Prentice J. Sargeant HIST 711 Dr. Martin Sherwin December 9 , 2013 Islands of Sanity: John F. Kennedy & the Alliance For
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Prentice J. Sargeant HIST 711 Dr. Martin Sherwin December 9th, 2013 Islands of Sanity: John F. Kennedy & the Alliance for Progress On March 13, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced an economic aid program for Latin America, unparalleled in size and scope to anything that the United States had attempted in the region. Dubbed the Alliance for Progress, this new program was designed as a "vast cooperative effort…to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health, and schools." In this speech, the president made clear that the “Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments-and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no right place.” This, Kennedy said, was the joint mission of all nations in the Western Hemisphere.1 By promoting a mutual economic aid program to assist in nation-building, Kennedy sought to accentuate social and economic growth while simultaneously combating communism in Latin America. By joining these two purposes, the Alliance for Progress combined both soft and hard power. Superficially, the AFP was entirely soft power.2 It espoused ideals, like erasing poverty and improving education, and promised massive economic aid to promote growth, which was greatly needed in Latin America. Nations in Latin America commonly dealt with high inflation, 1 John F. Kennedy: "Address at a White House Reception for Members of Congress and for the Diplomatic Corps of the Latin American Republics," March 13, 1961. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8531. 2 According to political scientist Joseph Nye, soft power is required to “attract others in world politics and not only to force them to change by threatening military force or economic sanctions.” Rather than using blunt military force, or even extortion or threat of violence, Nye argues that the desirability of a nation’s culture, political values, and foreign policies can instill a “power of seduction” that induces allegiance with certain values. Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 5-9. high infant death rates, and a lack of public education for the masses. Economic aid, to promote progressive economic and social change, was necessary to end the crises gripping the region. But the AFP was not just an example of soft power; as time wore on Kennedy also applied hard-line policies to achieve the changes he desired in the Western Hemisphere.3 To the Kennedy administration, Latin America was not just the impoverished neighbor that needed an economic jumpstart; it was a feeding ground for communist ideas, gripping entire regions in the Cuban mindset. In order to stop communism from spreading, Kennedy resorted to policies used by his predecessors. President Kennedy’s policies in Latin America were conceptually flawed, from start to finish. As senator, Kennedy heavily criticized the Eisenhower administration for ignoring the “economic gap, the gap…between the developed and undeveloped worlds.” Kennedy claimed that by ignoring the needs of the Third World, Eisenhower permanently damaged the American reputation as the leader of the free world.4 During his presidential run, Kennedy pledged to break from the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policies; covert operations were to be replaced with foreign aid programs to bring the Latin America into the First World. The Alliance for Progress was Kennedy’s vision for progressive change. But reality trumped Kennedy’s vision and that he resorted to the same tactics that Eisenhower had practiced. Kennedy adopted both hard and soft policies in Latin America. In nations like Venezuela and Columbia, his policies were welcomed by anticommunist leaders. But in others, particularly Brazil and Argentina, Kennedy was greeted with disinterest: Brazilian and Argentinean leaders did not share Kennedy’s fear of Cuban communism. In Kennedy’s mind, anticommunism was 3 Nye describes hard power as “military and economic might” that “rest[s] on inducements or threats,” which includes military action and extortion. Nye, 5-9. 4 “Economics: The Economic Gap,” Speeches and the Press, February 19, 1959, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, 1-7. key to the progressive change that he wanted in Latin America: if a nation fell to communism or promoted communism, it could never improve living standards, educational values, and economic development.5 The AFP, then, was an aid program designed to help developing nations that supported anticommunist policies; and a weapon to weaken left-leaning governments. Despite some of the actions that his administration would take in Brazil and Argentina, Kennedy was dedicated to his vision of progressive change, for both the United States and Latin America. Desperate to differentiate himself from the previous administration of covert military operations, Kennedy first exhibited his dedication to change by his refusal to send reinforcements to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.6 But his dedication to the AFP waned when Kennedy realized that economic aid did not beget anticommunism. The Bay of Pigs represented one of the few examples in which the Kennedy administration sacrificed anticommunism for the benefit of the AFP. In arguing that Kennedy doomed the Alliance for Progress, I am reversing a few trends that have existed in the Kennedy mythology since the 1960’s. One of Kennedy’s biographers, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., blamed President Johnson’s administration for giving up on the AFP. Schlesinger claimed that, had Kennedy lived to fulfill his first and possibly win a second term, the AFP may have succeeded in creating the progressive change Kennedy envisioned. Because Kennedy’s time in office only “lasted about a thousand days,” Schlesinger argued that “the Alliance was never really tried.”7 To prove his point, Schlesinger recalled a brief conversation 5 Kimber Charles Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 88-89. 6 “Memorandum from the Attorney General to President Kennedy, April 19, 1961,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963: American Republics, (Washington GPO, 1996), 302-305. 7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective,” in Latin America: The Search for a New International Role, ed. Ronald G. Hellman and H. Jon Rosenbaum (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 83. between Robert F. Kennedy and a State Department official in 1965, shortly before the attorney general left for a tour of Latin America: “After listening to the usual cant, Kennedy finally said, ‘What the Alliance for Progress has come down to then is that you can close down newspapers, abolish congress, jail religious opposition, and deport your political enemies, and you’ll get lots if help, but if you fool around with a U.S. oil company, we’ll cut you off without a penny. Is that right?’ The official replied, ‘That’s about the size of it.”8 Ted Sorensen believed that “reality did not match the rhetoric which flowed about the Alliance.” His speeches, alongside those of economist Walt Whitman Rostow, embodied Kennedy’s personal beliefs about progressive economic and social change; but the man who wrote many of Kennedy’s speeches argued that Kennedy embraced the neutralism of Latin America during the Cold War, refusing to “fix an aid recipient’s domestic policy” or coerce an alliance out of a neutral power.9 Some contemporary historians have agreed with Schlesinger and Sorensen, including presidential biographer Robert Dallek. In his biography of Kennedy, Dallek argued that “[r]esistance to reform in Latin America itself was a…greater obstacle. Kennedy’s idealistic rhetoric about transforming the region had not persuaded entrenched interests across the hemisphere.”10 Some Latin American critics even went so far as to call the AFP the “Fidel Castro Plan.” Dallek did argue that Kennedy resorted to the interventionist policies of the Eisenhower years, but Dallek countered that criticism of the president, arguing that his proposed “alliance between the United States and Latin America to advance economic development, 8 Schlesinger, “The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective,” 80. 9 Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965), 537-539. 10 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2003), 436. democratic institutions, and social justice” trumped Kennedy’s desire to keep Latin America from turning red.11 Contemporary historians have been more willing to blame the failure of Kennedy’s vision on Kennedy’s actions. In his work, Stephen G. Rabe argued that “President John F. Kennedy brought high ideals and noble purposes to his Latin American policy. Ironically, however, his unwavering determination to wage Cold War in ‘the most dangerous area in the world’ led him and his administration ultimately to compromise and even mutilate those grand goals for the Western Hemisphere.”12 Rabe’s argument is similar to mine, but it differs in a key way. Rabe rested a lot of blame on Johnson’s rejection of democracy in Latin America, choosing to support military dictatorships who were rabidly anticommunist rather than support hemispheric democracy, as had Kennedy.13 But I find that Kennedy’s failures to fully commit himself to his grand vision of progressive change irrevocably damaged the AFP; by the time Johnson inherited the program, it was already dead. According to Kennedy, progressive change and anticommunism went hand-in-hand. The AFP was designed to “create a neighborhood of Western hemisphere countries with whom [the United States] can live on a friendly basis.” Kennedy wanted to count on Latin American “support in the basic issues of the world power struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union.14 Progressive change, therefore, meant that the United States and Latin America would cooperate on hemispheric decisions, but Kennedy envisioned an anticommunist relationship.