A Case of Political Obscenity

...All members of the country team feel Bosch's return and resumption of control of the government is against U.S...

...The Dominican press, moreover, knows its Communists and never hesitates to mention them by name...

...Consequently: "Our sectarian attitude to the Army prevented us from correctly assessing the changes taking place in it and isolated us from the entire process of preparation of the coup in the barracks...

...Chargé d'Affaires Connett was in on the Dominican military decision to drown the revolt in blood and, in effect, the U.S...

...on April 25...

...on April 25, a half hour after the Air Force attack on the National Palace, and the links are to be found in three key sentences...

...Later we got into contact with Caamaño when we formed our commando (one of the fighting units).' (Chicago Daily News, November 9, 1965...

...I mentioned that the two leading Santo Domingo newspapers reported the first four days of the revolt...

...In brief, Bosch's party and the Christian Social Revolutionary Party, the Dominican version of what is known elsewhere as the Christian Democratic movement, made a pact in January 1965, to restore constitutional government...

...Even if this clumsy campaign were directed against the Communists, it would backfire...

...Yet this article in the World Marxist Review, which can be found in many of our larger libraries and could be bought in our larger cities, has been made the pretext for the latest propaganda campaign against the Dominican revolt...

...PRESIDENT OF THE CHAMBER assumes power...

...For there have been signs of late that the policy may be changing for the better...

...This was the first turning point in the fortunes of the revolt...

...Up to the time of Reid Cabral's resignation, the death toll, according to the Dominican press, numbered three...

...This campaign is nothing less than a clean case of political obscenity...

...Connett continued: "I have reluctantly agreed to the de los Santos-Wessin plan even though it could mean more bloodshed.' And three sentences later, he added: "Our attachés have stressed to the three military leaders, Rivera, de los Santos and Wessin, our strong feeling everything possible should be done to prevent a Communist takeover...

...Representative Joe D. Waggonner (D.-Ala...

...Thus they claim some credit for having joined the fight after it started without them, but they make clear that they played a relatively modest role throughout the April revolt...

...He told the House that the "hierarchy of international Communism" had now frankly admitted that "they armed and fomented the revolt last April in the Dominican Republic...

...was in Georgia visiting his mother...

...The "Communist advocacy of Bosch return,' to which Connett's cable alluded, apparently referred to a manifesto by the pro-Soviet Communist party, then known as the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), of March 16, 1965, about five weeks before the revolt...

...went Representative Seiden one better...

...Communism is a fantasy in this country...

...2 This cable proves that the United States representatives in Santo Domingo effectively intervened against the revolt on its second day...

...More recently, I have been able to restudy the antecedents and nature of the upheaval on the basis of surprisingly rich and revealing Dominican sources...

...On March 25, 1966, too, Senator Joseph Clark (D.-Pa...

...Why did the military officers who saw the handwriting on the wall for most of that day change their minds and oppose the revolt by force...

...intervention in the Dominican Republic-the alleged tie-up between Juan Bosch and the Communists...

...military intervention the island of Santo Domingo would have become another Red base in the Caribbean...

...Why...

...He introduced the full text of the World Marxist Review article in the Congressional Record, with an accurate commentary of his own...

...The people who engage in this kind of shabby deception may justify it on the ground that, against Communism, anything goes...

...The same story carried the text of a pro-revolt statement by the Dominican Lawyers' Association, hardly a revolutionary body...

...Molina Urefia was sworn in at 5:45 p.m...

...Santo Domingo is not and will not be Communist, and there does not exist any foundation on which it can develop...

...Representative Armistead I. Seiden Jr...

...Could members of Congress more blatantly proclaim their own irresponsibility...

...William S. White's column was inserted in the Congressional Record not once but three times by three different congressmen with their own distortions of his distortions...

...But, as far as I know, they went completely unreported in the U.S...

...From still almost bloodless success-the Dominican press reported only about 10 deaths on April 25-it was plunged into a bloody civil war...

...It was-and is-one of the most significant and hopeful aspects of the entire Dominican phenomenon, and its importance for all Latin America can hardly be exaggerated...

...It is clear, I think, that we are dealing here not with a series of coincidences but with a highly orchestrated operation...

...rose to expose this fantastic hoax on the Senate floor...

...An hour and a quarter earlier, though, at 4:30 p.m., Air Force planes attacked the National Palace where the Dominican Congress was meeting...

...Wessin has further revealed that he had only 200-250 men at his disposal at this time...

...The following day, March 25, 1966, Senator Russell B. Long (D.-La...

...Penna Marinho replied: "I do not see this possibility...

...The role played by the United States was, in my view, a historic wrong, an unmitigated, indefensible wrong...

...D.-Ala...

...The two Communists also criticized their party for its mistaken attitude toward the Dominican Armed Forces: "Besides, our party adopted a sectarian attitude to the Armed Forces, lumping them all together as a group of 'gorillas' in the service of recreation...

...It shows that there are very strong forces in the United States which are willing to resort to almost any deception to poison the minds of the American people against the Dominican revolt and its leadership...

...Consequently, our party found itself unprepared for the uprising and was unable to head it, although as far as possible it took a firm and resolute part in it...

...And an official State Department publication, Foreign Policy Briefs of April 11, 1966, carried some more carefully selected excerpts to get across the message, as the title put it, of "Communist Involvement in the Dominican Republic Crisis," 4. Not long ago, El Tiempo published a different version of the revolt...

...There will be an election in the Dominican Republic on June 1, and Juan Bosch is running again...

...Connett's cable, it should be remembered, referred to "Communist advocacy of Bosch return" and to the prevention of a "Communist takeover...

...1. Testimony of Brigadier General Elias Wessin y Wessin: Hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...

...In any case, if we are going to cite Communist documents, let us cite them honestly and fairly...

...If the Communists were diabolical enough, they would subsidize it...

...Communists in several Presidential elections, including the last one, favoring the Democratic candidate over the Republican...

...When we betray the Juan Bosches of the world we must, in the final reckoning, betray ourselves...

...Communism could gain strength if Bosch emerged victorious in the forthcoming elections...

...But that it should be aimed at a man whom the Communists have themselves vilified most of his life makes it political suicide as well as a moral swindle...

...There is much to read, too, in the publications of several political parties, and especially of some Catholic organizations...

...but carefully omitted all those passages which had confessed how late and limited the Communist involvement had been...

...military attaches urged the Dominican military leaders to get in there and fight...

...First Alvarez asked the Brazilian whether, in his view...

...The irony is that Catholic apologists of U. S. Intervention and Dominican reaction, (of the type represented by William F, Buckley Jr.,) are doing more serious, long-range damage to the interests of their church than the Communists could ever inflict...

...I have also been informed that Reverend James A. Clark of the Latin American Bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference has just completed a book on the role of the Catholic Church in the Dominican crisis...

...And that crisis-our crisisis still with us...

...Conine's article was not the worst of the lot...

...President Johnson ordered in the Marines on the fifth day, April 28, to do the job the Dominican military was unable to do...

...Peculiarly, the Congressional Record of March 24, 1966, published White's column twice in a single issue, only three pages apart...

...By military, the story made clear that it meant the group headed by Colonel Caamafio...

...As we have seen, Isa Conde and Quello had said nothing of the kind...

...For the past few months, I have been going over the events of April 1965 on the basis of material not previously available to me...

...But Conine's imaginative little effort was only a foretaste of what was to come...

...But I fear that we in the United States will never be able to look back at what we did in April 1965 with pride...

...Spanish-language readers were treated to an editorial in the New York weekly, El Tiempo of March 27, 1966, by its editor, Stanley Ross, a former journalistic henchman of the late Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo...

...In my first article on the Dominican revolt in The New Leader of May 24, 1965, written about two weeks after the outbreak, I concluded with these words: "I venture to make a prediction: In the end we will need Juan Bosch far more than he ever needed us...

...Initially, what we knew of the Dominican revolt came mainly from United States sources...

...It has polluted newspapers, magazines, and both houses of Congress...

...And now the game of distorting the World Marxist Review article really got out of hand...

...Indeed, one of the main points in the World Marxist Review article was how limited the Communist power had been to make any "power play" or "grab...

...Fortunately, there is a bright side to this political outrage...

...Nevertheless, the Communists recognized that an overwhelming mass movement was building up for the restoration of Bosch's constitutional government, and they tried to identify themselves with this movement, at least nominally, because they did not wish to be completely isolated from what they considered to be the trend of the masses...

...In this space, I merely wish to call attention to two or three main points that bear on the latest campaign in this country to convert the revolt into a Communist plot...

...The Communists made overtures to be admitted into this united front, but were turned down...

...About a dozen different stories on practically all aspects of the revolt filled three or more full-sized pages daily in both Listin Diario and El Caribe, which has long been Bosch's journalistic bête noire...

...This prediction has now come true beyond my most extravagant expectations...

...But this did not stop the propaganda machine...

...The falsity and futility of all the attempts to depict the Dominican revolt as a Communist conspiracy have merely served to bring out more sharply and unmistakably its essentially democratic character...

...But Alvarez was not satisfied and asked another question-whether, in his opinion, Communism had also been a fantasy in the days of the revolt (of April 1965...

...imperialism able to prevent the Dominican democrats and Constitutionalists from achieving their immediate aims...

...introduced the same column which showed, he said, that "our Communist opponents in the struggle for the Dominican Republic are blatantly proclaiming their responsibility for the uprising...

...El Popular published a "self-criticism" of Communist policy before and during the revolt...

...They are wrong, profoundly wrong...

...Victory seemed so near that, with one exception, the highest military officers, who later turned against the revolt, made friendly overtures to its leaders...

...The missing links are provided in a cable from U.S...

...They rose against a politically and economically bankrupt regime, born of a military coup, and fought to reestablish a humane, democratic, constitutional government...

...As a result, constitutionalist officers and soldiers established contact with the vacillating and moderate circles of the democratic movement, which were planning armed action merely as a countercoup...

...He has said the chief of the Air Force, General de los Santos Céspedes, asked him on April 24 to surrender and he responded the following day by sending two aides to de los Santos whom they forced at gun point to order the attack on the National Palace.1 But there was more to the story than that...

...It sometimes helps, however, to know what a thing was not in order to determine what it really was...

...Penna Marinho thought for a moment and then replied: "Always Caamano's revolution was a popular type of movement...

...And early the next morning the Air Force attacks began in deadly earnest...

...I have also been able to obtain a complete file of the various Communist publications...

...prefaced the column by telling the House of Representatives that the two Dominican Communists had stated, "except for U.S...

...The Dominican magazine, ¡Ahora!, put out two numbers in May 1965...

...News & World Report of April 4, 1966, published excerpts from still the same article with the editorial comment that "the Communists now say" that "only armed intervention by the United States" stopped them from taking over the country...

...The following day, the main headline across the front page of the newspaper closest to the Catholic hierarchy, Listin Diario, read: military depose triumvirate...

...The forces of the Left were minimal-less than 10 per cent...

...Except for a small force of professional militarists, the Dominican people did something they will long be proud of...

...This cable was received in Washington at 5:00 p.m...

...There is an authoritative account of the efforts made by the Catholic Church itself to live down its past subservience to the Trujillo despotism and assume a new, politically democratic and socially progressive role in "Chez le Nonce à Saint-Domingue," informations Catholiques Internationales...

...They had, in fact, said just the opposite, namely that the Communists had not had the foresight or the power to become the "ultimately moving force" at any stage of the revolt...

...It remains to be seen, however, whether we are getting a change of rhetoric or of reality...

...He at least told his readers that the two Communists had not claimed credit for the initial phase of the revolt, but he pretended that what they had written tallied "on most points" with what the Johnson Administration had said at the time...

...Back on August 16, 1965, the organ of the Communist PSP...

...Chargé d'Affaires William B. Connett Jr., acting as head of the Embassy in Santo Domingo while Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett Jr...

...That a number of Communists wanted to profit from it, as is their custom, is something natural and logical but it does not mean that there existed a true threat from the extreme left...

...The two main newspapers in Santo Domingo, El Caribe and Listín Diario, published editions on April 25, 26, 27, 28, 1965, that contain columns and columns of reports covering nearly every aspect of the first four days...

...An editorial in the same issue praised the new Provisional President, Dr...

...White took the line that "[Isa] Conde and Quello have now unmistakably and openly identified the Communist party as the ultimately moving force in the Dominican upheaval...

...But we have now been given that other rarity in foreign affairs-a second chance...

...In the beginning, we thought that it would be a simple reactionary coup...

...Ross told his readers that "we have in the Communists' own words, and right from Moscow, the proof that the revolt which overthrew Donald Reid Cabrai was sponsored, financed, armed, and inspired direct from Moscow"-not a word of which was true.4 Then a national magazine, U.S...

...And Geyelin discusses the cable at some length, with direct quotations, in his forthcoming book, Lyndon B. Johnson and the World, to be published by Frederick A. Praeger in June...

...This kind of anti-Communism can only end by making anti-Communism a mockery, a scandal, a stench in the nostrils of all decent people...

...The Dominican Communist maneuver was not too different from the stand taken by the U.S...

...But when we got the opportunity to get arms (on the second day, when the armories were broken open), we started to fight...

...The principal force was always Caamano...

...But this time Penna Marinho gave an interview to Max Alvarez which appeared in El Tiempo of New York, January 27, 1966...

...José Rafael Molina Ureña, as "a man of intelligence, prudence, and good will.' Dr...

...The only thing the editors thought worth reporting on an inside page on April 26 was a manifesto of the Castroite 14th of June Movement calling for the restoration of the 1963 Constitution, but significantly omitting a demand for Bosch's return to power...

...Here is how this campaign has developed in the past two months: It seems to have been kicked off by Ernest Conine in the Los Angeles Times of February 25, 1965...

...No doubt more research would turn up other specimens of this peculiar literary genre...

...policy in the Dominican Republic...

...I have explained the circumstances of this manifesto in detail in the New Republic of February 19, 1966, and I do not wish to repeat the whole story here...

...Reid Cabral's regime was known as the Triumvirate...

...This was outright distortion...

...The main dish was served up by William S. White in a nationwide column on March 24 of this year...

...If we knew the answers to these questions, we would know more about the outlook for U.S...

...The Communists never had enough force to put the revolution in danger...

...October 1, 1965, pp...

...and the Chamber was the Chamber of Deputies...

...Two leaders of the pro-Soviet Dominican Communist party (exPSP), J. I. Quello [Cuello] and N. Isa Conde, gave their version of the revolt in the two-part article in the organ of the pro-Soviet Communist parties, World Marxist Review (December 1965 and January 1966...

...on April 25...

...ABORTING THE DOMINICAN REVOLT A Case of Political Obscenity By Theodore Draper The more I study and think about the Dominican crisis of last year, the more I believe it was, in a deeper sense, a United States crisis...

...indeed, we have not yet succeeded in even facing up sufficiently to our actions, or at least the actions that were committed by our government...

...This revolt was, in reality, one of the very rare, unusually pure, popular, democratic, constitutional movements in this Hemisphere...

...156-157...

...While the Dominican Communists have been absurdly overrated, the Dominican Catholics have been unjustly underestimated...

...Why did the Dominican Air Force decide to attack the National Palace at 4:30 P.M...

...But who is conducting this orchestra, and who is paying for it...

...At that time, he merely said that "the Caamano movement could be rapidly converted to a Communist insurrection," not that it had been...

...To begin with, there is now overwhelming evidence that the revolt was virtually robbed of almost bloodless success on April 25, the second day...

...In the first installment they wrote: "We failed to see that an armed uprising was inevitable...

...3. Catholic support of the constitutionalist movement deserves far more attention than it has yet received...

...At 10:30 that morning, Provisional President Donald Reid Cabrai resigned at the demand of a group of officers headed by Colonel Francisco Caamaño De...

...Is it not incredible that an article which had explicitly stated that the Dominican Communists had been "unprepared for the uprising" and "unable to head it" should be distorted by one Representative to mean that the Communists had frankly admitted "fomenting" it, and by one Senator to mean that they were "blatantly proclaiming their responsibility" for it...

...One can only hope that we will find a way to make just as clear this time that his return to power is not against the interests of the United States as we found a way last April to make clear that we thought it was such a danger...

...interests in view of extremists in the coup and Communist advocacy of Bosch return...

...As for the danger of a "Communist takeover" on that day, April 25, the Dominican material is particularly revealing...

...We know, because he has told us, that the only top officer who actively opposed the revolt from the outset was General Elias Wessin y Wessin, the ringleader of the September 1963 anti-Bosch coup...

...He told her: "We were not in on the plans of Caamaño...

...Brazilian Ambassador Ilmar Penna Marinho, a member of the original OAS fact-finding committee sent to the Dominican Republic, has frequently been cited to prove that there had been a real Communist threat to justify the U. S. intervention...

...Thus we are led back to the original and still the only serious long-term rationale for U.S...

...Paris, April 15, 1966...

...Some of the worst offenders, unfortunately, were members of Congress...

...Yet there is not a line, not a word, in either paper about Communist influence or activity in the constitutionalist ranks, let alone about the threat of a Communist takeover...

...2. The substance of Connett's cable has been known for some time...

...I have devoted a good deal of time to tracking them down because they have played a key role in the campaign of falsification and vilification which the Dominican revolt has suffered, and is still suffering, in this country...

...The able correspondent of the Chicago Daily News Georgie Anne Geyer interviewed Cayetano Rodriguez del Prado leader of the Dominican Popular Movement the pro-Chinese Communist party...

...The President did not need about 25,000 troops to evacuate about 5,000 American civilians, who were being successfully evacuated anyway, and he did not need to keep the troops there indefinitely if the evacuation was his only or even his main purpose...

...It was accurately paraphrased as long ago as June 25, 1965, in The Wall Street Journal by its Washington correspondent, Philip Geyelin...

...What the two Communists had said was this: "Only by direct armed intervention was U.S...

...This document quite explicitly stated that "our party was not prepared for the armed insurrection and for that reason was not capable of directing it...

...On April 4 and 6 of this year, Juan Bosch delivered two of the most basic, eloquent and moving talks in defense of democracy against Communism that have ever been made, and they were published in full in the Santo Domingo papers...

...To bolster this claim, Conine wrote: "Only the landing of American troops, they say, caused the Red power play to fail...