Since John Kennedy’s death, the moderate social reforms supported by the Alliance for Progress for Latin America had given way to a more pragmatic, pro-business approach that called for supporting dictators if they remained friendly to American businesses—a policy promulgated by Thomas Mann, Johnson’s choice as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. Martin viewed Mann as “a right-wing fellow. He had a Texas attitude toward Latin America, the Tex-Mex attitude, the paternalistic, ‘Oh, they’re all just a bunch of little kids. They have their little revolutions, but they don’t mean much.’” Mann’s associates also believed that he operated under a single judgment when it came to Latin Americans, asking the question: “Is he a Communist or isn’t he?”
Both Mann and the new American ambassador to the Republic, W. Tapley Bennett, a career Foreign Service officer, were comfortable with Reid, and had funneled $100 million in direct and guaranteed loans to his regime. Reid’s influence in the Republic had suffered, however, due to economic troubles, worsened by the worldwide fall in the price for sugar—a crop that constituted 70 percent of the country’s economy. Many Dominicans were also uneasy with Reid’s close ties to the United States (many living in Santo Domingo derisively referred to him as “el Americano”) and had grown tired of the widespread corruption in their government.
To cut costs for sugar production, Reid laid off thousands of workers, increasing unemployment and worsening the lives of ordinary Dominicans in the process. “We seemed to have few ties to the young people and to the left,” noted Martin. “And where did we go politically if Reid failed?” He also worried that Bennett had no dealings with Dominicans opposed to the ruling government, including those who supported Bosch’s return, particularly members of his Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (Dominican Revolutionary Party, or PRD). “The ambassador should always be in touch, not only with the regime in power, but with the opposition to the regime,” said Martin. “He’s not doing his job if he’s not.”
After the crisis, Bennett came under fire from some administration officials in Washington, with one source telling a reporter that the ambassador did not seem to know anyone in the Republic “who was to the left of the Rotary Club,” and an embassy associate saying Bennett seemed ill at ease with people “who were not well dressed and to whom he had not been properly introduced.”
The counter-coup struck while Bennett was away; he left the Republic for consultations at the State Department the day before the uprising, stopping along the way to visit his mother in Georgia. In addition, eleven of the thirteen officers in the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Mission were out of the country, attending a conference in Panama. With the rebels distributing captured weapons to the general populace, anarchy seemed to reign in the capital, with public order collapsing and fighting intensifying into a full-scale civil war with thousands of casualties. Consisting of much of the regular Dominican military and business class, the Loyalists forces in the Republic, fearing the possibility of defeat, called upon the United States to intervene.
Worried about the potential threat to American citizens, and the danger that the rebellion might be infiltrated with Fidel Castro-style Communists, Bennett pressed the Johnson administration to dispatch American troops to restore order. “If the present loyalist efforts fail,” Bennett cabled Washington, “the power will go to groups whose aims are identified with the Communist Party. We might have to intervene to prevent another Cuba.” There had existed a chance for the United States to exert its authority earlier and put an end to the fighting when military and political figures from the Constitutionalist cause had met with the ambassador and asked him to mediate an end to the fighting.
Through a representative, Bosch had even broached the possibility of resigning as “constitutional president” in favor of José Rafael Molina Ureña, Speaker of the Dominican House and next in line for the presidency. Believing the Loyalists should have no trouble in crushing the rebellion, Bennett declined to intercede and instead tried to convince the Constitutionalists that their cause was hopeless and they should lay down their arms.
The rebel representatives later told journalists that Bennett had been unnecessarily insulting when speaking to them, responding to their request for him to intercede with the comment, “this is not the time to negotiate, this is the time to surrender.” Bennett maintained, however, he told the rebels that he did not have the authority to serve as a mediator in the conflict, but would pass along their request to the Loyalists so the two sides could start talking with each other. After being rebuffed by Bennett, an angry Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deño, who became the popular leader of the insurgent forces, vowed to fight to the death. Bennett remembered that as the rebel leaders were about to leave the room, Caamaño, whom he had never met before this day, stopped and said, “Let me tell you, we shall go on fighting no matter what happens.”
Reading about the intervention, which grew to approximately 20,000 American troops, Martin felt disheartened by the turn of events in the Republic. “I feared that once more we had ranged ourselves on the wrong side—for an unpopular regime, against the people,” he noted. Martin could not “make heads or tails” of American policy, telling a newspaper reporter he did not know why U.S. troops were in the Republic. “I said that if we wanted to really just protect the lives of American citizens,” Martin remembered, “it seemed to me that the thing to do would be to take them out of the country and get our troops out.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Martin criticized Bennett for failing to broker an agreement between the warring factions when he had the chance. “Bennett should have, in my view, kept them talking,” said Martin. “As long as they’re talking, they’re not shooting. And all he would have had to have done would have been to bring them together with somebody from the government and have them sit down in somebody’s neutral office, and try to work out a settlement, which we’ve done before, there and elsewhere.”
Once the ambassador refused to use his influence to broker a settlement, many of the civilian politicians from Bosch’s PRD, including Molina Ureña, abandoned the cause and sought the safety of asylum in foreign embassies. “Civilians, they respect the right of asylum; the military, they don’t,” Martin said. “So the military men had no choice, but to go back to the street and fight, you see? They had no political leadership or guidance from the Bosch people; they were all in asylum. And this is the vacuum that the communists filled.”
Bennett had also disseminated to reporters sensational accounts of atrocities committed by the rebels given to him by Loyalist generals, including a wild tale of a police officer having his head cut off, stuck on a pole, and paraded through Santo Domingo’s streets. Martin believed that Bennett did not “lie deliberately to them [the media], but they thought he did. From then on, they didn’t trust him, and they didn’t believe the United States’ line. They didn’t believe anything we said.” Johnson later further inflamed the issue with his extreme rhetoric.
The president’s own national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, later admitted that although there was “a mess in Santo Domingo,” the graphic accounts the president shared with the media did not “correspond precisely with the evidence that was available to substantiate his proposition.” These miscues undermined the Johnson’s administration’s credibility with the media, and helped to spark opposition to the intervention from liberal members of the Democratic Party.
On Thursday, April 29, Martin received telephone calls from Johnson aide Bill Moyers and George Ball, Undersecretary of State, telling him that Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk wanted him to travel to Washington to consult on the Dominican crisis. “I went gladly,” said Martin, “grateful for an opportunity to advise and participate.”
Early the next morning he traveled from Connecticut to Washington via a U.S. Air Force Lockheed Jet Star aircraft, arriving about 6:30 a.m. and immediately going to the White House Situation Room, where he reviewed the cables and papers about the situation in the Republic. He also met with Johnson and key officials—Ball, Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, members of the CIA, and other administration officials—in the Cabinet Room to discuss what American forces should do if the Loyalist forces collapsed. Should U.S. troops then fire upon the rebels?
Martin remembered that Rusk pointed out to the president that it was a serious matter to start shooting up a foreign capital with American troops. “I said quickly, ‘Yes Mr. President, that’s the last thing we want to happen,’” Martin noted. Johnson looked across the table at Martin and responded, “No it isn’t. The last thing we want is another Castro in the Caribbean.”
The bitterness engendered by the fierce fighting torpedoed Martin’s initial efforts at achieving a cease-fire during his April 30 meeting with Loyalist generals and Lieutenant Emilio Conde, the Constitutionalist representative, at the San Isidro Air Force Base. “This was hate, real and naked,” Martin recalled. The sides could not even agree to stop the shooting for a few hours to collect the dead bodies now rotting on the capital city’s streets. News of an attack from rebel troops threatened to derail the talks before they had much of a chance to get started.
While Clarizio broadcast a news announcement about the cease-fire agreement over the radio, Martin, Shlaudeman, and Bennett flew in a helicopter to the U.S. embassy, where they talked for a bit before the presidential envoys dined on C-rations, found some desks to work at, and set out separately to meet with people they knew. Because gunfire made it impossible to venture into the rebel zone at night, Martin went to see several Dominicans in the International Zone, the perimeter of which was now patrolled by American forces. “The night was black. There were no streetlights,” said Martin. “No houses were lit. My driver stopped at checkpoints manned by shadowy men with guns. . . . Sometimes far away, sometimes close, we heard gunfire—sniper fire, machine gun fire, and heavy fire, mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles.”
While the two men talked at Imbert’s house on Sarasota Venue about what had prompted the uprising, Martin received an urgent message from American officials that Bosch had been trying to get in touch with him from his exile in Puerto Rico. Martin hurried back to the embassy to call Bosch, who appeared upset over reports that U.S. Marines had attacked Constitutionalist forces to make it easier for Wessin’s troops to advance. “I told him that, so far as I knew, this wasn’t true (it wasn’t),” said Martin. “I would inquire, and hoped to see his rebel commander . . . [Caamaño] tomorrow.” Bosch passed along to Martin possible telephone numbers to reach Caamaño and told him that his arrival in the Republic had been “the best news he had received.”
The danger inherent in Martin’s mission became apparent upon his return to Imbert’s home at about 1:00 a.m. When his driver pulled up to the gate, Martin noticed it was closed and could not see any guards in sight, but knew they were hiding behind the hedge and wall. He told his driver to turn on the inside dome light and “made a ‘pssst’ sound.” In a couple of minutes a guard appeared out of the darkness and approached the car with caution. Not recognizing Martin, the guard returned to the sentry post to call the house for instructions. “At that moment a string of shots went off behind my ear,” Martin remembered. “I dived for the floor, began calling out to the guards not to shoot, that it was an accident.” Fortunately, Imbert’s guards were well trained and did not return fire. One of Martin’s Marine guards had been attempting to put the safety on his weapon, his hand had slipped, and it had gone off by mistake. “Had they been any other Dominican troops they’d have killed me,” said a relieved Martin.
That was not the last of the gunfire he experienced early that morning. As he and Imbert talked in the dining room, lit with a kerosene lamp, they heard heavy automatic weapons fire that sounded as if it was coming from across the street. Imbert told Martin to get on the floor and the two men “went crouching low to the living room.” Imbert believed that the PRD had lost control of the rebellion to the communists, and seemed confident the war could be ended without a frontal assault on the rebel stronghold at Ciudad Nueva. Martin asked him to see if he could learn more about the rebel leadership. “The thing I want to do,” Martin recalled his saying to Imbert, “is to stop the killing, stop the bloodshed. That’s the first thing.”
The morning after his meeting at Imbert’s home, Martin began what he called “an elaborate charade” in order to arrange a meeting with Caamaño, who refused to talk anywhere but at his headquarters behind the rebel lines. “We called him, he called us, we called the Papal Nuncio, he called us, and so on,” Martin noted. Finally, Martin and Shlaudeman set out for the rebel stronghold in the southern part of the city in the nuncio’s black sedan, its hood covered by a large yellow and white Vatican flag and driven by Clarizio, dressed in his long, white robe and red cap.
Clarizio, described by a reporter as “a veritable dynamo and a dauntless truce negotiator,” drove slowly, so any potential snipers could plainly see him, and he also kept the car’s windows rolled up so they “would know we did not intend to shoot,” said Martin. Reflecting on the trip years later, Martin believed that the instruments of U.S. policy in the Republic—the nuncio and the marines—were similar to those employed by the Spanish who had ruled the country for three centuries, “subduing and pacifying the natives by using both the cross and the sword.”
At their meeting, Caamaño indicated that he intended to honor the cease-fire, but Martin had difficulty connecting with the colonel because of interruptions by Héctor Aristy Pereyra, a former official with the Council of State and someone Martin had considered to be “a playboy, a smooth operator in both business and politics, intelligent, ambitious, joining party after party and movement after movement.”
While moved by the demonstration, Martin knew it had been well organized, and Shlaudeman had noted that a black-shirted young man, a member of a far-left political party, had been yelling “Yankee go home” before being jerked out of sight. “He had used the wrong script,” noted Martin. Still, the plight of the Dominicans weighed heavily on Martin’s mind, and he told Shlaudeman that night that he had never done a “dishonorable thing until that day.” He said he had accepted the friendship of the rebels and the ordinary people gathered at their headquarters, but soon they might all be slaughtered in the coming days, possibly even by gunfire from U.S. forces, a horrible thought for Martin.
Shlaudeman, however, held out hope that the cease-fire they had negotiated would hold, thereby saving thousands of lives, and now they had to work to avoid another Hungary. “I doubted that we could,” said Martin, who remembered earlier overhearing young marines bragging about achieving their first kills. “They had been so trained. What a world.”
In spite of Martin’s fears, and sporadic gunfire throughout the night, the cease-fire held. Because of the animosity between the two sides, however, he saw no chance for a political settlement at that time, and sensed a “rising determination” from U.S. officials and Loyalist generals to use American troops in direct action against the rebels. “I began to think our gravest danger lay in being provoked into a massacre,” Martin said. “Indeed, now that the U.S. troops had landed and the Communists knew they could not win, perhaps the Communists’ new objective was to provoke us into just that.” The only hope he saw was to gain time by maintaining the hard-won cease-fire and hope that Dominicans “might come to their senses” in time and reconciliation could come through the rise of new political leaders.
Martin had also reported his conclusions about the rebel movement falling under control by “Castro Communism” and its democratic elements “destroyed” at a joint press conference with Bennett on Sunday, May 2—the first time, noted Kurzman, who covered the revolution for the Washington Post, an American official had “gone on the record with so unequivocal a statement.” Caamaño was quick to tell reporters that the rebel movement did not “have a Communist problem.” He accused American embassy officers of having “Communists on the brain.”
The rebel colonel did say that there were some Communists who attempted to “latch on to the movement,” but they had no power and were not in a position to gain any. Those supporting the Johnson administration were quick to piggyback on Martin’s assessment, with one official saying, “It is one minute to midnight and if we do not act at once in the political field the movement will really become Communist and we shall have to maintain a permanent military occupation in this country.”
Perhaps remembering their earlier experience with the list of Communists supplied by the American Embassy, reporters greeted Martin’s announcement with some skepticism, this despite many believing him to be, as Kurzman called him, “a scrupulously honest man.” Interviewing Martin while the former ambassador ate a hasty lunch at the embassy residence, Kurzman said that when he asked him if he could offer any concrete evidence about his charges, Martin would only say that such “evidence existed but could not be divulged.”
Another reporter who interviewed the former ambassador, Szulc, believed that Martin’s bitter disappointment at Bosch’s overthrow two years before and now seeing the chaos and bloodshed in a country in which he had placed his hopes had made him “slide too easily into despair.” According to Kurzman, Martin’s suspicions of alleged communist influence in the rebel cause were not necessarily wrong, but they did seem to be based on “impressions and assumptions rather than facts, unless the facts were among those he was unable to divulge.”
Even with the Imbert government now in control, Martin continued to try to craft a political solution, meeting once again with Caamaño in an attempt to get talks started between the rebels and Imbert. To help break the impasse, Johnson sent a new negotiating team to the Republic in mid-May that included Bundy, Mann, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance, and Peace Corps Director Jack Hood Vaughan. These negotiators, said Martin, “cut the ground out from under Imbert and tried to install a president of more liberal coloration,” selecting Antonio Guzmán, the former minister of agriculture during Bosch’s administration. “He had been my first choice to enter the Imbert government; I had tried unsuccessfully for hours to persuade him to do it,” Martin noted.
Caamaño agreed to step aside in favor of Guzmán, but Imbert, enraged at what he saw as the American’s perfidy, refused. Martin speculated that Johnson decided to dump Imbert because he had started receiving criticism from the U.S. press about Imbert being “another Trujillo, a kind of gangster, an assassin, and a rightist.” Supporting such an individual might damage the president politically, Martin added, and might explain why the administration decided to try to build a new government around Guzmán.
The Guzmán gambit, as Martin called it, eventually failed, and on May 18 Martin left Santo Domingo with Mann for Washington, staying there for an additional ten days. Ironically, Mann, usually considered a conservative, Martin noted, had been working with Bundy on installing the liberal Guzmán government, while Martin, a liberal sent by Johnson to the Republic to talk to the rebels, had ended up helping set up the conservative Imbert regime.
On May 19 Martin participated in a tense meeting with Johnson, Humphrey, Rusk, McNamara and other administration officials on whether to favor Imbert or Guzmán. “After the meeting had been going on for more than three hours,” Martin recalled, “it began to relax simply because of the passage of time, and some of us caught ourselves forgetting we were addressing the president of the United States, he seemed more like a county board chairman running a courthouse meeting on a sewer bond issue.”
In early June the OAS sent a new negotiating team to the Republic that included representatives from Ilmar Penna Marinho from Brazil, Ramón de Clairmont Duenes from El Salvador, and Ellwsorth Bunker (American ambassador to the OAS) from the United States; the negotiators were supported in their efforts by a contingent of troops from Latin America, as the United States slowly reduced the number of its forces in the country.
By the summer of 1965 all sides had agreed to an Act of Dominican Reconciliation with a provisional government headed by Héctor García-Godoy, formerly foreign minister under Bosch. On June 1, 1966, Dominicans elected Balaguer as president with approximately 57 percent of the vote. He defeated Bosch, who had returned to the Republic on September 25, 1965, the second anniversary of his overthrow, amid charges of intimidation and fraud among PRD supporters and their allies.
Martin had tended to think of his days in the Republic as a failure, but in the years from Trujillo’s assassination to 1986, discounting the 1965 civil war, the Dominican people, he noted, lived “in peace and freedom, the longest period of peace and freedom in all Dominican history. Our military intervention turned out far better than we had any right to expect.”
As Johnson’s envoy to the Republic, Martin had, in spite of the mess with the Imbert government, accomplished two of his main goals—obtaining an initial cease-fire and preventing any “massacre of the Dominicans by the Americans.” Such service sometimes translates into a job with a president’s administration, and Johnson seemed amenable to the idea. Several times since he left the Kennedy administration Martin had thought about going back into government, but had turned down a request from Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps director, to head the program’s effort in Brazil, and had rejected an offer from the State Department to be the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica.
Having performed several missions for Johnson, Martin saw him alone in the Oval Office and the president proposed that he move to Washington permanently as a consultant to him and the State Department. “I didn’t want to do it and made some noncommittal response,” Martin remembered, “and we talked on, then he asked if there was anything else I wanted to say to him. I told him I’d be interested in another embassy but not a sinecure like Jamaica, an important one and one where we had a chance of success.” The president indicated Martin was “entitled” to such a position, adding, “I’d like to see you have it.”
Asking him where he might want to be posted, Martin suggested to Johnson somewhere like Venezuela, and as he left the president said he would try to keep in touch. Subsequently, Moyers pushed Martin to accept the consultant position, saying he would have only nominal contact with the State Department, and instead would actually be “the president’s principal speechwriter and one of his principal advisers, and he indicated it might well lead to a very good embassy.”
Later, talking with his wife Fran, Martin began to realize just how carefully Johnson had phrased his response. “He’d said I deserved an embassy but he hadn’t said he’d see that I got one, he’d said he’d like to see me have it,” Martin recalled. Such an offer never came, and Martin presumed he never received an ambassadorial appointment because he had declined to show the personal loyalty Johnson demanded when he declined the offer to join the president’s staff.
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