Becoming Ambassador: John Bartlow Martin and the Dominican Republic

After the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as the thirty-fifth president on January 20, 1961, Washington, D.C., appeared to be “suffused with an atmosphere of youth, of vigor, of hope,” noted John Bartlow Martin, who had worked as a speechwriter on Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Martin credited the transformation to the young president.

The new administration included many people Martin had known during his days with Adlai Stevenson’s two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, and his time as a Kennedy speechwriter. Although bitterly disappointed at being passed over for the Secretary of State position that had gone instead to Dean Rusk, Stevenson had accepted a job as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson’s law partners also joined the administration, with Newton Minow serving as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Bill Wirtz as undersecretary of labor, and Bill Blair as ambassador to Denmark. Theodore Sorensen, Pierre Salinger, Richard Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Kenny O’Donnell were on the White House staff, while Robert F. Kennedy joined his brother’s Cabinet as attorney general. “Never before had I known so many important people in an administration,” said Martin. “It was an aspect of political campaigning to which I had given no thought.”

After the turmoil of the campaign season, Martin had relaxed with his wife Fran by vacationing in Puerto Rico, paid for by a public relations company promoting the commonwealth. The firm hoped Martin might write about his experiences there for the Saturday Evening Post. “I checked with the Post then went,” he said. Martin found no story there, which did not bother his hosts, as they were patient; Martin did later write some articles about Puerto Rico. When he and Fran were about to leave, he suggested that on their way home they should visit the Dominican Republic—a place Martin had not been to since the winter of 1937–38, on a trip with his first wife, Barbara. “I had always wanted to go [back],” Martin noted, “for I had liked the Dominican Republic and its people better than any other in the Caribbean, but, since I had published my anti-Trujillo piece [in Ken magazine] I had not thought it entirely safe.”

Although Rafael Trujillo continued to maintain an iron grip on the country and its people, Martin thought he might be safe because of his connection to the Kennedy administration. He took no chances, however, writing letters to Schlesinger and Sorensen in the White House giving them his detailed itinerary and letting them know when he and Fran expected to return. Because he entered the country as a journalist, and expected Trujillo’s secret police to search his hotel room, he kept carbon copies of his letters to the White House in his briefcase, hoping to forestall any reprisals for his previous supposed transgressions against the dictator.

The Martins spent a week in the Dominican Republic, visiting tourist sites and, more quietly, talking to people and getting their insights and opinions about Trujillo’s reign. The entire country, especially its capital, Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City), named by the dictator after himself, appeared to be “unusually tense,” according to Martin. Upon his safe return to the United States, Martin produced a memorandum about Trujillo, the country, the effect of economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Trujillo by the Organization of American States after the dictator had dispatched agents to assassinate Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt, and the possibility of subversion inspired or instigated by Fidel Castro’s Communist government in Cuba. Once he finished the memo, Martin sent it off to Schlesinger.

Refreshed by his trip, Martin returned to producing well-researched stories for such national magazines as the Post and Look, including a four-part series on how the Midwest had changed in the years since the end of World War II and an in-depth examination of an obviously disturbed young New Jersey man who had murdered someone after receiving little or no help from his school and a state hospital. They were good stories, Martin noted, but he realized that he had begun to repeat himself; the Midwest series seemed to mirror what he had done on Muncie, Indiana, so long ago for Harper’s magazine. “It was getting too easy, too expectable,” he said. “I have always worked best when I worked against a resistance, writing something new, something hard.”

Martin began wondering if it was perhaps time for him to take a risk with his career. This restlessness might have been fueled in part by an offer broached by Schlesinger, who asked him if he might be interested in serving as ambassador to Switzerland. A startled Martin said he knew little about that country, but believed it was “a rather dull place.” He also demurred about serving as America’s top diplomat in Morocco, whose ruler, he noted, still cut off the hands of thieves—“not a pleasant prospect.” Undisturbed at his friend’s rebuffs, Schlesinger advised him to take time and think more about the job offers, as it was hard to find capable people to staff the new administration.

A dramatic event changed the course of Martin’s career. On May 30 on a road outside of Ciudad Trujillo, then the capital of the Dominican Republic, seven assassins ambushed and killed the dictator. Those directly involved in the dictator’s killing, and the other conspirators, had all previously been associated with Trujillo’s rule and were inspired in their action by everything from patriotism to revenge. The murder sparked retaliation from Trujillo’s relatives and remaining supporters, who tracked down and killed all but two of the assassins. The country slowly plunged into chaos as rival groups, including Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and the dictator’s puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, jockeyed for control. Democratic elements in the Republic took to the streets to seek the removal of the dictator’s family from the country once and for all.

The news of Trujillo’s fall from power prompted Martin to ask Fran, while they sat on their home’s back porch having a drink, “How would you like to be the wife of the ambassador to the Dominican Republic?” Although he had not spent a lot of time thinking about what Schlesinger had earlier said about being an ambassador, the chance to establish true democracy in the Dominican Republic after thirty-one years of Trujillo’s despotism had inspired Martin to start thinking about seeking a diplomatic post. It also marked a chance to be a part of the Kennedy administration’s Alianza para el Progreso (Alliance for Progress)—a program for economic aid and political reform instituted shortly after Kennedy had taken office to do for countries in Latin America what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe following World War II. Kennedy said the Alliance represented a “vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose,” to satisfy such basic needs in Latin America as homes, work, land, health, and schools. 

At the back of the president’s mind was the fear that the region, ripe for revolution, might embrace communism as Cuba had done when Fidel Castro overthrew pro-American dictator Fulgencio Batista. Kennedy told his aide Richard Goodwin, who worked to fashion many of the Alliance’s details, that the “whole place could blow up on us,” and considered the region to be, for his administration, the “most dangerous place in the world.” In the aftermath of Trujillo’s killing, Kennedy saw three possibilities for the Republic—the development of a democratic regime, a continuation of the government established by Trujillo, or the growth of a Castro-style leadership. “We ought to aim for the first,” the president told his aides, “but we can’t really renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.”

Martin called Schlesinger to express his interest in becoming the American ambassador to the Republic, and Schlesinger appeared enthusiastic about the suggestion, but cautioned patience. The Kennedy administration had yet to decide whether to send a new ambassador; the United States had cut diplomatic ties with Trujillo on August 26, 1960, and OAS sanctions against the Republic were still in force following the dictator’s assassination. 

As he later wrote Schlesinger, Martin believed he was particularly equipped for the job because he possessed a longstanding interest in the country, had written about it, studied it, and visited there. “I love it and its people and would like to help it realize its potentialities,” wrote Martin. “What is more, it seems to me that if somebody with my experience can serve this country abroad, it is primarily because he can do legwork, can find out what is going on; and the Dominican Republic seems to me to be a place where it could be a good idea to have someone who can do legwork.”

In June 1961 Martin met with Robert Kennedy, who had become increasingly involved in foreign affairs on his brother’s behalf since the Bay of Pigs disaster, at a fund-raising dinner. Before the dinner and after, Martin met with Kennedy in his room to talk about the Dominican post. “In brief,” Martin wrote Fran about the meeting, “he was for my appointment and was sure the President would favor it and he would get busy on ‘working something out’ and we would keep in touch.” 

Kennedy did tell Martin that there existed strong opposition within the government, especially within the State Department, on recognizing the new regime and nothing would happen anytime soon. Even if the administration decided to send an ambassador, the State Department was certain to have its own candidate in mind for the job. “This is all a long way from happening,” Martin wrote. “But I would think that tonight’s conversations moved the affair out of the realm of day dreaming and into the possible. I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Other members of the administration offered their support for Martin, including Chester Bowles, undersecretary of state, who wrote Schlesinger that Martin, whom he knew from Stevenson’s 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, would make “an excellent ambassador to the Dominican Republic when and if we restore normal relations.” Robert Kennedy spoke directly to Rusk about Martin’s wishes for a diplomatic assignment, and Kennedy told Martin that the Secretary of State appeared to be “enthusiastic about it.” Schlesinger informed Martin that support had been coming in “from even the remote precincts,” and jokingly said that “we confidently expect your nomination on the fourth ballot.” 

Although Stevenson had initially questioned whether Martin might be a good choice when asked by Schlesinger, saying he would have to first think about it for a time, he eventually wrote a letter of support on Martin’s behalf to Rusk. In the letter, Stevenson, sounding particularly Stevensonian, wrote: “I hear that John Bartlow Martin is under consideration for Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. I am not sure why anybody would want to be Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, and John has not approached me personally. But if he wants to be, I can underline, endorse, recommend, sponsor, and get madly enthusiastic about his appointment. I don’t know whether you know him, but he’s a gifted writer and thoughtful student and perceptive reporter—and a damn good liberal Democrat!”

With no decision forthcoming from Washington, in early August Martin, accompanied by Fran and their two sons, traveled to Three Lakes in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a vacation. On Friday, September 1, after a day spent exploring the dense woods in the family’s Jeep, Martin’s friends in Michigamme, Earl Numinen and Maurice Ball, greeted him with the news that President Kennedy had been calling all over town trying to reach him and wanted him to return the call as soon as possible. By the time Martin reached the White House, Kennedy had left for the Labor Day weekend and instead he talked to the president’s brother-in-law, Stephen E. Smith, who said Kennedy wanted Martin to travel to Washington as soon as he could for discussions on the Dominican Republic.

Upon his arrival in the nation’s capital, Martin met with Smith and Robert Kennedy, who told him that the president wanted additional facts in order to deal with the OAS sanctions against the Dominican Republic. “The main question was: Should we urge the OAS to lift its sanctions against the Republic?” noted Martin. “This, in effect, would mean that we regarded the sanctions as directed against the Generalissimo personally and that, with him gone, we now accepted his heirs as rulers of the Republic.” Kennedy wanted Martin to travel to the Republic, learn what he could, and report back to him. Smith gave Martin a sheaf of classified information to study and, when Martin pointed out he had no security clearance, Smith, knowing of the urgency of the situation, told him, “You’ve got Smith clearance—take them.”

Martin spent a week going over the material and gaining his bearings in the State Department before traveling to the Republic, arriving there for his presidential fact-finding mission on September 10 and staying in the country for three weeks. Martin, accompanied by an interpreter, Joseph G. Fandino, a State Department career officer, did most of his work in the Republic’s two major cities, the capital and Santiago (Martin spoke “adequate” Spanish, but always depended upon an interpreter when conducting official business). Martin did what he had always done in his magazine legwork, talking to all sorts of people—businessmen, workingmen, doctors, lawyers, militant university students, widows whose husbands had been murdered by the secret police, army officers, government officials, leaders of the underground political parties, and Trujillo’s son, Ramfis.

Everywhere he went, Martin was besieged by Dominicans pleading with him for visas so they could leave their country for the United States. The wife of a young member of the oligarch, then in prison, spoke for many of her fellow countrymen when she told Martin that Ramfis’s had been making a great show of democratizing the country, but that nothing had really changed. “There’s been thirty-one years of murder,” she said. “People now don’t want any more Trujillo. There’s a feeling that if you don’t help us, we’ll let anyone else do it. But we don’t want to.” She urged that the OAS sanctions remain in place. Ramfis insisted that only he could control the military, and expressed surprise at the opposition’s impatience with his attempts at democratization. He promised Martin that if a clash came, the opposition, and not his supporters, “would get the worst of it. I see the future as very, very dark.”

Trujillo’s decades of rule had left the Republic in shambles both economically and politically. In Martin’s estimation the worst thing the dictator had done was to damage almost beyond repair the Dominican character, destroying the nation’s approximately three million population’s confidence in themselves and in each other. “Nobody trusts anybody down there,” Martin noted. “They’re afraid to talk out loud . . . in restaurants. They whisper. To relatives, a man to his wife.” 

In his years in power Trujillo had unraveled the mutual trust that “creates civilization,” Martin said, “the glue that holds society together.” The dictator left behind a harmful legacy that affected the Dominican people as they moved toward self-government, and made things extremely difficult for the Kennedy administration as it attempted to aid the Republic through the Alliance for Progress. “They have no confidence in themselves because for thirty-one years they looked to the palace for everything, to Daddy [Trujillo],” lamented Martin. “They don’t think they can do a thing.” The Republic’s history provided little hope for future stability—between 1844 and 1930 the country had been presided over by fifty presidents and suffered through thirty revolutions.

Upon his return to the United States Martin produced a 115-page report for the president and State Department outlining what he had discovered and setting out the choices for the administration moving forward, “all bad,” he noted. Martin described the Republic as “a sick, destroyed nation, to be viewed as one ravaged by a thirty-years war, even one to be occupied and reconstituted.” Ramfis had begun to enjoy the feeling of power, Martin continued, describing him as “pretty cold and tough,” while Balaguer’s moves toward democratization were merely window dressing; the rightist military, not the Communist left, posed the greatest danger to establishing democracy in the country.

The alternatives Martin proposed to Kennedy were, in a rising order of involvement for the United States: do nothing (an impossible choice given America’s interest in establishing a pro-western, reasonably stable, and free government in an important region); support the regime as it then existed, which would cost the United States “the support of the Dominican people for years to come,” Martin noted; or help establish a broad-based provisional government until, with OAS assistance, free elections could be held, and negotiate Ramfis out of his economic power and out of the country.

If the last option, the one Martin supported, was selected, the Kennedy administration would also have to be prepared to loan the Republic funds to get its economy on track and send in numerous civil and military missions to establish order. “It amounted,” Martin said of this final choice, “to negotiating the Trujillos out if possible and, if not, throwing them out. I recommended sending a high-level negotiator immediately and sending the fleet to the horizon to back him up.” The political risks in this option were extreme for Kennedy because, if the administration tried, but failed, to establish democracy in the Republic, it faced the danger of “another Castro in the Caribbean,” noted Martin.

On October 5 Martin and a host of administration officials, including Rusk, Goodwin, Schlesinger, as well as representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and Alliance for Progress, met with President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room at the White House. As Kennedy came into the room and gestured for those waiting for him to be seated at the long, gleaming, six-sided cabinet table, he saw Martin and said to him, “I’ve been reading your novel, John.” A speed reader, Kennedy had perused Martin’s report, according to Schlesinger, “with relish” while he also listened to a World Series game between the New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds.

Kennedy told those gathered that none of the alternatives looked attractive, and asked questions as they discussed the issue. State Department officials George Ball and George McGhee had worked out a plan whereby the Trujillos would deed their vast land holdings to the Republic, and in return the United States would help the Dominican government raise the needed funds to pay off the dictator’s family.

In the end, Kennedy adopted the proposal Martin had recommended, and sent McGhee directly from the White House to the airport to put the policy into action. As Martin left the meeting to return home to Highland Park, Kennedy thanked him for his work. “Seeing President Kennedy made you feel good all the rest of the day and for several days thereafter,” noted Martin. “There was hope. If ever a man was a leader, John F. Kennedy was.” Of course, the policy chosen by the president meant that the United States would not be sending an ambassador, Martin or anyone else for that matter, to the Republic for quite some time—a fact he explained to Fran in talking about his trip.

Although negotiations in the Republic started well, and agreement appeared to have been reached with the Trujillos to leave the country, the Dominican armed forces balked and threatened a coup against the Balaguer government. Sporadic rioting broke out and troops began shooting students in the streets, the secret police continued a campaign of terror against those viewed as enemies of the state, and two of Ramfis’s uncle returned from “vacations” abroad to take matters into their own hands.

Moving swiftly, Kennedy dispatched a fleet of American warships to the Republic; the fleet sailed just offshore of the capital, ready to support Balaguer if he needed help in stopping a military coup. “The day we sent the fleet,” said Martin, “is the only time in our recent history, so far as I can recall, when we threw our weight, including the threat of force, solidly against a rightist dictatorship.” After further unrest and military uprisings, including strikes and looting in the capital, Ramfis flew to Paris, followed by the body of his father; Bonnelly succeeded Balaguer as president; the United States and a number of Latin American nations recognized the new Council of State, which took power on January 1, 1962, and was charged with leading the country until democratic elections could be held; and the OAS lifted its sanctions.

As matters reached a climax in the Republic, Martin poured over reports about the negotiations he had received from his friends in the State Department and White House. The Council’s establishment finally gave the American government a chance to do something positive in the Caribbean after the crushing failure of the CIA-sponosred Bay of Pigs operation. Because of Trujillo’s damaging influence, the country had no experience with democracy or politics, noted Martin. “They realize this,” he said of the Dominicans. “They seek guidance. If we do not provide it, the communists will. Now we have what may be a last chance to teach the moderate Dominicans how to lead.”

Martin remembered a conversation he had during his fact-finding mission with a young Dominican lawyer, ignorant of politics, who wanted to form a new political party and had asked him for copies of the U.S. Constitution and political party platforms. When Martin suggested that the lawyer obtain the documents at the library, the Dominican had looked at him “as though I’d lost my mind—didn’t I know Trujillo hadn’t allowed such subversive material into the Republic?” Appointing an ambassador to the Republic, Martin added, would show America’s moral support for the Council, and “symbolize our intention to offer it political as well as economic aid. It would give us a fresh start to match the regime’s fresh start. . . . Only an ambassador can make America’s purpose clear.” Martin wanted to be that ambassador.

With the way now seemingly clear for the Kennedy administration to send a new diplomat to the Republic, however, Martin received some disappointing news from Ball—the State Department had a candidate of its own, a career Foreign Service officer. Instead of the position in the Caribbean, Ball offered Martin a post as ambassador to the newly independent African nation of Tanganyika (today the United Republic of Tanzania). A frustrated Martin traveled to Washington to personally lobby for the Dominican post with administration officials, talking with Ball and Minow, who advised him to seek help directly from Robert Kennedy.

According to Martin, Minow had earlier told Kennedy that Martin badly wanted the Dominican position, and Kennedy had responded, “But John knows he can have any job in this administration he wants.” Martin went to Kennedy’s office in the Justice Department and arranged to meet with the attorney general. “I’ve never asked you for anything in my life, Bobby,” Martin said in the meeting, “but I want the ambassadorship to the Dominican Republic, and they’re about to give it to the [State] Department’s candidate.” Kennedy looked at him “for a long time,” then told Martin he would speak to the president on his behalf.

Martin waited in the apartment of his friend, Congressman Sidney Yates of Chicago, to learn about his fate. After six days, he received a call from a deputy undersecretary of state for administration telling him he was being appointed as the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic and he should come to his office to start filling out the necessary paperwork. It marked quite a change for the forty-six year old, self-employed, freelance writer. “I’m going to have a job and a boss—something I haven’t had for 25 years,” Martin noted.

After being confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn into office by McGhee, Martin paid a courtesy call at the White House on President Kennedy, who, from the first, acknowledged that the new ambassador’s job would not be an easy one. The two men discussed the problems facing the Republic and Kennedy noted his intent to send Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Republic for a visit in mid-April (later postponed), warning Martin that he did not want any riots to occur during Johnson’s stay. On more than one occasion the president said Martin should let him know directly if he needed anything. As Kennedy showed Martin out the door, he displayed his well-known mordant wit, saying to Martin, “If you blow this, you’d better not come home.”