Conclusion

If Lyndon Johnson’s administration witnessed a dwindling of the energy and optimism of the early days of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, then his successor would preside over its disappearance. Johnson’s attempts to promote regional integration were the last significant effort of an era characterized by the belief that the United States could further its own interests by encouraging Latin American modernization and economic development through various forms of aid and assistance. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, whose experiences during his ill-fated tour of 1958 had helped prompt the Eisenhower administration’s belated interest in Latin America, would abandon the idea of hemispheric development almost entirely. Despite some claims to the contrary during the 1968 election campaign, the region did not play a significant role in the strategic vision of global affairs of Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, and the Alliance was not part of their plans. As Nixon stated bluntly: “Latin America doesn’t matter.” To an even greater degree for the new administration than for its predecessors, stability was the key; few promises of economic assistance were forthcoming, and repressive governments would be embraced even more readily than in the Kennedy-Johnson era. “So unambitious as to be embarrassing,” was the stark assessment of Nixon’s regional agenda in the ...

A New Deal for the New Frontier

This chapter studies the tumultuous period 1960–1964, focusing largely on developments in Washington, and incorporating analysis of Kennedy’s management of the Alliance and Lyndon Johnson’s tragic elevation to the presidency. In studying Johnson’s and Mann’s difficult relationships with Kennedy’s key Latin American aides, deep divisions within the administration are revealed that would have damaging consequences in the coming years. Long-simmering tensions would boil over following Mann’s appointment as head of Latin American policy, culminating in the creation of the “Mann Doctrine,” which critics of the administration claimed signaled the death of the Alliance. The clashes between New Frontier advocates of social-scientific theories of modernization and the New Deal liberalism of Johnson and Mann shed important new light on the planning and implementation of America’s “development decade.”

Introduction

We have problems everywhere. —Thomas Mann to Lyndon Johnson, June 1964 On 11 April 1967, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a rare foray outside the United States to spend three days in Punta del Este, Uruguay, attending a conference of American presidents. Six years previously, that same coastal resort town had been the location from which John F. Kennedy’s ambitious cooperative aid program, the Alliance for Progress, had been launched, yet Johnson hoped the meeting could be more than a celebration of his predecessor’s achievements. Having played a leading role in organizing the hemispheric summit, he pushed his aides to draft a wide-ranging series of proposals intended to launch a renewed and reinvigorated Alliance for Progress, focusing on regional economic integration through a common market and cooperative infrastructure projects. His public dedication to renewed efforts at hemispheric development would result in a rewarding trip, with constructive private and public meetings followed by a joint declaration that incorporated all his key proposals. The United States, he told the gathered presidents, was committed “by history, by national interest, and by simple friendship to the cause of progress in Latin America.”...

New Alliances

The final chapter considers the period following the Dominican Republic intervention and Mann’s departure from the government. Rarely explored by historians, these years witnessed an increasingly embattled administration attempting to repair the damage done by its actions in the Caribbean while facing an escalating conflict in Southeast Asia and an ever more hostile Congress. The 1967 Summit of the Presidents of the Americas, which Johnson played a leading role in organizing, is considered in depth as reflective of a revised approach to the hemisphere. In particular, Johnson’s emphasis on integration—both physical, through the development of inter-American infrastructure, and economic, through the envisaged expansion of common markets—is used as evidence of a relatively coherent vision and a potentially more viable framework for modernization than the initial direct-aid-centered efforts of the Alliance. Although undermined by continued political instability, these genuine efforts nonetheless challenge the traditional narrative of an administration that had all but given up on Latin America after 1965.

No More Cubas

The majority of this chapter is dedicated to exploring the most controversial and destructive incident of Johnson’s management of Latin American policy, the intervention in the Dominican Republic in April 1965. By considering the decision to intervene, the period of occupation, and the Organization of American States (OAS)–supervised elections that followed, the impact and significance of the first use of US forces in the hemisphere since the 1930s can be thoroughly unpacked. A turning point in Johnson’s presidency, the intervention was in some respects a success, with few casualties and the eventual election of a US-friendly government. However, it also severely damaged relations with Congress and the press, alienated masses of Latin Americans, undermined trust in the OAS, and convinced Thomas Mann to leave government service after more than twenty years. This use of force occurring at the same time as American troops were introduced in Vietnam, its relevance is readily apparent.

Trade, Aid, and the Cold War in the Americas

This chapter explores Thomas Mann’s career in the State Department in the period prior to Johnson’s presidency, establishing both Mann’s background and beliefs and the broad pattern of inter-American relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mann’s role as an early champion of increased economic aid and cooperative measures to assist the economies of the hemisphere is vital for understanding the positions he would later advocate in the 1960s, as is his highly successful period serving as Kennedy’s ambassador to Mexico. The chapter also traces the gradual shift from the Eisenhower administration’s “trade-not-aid” position to early efforts at promoting economic modernization, supported by Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, as the Cold War came to Latin America via Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. It concludes with the culmination of this process, the creation of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.

The Good Neighbor Returns?

Chapter 3 studies Johnson’s and Mann’s handling of Latin American policy in the first full year of the new administration. Beginning with a major international crisis in the Panama Canal Zone in January, the year 1964 was a challenging one that would also see military coups in Brazil and Bolivia, Mann’s attempts to reshape Alliance bureaucracy, and former Kennedy aides continually challenging the legitimacy of Johnson’s leadership and Mann’s liberal credentials. Particular attention is given to the skillful manner in which the Panamanian crisis was resolved and the improvements in the performance of the Alliance for Progress, challenging standard interpretations of Johnson’s diplomatic abilities. The controversy of the Brazilian coup is not overlooked, with the complex relationship between the Brazilian military, the US ambassador in Brasilia, and State Department and National Security Council officials in Washington representative of the increasingly problematic and intertwined nature of security and development goals.