh peace treaty on Germany. Roosevelt wanted a wider Open Door and appealed to Churchill to end the closed British trade system of the Commonwealth. Opening the dominions’ markets to “healthy competition” could be done only if Britain were spared competition from German industrial might. Britain also needed to maintain—at least temporarily—its strong trade with Argentina, a prospect put in constant jeopardy by Argentina’s refusal to declare war on the Axis. Something had to be done by the Western powers to allay Soviet suspicions of an accommodation with fascism. Roosevelt and Churchill, therefore, went along with Russia and agreed that any government that had not joined the United Nations’ war against the Axis powers by March 1, 1945, would not be invited to the San Francisco Conference to draw up the formal U.N. charter. Nor could it be eligible for charter membership in the United Nations.
Nelson was particularly unhappy with this aspect of the Yalta accord. The March 1 deadline was past. But Nelson believed it was possible to persuade Argentina to join the Allies, as long as that country’s attendance at the U.N. conference was not foreclosed. “The important thing,” he told Roosevelt, “is to get the Argentine government to reorient its policies, and join in cooperation with the other republics and, if that is done in good faith, it will be natural to want her in the world organization.”14
Indeed, Nelson had already gotten the Latin American ambassadors in Washington and Secretary Stettinius to pledge U.S. recognition of the Perón regime and to recommend that Argentina be invited to the U.N. founding conference if it declared war on the Axis and signed the Act of Chapultepec.
Roosevelt was confronted with a tough decision. He was aware of the importance of Argentine exports to Britain. But he also believed that future relations with the Russians had been promising at Yalta. Ultimately, one thing stood in the way of postwar cooperation through the United Nations with the Soviet Union: rejection of the Yalta accords by Republicans in Congress. Roosevelt needed Rockefeller allies in the Republican party to ensure congressional support for the Yalta accords and the U.N. organization. He reluctantly initialed Nelson’s memorandum recognizing Perón’s Argentina.
The decision exhausted him. He collapsed in his seat as Nelson left with paper in hand. The next night, Nelson and Tod saw the president at a White House dinner. He seemed his old, strong self. But such public gestures could not hide the fact that his health no longer permitted him a full day’s work.
Nelson never saw Franklin Roosevelt again.
REKINDLING THE COLD WAR
As official Washington learned of the new terms for Argentina’s entry into the United Nations, a debate broke out over whether this was Roosevelt’s policy or Rockefeller’s. Even before Chapultepec, rumors had been circulating over Nicolo Tucci’s resignation as head of the Bureau of Latin American Research. Tucci had asked that the bureau be dismantled because although it “was supposed to undo the Nazi and fascist propaganda in South America … Rockefeller was inviting the worst fascists and Nazis to Washington.”
“Everybody is useful,” Nelson had told him, “and we’re going to convert these people to friendliness to the United States.” Nelson’s legal counsel explained what conversion meant. “Don’t worry,” he told Tucci, “we’ll buy those people.”15
The last week in March, with only six weeks of life left for the Third Reich, Argentina declared war on Germany “as an ally of Japan” and gave unguaranteed pledges of action against Axis influence.
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p; Perón’s change of heart after the Chapultepec conference gladdened Nelson, and he had no trouble claiming it as one of his war trophies. He then approached an old friend, Leo Rowe, who presided over the Pan American Union, the precursor of the OAS. Nelson wanted the Pan American Union to pass a U.S.-sponsored resolution inviting Perón to sign the Act of Chapultepec. Rowe, who had an esteemed record of service in Latin America, was happy to oblige.
The motion sailed through the next meeting of the Pan American Union, despite the unwillingness of any other nation to act as a sponsor. Once again, Nelson had his way.
It was also his undoing. Argentina quickly signed the act. Probably tipped off to the contents of the Rockefeller memorandum with Roosevelt’s initials, Argentina then promptly requested that the United States support its bid to become a charter member of the United Nations.
Nelson now shifted his steamroller into high gear. On April 9, five days after Stettinius restored formal diplomatic relations with Argentina, Rockefeller tried to push Perón’s case through a meeting of a committee of the State Department’s top staff. To his surprise, he was hit from all sides. Even diehard conservatives were worried about this violation of the Yalta Agreement.
Twice at Yalta, Roosevelt had pledged to Stalin that Argentina would not be invited to the initial U.N. conference if Perón did not live up to the March 1 deadline to declare war. Argentina’s presence at San Francisco would tarnish the Latin American bloc’s image and reduce its propaganda value to the United States. There were already enough votes; Perón’s was not needed.
Nelson insisted that his commitments to Argentina had the full knowledge of the president, the secretary of state, and the staff committee. He warned darkly of “political troubles” at San Francisco. “If we don’t act, I do not believe we can persuade the other American republics to refrain from proposing Argentina for membership.”16
No one bought it.
Nor could Nelson pull out his usual White House trump card. Three days later, on April 12, Franklin Roosevelt collapsed at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, and died that afternoon. The president’s last official act had been to agree to buy the first sheet of U.N. stamps on April 25, on his expected arrival at San Francisco.
Three days after Roosevelt’s burial, Rockefeller aide Avra Warren flew to Argentina on a special mission. The newly installed President Harry S. Truman was inexperienced in foreign affairs; Nelson guessed that he had to act quickly on Perón’s request for an invitation to San Francisco.
Most political analysts had studied Perón carefully and were not convinced that his regime was cleaned of fascist influences. Warren was—in two days. Business leaders assured him that Argentine markets were eager again for American industrial exports; generals said that their army and navy were hungry for U.S. weapons. Warren flew back on April 20 and recommended military aid.17 Nelson embraced Warren’s report with glee.
The same day, Nelson was summoned to Secretary Stettinius’s office. “In view of the unhappy feelings between you and members of the International Division,” Stettinius suggested that Nelson not go to San Francisco.
“You had a free hand in Mexico City,” the secretary continued. “They want the same now in San Francisco.”18
But within a few hours Stettinius began to question his own judgment. He told Nelson to go “talk to the Latin Americans and get the ball rolling.” Then he was to come home.
Nelson stayed for two months. When he left, the Cold War was on the brink of becoming hot.
CHARGING UP NOB HILL
The Rockefeller road show rolled off Washington Airport’s runway the following day, Nelson’s chartered airliner again packed with his Latin American friends. Arriving in San Francisco, he dived into the parliamentary fray. “He jumped energetically from one thing to another,” Alger Hiss, who was one of State’s International Department representatives at the conference, later recalled. “He was the perennial adolescent.”19 Corralling votes, Nelson had learned in Washington, meant providing off-hour pleasures as well, and he threw banquets for the Latin Americans at such posh sites as Trader Vic’s and the Bohemian Club. At the St. Francis Yacht Club, Nelson even had Carmen Miranda perform her Chiquita Banana dance for the delighted delegates.
Nelson, himself, was not an official delegate to the conference, but his staff—twenty-seven members in all—was larger than that of most nations.
Arraying these deputies across the conference floor like pieces on a chess board, Nelson became the United States’ parliamentary whip over Latin America. Among the Latin American leaders whom Nelson also brought into play were Colombia’s Lleras Camargo (recently appointed foreign minister), Ecuador’s Galo Plaza, Mexico’s Ezéquiel Padilla, and Bolivia’s Victor Andrade.
Through these men, Rockefeller’s crowd controlled representatives’ votes cast in the name of millions of Latin Americans.
The opening days of the conference had all the makings of contemporary theater. Like a forced family reunion of estranged and disgruntled relatives, the conference of wartime allies began with squabbling over who should sit where at the negotiating table.
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, fearing a U.S.-dominated conference, proposed revolving chairs.
Mexico’s Padilla answered him by seconding the nomination of the U.S. secretary of state for chairman.
Molotov exploded, denouncing the proud Padilla as a tool of the U.S. delegation. Then he fired away at Colombia’s Lleras Camargo for obstructing a resolution intended to seat the Ukraine and Byelorussia as agreed at Yalta.
Nelson stirred the resulting Latin American resentment toward Molotov into a fierce determination to seat Argentina and then, seeing that the Yalta accords gave Molotov the upper hand, suggested a three-week delay in seating any new members.
Finally, at a delegation meeting, Averell Harriman, ambassador to the Soviet Union, looked Rockefeller straight in the eye with the air of a disapproving uncle.
“Nelson,” he asked, “are you the ambassador to the Argentine or the ambassador of the Argentine?”20
Stettinius made one last effort at reconciliation, convening a Big Four meeting with three representatives of the Latin American bloc at his penthouse suite atop the Fairmont Hotel. Led by Padilla, Nelson’s friends repeated their demand for Perón. Molotov’s patience was gone. He simply ended the meeting, turning the matter over to the conference’s executive committee.
Nelson had no qualms about acting like an irrepressible family gossip, whispering first to his harassed secretary of state and then giving Cuban Ambassador Guillermo Belt the outline of points he should make in a speech. Ecuador’s Galo Plaza, ever compliant, shuttled his aide back and forth to Rockefeller for instructions to give to the other Latin American delegations. Nelson’s domination was shamelessly blatant, but it got results.
Less than a week after the conference had begun, the weary delegates were ready for anything called compromise. The time had come for the Americans to offer the seating of the Ukraine and Byelorussia in exchange for the admission of Argentina. Molotov again argued against the Perón regime and denounced the admission as a violation of the Yalta Agreement. His objections were futile. The thirty-two votes gathered by the United States, Britain, and France easily overrode the four votes his arguments attracted, although a number of small nations noticeably abstained. Molotov was furious, but there was nothing he could do. Nelson had guessed correctly that the Soviets would not storm out of the conference; nor could they stop the seating of Argentina with a veto, since the conference had not yet established the Security Council.
Yet to many it was a hollow victory. The American delegates were “riding roughshod through a world conference with a bloc of twenty votes,” Walter Lippmann grimly assessed, with possible “disastrous consequences.”21 This founding session did not bode well for the future practical effectiveness of the United Nations as a peacekeeping body. If the organization could not cope with the behavior of one man, how could it restrain entire natio
ns?
THE FUSE IS LIT
When Nelson arrived back in Washington for appropriations hearings, the attacks against him in Congress were immediate, widespread, and pitiless. The press, in an excess of political self-interest, ignored the Soviets’ stated concerns and concentrated its criticism not on Nelson’s manipulation of the Latin American bloc, but on his and Stettinius’s alleged “knuckling under” to Latin American “blackjacking” over Argentina.
Nelson tried desperately to set the record—or at least his interpretation of it—straight. No, he insisted, he was not a friend of fascism or an enemy of peace and Allied unity. But he could not get through. Nelson went to the White House to explain why the press and Congress were wrong to criticize his advocacy of Argentina. But Truman’s grasp of the issues was limited to a superficial distrust of both Russians and Rockefellers. Rockefeller continued to take the heat.
On May 5, Nelson Rockefeller arrived back in San Francisco. He had decided to leave to Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew the task of convincing Washington about Perón. It was a wise move. Grew called an anguished Cordell Hull, whose opinion was still respected by those opposing Perón’s entry into the U.N., and persuaded him that “there was nothing to do but go along with the wishes of the Latin American republics.” They “wanted Argentina in,” he explained, and “if we had not done so there was the risk of their withdrawing and ruining the conference.”22
With Argentina’s entry secured, Nelson now turned his exuberant energies on preventing the Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta agreements from interfering with the U.S.-dominated military pact he projected for Latin America. He invited Senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the U.S. delegation, to a private dinner. Before long, Colombia’s Lleras Camargo and Cuba’s Guillermo Belt were summoned to join them. A letter was drafted for Vandenberg’s signature that would have instant repercussions. Raising the specter of another political defeat like the one that the Republicans wreaked on Wilson’s League of Nations, Vandenberg threatened Senate rejection of the United Nations charter unless the military pact in the Act of Chapultepec and the Monroe Doctrine were specifically exempted from any suggestion that they required approval by the United Nations. The U.S. delegation exploded when they read Vandenberg’s ultimatum. The United States had already agreed that the United Nations would exempt only the anti-Axis military alliances from U.N. approval. Rockefeller was trying to change U.S. policy.
