What was the dominican crisis

The reductio ad absurdum of these intellectual monstrosities is that the administration's defenders were forced to flaunt the specter of Communist supermen. If a few Communists could take over a revolt that had failed and in a few hours vanquish the entire Dominican military establishment, they were obviously a superior breed.

In fact, in all Communist history, there had never been so few who had done so much so quickly against so many. At his press conference on May 26, Secretary Rusk emphasized that it was not the numbers of the Dominican Communists that had counted but their organization and training. That is what they did in the Dominican Republic. A few skilled people can do this in the proper circumstances. For a while, as I read these words, I wondered where I had seen them in somewhat different form before.

Suddenly I realized that some of our foremost U. For more than any other Communist ideologist, Guevera has popularized the idea that a few revolutionists can take power, though even he has never gone so far as his epigoni in the State Department and U. Guevara has taught that a few revolutionists could begin the armed struggle for power, not that they could in a few hours or days successfully end it. The fact is that U.

The same U. On at least two occasions, moreover, Under Secretary Mann has suggested that the combined forces of the Soviet Union and Communist China were behind the Dominican Communists. In his interview with Max Frankel, Mr.

Finally, there came the third and last stage in the rationalization of U. Instead of inflating the numbers of Dominican Communist supermen or insisting how strong a few could be, the new line sought to emphasize the weakness of the opposition.

This stage was neatly put in one sentence by Professor John N. It should be noted, however, that President Johnson's intervention course was decided upon, not because of a judgment that the Communists in the Dominican Republic were strong, but rather because of a conclusion that non-Communist elements were too weak, too lacking in political sophistication, and too little skilled in the arts of governance, to withstand Communist infiltration and subsequent control.

On the face of it, this is a far more sensible and moderate position. It seems to avoid making the Dominican Communists too big or too small and introduces a seemingly more thoughtful element of relativity into the discussion. Nevertheless, it is, I think, only a variation on the original theme and it also brings out in bolder relief some of the most disagreeable aspects of U.

I do not wish to go over already familiar ground—how weak the non-Communist elements really were, how much of their weakness was caused by U. I doubt whether anyone would care to dispute Mr. Indeed, the U. Political sophistication, like the strength of the Dominican Communists, is relative, but I question whether one student in a hundred of Latin American affairs believes that the United States has the political sophistication to carry off such tricky enterprises.

I know that Professor Plank referred only to the Dominicans' lack of political sophistication; but he implied that we must be able to give them what they lack. In those circumstances, why not ask the Dominicans?

From this, one might have gathered that there was a Dominican constitution comparable to the constitution and that both somehow enjoyed the same status. Any Dominican could have given the Secretary a lesson in Dominican constitutional history.

It was in December that Trujillo promulgated his last constitution. It remained in force for the next two years, except for modifications by decree. The Council at first promised to convene a Constituent Assembly in August and to call general elections in December But it later changed its mind and decided to hold the elections first.

As a result, the pro-Bosch landslide enabled an overwhelmingly pro-Bosch Congress to draw up the new constitution, something which the Council had not planned on. What is important about a constitution in the government is that it have the consent of the people at the time, of the day. Nothing, to my mind, reveals the abyss that separates the U. For most of its history, the Dominican Republic has been a nation in name only.

No sooner was it liberated from Spain in than it became the plaything of one caudillo after another, one junta after another. Insurrection after insurrection, assassination after assassination, frustrated hope after frustrated hope—these were its lot. I know of no nation in Latin America, with the possible exception of its neighbor, Haiti, which has had such a disastrous past. From , for thirty-one endless, remorseless, monstrous years, it was one man's chattel—a private fief, not a nation.

In all this time, sophisticated American politicians paid homage to and demeaned themselves before the aging tyrant. His paid Washington lobbyist, Joseph E. Davies, was appointed U. Trujillo's assassination in was, then, a unique moment in the decades-long agony of this people.

For whatever reason, the door had opened on a new and better future. Or were they to fall back into the old pattern of self-appointed saviors who invariably became their exploiters and executioners?

This explains why the finest minds of Latin America have been filled with such a deep yearning for a constitutional solution to the still tormenting problem of political power and succession.

Constitutional democracy is not merely the only way out of periodic bloodletting and dictatorship in all its forms; it is also the end of chatteldom, a reawakening of national consciousness, a rediscovery by a people of itself, and in the case of the Dominican Republic, the very beginning of a process of political self-realization that should have started over a hundred years ago.

For such a country and such a people, the free democratic elections of December and the democratically enacted constitution of April were promises, above all, of a new national destiny. It did not matter so much that the constitution was not perfect which is? The constitution provided for its own amendment, and the President could be changed every four years. That is why the reaffirmation of the constitution was the banner and symbol of this revolt, why it was not a step backward but a step forward.

I have, in these pages, tried to find out how we got into the Dominican morass. It is too early to tell how we are going to get out of it. But one thing is already clear: we have successfully disappointed everyone. The United States thought well enough of Donald Reid Cabral to invest a great deal of treasure and prestige in him. When he asked for U. Instead, our first hero was General Wessin y Wessin. Time magazine, which huckstered every twist and turn of the U.

No secret was made of the fact that General Wessin was the strong man behind the three-man junta headed by Colonel Benoit, which the C.

But in Washington, a different solution of the Dominican crisis was soon in the making. While the United States is economically at its best, my poor country, which is in its orbit, is going through a crisis that is nearing the stage of a revolution with jet-like speed. We are at the brink of the explosion. Now Sr. Figueres got in touch with Bosch in Puerto Rico and in conversations lasting two days they began to work out a new understanding. After April 29, therefore, a struggle went on in Washington for the conscience and comprehension of President Johnson and those closest to him.

If they had not been deeply disturbed by the events and their own part in them, they would not have gone to the trouble of bringing three of the most respected and most progressive Latin American elder statesmen to advise them. In effect, one arm of U. But from various quarters—the news corresdents in the Dominican Republic, the three Latin American consultants, and probably its own intelligence sources—Washington began to hear that perhaps Tony Imbert was not quite the right man for the job.

He was not such a national hero, despite his part in the assassination of Trujillo, after all; politically he was trusted by no one; socially his base was just as narrow as Wessin's or Benoit's.

Thus the Figueres-Bosch telephone negotiations were not discouraged, and within days after Imbert had been set up in business, the last thing that one would have expected to happen, considering the foregoing, happened—a decision was made in Washington to dump Imbert and to go back to an understanding with Bosch. Fortas, soon to be appointed a Supreme Court Justice by President Johnson, allegedly made no commitments and flew back to Washington to report to the President.

Within about twenty-four hours, the President acted on Mr. Fortas's report. He appointed a team of four—a team that could hardly have been more impressive—to go to San Juan and Santo Domingo.

Vance remained at the air force base in Puerto Rico. The negotiations with Sr. Bosch were conducted entirely by Mr. I have been assured by a person who was present at all the discussions between them that Sr.

Bosch and Bundy, it appears, quickly learned to respect each other's qualities and good faith. If ever the United States seemed committed to a course of action, this was it. As might have been expected, they were not happy with it and saw no reason to replace Imbert's set-up.

Under Secretary Mann flew back to Washington that day. Bundy, Vaughn, and Vance carried on in Santo Domingo. By May 19, the Dominican military were virtually accusing the Bundy mission of a sellout to the Communists. This struggle over the Bundy mission in Santo Domingo was both a factor in, and a reflection of, a similar struggle that was going on in Washington. On Sunday, May 23, Mr. Bundy received a message from Washington which torpedoed his entire mission, 42 This message was the result of influences brought to bear on President Johnson, who was finally swayed by another of Secretary of State Rusk's incongruous historical analogies.

Rusk apparently succeeded in talking Mr. A lengthy memorandum, according to Tad Szulc, was drawn up in the State Department on these Cuban events of thirty-two years ago; it must be the first repudiation of Sumner Welles's activities in an official document.

After the C. In any event, the only one on the U. At the time, the exact sequence of these events was confused by what was probably the most outrageous journalistic scandal of them all. Within forty-eight hours, the bank's auditors and everyone concerned with the alleged misconduct had denied that there was any truth in it.

The story had been planted by a paid agent of the Dominican Embassy in Washington during Reid Cabral's regime. It had been knocking around the State Department for some time, as had the audit of the bank's books.

The story behind the story will indeed be worth waiting for. At the same news conference, Mr. Rusk also led the press to believe that the State Department had been talking with Sr. The trouble with this explanation was that it assumed the Washington policy-makers to be just as naive and gullible as newspaper readers. It might have made sense in the United States, with a solemn, centuries-tested constitution providing both first principles and rules for organic change.

In such a system, deals and combinations by nominal political rivals may serve a useful purpose or at least may avoid any fatal disaster in times of stress, however they may ruffle political purists. But in the Dominican Republic, the constitutional first principles and rules for organic change were lacking.

These were precisely what the revolt was about. It demonstrated once again how much greater the political distance between the United States and the Dominican Republic is than the geographical distance. The struggle between contending forces and views in Washington and the mixed ideas and feelings of individual officials, prevented anything like a clear-cut decision. Thus, by June, a new Dominican politician was given the Washington buildup.

He was Dr. A well-known jurist, educator and historian, Balaguer had served the Trujillo dictatorship for almost thirty years as its most respectable intellectual front and had in return been rewarded with just about every honor it was in the power of the regime to bestow. He became Trujillo's vice-president in , and was promoted to the Presidency in August to take some of the sting out of the O.

When Trujillo was assassinated in May , Balaguer continued as President, but he realized much sooner than the other trujillistas that an epoch had come to an end. In the next year, Balaguer tried to ride out the post-Trujillo storm by making concessions to leftist demands and preparing the way for constitutional reform. Juan Bosch relates that Balaguer offered to turn over the presidency to him in December The UCN therefore waged a demagogically bitter campaign against him as the very incarnation of trujillismo and as Trujillo's political heir.

Balaguer's military chieftain, General Pedro Rodriguez Echavarria, tried to save him by staging a military coup in January , but the U. Balaguer was literally driven into exile in March as an unreconstructed trujillista , and he was not able to return until July of this year. The man who could not live down his past in had become the United States' man of the future in Ah, but those who think that U.

Lyndon Johnson may not be able to admit a mistake but it is not impossible that he is quite capable of correcting one. He was able to take office for nine months on September 3 only because the United States decided to withdraw its financial support from Imbert's junta and effectively make known its will to the Dominican military. Bruce Palmer, Jr. That they would then escort him to a waiting U. Now who in the world could have thought that?

Or could it perchance have occurred to Representative Armistead I. He knew of no Washington official who thought that the doctrine of non-intervention was obsolete, he said. That is why, he went on, the United States had refrained, in the first days of the revolt, from supporting either side in the Dominican Republic. If I were of a more skeptical mind, and Mr. Mann's reputation for gravity were not so well established, I would almost be tempted to suspect that this allusion to the way we refrained from taking sides was some sort of private joke for those who have read all the messages among the U.

We have now come close to the present phase of the still unfinished Dominican crisis. I do not wish to pursue it any further because we know far more about the earlier phases than about the later ones. But enough has been disclosed, I think, to see the past six months or so of U. Non-Americans are always likely to interpret this kind of extravaganza as a manifestation of diabolical malevolence; Americans are more likely to regard it as an exhibition of monumental incompetence.

Every move was cancelled out by another move; every rationale was inferentially disavowed by a later one. General Wessin y Wessin was a hero in April and a villain in September, though his Dominican version of the John Birch Society mentality had not changed at all and he was just as apt to accuse Donald Reid Cabral and U. It may be argued that this overabundance of disappointed suitors proves that the United States never played anyone's game and strictly maintained the neutrality which it pretended to observe; I rather think it merely proves that at different times the United States played everyone's game and was always unneutral to someone.

A succession of inconsistencies does not add up to consistency any more than a collection of falsehoods is equivalent to the truth. It has mattered little, indeed, who has represented the democratic alternative to the Imberts and the Wessins.

The particular personality or political style of Juan Bosch was never the real issue. In a deeper sense, then, the Dominican crisis is an expression of a crisis in the use and abuse of anti-Communism. Only some aspects of this larger problem can be touched on here.

It is no longer quite as clear as it used to be what Communism is. Nevertheless, in all its exist forms, it is still a system of political, intellectual, and social repression, based on a single dogma, sometimes arbitrary, sometimes ambiguous, and a single source of power, at best a party dictatorship, at worst a personal dictatorship.

It has proven its ability to debauch the noblest ideals and to commit the most monstrous crimes. Yet, whatever form it still takes, Communism has its sacred books, its recognized national and international chiefs, and its tradition of faith and discipline. Anti-Communism is not like that. It is merely a negation of Communism. The Communist world, however transitional it may be, is still a relatively restricted, prescribed order.

The anti-Communist world is, by comparison, unlimited and non-uniform. It has no sacred dogmas or too many, no leaders or too many, no causes or too many. It takes in the best and worst of humanity. The anti-Communism of a Hitler or a Trujillo is just as evil and repulsive as the Communism of a Stalin or an Ulbricht. As a result, anti-Communism by itself tells us nothing about whether a cause is worth fighting for.

The Stalins always tell us that we need to fight with them against the Hitlers, and the Hitlers always tell us that we need to fight with them against the Stalins. Thus arises the ordeal and the grandeur of humane anti-Communism—that it must usually fight on more than one front. What we must always ask is: What kind of anti-Communism do you stand for?

The problem of anti-Communism is bedevilled by an even more disturbing factor. There is no Chinese Wall between Communism and anti-Communism; almost every form of anti-Communism believes that other forms wittingly or unwittingly play into the Communists' hands. Hitlerism, to cite an extreme example, was not merely an evil in itself; it was the form of anti-Communism on which Stalinism fed the most: once the choice could be reduced to Hitler or Stalin, thousands who might have chosen neither felt that they had to choose Stalin.

Conservatives think that liberal anti-Communism is really the anteroom to Communism; liberals think that conservatives seek to perpetuate the injustices and inequalities on which Communism thrives. There are those who thought that the late Senator Joseph McCarthy was the scourge of Communism; and those who were almost convinced that only a secret agent of Moscow could have sought to destroy trust in the U. Army's top leadership. The National Review thinks that the John Birch Society is causing grave damage to the anti-Communist cause; and the John Birch Society accuses everyone outside its orbit of selling out to the Communists.

Under fidelista auspices, Bosch's brand of liberalism and ineffectual, if well-meant, anti-Communism, would have lasted about as long as an icicle on the Avenida Independencia. But the general idea was clear enough and was repeated, in far more vulgar and offensive terms, in hundreds of other editorials. A recent book by the late deLesseps S. Obviously, the problem extends far beyond Bosch personally, and any one of these figures, lumped together so indiscriminately, might have found himself in the same position and have been subjected to the same kind of treatment.

Morrison was not, to be sure, one of the brightest stars in the U. Ambassador to the Organization of American States from to Briggs was U.

Ambassador to Greece from to Indeed, there were startling similarities between the Greek crisis and the Dominican crisis. I do not wish to oversimplify the problem. I believe that there is a sense in which it is right and natural that some anti-Communists may question the effectiveness of other anti-Communists and even conscientiously believe that some anti-Communism does more harm than good.

Nor do I think that it is necessary to equate our Dominican policy with our Vietnam policy or pass judgment on the entire Johnson administration as if it had accomplished nothing else. It also makes a difference whether they come in anonymously or openly, in the rank and file or in the top leadership. To what extent can a democratic organization inhibit or prohibit such tactics?

Are the Communists the only political group that uses them? Questions such as these might well occupy some of the time and energy of political scientists.

Conservatives and liberals might well ponder the words of Professor Russell Kirk in a letter to Robert Welch, the founder and master of the John Birch Society:. A third book, by Barnard Law Collier, to be published shortly, was not available to me at the time of writing. Eisenhower reminisced about the Guatemalan coup in a way that seemed to reflect adversely on former President Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs operation.

Eisenhower took credit for ordering the replacement of some planes, provided by the C. This depressingly hilarious story—an essential detail of which the former President has now helpfully corroborated—has been told in The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas B.

The magnitude of President Eisenhower's decision was so derisory that it hardly bears comparison with President Kennedy's. Indeed, one now wonders why President Eisenhower did not carry out the invasion of Cuba, with U. The crucial importance of a handful of planes, operated by the C. Mann and Secretary of State Rusk have evidently never synchronized their views on this point. Kurzman has a somewhat different but essentially similar version.

This was never mentioned again. I cite Mr. Winfrey because he can hardly be accused of having had a pro-Bosch bias. Rodman communicated the embassy's complaint as if it were so self-evident or well-founded that nothing more needed to be said about it.

The contemporaneous report by Barnard L. Bennett said Col. The rebel colonel was responsible for at least 12 shootings yesterday as he lined up opposing troops against a wall in a downtown square and ordered them all machine-gunned.

The dead included. Szulc and Kurzman tell essentially the same stories, though minor details vary. Since the Department of State Bulletin of May 17, May 24 and June 14, , contains the official texts with the three slightly different times of arrival, I have thought it best to cite them in the same way.

The same happened with the air force. Then a group of officers of the air force were ready to surrender and accept the conditions of the rebels. Monday, the Reds would have been in power that night. Thus the decision had had nothing to do with these sound effects.

Senator Stephen M. Both articles are based on depositions by Imbert's go betweens, the originals of which I have seen. The stories seem entirely in character with the man. Martin explicitly stated that he was personally responsible for giving Imbert the green light. Marvin Kalb : Mr. Martin, the question comes up, why General Imbert? Did we find him, or did he find us?

Martin : Well, he called me and asked me to come and see him. And he told me that he had been approached by a number of Dominicans. He told them that they could not support either the rebel government or the San Isidro junta, which represented the military elements that the rebellion had begun against.

These people, the Dominicans, had asked Imbert to form a third force, a new government. It cut the rebel zone in two and later permitted the regrouped pro-Imbert troops to wipe out the northern rebel-held sector. Inasmuch as I am not trying to deal with every phase of the revolt, and the military actions raise a whole set of different problems, I have limited myself to behind-the-scenes political actions and decisions which go directly to the heart of U.

Senator Clark did not give the exact date for the three but said that they had been produced 72 hours before the The original charges against the three appeared in the New York Times story on May 6, Unfortunately, no one told Senator Frank J. Lausche of Ohio that he no longer had to worry about them. More than four months later, Mr. Lajara Burgos had also been a Rear Admiral ret. For some reason, Goodsell and Geyelin did not receive the same treatment, possibly because the very names of their papers might have caused some wonderment, though there is very little of importance in the first three that cannot be found in the last two.

This book has just been issued in. Martin's own account. Then Mr. And I think he was, too. Time is running out. In many ways Mr. Bosch is much more courageous than any one of us. His personal life fully supports this.

It is rather a matter of intimate outlook, of emotional and intellectual reactions to dead-end situations which our tragic times force upon many of us. In Mr. Bosch's estimation he could only return during his unexpired term to the Dominican Republic as President or not at all.

In he had chosen exile rather than precipitate a blood bath in Santo Domingo. He could not discard the possibility that his presence in themidst of conflict might intensify one now.

Furthermore, Bosch resents bitterly American occupation, broods over his anticipation that it may last several years, and often says it is not within himself to deal personally and constructively with such an occupation. At the same time he cannot seal himself off from what is happening, for it is happening to his country, his people and himself. Of all the attacks on Bosch, however, the dregs were reached by William F.

Buckley, Jr. Senator George Smathers improved on Mr. Alan Bullock says that Hitler attended his first party meeting in a Munich beer-cellar with twenty or twenty-five people present Hitler: A Study in Tyranny , p. It is a particularly thoughtful and penetrating analysis of the Dominican problem.

We are seeking their wisdom and their counsel and their advice. It is hard to think of anyone who is less of an innocent in these matters. But one of the points demanded that he should also agree to the expulsion from the country of a number of Communists in express violation of the constitution which forbade the Trujillo practice of exiling opponents for political reasons.

Johnson sends more than 22, U. Troubles in the Dominican Republic began in , when long-time dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated. Trujillo had been a brutal leader, but his strong anticommunist stance helped him retain the support of the United States. His death led to the rise of a reformist government headed by Juan Bosch, who was elected president in The Dominican military, however, despised Bosch and his liberal policies.

Bosch was overthrown in Political chaos gripped the Dominican Republic as various groups, including the increasingly splintered military, struggled for power. By , forces demanding the reinstatement of Bosch began attacks against the military-controlled government. On April 28, more than 22, U. View Metrics. Citing articles via Google Scholar. Email alerts Latest Issue. Related Topics martin. Related Book Chapters Vincent and Trujillo. Founding the Archive. Duke University Press W.

Main St. All Rights Reserved. Close Modal. You will be given sufficient forces to do the job. Johnson feared that Castro-ite and Communist forces were threatening to establish a Communist regime in the Dominican Republic. LBJ's secretly recorded White House tapes provide a deeply textured and intimate view of his decision making during the crisis.

The telephone had long been one of Johnson's essential work tools, allowing him to neutralize geography and compress time in reaching out beyond the bubble of the Oval Office.

During the Dominican crisis, he employed it extensively, connecting directly with Tap Bennet in Santo Domingo, and with Puerto Rico where Abe Fortas the future Supreme Court justice had volunteered his services as a line of communication with exiled president Juan Bosch. He was also able to get status reports at all hours directly from the duty officers in the White House Situation Room and the Pentagon Military Command Center.

But it did not always go smoothly. The lack of secure communications equipment meant that the President and his representatives in the Caribbean typically had to speak over open lines that were prone to interception or just the more mundane problem of crossed lines. In some cases, that led to absurdly convoluted codes being improvised that often created more confusion than clarity.

Reflecting Johnson's own heavy personal involvement in directing the intervention, the crisis is represented on hundreds of tapes in the Johnson collection of secretly recorded White House telephone conversations. Below is only a small sampling taken mainly from the first days when the important decisions were being made about sending U. Marines into harm's way and whether to escalate U.

The transcripts presented here provide a cross-section illustrating Johnson's personal management of the crisis. Some of them are entirely new; others are improved versions of transcripts that have been published elsewhere previously. Together they reveal the kind of information that the President was hearing, including when, how, and from whom. They reveal, strikingly and often jarringly, the kind of incomplete and often flawed information that was being used to make important decisions.

And they show the gap between what was being said in public and what was being said in private, a phenomenon that had troubled the administration less than a year earlier in the Tonkin Gulf episode and would become increasingly important as the Vietnam War raged on. Duty officer Jim Murray fielded the call.

The USS Boxer , on station off the coast of the Dominican Republic, was being used as a floating base to evacuate Americans by helicopter from a polo field next to the Hotel Embajador in the western outskirts of Santo Domingo. Later in the day, Johnson would order the Marines to move into Santo Domingo, but for now their mission was confined to evacuation.

The recording begins after the conversation has started. Tape No. They think he's just a stooge for the deal. But nobody thought Castro was either. Using his extensive contacts in Latin America, lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas volunteered to act as a line of communication with Juan Bosch, the exiled President of the Dominican Republic who had been ousted in a coup in and had since been in self-imposed exile in Puerto Rico.

William "Red" Raborn's first day on the job was a busy one. He had been sworn in as the new Director of Central Intelligence, replacing John McCone, just eight hours before Johnson went on national television to announce that U. Marines were landing in Santo Domingo.