Prelude to Violence
Goodsell, James Nelson
Prelude to Violence Reviewed by James Nelson Goodsell THhe title of John Bartlow Martin's new book is particularly apt for it so ably characterizes the unhappy position of the United States with...
...Yet he argues the intervention case with a fervency which, considering the downplaying of the case in official Washington these days, is something of a surprise...
...embassy, and the embassy's hostility toward the rebel forces in the early days of the revolution are among these charges...
...Bosch proved to be a poor president," he writes...
...It is the process itself—the fusion process of the bloodbath...
...Of prime interest are Martin's observations on the 1965 revolution and the subsequent U.S...
...Yet nowhere does Martin give any real proof for his thesis...
...Martin must surely know this...
...Later Martin spent a brief period as a special Presidential envoy in Santo Domingo trying to work out a ceasefire in the 1965 crisis...
...performance in the Dominican Republic in 1965...
...Martin says the Bosch administration "never got off the ground," and he blames Bosch for this failing...
...Much of what Martin has to say in the early part of his book explains the background to the 1965 revolution...
...Overtaken by Events is a chronicle of those developments and of Martin's own involvement in them...
...He concedes that a number of charges are justified...
...They had briefly flirted with the concept of democracy to which Bosch is so firmly attached...
...It is a case based on impression, not fact...
...I have no doubt whatsoever," Martin states, "that there was a real danger of a Communist takeover in the Dominican Republic...
...The Martin account of the 1965 revolution is an important document in the historical archives of Dominican events...
...Prelude to Violence Reviewed by James Nelson Goodsell THhe title of John Bartlow Martin's new book is particularly apt for it so ably characterizes the unhappy position of the United States with respect to recent developments in the Dominican Republic...
...Martin's reasoning is based on the contention that a "bloodbath drowned the ideals and purposes which had created the rebel force" and that "in those terrible hours, all ideals vanished...
...The Johnson Administration's lack of candor, serious mis-judgments of the Dominican political scene by the U.S...
...Further, the Ambassador argues that although the revolution started as an effort to restore Bosch, it early had "fallen under the domination of Castro/Communists and other violent extremists...
...Martin, as expected, joins with those who agree with President Johnson's controversial handling of the crisis...
...Further, Martin says, there was a breakdown of law and order, countless senseless killings, and the transformation of gentle idealists into "extremists in the true sense of the word—men of violence...
...As ambassador to the island nation during Juan Bosch's aborted presidency in 1963, he witnessed the bright opportunity of those months being steadily undermined by Bosch's military and civilian opponents...
...They embody the original core of the Martin work— which was almost ready for publication when the revolution broke out in 1965—and cover the three-year period down to the military overthrow of Juan Bosch...
...The rebel movement, he says, may have been headed by Lieutenant Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno as "the nominal leader," but real control "resided in three or four Communists and one or two military men...
...As Washington's man in Santo Domingo during much of this era, Martin was deeply involved in the hope that the Bosch government would survive and would be able to cope with the legacy of the Trujillo years which was part of its administrative and psychological baggage upon assuming pffice...
...intervention...
...Partly in answer to this, Martin writes: "It is not names of Communists, or numbers, that is important...
...There certainly is no new evidence in his argument to support the view that the revolution in April, 1965, had fallen into the hands of the Communists...
...Yet he tempers this by noting that it is impossible to "ignore the indisputable fact that his brief administration may well have been the most honest in Dominican history, if not in Latin America" and adds that "Juan Bosch gave the three and one-half million Dominican people seven months of peace and seven months of freedom, things rare and precious in the tragic Republic...
...But the Martin book is more than an account of that revolution, although this part of the book will provoke the most interest...
...When lists of known Communists alleged to be a part of the rebel movement fall apart under close scrutiny, the whole fabric of the intervention case is cut asunder...
...For the names and numbers of alleged Communists in the rebel movement are, contrary to what Martin says, quite important...
...This, perhaps more than anything else Martin says, explains why so many Dominicans fought in the 1965 revolution...
...The hope that the island could be turned into a democratic nation after thirty long years of Trujillo dictatorship proved impossible...
...The Martin case is a strange one...
...The first three sections carry far more substance and importance...
...The Dominican Republic was "a sick, destroyed nation, to be viewed as one ravaged by a thirty-year war...
...What emerges from these pages is a highly personal account of Dominican events in the past five years since the assassination of dictator Rafael Tru-jillo...
...To many observers, it is precisely the lack of proof, which Martin says is unimportant, that destroys the case...
...Yet in those brief months of hope—somehow centered around Juan Bosch—Dominican democracy got a start...
...Balanced against his viewpoint on this issue, however, is Martin's agreement with some of the serious charges leveled against the U.S...
...Moreover, he argues the case for U.S intervention with a determination not shared by many Administration spokesmen in Washington today...
Vol. 31 • February 1967 • No. 2
