The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende
Davis, Nathaniel
does not invalidate the utility of his observations today. What began as an instrument of foreign policy, he writes, took on a life of its own, and today more and more Western governments "act...
...What is even worse, domestic pressures in both the United States and Western Europe to increase economic relations, or to offer new arms control proposals, often increase after demonstrations of intransigence or lawlessness by the Kremlin...
...For the U.S., the underlying theme of Observations is the need for it to act its age...
...I was living in Spain that summer t~ 9 t when Ordonez and Dommgum clashed in the arenas...
...He writes: "Pending undiscovered evidence to the contrary, it would appear that the Junta version is true in its essentials, and the five opposing versions are not...
...They broke the political deadlock on September 11, 1973, with the coup d'~tat in which Allende died and Augusto Pinochet's grim military regime was born...
...A DEFENSE THAT DEFENDS $17.50 HIGH FRONTIER A STRATEGY FOR NATIONAL SURVIVAL HIGH FRONTIER NEWSLETTER NAME ADDRESS TOTAL: Subscribe now to our monthly newsletter CITY, STATE, ZIP BILL MY MASTERCARD expires $ 7.95 $25.00/yr $12.00/students THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985 43tim of powerful, scheming enemies...
...It was he who imbued almost every pass with something that made the heart pound...
...all the more reason, therefore, why those who make such choices should understand that Salvador Allende's experiment was doomed by its very nature...
...I coincided at three of the bullfights that Ernest Hemingway so memorably describes in this book...
...There could, he points out, have been covert U.S...
...Michener is off-base in his otherwise informative introduction when he castigates Hemingway for exaggerating the superiority of Antonio P. Ordonez, and he is wildly mistaken when he says of Domingu{n that he was "usually the more artistic" of the two...
...The elusive prize was not El Dorado's gold, but socialist revolution, to be achieved in a unique and gratifying manner: through democratic process in a free society...
...Dommgum was an incomparable domador (dominator, tamer) of the fighting bull and an exceptional artist in the classical Castilian mode, but it is Ord~fiez who had passion...
...But the important point is that U.S...
...The government began to talk of rationing food and starting a socialist indoctrination program in the schools...
...For drama, for contrast in styles, for fidelity to the art, and for what Spaniards call pundonor, which goes beyond honor, there may never again be one like it...
...Life had commissioned a 10,000 word article tha~ the editors hoped would be a reprise of sorts of Death in the Afternoon...
...His first order of business was the destruction of the private sector, which involved the nationalization of ITT and the copper mines, along with the creation of a retroactive "excess profits" tax that wiped out almost all compensation owed to the U.S.-based mining companies...
...A host of scientists, engineers, and military strategists joined in 1981 to recommend project High Frontier...
...Despite the increasing civil furor, the generals were reluctant to launch a coup...
...plaza of Linares...
...i i Z,p i L Rates in U.S...
...In the book's concluding chapter, he says: "A case can be made that Allende's Chilean experiment could not possibly have succeeded...
...ambassador to Chile from October 1971 to November 1973, aims to dispel this notion...
...This is a deeply controversial point, for it stands as a symbol of the much larger question: Did the Allende government in effect do itself in, or was it the vicTHE SO VIE TS FEAR THESE BOOKS THEY OFFER A S TRA TEG Y OF HOPE FOR FREE PEOPLE EVER YWHERE Available From High Frontier HIGH FRONTIER A STRATEGY FOR NATIONAL SURVIVAL by Lt...
...American conservatives and liberals would do well, too, to moderate their fire on one of the few serious foreign policy thinkers this country has produced in the last generation...
...played no direct role in the coup...
...After thirty pages of such material, Davis concludes that the official verdict "of suicide was probably correct...
...Tanks patrolled the streets to enforce emergency curfews...
...A Spanish and Indian expedition that set out in 1541 to find the land of spices and gold ended with a few hungry survivors butchering their own horses and dogs for food...
...Antonio watched him with his hand up guiding his death as he had guided [the bull's] one performance in his short life, and suddenly the bull shuddered and crashed over...
...Defense Intelhgence Chief Lt...
...In challenging the common wisdom on Chile, Davis has set himself an uphill task...
...The campaign against domestically owned enterprises was also thorough, and did not always use legal channels...
...Turning sixty at the time, Ernest Hemingway was desperately attempting to recover his youth and failing art...
...This attitude was fueled at times by his ill-considered remarks on the American political process...
...Though no responsible figure in the media or politics has chosen to exploit Kissinger's foreign origins to criticize his policies (editorial cartoonists naturally excepted), during his term as National Security Adviser, and even more, as Secretary of State, there was i Name (please print) i ,Tress ,ot...
...Hotchner valiantly wrestled down to 70,000 for serialization in the magazine, and from which James Michener, in a labor of love, has culled the 45,000 words that make up the present book...
...Daniel O. Graham joins WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial writer Greg Fossedal to present a hard hitting informative roadmap for a sweeping reversal in U.S...
...It is hard, of course, to prove that something did not happen...
...Allende was reluctant to punish the left, even when punishment was required by law, and he did little to stop these groups...
...As Davis narrates'his tale, he takes pains to show that though the American embassy kept fairly accurate track of the coup plotting, it did not try to influence it one way or the other...
...Allende began his revolution on the dubious strength of a 36.3 percent plurality in the 1970 general election...
...are simple fables sunk deep in the American psyche...
...These in turn led to shortages, wlxich, along with the nationalizations, resulted in protest strikes, riots, and increasing militancy on the right...
...actions of which he was unaware...
...What Davis ignores is that in Chile the anomalies and contradictions of socialism rooted in democracy transformed democrats into men with guns, and transformed a democracy into a dictatorship...
...Other foreign $32, Note: Order must be paid before the receipt | i l i l l e i IIBII IIIB lilB i i i IBIBB i IBIBI IIIIIB ~BI BIIIBIBi iBII B ~ i i i i ~ IIIBIB U~II g e l HI IIIIIB IllB I a perceptible undercurrent of resentment at the "European" way in which he viewed some foreign policy matters...
...Compromise among the many political factions had become Claudia Rosett is book review editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Critics claim it can't be done.., some argue it shouldn't be done...
...Actually, one of the ironies of the Reagan Administration that Kissinger cannot forbear from mentioning more than once is the difference between its bark and its bite...
...impossible...
...That was at Malaga...
...Nonetheless, he was an extraordinary leader and a profoundly impressive human being...
...No one accepted the gift of his enemy's f~ death so profoundly as Ordonez, and in the summer of 1959, no one killed more honorably...
...The President says it must be done and Graham and Fossedal show how with immediate off the shelf technology...
...Let's start now to deploy a strategic defense system in space, argues Graham in this brilliant and dynamic book which presents a new strategic plan for the U.S...
...By the time of the coup, more than 500 companies had been taken over, and both foreign and domestic investment had understandably dried up...
...He was destined to enjoy peace scarcely two years...
...He made all the classic passes and then seemed to try to refine them and make them purer in line and more dangerous as he purposely shortened his naturales by bringing his elbow in to bring the bull by him closer than it seemed any bull could be passed . . . [wrapping] the bull around him again and again and again . . . . He went past reason and seemed to be fighting in a controlled rage . . . . " At the kill, he was incomparable: "By the time Antonio's fingers were bloodied the bull was dead but the bull did not know it for a while...
...He had to kill absolutely p e r f e c t l y . . . . So when he furled the muleta and sighted with the sword, he aimed for the very high top of the notch between the shoulder blades and drove in over the horn . . . . He and the bull formed one solid mass and when he came out over the horn the bull had the long steel death in him to the hilt . . . . Antonio watched him go down in a footgripping, staggering, rolling crash and the second mano a mano was over...
...After all, it was Reagan, not Carter, who campaigned in 1980 against the grain embargo, and the conduct (as opposed to the posturing) of his administration has been a model of restraint...
...The facts are very much on Davis's side...
...Michener for having salvaged this material9 As for me...
...But if so, they have yet to be discovered, even after the Church committee investigations of the mid-1970s and the extensive research of journalists such as Seymour Hersh...
...What began as an instrument of foreign policy, he writes, took on a life of its own, and today more and more Western governments "act on the premise that the immediate goals in employment outweigh the political risks in strengthening a hostile and aggressive political system...
...The fans of Manolete said .that he had been pushed to his death by the ruthless challenger...
...As the public sector began to swell, the state met its expanding payroll by printing money, and responded to the ensuing inflation with wage, price, and currency controls...
...Regretting that "the analysis requires an almost clinical examination of the deceased president's remains," he then sorts through six well-known versions of Allende's death, including graphic discussions of the president's wounds: For example, could Allende's body have remained in a sitting position after he shot himself in the head with a submachine gun...
...In August of 1947, a Manolete past his prime was killed in the provincial Reid Buckley most recently founded the Buckley School of Public Speaking, which organizes seminars for professional executives...
...Now even the posturing is changing, but both critics at home and allied leaders abroad seem .not to notice...
...It was Dommguln s highwater mark, as it turned out, because at Malaga he gave his best, he fought maybe better than ever he had fought 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985...
...a m mmlmm m m m m m i u m m m m m i i m m m m m m i m m m m m m m m i m m m i m m m m m m n m m m m i m m m m n m m m m m m m i m n m i m m i m m m i N m i High Frontier, 1010 Vermont Ave., NW, Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20005 (202) 737-4979...
...Instead, in a monumental exercise of ethnocentricity, many Americans blamed the usual suspect-the United States...
...He, like Manolete (who is savagely criticized by Hemingway for fighting "half-bulls"), possessed the tragic dimension...
...By August 1973, the Chilean congress had passed a resolution accusing the Allende government of assaulting freedom of education and of the press, violating property and trade union rights-and the autonomy of universities, and illegally arresting and torturing its opponents...
...They predicted that someone would come along one day to inflict vengeance on Domingufn, and they prayed to live to see it...
...He comments, for instance, that Allende "unfailingly displayed great, generous, and compelling personal attributes...
...Hemingway's fascination with bullfighting is easily explained, creativity being intimately of the stuff of death, sex, and religion...
...About religion he was callow and formally ignorant...
...Davis hopes to overwhelm the myths with a truly massive onslaught of facts, so he gives a sometimes maniacally detailed but diplomatic description of events during his stay in Chile, piling up fifty-one pages of footnotes from sources that span the political spectrum...
...17.95 away from Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) to Mutual Assured Security (MAS) with High Frontier...
...Now, a defense is available to render this weapon of terror obsolete...
...Those "slow, straight, beautiful long passes," with the ceriseas Ordonez hunched his left and-yellow ' ~ " shoulder and bent with an erotic kind of joyousness into the bull, stopped time still-, but he was as breathtaking with the red muleta: "He took the b u l l . . , so suavely, so simply, and so smoothly that every pass seemed to be sculptured...
...As Davis says, Allende "never made it quite clear whether he was on the side of the mobilized workers or of his own authorities...
...Davis tries to establish once and for all what happened inside the burning presidential palace on the day of the coup...
...role in Chile, Davis amasses a credible case that the U.S...
...Impatient with the pace of official nationalizations, radical left-wing groups began seizing farms and factories and arming the workers...
...The result was the now historic decision by President Reagan to move Ppbk...
...Apparently, the same talent for polite equivocation that helped Davis as a diplomat hinders him as a historian...
...More than that, trade with the Soviet Union is often conducted on concessiortal terms, so that it amounts to a form of appeasement, a subsidy to ward off Soviet bad conduct...
...The right to democratic choice is indeed invaluable...
...One was the ongoing course of Chilean democracy...
...Antonio almost made me choke up with the cape," Hemingway writes, accurately describing Ordonez s effect on anyone who saw him in the years when he was still hungry...
...He has lost the thread of his own argument when he maintains that "socialism may not be the best or even a good way to order sooety's affairs, but the ability of free citizens to choose socialism or capitalism is beyond price . . . . Too many people in the world share Allende's socialist convictions for democrats to abandon that aspiration to men with guns who preach bloody revolution as the only road to social justice...
...dollars...
...In 1970, with the election of Salvador Allende to the presidency, Chile embarked on a twentieth-century version of the same quest...
...activities were flyweight endeavors compared to the suicidal force of Allende's own policies...
...Although he talked of the "via Chilena" to democratic socialism as if it were a freeway to brotherly love, he was in practice trying to follow two roads...
...Challengers came and went...
...Daniel O. Graham A DEFENSE THAT DEFENDS by Lt...
...His government could not follow the latter way without engaging in economic coercion and, ultimately, political repression...
...Only wishful thinking suggested that Allende's venture would succeed...
...I did not see Hemingway's account in Life, however...
...Few people are altogether consistent in outlook, and Salvador AUende revealed more contradictions and anomalies than most...
...he put them away...
...national defense policy...
...he wrote 120,000 words that his friend and memorialist A.E...
...Daniel O. Graham and Gregory Fossedal Former U.S...
...He is one of the last true "trans-Atlantic" figures in our political community, and our NATO allies would do well to consider his counsels as those of a true friend--one of the last, in fact, they are likely to have, unless and until his advice is acted upon...
...I read The Dangerous Summer with a keen and very particular ache in my heart...
...Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine any European-certainly not Lord Carrington, certainly not Claude Cheysson--writing a book like this...
...The government's bid to nationalize the trucking business in September 1972 provoked the first of the truckers' strikes that paralyzed the country...
...It is troubling to consider how close the question comes to answering itself...
...THE DANGEROUS SUMMER Ernest Hemingway/Charles Scribner's Sons/$17.95 Reid Buckley In the summer of 1959 a doomed Ernest Hemingway came back to the Spain he had celebrated in The Sun Also Rises to cover the deadly rivalry developing between Luis Miguel Dommgum and Antonio Ordonez, two of the most sensational matadors in bullfighting annals...
...But he goes on to reject this diagnosis, "perhaps because I instinctively reject such preordained afflictions and gloomy probabilities...
...After all this, however, Davis does not seem to understand the significance of his own story...
...He retired: famous, rich, married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, his terrible pride unchastened...
...I remember hearing that it disappointed...
...Why is this so...
...Not the kind of choking where people sob.., but the kind where your chest and throat tighten up and your eyes dim seeing something that you thought was dead and done with come to life before you . . . . Antonio was using the cape as no one alive had ever used it . . . . He wanted to be alone with the bull and then he cited him and when he came in a rush Antonio coupled into him to make the long, slow endless passes that were like some deep music that only he and the bull could hear...
...With each new crisis, their secret discussions would resume, but the members of the armed forces were professionals, sworn to uphold the constitution, and they were not eager to depose an elected president...
...More than a quarter of the aid, for example, went to support the leading opposition newspaper, El Mercurio, which the government was trying to bankrupt by manipulating the advertising policies of nationalized companies...
...Well, anyone remotely interested in bullfighting and the literary legend that Ernest Hemingway once was should be grateful to Mr...
...Kissinger's is an American vision enriched by European experience...
...This team examined the estimate cost, effectiveness and benefits of a space-base missile defense system...
...And hubristic...
...When the horns claimed Manolete that afternoon, Domingufn inherited not only the crown but undying hatred...
...9 I The reverse is the fact...
...In The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende Nathaniel Davis, who was U.S...
...The congress called upon the military to steer the government back to legal behavior, and the armed forces responded, but not as congress had hoped...
...He could always break my heart with the cape . . . . " Yes, he could...
...According to Davis, "There were ebbs and flows of planning and activity which followed the successive pulls of national crisis and subsided when the nation's politics moved in quieter ways...
...This enthusiasm for detail verges on the surreal when Davis raises the question of whether Allende's death was an assassination or a suicide...
...They suggest that though the U.S...
...For many, especially foreigners who had not suffered the forced march along the via Chilena, it was intolerable to believe that Allende's ruin might have come from his own confused ambitions...
...The romance of Allende and the villainy of the U.S...
...To mediate the strikes and help maintain his control over an angry and divided citizenry, Allende brought military leaders into his cabinet...
...In i958, a young and handsome matador from the chalk-white Andalusian town of Ronda unfurled one of the most exquisite capes in the history of bullfighting...
...In Canada $15...
...For over 20 years, America has remained completely defenseless against the most awesome threat the world has ever witnessedmthe Soviet long range nuclear ballistic missile...
...But the search for this easy wealth leads to sordid realities...
...Hemingway calls it one of the greatest fights ever...
...the other veered off sharply toward a centrally planned economy...
...Hemingway had that and much else in mind...
...He goes to some length in his book to put in a kind word for almost all the main figures in the Chilean drama, especially AUende...
...For twelve triumphal years, however, Domingufn ruled the arenas...
...Death therefore rode him like an obsession, and at the end, though he fought and defied Death, which stood for the extinction of his literary powers, it claimed him...
...But with his item-by-item examination of charges against the U.S...
...This is something against which as a political culture we still rebel, but from which, inevitably, there is no escapc [] THE LAST TWO YEARS OF SALVADOR ALLENDE Nathaniel Davis/Cornell University Press/S24.95 Claudia Rosett Since at least the time of the conquistadores Latin America has been haunted by the legend of El Dorado-the land of treasure that lies always just beyond the horizon...
...It is a very Spanish twist that he who 9 I would drive Domlngum back into the lists, who would humiliate him and very nearly satisfy the bloodlust of the idolators of Manolete, was married to the sister of his victim and managed by his victim's two brothers...
...See my "Death and Domingufn" in the June 1968 Atlantic...
...did supply a little more than $6 million in covert aid to the opposition during 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1985Allende's three years in office, much of Lhe money went to support legitimate apposition activities that the government was trying to suppress by unscrupulous means...
...Is it because the critics seek an excuse for a barely disguised neutralism, and the leaders require--or believe they require--at least the pretense of 'moderating' American obtuseness and intransigence as a unifying element in their domestic politics...
...On the card with him were Gitanillo de Triana and the young, brash, obnoxious, brilliant Luis Miguel Gonzalez Lucas, "Domingufn," who for several years past had paraded around the bullrings stabbing the skies with the index finger of one hand to assert that he, not the aging and dissolute king, was numero uno...
...There was only one thing for him left to do...
...This book, as he says, is both monograph and memoir, an attempt to explain what happened in Chile and to vindicate himself...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
