Opening the Debate
GOLDMANN, ROBERT B.
Opening the Debate DOMINICAN DIARY By Tad Szulc Delacorte Press. 306 pp. $6 REVOLT OF THE DAMNED By Dan Kurzman Putnam. 310 pp. $5.95 Reviewed by ROBERT B. GOLDMANN Economic...
...The narrative has a certain air of the detective story about it, but there is no mystery...
...Kurzman devotes half of his book to the historical antecedants of the April rebellion...
...The debate has only begun, and the Administration is in for a long siege...
...Mora seems to have shown unsuspected resourcefulness and stamina in the almost impossible mediation task he was asked to perform in Santo Domingo...
...While Szulc and Kurzman have little new to add to the knowledge of diligent readers of the daily press and the many magazine articles on the Dominican fiasco, their books are nonetheless useful, especially for their interesting glimpses of some of the key figures in the struggle...
...from the inclusion of a description of some "entertainment" that reporters "enjoyed" in the Hotel Embajador in Santo Domingo during the later stages of the rebellion...
...Szulc credits Bundy with "a superb insight into the whole Dominican state of affairs...
...Latin Americans, said Mann, "do not want a paternalistic United States deciding which particular political faction should rule their countries...
...After several thousand Dominican dead, scores of U.S...
...He is particularly good in his documentation of Imbert's closeness to the 14th of June Movement in the days following the fall of Trujillo, and he also provides interesting insights into the personal motivations and attitudes of some of the men who were lumped together in the revised, rerevised and unendingly corrected U.S...
...diplomats in Santo Domingo-the more so because the U.S...
...It is hardly surprising that the Johnson Administration wishes it were not so...
...Szulc's book, a tour de force written and edited in less than a week, is a fascinating play-by-play account of the events which the author himself covered or which were directly apposite to his on-the-spot reporting...
...During the 13-and-a-half months he had spent in Santo Domingo," says Szulc, "Ambassador Bennett had largely confined himself to contacts with the Reid Cabral government, business and land owning groups supporting it, and some of the military officers loyal to it...
...the State Department spokesman was John F. King, not John W. King (Szulc...
...But such shortcomings are easily and heavily outweighed by the solid information in both books...
...This is the source of the deep animosity in Latin America-from Communists and conservatives alike-toward the Bosches in the Dominican Republic, the Furtados (in Brazil) and the Freis (in Chile...
...Yet, it was Bosch's return to power that the U.S...
...Although former President Juan Bosch has not been tainted by close association with Communists, Antonio Imbert Barrera, who last May was the apparent U.S...
...is not merely or primarily whether a man holds a Communist card, but whether he acts in the revolutionary way...
...Tad Szulc, who covered the uprising and its aftermath for the New York Times, bluntly calls U.S...
...Both books could have done with some better editing...
...The ironies of the imbroglio were plentiful...
...Nobody denies that some of the aims of Bosch and his PRD, and of many other reformist parties in Latin America, coincide with those the Communists profess...
...As the rebellion dragged on and the rebels refused to give in, Johnson pulled Martin (along with some other discarded liberals) out of mothballs to establish contact with the liberal elements...
...But it is surprising that Assistant Secretary of State Jack H. Vaughn would make a bet with Senator Robert Kennedy that Kennedy would not get many questions about the Dominican Republic during his recent trip to Latin America...
...Says Szulc: "A few weeks later I ran into him [Calderón] in a Santo Domingo hospital, where he was recovering from a slight neck wound...
...list of "Communists...
...choice to be the Dominican leader, did have discussions with them in the early post-Trujillo days...
...youths could not have been "disbursed" (Kurzman...
...was determined to prevent for fear of a Communist takeover...
...Mann said in the same speech in October that, because the United States did not want to decide Latin Americans' fate for them, "we refrained during the first days of the violence from 'supporting' either of the factions contending for power...
...support for "political parties of the non-Communist left" in the Hemisphere are victims of "confusion...
...As President Kennedy's ambassador to Santo Domingo, he was an all-out supporter of Bosch and reform, and he diligently tried to frustrate the coup that ousted Bosch in September 1963...
...Shortly thereafter President Johnson replaced him with Bennett, who got along famously with the triumvirate the military installed following Bosch's ouster...
...Kurzman's own belief in the need for revolutionary change can be clearly felt throughout Revolt of the Damned...
...Also, his search for decent watering and eating places, while understandable, is described in too much detail for the kind of book he has written...
...And it was only when the tide of battle turned in favor of the rebels, in the wake of this new and disastrous misjudgment of Bennett's, that the U.S...
...It was this assumption of Bennett's that the rebel leader, Colonel Francisco Caamafio Defio, says insulted him and his associates so deeply that it made them "fight to the death...
...At the very least it was an indelicate statement for the U.S...
...In Ambassador Bennett the conservatives had a sympathetic audience...
...Uruguay is not a "reformist" country...
...military forces were openly and smilingly cooperating with Imbert's "loyalist" troops...
...The impression grows that what concerns the U.S...
...Szulc's point of view can never be mistaken, and yet he is restrained in projecting it...
...And it was not Bosch's Dominican Revolutionary party (PRD) that the Castroite 14th of June movement successfully infiltrated at the time-it was the conservative Union Civica Nacional, from whose ranks come many of the people trusted by Washington...
...But something had happened to Martin...
...Perhaps more important, though, the statement underlines our policymakers' deep distrust of genuinely reform-minded governments...
...stumbled into its second major error...
...But on April 26, the third day of the rebellion, according to Szulc, "the United States Embassy was squarely on the side of General Wessin...
...Reading these two chronicles of the recent Dominican revolt, one also begins to suspect that this distrust is based on something far more serious than fear of a Communist takeover: a remarkable lack of sound judgement...
...casualties, and an incalculable amount of damage to U.S...
...It was therefore natural that Bennett and his conversation partners became alarmed when the rebels struck...
...And sometimes his interests as a reporter get the better of him, as when he says that the perfectly legitimate attempt of the U.S...
...became seriously, even desperately interested in a cease-fire...
...Dan Kurzman, who was on the scene for the Washington Post, hopes that "the Dominican episode was not a return to the bitter past but an unfortunate digression from the road leading to a brighter future...
...Szulc and Kurzman provide ample evidence that Bennett felt sure the rebels were licked and advised them to surrender to Wessin...
...Its military attaches were at San Isidro with the Wessin Command, relaying to the Embassy battle reports and requests for assistance...
...Kurzman's book suffers from a lionization of Bosch, who turned out to be more of a lamb than a lion...
...Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett Jr., who is responsible for much of what happened in Santo Domingo in 1965, may have given a clue to this implicit policy in a frantic telegram he sent to Washington on April 28: "If the present loyalist efforts fail, the power will go to those whose aims are identical with those of the Communist party...
...The essential difference, however, is that the Communists use reformist propaganda to get themselves into power, while the real reformers use power to put through reforms...
...and from some maudlin passages about the sufferings of the Dominican people...
...Both authors have high praise for OAS Secretary General José A. Mora, who in the past has not enjoyed a reputation for dynamic action and has often been the object of derision on the part of cynical members of Washington's news corps...
...Szulc could have spared us some of the excerpts from Times editorials, which add little to his account...
...He claims he lacked authority...
...An unfortunate mixture of hysteria and lack of judgement quickly rendered him useless as a contact man with the rebels...
...Bennett's attempts to discredit the rebels are typified by his report to the State Department that Caamafio had "personally killed" a Colonel Calderón, who had been an aide to ousted President Donald Reid Cabrai...
...5.95 Reviewed by ROBERT B. GOLDMANN Economic Editor, Vision magazine On October 12 Under Secretary of State Thomas C. Mann, one of the main architects of present United States policy in Latin America, charged that those who favor U.S...
...Secretary Mann's pious words notwithstanding, our Embassy was determined to prevent the Boschists' success from the outset...
...prestige a shaky truce was achieved...
...After having thrown its political and material support on the side of the Dominican military, the U.S...
...actions in Santo Domingo a tragedy...
...He provided the backing for the Imbert junta, whose actions embarrassed the supposedly neutral U.S...
...According to St...
...Former Ambassador John Bartlow Martin is given the role of tragic victim...
...had just put the man of its choice into the Presidential chair in Santo Domingo...
...When the rebels came to the Embassy on April 27 to ask for mediation, Bennett turned them down...
...White House foreign policy assistant McGeorge Bundy receives high praise from Szulc for his efforts to put together a government under pro-Bosch politician Silvestre Antonio Guzman...
...to keep some of its diplomatic maneuvering from the public "compounded our problem...
...Kennedy, of course, was bombarded on the subject and Vaughn lost the bet...
...Louis Post Dispatch correspondent Richard Dudman, as quoted by Szulc, this plan was sabotaged by Mann...
...Caamafio and Bosch were happy to see Martin and eager to trust him...
...The Dominican rebellion is going to spur debate and writing among Americans, Latin Americans and non-Americans for a long time...
...Yet to come are the accounts of Barnard Collier of the New York Herald Tribune and Jules Dubois of the Chicago Tribune, and this is just the beginning...
...The weekly Embassy airgrams are "Weekas," not "weekers...
...Bennett is the villain in both books, although Mann comes in for a good share of the blame too...
Vol. 49 • January 1966 • No. 1
