Dominican Revolt
DUDMAN, RICHARD
Dominican Revolt Dominican Diary, by Tad Szulc. Del-acorte Press. 306 pp. $6. Santo Domingo: Revolt of the Damned, by Dan Kurzman, G. P. Putnam's Sons. 310 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Richard...
...Szulc covered the crisis for The New York Times and Kurzman for The Washington Post...
...If the present loyalist efforts fail, the power will go to groups whose aims are identical with those of the Communist Party...
...embassy in Santo Domingo and among Mr...
...Louis Post-Dispatch—from the island during the month of May and subsequently from Washington...
...It was believed at the U.S...
...Reviewed by Richard Dudman One big difference between the Bay ^ of Pigs invasion and the Dominican intervention is that everyone knew that the Cuban episode was a mistake and a failure, whereas only the rest of the world seems sure that the same was true of what happened last spring in Santo Domingo...
...Just as the recognition of failure at the Bay of Pigs helped the Kennedy Administration round out its progressive concept of the Alliance for Progress, the failure of the Johnson Administration to see its mistake at Santo Domingo has led it into a series of policies in Latin America that amount to a reversal of what Mr...
...Creation of any such force seems as far off as ever, largely because so many Latin Americans fear that it would be used the way the Inter-American Peace Force was used at Santo Domingo—to multilateralize an armed intervention by the United States to crush a popular revolution...
...The official story was that the troops first landed to protect the lives of American and other civilian nationals and that they remained steadfastly impartial in the fighting between the rebel "constitutionalists" and the successive juntas set up with the help of the United States...
...That phrasing suggests an overall significance for American policies throughout Latin America...
...The name of the game when laid out in public is anti-Communism...
...Szulc's day-by-day account of the crisis includes the texts of some enlightening official teleg rams that he was able to obtain afterward...
...Many Latin American oligarchs and their political allies have learned to get official sympathy from the United States by crying "Communist" at all political and social dissent...
...Johnson's new advisers in Washington that Bosch's return would open the door to a Communist take-over...
...Tad Szulc (Dominican Diary) and Dan Kurzman (Santo Domingo: Revolt of the Damned) are two of the reporters whose dispatches from the Dominican Republic last spring contradicted the official story of the mission and behavior of the American troops that were landed there...
...Both of these reporters' useful volumes of current history raise the painful question whether the Dominican intervention did not manufacture new Communists more than it frustrated the aims of those few who already existed in the Dominican Republic...
...We might have to intervene to prevent another Cuba...
...Lyndon B. Johnson, with a new team advising him on Latin American affairs, neither recognizes nor acknowledges that the Dominican landings were a mistake...
...RICHARD DUDMAN has covered the crisis in the Dominican Republic for the St...
...The main reason for this distinction is that John F. Kennedy acknowledged error after the Bay of Pigs and showed that he had learned from the experience...
...In the United States, there still is doubt and dispute about that point...
...But the real objective is not to halt the spread of an international conspiracy based in Moscow and Peking but to maintain a status quo in Latin America against indigenous social upheaval...
...WILLIAM MATHES is a free lance writer whose work appears regularly in The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times...
...These two reporters make it clear that the real reason for the U.S...
...Whether they will turn out to be a failure remains to be seen, but the omens are not good...
...One of these was from Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett to Washington a few hours after the first troops had landed and seems to have significance beyond what was intended...
...THE REVIEWERS JULES CHAMETZKY is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and an associate editor of The Massachusetts Review...
...Kennedy started...
...He was national educational director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers for several years and is the author of "American Politics and Labor, 1900-1918...
...MARC KARSON is a professor of political science at North Central College in Illinois...
...intervention was to prevent former President Juan Bosch from returning to power...
...When arm-twisting had failed to line up the necessary two-thirds vote, Secretary of State Dean Rusk went to Rio de Janeiro on a soft-sell mission, hoping to develop agreement on some generalizations that could be shaped into something tangible at a second meeting some months later...
...For example, the Johnson Administration has continued to side with the military dictatorships and against the popular constitutional democracies by pressing for creation of a permanent "Inter-American Peace Force...
...Note that Bennett referred not to Communists but to groups that had the same aims as the Communists...
...Fortunately for those anxious to maintain the status quo and head off land reform, tax reform, and the other goals of the original alliance for progress, the Communists often mouth the same goals...
...Bennett wired: "I recommend that serious thought be given to armed intervention to restore order beyond a mere protection of lives...
Vol. 30 • February 1966 • No. 2
