RAG-TAGS, SCUM,
RIFF-RAFF, AND COMMIES by Eric Thomas Chester
ISBN:
1-58367-032-7

In April 1965, a popular rebellion in the Dominican Republic toppled the remnants of the U.S. backed Trujillo dictatorship thus setting the stage for the master tinkers of America's Cold War machine. In this groundbreaking study, Eric Thomas Chester carefully reconstructs the events that followed into a thriller of historical sweep. The result is a stunning portrait of how President Lyndon Johnson used the C.I.A., the Pentagon, and the State Department to suppress the rebellion and, ultimately, orchestrate events surrounding the national election to insure an outcome favorable to U.S. interests.

Eric Thomas Chester explains how the U.S. invasion followed in the tradition of “gunboat diplomacy” and was a consequence of superpower Cold War rivalry. Moreover, the intervention sent a clear signal that the United States would not tolerate any threat to its dominant position in Latin America. Confronted with the likelihood of a rebel victory, President Johnson authorized a massive military intervention, thus overturning Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and initiating an era of direct armed conflict in the region. The result was that by early May, with more than thirty thousand troops deployed, there was a greater U.S. military presence in the Dominican Republic than in South Vietnam.

In this fascinating account, Chester makes extensive use of recently declassified documents, as well as the holdings of private archives, including uncensored telephone transcripts involving the president and his closest and most influential advisors. His nuanced study of the workings of covert and diplomatic initiatives provides a thorough analysis of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Prologue
The Dominican Crisis: An Overview

The Dominican Republic is located five hundred miles southeast of Florida, where it occupies the eastern half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, just west of Puerto Rico. A small country of three and a half million residents, it has long been dependent on the production and export of sugar cane. Possessing little in the way of valuable natural resources, it would hardly seem to present a prime target of strategic interest, and yet in the spring of 1965 this small Third World nation became the primary focus of concern for President Lyndon Johnson and his White House advisors.

On April 24, 1965, an insurrection of junior officers of the Dominican army started to unfold. Planned as a rapid coup by disaffected units, the insurrection bogged down, as top military commanders rallied loyal troops for a counterattack. Air force planes then began bombing insurgent forces holding Santo Domingo, the capital city and urban metropolis of the Dominican Republic. Rebel officers responded by authorizing the distribution of thousands of rifles and machine guns to civilian militants. A military coup had been transformed into a popular rebellion.

In Washington, the president was determined that the revolt not be permitted to succeed. A successful popular uprising in the Dominican Republic, one that incorporated an armed populace, could be the signal for similar revolts throughout Latin America. U.S. decision makers devised and implemented a sophisticated set of maneuvers to contain and defuse the revolt. Mobilizing the entire gamut of resources in its arsenal, the United States succeeded in defusing and containing a volatile crisis.

The Dominican Republic had been a focal point of concern of U.S. foreign policy for several years before it came to the world’s attention in 1965. Its people had suffered through three decades of rule by a vicious and rapacious autocrat, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Although the United States had consistently aided the Trujillo regime, by the 1950s relations had become strained. Trujillo had become the foremost symbol of oppression throughout Latin America. Soon after Fidel Castro’s revolutionary conquest of power in January 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that Trujillo’s excesses could no longer be tolerated. The U.S. drive to depose Castro could only be pursued within the broader framework set by a concerted push toward a democratized Dominican Republic.

President John F. Kennedy implemented covert operations already formulated during Eisenhower’s term in office. In addition to sanctioning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, President Kennedy approved Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assistance to a clandestine group that was preparing to topple Trujillo. On May 30, 1961, only six weeks after the embarrassing failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a small circle of conspirators succeeded in assassinating Trujillo. The next four years proved to be tumultuous as the Dominican Republic stumbled toward a more democratic society. The high point came in December 1962, when Juan Bosch, a moderate social democrat, was elected president. Bosch had lived for twenty-five years in exile, most of them in Cuba, where he helped to organize a series of unsuccessful efforts to depose the Trujillo dynasty. Although his term in office was cut short by a military coup in September 1963, he remained immensely popular. The uprising of April 1965 aimed at restoring Bosch to power.

President Johnson’s response to the Dominican revolt has to be placed within the context of the Cuban revolution and the Cold War. The president repeatedly warned his advisors that he would not countenance the creation of another Cuba in the Caribbean. Furthermore, he was convinced that the Dominican revolt had been planned in Moscow as a rejoinder to U.S. military operations in Vietnam. Only a few months earlier, the president had made the fateful decision to escalate drastically the U.S. presence in South Vietnam. U.S. bombers began raiding North Vietnam in February 1965. Then, in early March 1965, the first Marines were dispatched to South Vietnam. Ultimately, the number of U.S. combat troops in Southeast Asia would mushroom to more than five hundred and forty thousand soldiers, but in the spring of 1965 the administration was just initiating its descent into this bottomless quagmire.

From President Johnson’s perspective, the Dominican crisis constituted a major test of his resolve as a leader, as well as a crucial challenge to the commitment of the United States to the anti- Communist crusade. Quickly, and without hesitation, he ordered the deployment of U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic, thereby overturning the balance of forces that had been forged on the streets of Santo Domingo. At the zenith of the Dominican crisis, in early May of 1965, there were as many U.S. troops stationed in and around Santo Domingo as there were positioned in South Vietnam. Indeed, the United States task force grew to more than thirty-one thousand paratroopers, sailors and Marines sent to isolate and overwhelm a force of less than five thousand rebels, many of whom were lightly armed civilians with a modicum of military training.

April 28, 1965, the day when the first Marine contingent was deployed as a combat force, represented a decisive turning point in Latin American history. For thirty-one years, from 1934 to 1965, the United States had refrained from deploying troops on combat missions within the Western Hemisphere. The Good Neighbor Policy as enunciated by President Franklin Roosevelt had become a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. When Lyndon Johnson opted to dispatch troops to the Dominican Republic, he sent a clear signal to all of Latin America that the United States was prepared to use its devastating military power to maintain its tight hold over the region.

The Dominican crisis marked one of the defining moments of the Cold War. President Johnson was convinced that a rebel victory had to be prevented and he was willing to utilize every resource at his command to attain this goal. Needless to say, the full extent of the U.S. effort was kept secret. Thousands of documents were held under the tightest security precautions, stamped secret or top secret. For decades, researchers have been prevented from viewing these documents, notified that their release would, in some undefined way, endanger the national security of the United States.

Thirty-five years after the crisis, I have been able to circumvent many of these barriers to the truth. I filed dozens of requests for declassification reviews, as well as dozens of appeals on documents exempted from declassification at the first level of review. Many of my requests were denied, or brought forth censored versions of documents that had been stripped of any substantive content. Nevertheless, I gained access to all but a few lines of a lengthy chronology providing a detailed description of one of the more fascinating highlights of the Dominican crisis, the mission to Santo Domingo of the president’s most influential foreign policy advisors, led by White House national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy.

Although documents filed at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, such as the Bundy chronology, were useful, I uncovered the most revealing items in private archives scattered around the country. The most sensitive cache came from the papers of Thomas Mann, under secretary of state for economic affairs and a key presidential advisor on Latin America. Mann had taped telephone conversations and then had them transcribed. The transcripts present the candid and unvarnished opinions of Lyndon Johnson and his closest advisors.

The following narrative provides an in-depth description of the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, from the first days of the popular revolt in April 1965 through the presidential election of June 1, 1966. It constitutes a case study in how the United States can exert its massive power to mold and manipulate the recurring crises it confronts within the poverty-stricken countries of the Third World.

At the time the first U.S. troops were dispatched to Santo Domingo, Washington insisted that these troops had been sent to protect American tourists, and to prevent the further loss of life. Soon afterward, the official position shifted to a version of the standard Cold War rationale. The Johnson administration insisted that the popular uprising had been usurped by communist cadres, and thus a rebel victory would inevitably lead to another Cuba.

Once U.S. forces had created a cordon surrounding the rebel-controlled inner city of Santo Domingo, the United States contended that it was a completely neutral force interposed between the two sides. Its troops would remain in place as a guarantor of civil peace and democratic elections. Furthermore, U.S. diplomats publicly pledged that Washington would provide aid to the newly elected government, no matter who led it. In fact, from the first days of the revolt, the United States was committed to the defeat of the rebel cause, not because such a victory would be followed by a Communist regime, but because the insurgents were committed to the immediate return of Juan Bosch as the constitutionally elected president. Key presidential advisors quickly realized that communist cadres were an insignificant presence within the rebel leadership. Still, Washington assessed Bosch as erratic, egotistical and politically unreliable.

For his part, Bosch eagerly sought U.S. support. Nevertheless, he was also a genuine outsider within a highly stratified society. He distrusted the entrenched oligarchy of wealthy landowners, and he proposed to undermine their economic and political power. At the same time, Bosch sought to marginalize the radical left through the implementation of a program of social reform, rather than through the more traditional method of repression and violence.

Although the Central Intelligence Agency had channeled covert support to Bosch during the 1962 election campaign, President Kennedy tacitly approved the military coup that deposed him in September 1963, a brief seven months into his term of office. The military command quickly ceded governmental authority to a civilian junta that was soon dominated by Donald Reid Cabral, an affluent auto dealer. An integral member of the oligarchy, and a scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Dominican aristocracy, Reid Cabral proved to be a colorless and ineffectual politician, without a shred of popular support. His decision to remain in power in spite of his devastating unpopularity sparked the April 1965 revolt of junior officers. It was this revolt, pledged to the return of Juan Bosch as president, that provided the initial opening for a popular uprising. And when insurgent forces decisively defeated the most feared units of the Dominican military, the United States opted to intervene.

Although Lyndon Johnson was determined to prevent a rebel victory, he was also anxious to avoid a direct military confrontation with the insurgents, and the resulting casualties that such a confrontation would inevitably cause. This reflected the administration’s understanding that domestic popular support for the administration’s policy would rapidly dwindle should U.S. soldiers start dying. Indeed, the president’s policy of escalation in South Vietnam would later lead to his fall from power for just this reason. Yet Washington decision-makers were also certain that the Dominican Republic had to emerge from the Trujillo era with a civilian government, one that could command at least a modicum of community support. Throughout Latin America, popular tolerance of the ongoing campaign to unseat Castro was contingent on U.S. support for civilian rule in the Dominican Republic.

Thus, U.S. policy pursued a complex and twisting path during the Dominican crisis. Although President Johnson was implacable in his determination to prevent a rebel victory, Washington was also anxious to avoid a total triumph by the Dominican military command. This apparently contradictory policy produced a series of complicated tactical maneuvers, many of which were kept shielded from public scrutiny. Indeed, some of these maneuvers were so sensitive that only the president and his closest advisor during the crisis, Undersecretary of State Thomas Mann, knew of them.

During the first days of the popular uprising, Mann formulated a long-run strategic plan that quickly gained the president’s approval. Mann’s plan would set the parameters for U.S. policy for the next thirteen months. It envisioned the formation of a new provisional government, one that would be primarily composed of nonpolitical technocrats and business leaders. Such a provisional government would pursue policies that avoided both the social reforms advocated by the insurgents and the zealous anticommunism demanded by the military command. Yet, and this was critical, such an interim regime would leave the existing military hierarchy intact. Mann hoped that a provisional government constituted along these lines could restore stability by regaining control over the inner city and dispersing the insurgent forces.

This provisional government would be expected to remain in power for a lengthy transitional period prior to elections, thereby allowing the United States, in conjunction with its Dominican allies, to rally its resources behind a single presidential candidate. From the start, Mann was convinced that Joaquín Balaguer should be that candidate. Balaguer had served for decades as a faithful and sycophantic minion of Trujillo, before being selected by the aging autocrat for the then ceremonial post of president. After Trujillo’s assassination, Balaguer tried to remain in office, but he was soon forced to resign by popular pressure.

Mann understood that the insurgent forces, led by Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó, would summarily reject the concept of a transitional regime of technocrats. Instead, the rebels insisted on an interim government dominated by supporters of Bosch. Furthermore, the insurgents were uncompromising in their demand that a reconstituted military command must incorporate officers drawn from their ranks, not just those who had sided with the military junta. The U.S. position and that of the rebels proved to be fundamentally irreconcilable. Thus, the U.S. strategy during the crisis proceeded along parallel tracks. On the one hand, the United States employed military force to undermine popular morale to the point where the rebel leadership was cajoled into reluctantly accepting the U.S. proposal for a provisional government. This was a delicate task, given Washington’s desire to avoid a total confrontation with the insurgents. At the same time, U.S. envoys carried out a series of negotiations with the insurgents holding open the possibility of a favorable settlement. These negotiations served to open and deepen lines of communication, thus exacerbating divisions within the rebel leadership, while also helping to defuse the popular fury being directed at U.S. military operations.

In implementing its military strategy, the United States carefully and systematically escalated its pressure on the insurgents, moving methodically from secretive, low-level operations to open, if limited, warfare. Thousands of Marines and army paratroopers were rushed to Santo Domingo and then deployed to create a tight cordon around the rebel-controlled inner city. Over the next weeks, these troops engaged in frequent clashes with snipers, with U.S. forces utilizing their vast superiority in firepower to bombard insurgent positions, setting fires and destroying shacks and warehouses situated along the edge of the rebel zone. Special Forces personnel were dispatched on intelligence gathering missions into the countryside, using humanitarian aid as cover. Green Berets also joined elite units of the Dominican military in paramilitary forays aimed at destroying Radio Santo Domingo, the most powerful radio station in the Dominican Republic. (Radio Santo Domingo remained under rebel control for the first three weeks of the uprising, and its broadcasts were perceived as a vital threat by U.S. decision-makers.)