As we witness yet again some of the negative outcomes manifested , our educational deficits, from that dark and violent era, and given that The Goat's birthday is fast approaching this 24th of October, I thought it prudent to take a look back at that seminal era in Dominican history. I'll start it off with an article that goes into the assassination of the Goat.

Eisenhower and the Overthrow of Rafael Trujillo
by
Stephen G. Rabe

INTRODUCTION

In the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, journalists, legislators, and scholars inquired into the Cold War activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the most significant of the studies was the report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, issued by the Select Senate Committee charged to study intelligence activities and chaired by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho.1 The committee concluded that, during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, U.S. officials plotted to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. The senators also found that officials supplied weapons to Dominican dissidents whose aim was to assassinate Rafael Trujillo.

Finally, they agreed that in 1963 the Kennedy administration had encouraged South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem and that in 1970 the Nixon government encouraged Chilean military officers to block Salvador Allende from assuming the office of President of Chile. Those plots led to the death of Diem and his brother, and General Rene Schneider, the Chilean Commander-in-Chief of the Army and a constitutionalist opposed to military coups. Though the Church Committee found no evidence that U.S. officials favored the assassinations of the Diem brothers or Schneider, as a result of these findings, the U.S. Congress made assassination of foreign leaders illegal.

While the senators determined that the United States had plotted against foreign leaders, they could not agree on who authorized the assassination plots. The system of executive command and control, they noted,"was so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what levels assassination activity was known and authorized." The CIA may have acted without explicit authorization from the presidents. On the other hand, the Church Committee reasoned that "this ambiguity and imprecision leaves open the possibility that there was a successful 'plausible denial' and that a Presidential authorization was issued but is now obscured."2

That is, assassination was discussed in the Oval Office, but in an oblique manner to shield the president from responsibility. For example, Richard Bissell, the former Deputy Director of the CIA, testified that he felt certain that his boss, Allen Dulles, received authorization from Eisenhower and Kennedy. Bissell speculated that Dulles and the presidents would speak "circumlocutiously." Eisenhower and Kennedy would learn enough about a plot to terminate it but not too many of the details in order that they could plausibly deny knowledge of the plot.3 Other witnesses ventured that presidents and CIA directors communicated through euphemisms, generalized instructions, or synecdoches, figures of speech by which a part is used to indicate the whole or the whole to represent a part, thus "disposing of Castro" or "doing something about Castro"4 might be taken as only part of the phrase intended.

Conflict Quarterly
Although the majority of senators decided they could not answer the question of authorization, Senator Howard Baker opined, in a separate section of the committee report tagged "additional views," that "on balance the likelihood that Presidents knew of assassination plots is greater than the likelihood that they did not." Baker argued that both the record and the application of the usual courtroom tests for determining the worth and value of a witness' testimony — the demeanor of a witness, whether thetestimony has the ring of truth, the witness' interest in the subject —left him with that impression. The Tennessee Republican, who had risen to national prominence during the Watergate hearings with his penetrating question, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?," then appended evidence and documentation to the report to support his suspicion.9.

In suggesting "what most likely occurred in terms of how authorization was obtained by the CIA for the assassination plots," Baker cited the examination of Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA, by Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland:

Senator MATHIAS. When Mr. Bissell was here I think I asked him whether the job of communicating with superior authority was one of protecting superior authority,and specifically the President, protecting him from knowledge and at the same time informing him, which is a difficult and delicate job, and he agreed that that was really the difficulty. And you this morning have said that in advising a President or very high authority of any particular delicate subject, that you resorted to euphemism.

Mr. HELMS. Yes, sir.

Senator MATHIAS. Did Presidents indulge in euphemisms as well as Directors?

Mr. HELMS. I don't know. I found that in my experience that Presidents used the entire range of the English language from euphemisms on the one extreme to very explicit talk on the other.

Senator MATHIAS. Let me draw an example from history. When Thomas a Becket was proving to be an
annoyance, as Castro, the King said who will rid me of this man. He didn't say to somebody go out and murder him. He said who will rid me of this man, and let it go at that (sanitized).

Mr. HELMS. That is a warming reference to the problem.
Senator MATHIAS. You feel that spans the generations
and the centuries?
Mr. HELMS. I think it does, sir.
Senator MATHIAS. And that is typical of the kind of thing which might be said, which might be taken by the Director or by anybody else as Presidential authorization to go forward?

Winter 1986
Mr. HELMS. That is right. But in answer to that, I realize that one sort of grows up in tradition of the time and I think that any of us would have found it very difficult to discuss assassinations with a President of the United States. I think we all had the feeling that we were hired out to keep those things out of the Oval Office [sic]. Senator MATHIAS. And yet at the same time you felt that some spark had been transmitted that that was within the permissible limits?

Mr. HELMS. Yes; and if he had disappeared from the scene they would not have been unhappy.
After citing this historical analogy and other probable scenarios, Baker hastened to add that "whether such conversations did in fact occur is something we will never be able to prove conclusively."6 Nonetheless, recently declassified documents at the Eisenhower Library suggest that Senators Baker and Mathias may have been perspicacious, at least in the case of Rafael Trujillo.

THE PROBLEM OF RAFAEL TRUJILLO

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the absolute military dictator of the Dominican Republic, was a product of the Dominican national guard, the constabulary created by U.S. marines during their occupation of the country between 1916 and 1924. Trujillo, who was recruited by the marines and rose rapidly through the ranks, seized power in 1930 and used his position as commander-in-chief to maintain, for three decades, one of the most odious regimes in the history of the Americas. He also cultivated relations with Washington. He promoted U.S. trade and investment and retired his nation's substantial international debt. In addition, with great fanfare, he aligned the Dominican Republic with the United States during World War II and the Cold War. By 1955 the Department of State was hailing Trujillo as "one of the hemisphere's foremost spokesmen against the Communist movement."7 In view of Trujillo's ability to keep his country stable and friendly, many Americans were willing to excuse his gross violations of fundamental human rights. For example, in 1955 Vice President Richard Nixon toured the Dominican Republic and publicly embraced the dictator. As Nixon reported to Eisenhower's Cabinet, Trujillo had given his people clean, drinkable water, an obsession with pro-gress, and pride in being on time, although the price of this was dictator-ship. In any case, as Nixon saw it, "Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them."8

During the last five years of his tyranny, a heated debate erupted over U.S. policies toward Trujillo. In 1956 allegations arose that the dictator's henchmen had kidnapped and murdered Jesús Gafindez, a Spanish citizen and scholar who had written a bitterly anti-Trujillist book, while Gafindez was within the United States. Then Charles Murphy, a young aviator from Oregon, disappeared. Murphy had become unwittingly involved in the Gafindez affair and was probably kidnapped and executed by Trujillo's men to guarantee his silence. To cover that crime, Trujillo's agents arrested, imprisoned and murdered Octavio de la Maza, a Dominican pilot and friend of Murphy's. Dominican officials claimed de la Maza left a suicide note in which he took responsibility for Murphy's death.9 These related cases gained national attention between 1957 and 1959 through the persistent efforts of Charles Porter, an obscure congressman from the district in Oregon where Murphy had lived.10 Porter was soon joined in his campaign against Trujillo by his senior colleague, Senator Wayne Morse. Senator Morse used his position as chair of the Subcommittee on Latin American Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations to denounce U.S. support for Trujillo and what Morse perceived as a preference for Latin American
military dictators by the Eisenhower administration."

The revulsion over the Gafindez-Murphy case merged into a general concern about U.S. policies in Latin America. Through most of the 1950s, Latin America was assigned a low priority by Washington, for, with the exception of Guatemala, it was considered beyond the grasp of the Soviet
Union, with internal communist subversion the only potential problem. In view of its Cold War concerns, the Eisenhower administration worked with dictators and strongmen who maintained internal security. While it allocated comparatively little economic assistance to the region, it sent nearly $400 million in military aid to Latin America. In addition, President Eisenhower awarded a Legion of Merit, the nation's highest honor for foreign personages, to Manuel Odr'ia of Peru and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of
Venezuela, two unsavory military dictators.12 By the end of the decade, these policy undertakings were being widely questioned. A democratic trend swept the hemisphere, as Juan Perón of Argentina, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of Colombia, Odr'ia, and Pérez Jiménez fell from power. Latin
Americans, furious over U.S. actions, hounded Vice President Nixon during his 1958 tour of South America and in May a mob nearly killed him in the streets of Caracas, Venezuela.13

Particularly alarming to U.S. officials were events in Cuba. Stung by the mounting criticism of its policies toward dictators, the Eisenhower administration had in 1958 cut off arms shipments to Fulgencio Batista,the embattled Cuban dictator. It also suspended military aid to Trujillo. Trujillo then, against U.S. wishes, began to ship arms to Batista. The Dominican reasoned that the triumph of the guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro would, by example, encourage his own opponents. Indeed, by
June 1959, six months after the collapse of the Batista regime, insurgents were using Cuba as a base for armed forays into the Dominican Republic.14

Castro's subsequent radicalization of the Cuban Revolution and alliance with the Soviet Union produced certain anomalies in U.S. policy toward Trujillo. It seemed that support for dictators was counterproductive; frustrated reformers might resort to extreme solutions. As the State Department now saw it, " 'anti-communism' as practiced by absolute dictators is frequently used to suppress all opposition, without ideological distinctions, and thus not only undermines faith in true democracy by
identifying 'anti-communism' with tyranny but paves the way for Communist takeover." Yet, simply to abandon a tyrant like Batista or Trujillo would bequeath a political vacuum to their successors which might precipitate the Communist alternative.15 Accordingly, the Eisenhower administration had decided by 1960 that it must support leftist, but non-Communist, reformers such as José Figueres of Costa Rica and RómuloBetancourt of Venezuela, leaders whom the administration had ironically
scorned through the 1950s. This alternative too presented problems. As aprice for their support of anti-Castro policies, Betancourt and Figueres insisted that the United States must oppose all undemocratic regimes,including Trujillo's.16

MOVING AGAINST TRUJILLO

Within this new context of inter-American relations, the Eisenhower administration plotted against Trujillo. In mid-April 1960, President Eisenhower approved a State Department memorandum, which had been discussed before the National Security Council on January 14, regarding
policies to be followed "in the event of the flight, assassination, death, or overthrow of Trujillo." The United States would be prepared to dispatch warships to Dominican waters or to land troops on Dominican soil "to prevent a Castro-type government or one sympathetic to Castro." But, in order to avoid military intervention, the United States intended to persuade Trujillo to leave and to establish contacts with civilian and military dissidents, who would give the island republic "moderate, pro-United
States leadership." The U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Farland, was ordered to meet immediately with those dissidents, for, as the memorandum noted,"delay in the end of the Trujillo regime has already tended to make previously pro-American Dominican dissident elements — who are
increasingly desperate — more responsive to Castro's appeal and more ciritcal of the U.S. for failure actively to help them."17

Rafael Trujillo would not cooperate with the U.S. plan. Various Americans, including Ambassador Farland, Senator George Smathers of Florida, and the former Ambassador to Peru and Brazil, William Pawley, journeyed to Cuidad Trujillo (Santo Domingo) for discussions with Trujillo regarding the possibilities of his resigning or permitting a free election.

A comfortable exile, perhaps in Portugal or Morocco, with a "trust fund" was mentioned.18 The dictator resisted all blandishments, telling Pawley, "you can come in here with the Marines, and you can come in here with the Army, and you can come in here with the Navy or even the atomic bomb,
but I'll never go out of here unless I go on a stretcher.""

Trujillo not only refused to abdicate but also became more of a nuisance and a threat to U.S. policies in Latin America. He picked fights with his neighbors and in April 1960 aided an unsuccessful attempt by
right-wing Venezuelan military officers to overthrow the Betancourt government. Two months later, his agents tried to assassinate President Betancourt by detonating a bomb planted near the President's automobile.

Betancourt survived but received severe burns on his hands.20 Trujillo also counterattacked within the United States, actively promoting his cause. Having 54 consulates in the United States, more than any other country, Trujillo used his propaganda mill, taking out advertisements in newspapers and planting stories with friendly journalists. Those accounts always reminded Americans that Trujillo was a staunch anti-Communist. In addition, during the last five years of his rule, Trujillo reportedly plied U.S.

congressmen with prostitutes and over $5 million in bribes. Indeed, Eisenhower, in a private meeting, discussed with Secretary of State Christian Herter the names of two influential legislators that, reports indicated, were "receiving money in one way or another from the Dominican Republic."21

Unable to persuade Trujillo to leave, the Eisenhower administration considered violent measures. On May 13, 1960, Eisenhower met with Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs R. Richard Rubottom, Ambassador Farland, and General Wilton B. Persons, a presidential assistant. The Staff Secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster, recorded the conversation in a memorandum classified "top secret." The President opened the session "by
saying that he was being bombarded by people who are opposed to Castro and Trujillo." He and the State Department officials then reviewed the failures of the Pawley and Smathers missions. Under Secretary Dillon added that he had a classified report that claimed that Trujillo "did not
plan to retire 'before the year 2000'." Those present agreed that an election, while Trujillo remained on the island, would be meaningless. The dissidents would fear retaliation, and, if Trujillo ran, he would win, since he controlled all news outlets and had popular support. The discussion
continued:

Mr. Rubottom said that Trujillo is involved in all sorts of efforts all over the hemisphere to create disorder. The President commented that Castro is also, and he would like to see them both sawed off. Mr. Dillon commented that the State Department is about ready to propose some additional action against Castro. The participants concluded their review both by noting the Castro menace
and by recalling "that under the existing military contingency plan we would send in our forces into the area to keep Castro out." The President also remarked that the problem was "to find a way to give a chance for a new party to form."22

It would seem that, in the words of Senator Mathias, "some spark had been transmitted" by the President to Rubottom at the May 1960 meeting. During the next six weeks, the Assistant Secretary intensified U.S. efforts against Trujillo. On June 16 he gave his "unofficial" approval to a CIA
proposal that Henry Dearborn, the Deputy-Chief-of-Mission in the Dominican Republic, become the "communications link" between the dissidents and the CIA. The dissidents were to understand that, while the United States would not take any overt action against Trujillo, it would clandestinely assist the opposition in developing the "effective force" necessary to overthrow Trujillo.23 In late June, Rubottom met with Colonel J.C. King, Chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Divison. According to
King's handwritten notes and subsequent memorandum, Rubottom approved a CIA suggestion that the dissidents be provided with "a small number of sniper rifles or other devices for the removal of key Trujillo people from the scenes" and that these arms be placed "in [the] hands of the
opposition at the earliest possible moment." The CIA thereafter recommended that twelve "sterile," or untraceable, rifles with telescopic sights

together with 500 rounds of ammunition be delivered to the dissidents.24



Though few in number, the rifles would be critical to the Dominicans. When U.S. marines occupied the Dominican Republic, they disarmed the country and gave the national guard a monopoly over arms and munitions.Trujillo enforced his rule by retaining that policy.25 The rifles the CIA proposed to pass to the dissidents would be aimed directly at Trujillo. As Dearborn advised Rubottom on July 14, the dissidents were "in no way ready to carry on any type of revolutionary activity in the foreseeable future except the assassination of their principal enemy."26 Despite this extensive planning, the twelve sniper rifles were never furnished to the dissidents. In July Dearborn told the CIA that the dissidents now hoped that Trujillo might fall as the result of action by the Organization of American States.27 The OAS met in August to condemn Trujillo's assassination attempt against Betancourt. In accordance with OAS resolutions, on August 26, 1960 the United States broke diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic. Eisenhower also imposed punitive excise taxes on the imports of Dominican sugar into the United States. Sugar production was a key sector of the Dominican economy, and the Trujillo family controlled major plantations. Eisenhower resorted to excise taxes, because he could not convince the agricultural committees to eliminate the Dominican Republic's share of the sugar quota, as the
committees had recently done with the Cuban sugar quota. His inability to convince the committees prompted Eisenhower's concern about bribes and his comment to Secretary Herter that he was "very suspicious about the actions of a number of key people in the agricultural committees of the
Congress."28

Diplomatic and economic pressure failed to topple Trujillo. The plotting resumed. Between September 1960 and May 1961, officials in the State Department and CIA constantly discussed covert actions against Trujillo. Logistical and diplomatic problems, however, confounded their work. CIA operatives wondered how they could smuggle weapons to the dissidents. If, for example, the sniper rifles had been parachuted into the Dominican Republic, their telescopic sights might have been damaged.
Moreover, the dissidents continually altered their requests, calling at times for anti-tank weapons, machine guns, and even once for "a slow-working chemical that could be rubbed on the palm of one's hand and transferred to Trujillo in a handshake, causing delayed lethal results."29 Officials also
worried about a successor to Trujillo. In October 1960, Under Secretary Dillon informed Eisenhower that "we do not want to take concrete moves against the Dominican Republic just at present, since no successor to Trujillo is ready to take power, and the result might be to bring an individual of the Castro stripe into power there."30 Similarly, on May 5, 1961, President John Kennedy ruled at a National Security Council meeting "that the United States should not initiate the overthrow of Trujillo
before we know what government would succeed him."31 After the Bay of Pigs debacle, officials hesitated to be linked at all with assassination, for, as the liaison between the CIA and the State Department, known as the "Special Assistant," wrote, "U.S. moral posture can ill afford further
tarnishing in the eyes of the world."32

A FINAL SOLUTION

Despite these problems and misgivings, the United States aided Trujillo's assassins during the last months of the Eisenhower administration and the first months of the Kennedy government. Eisenhower and his closest advisors agreed that the United States could hope for Latin American support of an exile invasion of Cuba only if the United States moved against Trujillo. On this basis, on January 3,1961, Eisenhower ordered his national security officials to "do as much as we can and quickly about
Trujillo."33 Nine days later, Livingston Merchant, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, in the presence of Gordon Gray, the Advisor to the President for National Security Affairs, agreed that the CIA could provide the dissidents with "limited supplies of small arms and other

material." Early in 1961, pistols and carbines were passed to Dominicans. The pistols came through diplomatic pouch to Dearborn, the one U.S. diplomat left behind after the rupture in relations. Dearborn, who was officially Consul General and defacto CIA Chief of Station, added the carbines that had been left in the U.S. consulate by military guards34 to the weapons given to the Dominican dissidents.
Late in the evening of May 30, 1961, seven Dominicans led by Antonio de la Maza, the brother of Octavio de la Maza, the slain Dominican pilot, ambushed and assassinated Rafael Trujillo near San Cristobal, Dominican Republic. The assassins, who included disgruntled military officers, caught Trujillo on a lonely stretch of road as the aged dictator was on his way to visit his twenty-year-old mistress. Using handguns and shotguns, they riddled Trujillo's body with 27 rounds. The Church Com-
mittee could not establish definitively whether the assassins used the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson pistols passed through the diplomatic pouch or whether they carried U.S. carbines from the consulate. The committee did have testimony and evidence that these weapons reached the "action
element" of the dissident group.35

CONCLUSION

When, on May 13, 1960, President Eisenhower, in the presence of State Department officials, commented that he would like to see Castro and Trujillo "sawed off," it seems that he indicated his desire to see the Dominican dictator overthrown. Nonetheless, as in the case of King Henry, a historian will never be certain what Eisenhower intended. A memorandum of conversation does not convey tone or inflection and it may even be incorrect. Close associates, like General Goodpaster, testified
that Eisenhower never told them about any assassination efforts. The President's son, John Eisenhower, concurred and added that his father "did not discuss important subjects circumlocutiously."36 In addition, there is no evidence that any official ever apprised Eisenhower of the plans to arm Dominicans bent on assassinating Trujillo.

Finally, the Church Committee concluded that the United States was not as directly involved in the conspiracies against Trujillo, as it was in the plots to assassinate Castro and Lumumba. Therefore, the account of the May meeting is not comparable to the "smoking gun" meetings recorded on the Watergate tapes, which allowed Senator Baker and his colleagues to answer other questions concerning presidential knowledge.
41

However, for a president of the United States to say that he would like to see foreign leaders "sawed off sounds ominous, to say the least. Certainly, General Good paster saw fit to record the comment in a memorandum classified top secret and prior to the May meeting, the United States tried to persuade Trujillo to leave his nation. It was after that meeting, with its presidential comment, that the United States began to aid potential assassins.

Fascinating account. But it is my understanding that some of the documents of the era are still classified and although every effort may have been made to garner the truth some significant lies have been told by politicians and CIA operatives in other cases.
S.

Perhaps the most influential..........but also, in most Dominican eyes, the most corrupted, the most murderous and the most hated.

Here, to make it easier for the members: