---------------------------------
H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XI, No. 20 (2010)
6 April 2010
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Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii

Jeffrey F. Taffet. Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for
Progress in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN:
978-0-415-97771-5 ($28.95, paperback).

Stable URL:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-20.pdf

Contents

Introduction by Dustin Walcher, Southern Oregon University
Review by Max Paul Friedman, American University
Review by Michel Gobat, University of Iowa
Review by Andrew J. Kirkendall, Texas A&M University
Review by David M. K. Sheinin, Trent University
Review by W. Michael Weis, Illinois Wesleyan University
Author's Response by Jeffrey F. Taffet, United States Merchant Marine
---------------------------------

Introduction by Dustin Walcher, Southern Oregon University

On 13 March 1961, Latin American diplomats, U.S. officials, and other
dignitaries gathered in the East Room of the White House to hear
President John F. Kennedy outline a new vision for inter-American
partnership. He promised to change the nation's policy toward Latin
America by emphasizing the use of U.S. power to facilitate regional
modernization and economic development. The resulting Alliance for
Progress was among the most heralded foreign policy programs launched
during the 1960s. Its backers promised that it would promote positive
social, political, and economic change in Latin America from within a
liberal framework. It would, therefore, offer a non-communist
alternative to Fidel Castro's ascendant revolutionary model. Yet despite
the Alliance's dramatic beginning, and status as one of the Kennedy
administration's signature programs, by the end of the decade it was
almost universally regarded as a failure.

Historians have been slow to provide the Alliance for Progress with the
kind of deep and sustained analysis that only a scholarly monograph can
offer. Indeed, in light of the program's significance in the early  1960s,
it is remarkable that Jeffrey Taffet has become the first
historian to produce such a study. To be sure, others have examined the
Alliance. Stephen Rabe dedicated the last chapter of his analysis of the
Kennedy administration's approach toward Latin America to the program.  In
his examination of modernization theory, Michael Latham also devoted  a
chapter to the Alliance. Contemporaries provided somewhat more focused
attention to the topic, the most notable example of which is the work of
Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis.1

Taffet analyzes the Alliance from two distinct but related angles. The
first three substantive chapters explore the program's origins,
implementation, and evolution from Washington's point of view. The next
four chapters examine the Alliance's effects in the four countries that
received the greatest amount of U.S. assistance (the countries include
Chile, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia). Before concluding,
Taffet returns to a broad view in a chapter on the Alliance's "slow fade
to irrelevance." Among the reviewers, Andrew Kirkendall, David Sheinin,
and Michael Wise are particularly enthusiastic about this approach,
although they do not agree with all of Taffet's country-level
interpretations.

Indeed, the five reviewers find much to praise in Taffet's work. On the
question of causation, Taffet argues that "a purely economic analysis
misses the point. The Alliance for Progress was not an economic program;
it was a political program designed to create certain types of political
outcomes" (p. 10). The reviewers agree. "Political aims took precedence
over sensible development efforts," writes Max Paul Friedman, "part of
what Taffet convincingly shows to be a continuation of a historic U.S.
approach in Latin America, despite Kennedy's hope that the Alliance  would
represent a break from the past." Michael Gobat agrees that  political
considerations drove the Alliance, and finds that the program  was
"undermined from within." Like Taffet, he observes that the rhetoric  of
cooperation inherent within the Alliance's framework masked
Washington's unilateralism. Moreover, the reviewers agree that by using
aid to achieve political ends, U.S. officials undermined the larger
development project.

Although largely laudatory, the reviewers harbor some crucial
reservations. Kirkendall does not believe "that Taffet adequately
captures the spirit of the Alliance," in large part because "he does not
emphasize strongly enough the region's own interest in development."
Sheinin goes further, suggesting that as historians examine the lives of
those who benefitted from Alliance programs they will increasingly
question the conclusion that it was an unambiguous failure. "Taffet's
assessment suggests," writes Sheinin, "that if one were to begin with a
larger set of research hypotheses on the Alliance in a context of
imperial expansion as well as the historical moment in distinct Latin
American national histories, then our understanding of success and
failure might hinge on a set of factors beyond the contradictions built
into policy." Along similar lines, Gobat contends that because Taffet's
"analysis rarely strays beyond the realm of policymakers, important
questions about the program's local impact remain unanswered."

Taken together, these critiques point to the scope of Taffet's work.
Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy embodies a traditional approach to the
study of the history of U.S. foreign relations. It emphasizes the agency
of policymakers in Washington and Latin American capitals. It is
primarily concerned with the causes and consequences of official U.S.
decision-making. It situates the state at the center of analysis. That
there is so much the reviewers find to praise speaks to the ongoing
importance of considered and well-researched scholarship engaging
traditional questions. Indeed, the adjective traditional must not be  read
as an indictment. At the same time, the reviewers agree that  Taffet's
approach leaves work to be done by subsequent historians -  especially on
the local effects of Alliance programs.

Even operating within the study's existing framework, some of the
reviewers suggest that Taffet could have gone further in his analysis.
Friedman argues that "the fundamental problem with the Alliance lies
deeper than Taffet recognizes." The Alliance did not fail merely because
it lost sight of its original developmentalist objectives, but rather
because from the start it privileged rightist allies over Latin American
reformers who would have been natural allies in the pursuit of its  stated
objectives. He concludes that "Kennedy and his successors had  built an
Alliance against Progress, and unlike its halting competitor,  it proved
fairly effective." Weis makes the same fundamental point,  writing that
the Alliance "failed as a development program, although it  was at least a
moderate success as an anticommunist tool." In the  context of this
roundtable, Friedman and Weis can be read in dialogue  with Sheinin. He
points to Antonio López (not his real name), a
reasonably successful Colombian who benefitted from Alliance programs  and
is today sympathetic to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - a U.S.
adversary. Sheinin then asks whether López's support of Chavez "marks an
Alliance failure"? If success is defined by the political objectives of
the program's architects, Friedman and Weis appear to answer that López
indeed represents an Alliance failure. In turn, Sheinin offers that
historians should not allow the objectives of U.S. policymakers in the
1960s to provide the only criteria by which they measure success and
failure.

At its heart, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy evaluates the utility of
economic assistance as a means of achieving political objectives, and
finds it lacking. As the Alliance waned during the 1960s, Washington
increasingly aligned with right-wing dictatorships. Friedman disagrees
with Taffet's assertion that those authoritarian governments constituted
"cheap and effective" vehicles for containing communism. Certainly
dictatorships were not cheap from the standpoint of their many victims.
But they did inhibit the rise of new communist governments. The
Machiavellian U.S. partnership with military regimes that ultimately
prosecuted dirty wars against their own populations would have been
tragic under any circumstances, but was doubly so coming on the heels of
the Alliance's unrealized promises of democracy, economic modernization,
and social stability.

Despite the questions the reviewers raise, they agree that Taffet's book
makes a significant contribution to the literature. The Alliance for
Progress finally has a thoughtful monograph that will long be of use to
specialists in the field. It will be required reading for those
interested in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and the
politics of economic development.

Participants:

Jeffrey F. Taffet is an Associate Professor of History in the Department
of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings
Point, NY. He earned his B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College and his
M.A. and Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He is currently working on a
project that examines the ways municipal leaders in New York City
inserted themselves into international political questions in the Cold
War era.

Max Paul Friedman is Associate Professor of History at American
University. After receiving his PhD from U.C. Berkeley, he was a Woodrow
Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow and taught at Boulder, Tallahassee, and
Cologne. His book, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign
against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), won the Herbert Hoover Prize in U.S. History  and
the A.B. Thomas Prize in Latin American Studies. He is working on a  study
of anti-Americanism and U.S. foreign relations.

Michel Gobat is an associate professor of history at the University of
Iowa. He is the author of Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua  under
U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke, 2005). His current research focuses on  Central
America's encounter with U.S. expansionism in the age of
Manifest Destiny.

Andrew J. Kirkendall is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M
University. He received his PhD in Latin American history from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book Paulo Freire and
the Cold War Politics of Literacy will be published later this year. His
article "Kennedy Men and the Fate of the Alliance for Progress in LBJ  Era
Brazil and Chile" appeared in the December 2007 issue of Diplomacy &
Statecraft.

David Sheinin is Professor of History at Trent University (Canada) and
Académico Correspondiente (Canadá) of the Academia Nacional de la
Historia de la República Argentina. He has published seven books as
author or editor including Argentina and the United States: An Alliance
Contained (University of Georgia Press, 2006). His current projects
include the histories of boxing and society in Latin America after 1950
and a history of the foreign policies of the last Argentine dictatorship.

Dustin Walcher is Assistant Professor of History at Southern Oregon
University and a review editor for H-Diplo. He received his Ph.D. in  2007
from the Ohio State University. A specialist in the history of U.S.
foreign relations, his current project examines the failure of U.S.-led
development initiatives and the rise of political violence in Argentina
during the late 1950s and 1960s.

W. Michael Weis received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in
1988. He is currently Professor of History at Illinois Wesleyan
University. He is the author of Cold Warriors and Coups d' Etat:
Brazilian-American Relations, 1945-1964 ((University of New Mexico  Press,
1993) and a dozen articles/book chapters dealing with United  States-Latin
American relations. He is currently working on a book,  entitled The
Beatles and Our World.

---------------------------------

Review by Max Paul Friedman, American University

The Alliance against Progress

When John F. Kennedy announced "the Alianza para Progreso" to a roomful
of Latin American diplomats in March 1961, one or another must have
suppressed a smile. Kennedy had tasked speechwriter Richard Goodwin with
preparing his remarks, and Goodwin did not know enough Spanish to  realize
that leaving the definite article out of the phrase "para el  progreso"
would make the President sound benighted. Many of Kennedy's  advisers on
Latin America had as little Latin American experience as  Goodwin,
including Assistant Secretary of State Edward Martin, and  Special
Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, who believed that "Latinos resent  the idea
that money solves everything," and offered his own
recommendation: "It will be necessary to go in for a certain amount of
high-flown corn."1

This cultural gap was one reason smiles soon turned to frowns. Peru's
leftist reformer Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre wrote that the phrase
"'Alliance for Progress' is not enough. It is a motto without force,
without attraction, without resonance in the Spanish and Portuguese
tongues, and it has no attractive social content."2 The Alliance's many
other deficiencies, so ably documented by Jeffrey Taffet, were even more
important: Economic aid came with strings attached, requiring Latin
American countries to pursue unpopular austerity measures, or to divert
some of their resources from investing in development into buying
overpriced U.S. goods. When they complied, as Taffet shows in chapters  on
the Dominican Republic and Colombia, they were rewarded with more  funds,
more loans, and more conditions. When they objected, they got  little
sympathy from a policy-making establishment that, for all its  talk about
partnership and progress, could not shed some of the classic  stereotypes
of Latin inferiority. Goodwin thought Brazilian complaints  about U.S.
economic heavyhandedness were "completely irrational, highly  emotional."3
Skilled diplomats recognized what was going wrong.
Undersecretary of State George Ball in 1962 had to explain that a "buy
American" requirement, if applied to construction projects in Argentina,
would mean shipping lumber from the United States to build houses at the
other end of the world, an "astronomical" use of limited funds that  would
turn a development program into a costly boondoggle.4

Political aims took precedence over sensible development efforts, part  of
what Taffet convincingly shows to be a continuation of a historic  U.S.
approach in Latin America, despite Kennedy's hope that the Alliance  would
represent a break with the past. Taffet demonstrates that in the  case of
the Dominican Republic, once the Johnson administration decided  to
intervene to prevent the return of reformist former president Juan  Bosch
to power, all forms of aid aimed at strengthening the position of
anti-Bosch military and business elites before and after the Marine
invasion of 1965 were simply dubbed "Alliance for Progress" funds. That
kind of cynical ploy did not increase the program's credibility.

The treatment of Chile is quite effective in showing how large amounts  of
aid with very clear political aims failed either to nurture good
relations with President Eduardo Frei, or to prevent Salvador Allende
from coming to power. Taffet also shows, sometimes inadvertently, how
muddle-headed were key aspects of the Alliance program. He notes that
U.S. officials wanted to make certain that Chileans knew where their aid
was coming from, so they named rural communities that had received
housing assistance after U.S. states like Vermont and Kentucky. This  goes
uncommented, as does a photograph of U.S. officials at another such
project walking under a welcoming banner that reads "Bienvenidos a
Maine." Planners who came up with this scheme had to be pretty
tone-deaf; somehow they thought any negative reaction from treading on
Chilean nationalist sentiment would be outweighed by getting Chileans to
remember the "Maine."

Some passages will not convince all readers. Right-wing dictatorship was
not "cheap and effective" by many measures. (9) If Communism was still  "a
big problem" in the early 1970s, that did not prevent the Nixon
administration from merrily signing agreements with the two Communist
superpowers, and suggests this was not quite the compelling, if morally
repugnant, rationale for supporting dictatorship in Latin America that
Taffet claims. Taffet states that foreign aid programs are "a window  into
the national political soul" because they "express a set of
Judeo-Christian ideas held by most Americans about the moral
responsibilities the rich have to the poor." (3-4) Set aside the fact
that other world religions place an equally strong emphasis on charity,
and that such phrasing inevitably rings hollow in an era of callous Wall
Street bankers awarding themselves multi-million dollar bonuses "earned"
by the transfer of tax revenue to their profit and loss statements. More
relevant in this context would be the reality that foreign aid programs
are terribly unpopular with most Americans. In most years, about 60%
think we spend too much on foreign aid, compared to only 6 or 7 percent
who think we spend too little. Americans regularly tell pollsters that
foreign aid is a large proportion of the total federal budget, guessing
that it is as much as 30 percent of total spending, when it is usually
less than one percent-a figure that places the United States
twenty-first out of twenty-one industrialized donor countries in
proportional terms.5 That public opinion is the very opposite of how
Taffet characterizes it helps explain a structural impediment to
Alliance success: members of the public and business sectors put
pressure on their members of Congress, who insist that foreign aid
dollars sent abroad be sluiced back home to be spent in the United
States. The constricted impact of such "foreign aid" upon local
development in the target areas is predictable.

But the fundamental problem with the Alliance lies deeper than Taffet
recognizes. It is to be found not in the loss of the original "reformist
goals and moral compass," (8) but in the fulfillment of other, more
compelling original goals guided by a moral compass that placed a
sweeping anti-communism above all other considerations. Kennedy declared
in 1962 that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make
violent revolution inevitable."6 But he and his successors then worked
doggedly to deprive of power the very sectors of Latin American
societies most interested in carrying out the kind of "peaceful
revolution" necessary for reducing poverty and inequality-land reform,
workers' rights, progressive taxation, rural development, public
spending on health and education, and democratization of political  power.
When leaders arose who might carry out peaceful revolution of  this sort,
such as João Goulart in Brazil or Salvador Allende in Chile,  the full
power of the United States was brought to bear against them.  While
proclaiming a partnership for economic development and cultivating
leftist social democrats as long as they did not carry out leftist
programs, U.S. administrations funneled aid, arms, and ideological
training toward internal security programs that engaged in the
systematic repression of leftist and popular movements throughout the
region-movements that were the natural constituencies for high-flown
Alliance aims. Kennedy and his successors had built an Alliance against
Progress, and unlike its halting competitor, it proved fairly effective.

Notes

1 Alan L. McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American
Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 73. See
also Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F.
Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 16.
2 Haya de la Torre to Sacha Volman, 5 Jul 1961, Box 8, Latin American
Policy, Goodwin Papers, John F. Kennedy Library (JFKL), Boston.
3 "Brazil, Peru, Common Market, Berlin, and Canada," 30 Jul 1962,
Presidential Recordings, Tape 1, President's Office Files, JFKL.
4 "Feldman-Ball Telcon," 23 Jul 1962, Box 1, Alliance for Progress, Ball
Papers, JFKL.
5 See, for example, Ian Smillie, "Optical and Other Illusions: Trends  and
Issues in Public Thinking about Development Co-operation," 22-3, in  idem
and Henny Helmich, eds., Public Attitudes and International
Development Co-operation (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, 1998).
6 Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central
America, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), 156.


---------------------------------

Review by Michel Gobat, University of Iowa

[This revised review, which originally appeared in the American
Historical Review, June 2008, 113:3, 872-873 is reprinted with
permission. (c) 2008 by the American Historical Association.]

Contemporary U.S. "nation-building" efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have
frequently elicited comparisons with the Marshall Plan. But perhaps the
better comparison is the 1960s Alliance for Progress, which the Kennedy
administration couched as a Marshall Plan for Latin America. Under this
aid program, the United States sought to promote democracy in a region
with a long history of authoritarianism by modernizing its "traditional"
social and economic structures. Ultimately, the Alliance for Progress
failed to achieve its main social and economic goals, while its
democratizing project ended with much of Latin America under brutal
military rule.

Few historians have examined this failure. The main historical study has
hitherto been Stephen Rabe's The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John
F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (1999), which
explores the program's origins and initial implementation under the
Kennedy administration. Jeffrey Taffet's book, by contrast, not only
traces the Alliance for Progress' course through the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations but also illuminates in unprecedented ways the role that
Latin American governments played in its rise and fall. Based largely on
newly released U.S. government sources, Taffet's clearly written study  is
a valuable-and timely-contribution that sheds new light on the most
ambitious U.S. effort to reshape Latin America in its own image.

Taffet's main goal is to illuminate the limits of economic aid as a tool
of U.S. foreign policy. He first examines how the Cuban revolution's
embrace of communism pushed the Kennedy administration to design the
Alliance for Progress. If U.S. officials had previously feared that
external forces would spread communism to Latin America, the triumph of
the Cuban revolution led them to focus on communism's internal sources,
especially poverty, social inequality, and the absence of democracy. To
curb communism's appeal in Latin America, U.S. policymakers drew on the
insights of U.S. modernization theorists to develop a massive aid and
reform program designed to promote economic development, social justice
(largely via land reform), and democracy throughout the region. In
defending the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy famously warned
that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable."

The bulk of Taffet's study examines how Kennedy's "peaceful revolution"
was undermined from within. From the start, many U.S. congressmen  opposed
financing a 10-year, $20 billion undertaking that appeared to  threaten
U.S. business interests. The Alliance for Progress also
suffered from a weak bureaucracy and resistance by Latin America's
conservative elites. The program subsequently experienced crippling cuts
as the Johnson administration struggled with the soaring costs of the
Vietnam War and Great Society programs. When President Nixon essentially
ended the Alliance for Progress in 1969, it had already, as Chile's
President Eduardo Frei noted, "lost its way."

Ultimately, however, Taffet argues that the program's failure stemmed
mainly from U.S. officials' unwillingness to engage their most natural
Latin American allies as real partners. He develops this argument by
examining (in separate chapters) the Alliance for Progress' impact on  the
four countries that received most of its funds. In Brazil and the
Dominican Republic, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations used the
program to pressure the left-leaning governments of João Goulart and  Juan
Bosch, which backed the Alliance's reforms, to drop their support  for
revolutionary Cuba and proscribe local Communists. Unable to sway  Goulart
and Bosch, U.S. officials deployed the program's funds to first
destabilize their governments and then prop up their unconstitutional,
anti-reformist successors. In Chile and Colombia, by contrast, the U.S.
government granted aid to reformist yet reliably anti-communist
governments throughout the 1960s. But even here the Alliance for
Progress' successes were limited, largely because U.S. officials forced
their Chilean and Colombian counterparts to forsake development projects
in favor of economic stabilization programs.

Taffet breaks new ground by revealing how the Alliance for Progress
antagonized its staunchest Latin American supporters. But since his
analysis rarely strays beyond the realm of policymakers, important
questions about the program's local impact remain unanswered. Did its
social reforms, as some studies of Chile imply, further polarize local
societies and thus inadvertently contribute to the region's eventual  turn
toward military rule? Taffet also reveals little about the
program's effects for civil-military relations, even though U.S.
officials encouraged Latin American militaries to implement their  reforms
in the countryside via "civic action projects." Designed to  strengthen
the military's respect for democracy did these projects  instead help
militarize rural society and thus undermine democratic rule?

In sum, Taffet greatly advances our understanding of the role that U.S.
officials played in one of the most tragic U.S. policy failures in Latin
America. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he shows that the failure of
the Alliance for Progress stemmed not only from U.S. officials'
anti-communist paranoia but above all from their stubborn belief in U.S.
superiority. As Taffet concludes, U.S. officials ran the Alliance for
Progress as if it were anything but a real alliance.

Notes

1 Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy
Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, 1999),
148-172; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social
Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, 2000);
Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance that Lost its Way: A
Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago, 1970).

---------------------------------
Review by Andrew J. Kirkendall, Texas A&M University

This is a book we have long needed. Historians of U. S. foreign
relations have tended to ignore the "other" major foreign policy failure
of the 1960s, the Alliance for Progress, perhaps because of a fear of
death by immersion in dry bureaucratic reports. It is certainly the best
book on the subject in English since Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís,
The Alliance that Lost its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for
Progress (1970). Taffet is a man of fine judgements, who is particularly
good on economic issues. It is also one of those rare first books which
is not merely a revised version of a doctoral dissertation (his
Georgetown dissertation focused on Chile alone).

He provides an overview of the program and then focuses on four case
studies. Certainly, some readers might be surprised by his choice of
countries. Thomas Field, a doctoral candidate at the London School of
Economics, suggested at the 2009 Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations conference that based on his own research, Bolivia was
central to the Alliance for Progress in the early years. And certainly
many will be surprised to learn that after Brazil, Chile, and Colombia,
the Dominican Republic was the fourth largest recipient of Alliance
money. Nevertheless, Taffet convinces me that he made the right choices
even if the U. S. may have made the wrong ones.

I don't think, however, that Taffet adequately captures the spirit of  the
Alliance. From a Latin Americanist's (and particularly from a
Brazilianist's) perspective, I would say that he does not emphasize
strongly enough the region's own interest in development. And certainly
the book would have been a different one if he had done more to engage
the burgeoning historical literature on modernization and development.
Although it was a reaction to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Alliance for
Progressstill represented an attempt to fight the Cold War in a way  which
was preemptive, positive, and responsive to the region's needs.  Surely,
Taffet is right in arguing that idealism was usually sacrificed  to
political expediency. Two of Kennedy's key advisers on Latin American
matters, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ralph Dungan, challenged the
president to be more creative and less orthodox in terms of economic
policy, but both men, in the end, found their advice being ignored.
(Schlesinger's "revenge," if one wants to call it that, was to write a
biography of JFK in which he could paint him in a more Schlesingerian
light.)

I must admit that I see Chilean president Eduardo Frei quite differently
than Taffet does. Frei was not so independent or critical of the U. S.
(and certainly never "anti-American), but he was also ambitious and had  a
larger vision of the changes he wanted to see take place. Despite the
setbacks in his agrarian reform plans, his encouragement of rural
unionization in particular did a good deal to make the country even more
democratic. Taffet might usefully have engaged with Heidi Tinsman's work
in this regard.1 And as an article I wrote suggests (it appeared too  late
for Taffet to consult it), I certainly think that U. S. ambassador  Dungan
was much more sympathetic to Frei than is indicated here.2

It was not easy for the United States to find Latin American leaders who
were both pro-U.S. and interested in reform. U.S. policymakers, for  their
part, reflecting the immaturity of a young superpower, seemed to  always
want to hear praise. They could not imagine that a leader could  be
skeptical of U. S. aims but not anti-democratic. Latin American
presidents who sought an "independent" foreign policy seemed too much
like the neutralists or non-aligned forces U.S. officials feared
elsewhere, and independence in one's own backyard was not acceptable.
There was so much that needed to be done in Latin America, but so few
whom the U. S. was willing to trust to do it.

Brazilian President Jo`ão Goulart's interest in reform was somewhat
poorly defined at times; even fuzzier, as U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon
complained, was his grasp of economics. When the Gordon papers became
available at the John F. Kennedy Library, our understanding of U.S.
-Brazilian relations during the Alliance years will undoubtedly become
more complicated, yet the materials which have come to light more
recently suggest that the Kennedy administration was not of one mind
regarding "Jango." But Taffet is right to stress how the administration
used development aid to try and influence the 1962 by-elections. His
overall picture of U.S. policy in Brazil is on the money.

If Taffet does not take the "alliance" part of the equation seriously,  he
also makes a convincing case that few U.S. policymakers did either.  Latin
American countries were supposed to more than match the $20  billion the
United States would provide with $80 billion of their own.  Yet many Latin
American countries seem to have missed that in the fine  print as well.

In any case, Taffet proves what he set out to prove, that the Alliance
for Progress was "a political program designed to create certain kinds  of
political outcomes" (p. 10). This entailed supporting in the early  1960s
a conservative like Chilean president Jorge Alessandri whom  Washington
generally found quite frustrating. The U.S. convinced him to  support just
enough reform to make voting for Salvador Allende seem less  of an option
to many in 1964. In Brazil, having supported the overthrow  of Goulart,
the U.S. then plowed money into a military dictatorship  which no one
seems to have anticipated, and yet they did it while  invoking the
Alliance. In the Dominican Republic, the U.S. chose not to  support
reformist president Juan Bosch, who, like Goulart, didn't  sufficiently
prove his anti-communist credentials (though in neither  country were
Communists a serious threat). Instead, in the long run and  after the 1965
invasion, it meant supporting Trujillo lite, Joaquin  Balaguer, and
promoting longstanding U.S. interests at any cost over  reform. Only in
Colombia (though I would also add in Chile under Frei)  did it mean
supporting governments which, privately, U.S. officials  could feel proud
in supporting. And if U. S. aid could make a difference  there, it was in
part because Colombia did not need U.S. aid quite so  desperately.

The program's structural and administrative deficiencies have long been
well-known. Furthermore, the lack of congressional support for foreign
aid was a given throughout the Cold War. And if Latin America's economic
development hopes were undermined by a population explosion in the  1960s,
they were also subject to the vagaries of commodity prices (like
Colombian coffee and Chilean copper). If Latin American countries had
been more politically stable, the Alliance might have achieved more, but
there would have been no perceived need for it.

In the end, the Alliance for Progress was neither.

Notes

1 Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender,
Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002).
2 Andrew Kirekendall, "Kennedy Men and the Fate of the Alliance for
Progress in LBJ Era Brazil and Chile," Diplomacy & Statecraft 18:4
(December 2007): 745-772.

---------------------------------
Review by David M. K. Sheinin, Trent University

At age forty-five, Antonio López (not his real name) has a life he could
never have imagined as a child. And in many regards, Jeffrey F. Taffet's
wonderful book tells the precursor narrative to López's story. An
accountant for a large corporation in Cartagena, Colombia, López is a
child of the Alliance for Progress and he knows it. Born into poverty,  he
lived in a neighborhood where, when it rained heavily, the water  would
often rise a foot or three in the streets and in peoples' homes.  His
father worked at an industrialized dairy and became a local union
organizer at a propitious moment; as López recalls, there was Alliance
for Progress funding available not only to help his father sharpen his
leadership skills, but to retrain and to improve his work situation.
Having capitalized on those opportunities, López's father was able to
move the family to a nicer (dryer) neighborhood and could send his son  to
a small private school with a technical orientation (also funded by  the
Alliance, according to López). From there, López jumped to
post-secondary education, good jobs, and a middle class lifestyle. While
he does not have enough money to travel outside Colombia, he does have
plenty of time to enjoy life in Cartagena which now includes Saturday
afternoon soccer games on a company team and a pro bono position
managing the accounts of a state amateur athletics federation (in
essence, making certain that funding for athletes reaches those same
athletes).

That López credits the Alliance as one of many factors in his success
underlines two key ironies. While many scholars, like Taffet, have shown
tragic policy contradictions and failings embedded from the outset in
Alliance plans and projects, and while "national" histories like that of
Colombia after 1970 do not reflect the lofty John F. Kennedy
administration visions for growth and prosperity that were refracted
through the Alliance, López's life - times several million -- is
precisely what United States policy makers in the 1960s might have hoped
for decades down the road. Moreover, López's trajectory - even if only a
single case -- marks a second notable Alliance success (though perhaps
not one envisioned as such by policymakers). Whatever the Alliance
created in López, it did not produce either a "pro-" or "anti-American"
in any sort of Cold War context. A reasoned opponent of his president,
Álvaro Uribe (the staunchest ally of the United States in the
hemisphere), López is a thoughtful anti-authoritarian who supports
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez's redistributive politics. Ironically,
as it turns out, and were one to risk morphing Colombian onto American
politics, one might find this child of the Alliance more Michael
Harrington than Irving Kristol.

López may be one of many who best represent the happy outcome of what
Jeffrey Taffet argues was the Alliance as "great hope" (p.195) for U.S.
policymakers in their Cold War struggle against communism in the
Americas. In a monograph that is extremely well-written, that moves with
alacrity, that draws on a masterful review of the secondary literatures,
and that is based on original primary research in recently opened U.S.
government documents, Taffet has produced a tight, scholarly, but at the
same time accessible synthesis of that hope and what it became. Despite
continuities the author skillfully explores, Taffet ably shows that the
Alliance marked key departures from pre-1960 American approaches to  Latin
America, highlighting Washington's commitment to long-term
economic growth and political stability in the Americas.

The Alliance did not achieve its goals. Problems included bureaucratic
entanglements, a lack of sustained congressional support (financial and
political) for the project, Alliance director Teodoro Moscoso's weak
position within the Kennedy administration's hierarchy, a failure to
consult adequately with Latin American partners, a punitive quality to
U.S. policy toward Latin American governments, as well as the imposition
of "unwieldy, impractical, inefficient, and ignored" (p.195) mechanisms
for achieving development. Taffet is at his best, in fact, showing how
Alliance ideals came undone.

There is an effective balance (one that will be useful to Alliance
neophytes) between chapters on how policy and action unfolded in
Washington, and chapters on how the Alliance was applied in four nations
-- Chile, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. These latter
chapters highlight Alliance failures, ranging from the speed with which
American policymakers gave up on reform in Chile, the undermining of
democratic rule in Brazil before 1964, the ominous inclusion of military
assistance under the Alliance umbrella in the Dominican Republic, and  the
ironies of relative Alliance successes in Colombia in the context of  that
country's long descent toward endemic violence.

One key conclusion that Taffet reaches in the case of Colombia is that  it
is impossible to assess the exact impact of U.S. aid "on overall  economic
change in Colombia during the 1960s or beyond" (p. 173). Taffet  is not
throwing up his hands here. He has plenty to say about the nature  of
Alliance aid to Colombia and how Americans did and did not work
effectively with their Colombian counterparts. But Taffet's argument
identifies three key points of departure for future research. Most
important (and as the case of Antonio López reflects), as Taffet writes
of Colombia, we have little idea beyond the macroeconomic and past a
narrow assessment of "ideals" in broadly political terms, of how
successful the Alliance was. López's case shows, first, and perhaps not
surprisingly in terms of how funding was distributed in hundreds of
programs across the Americas, that accomplishments were likely piecemeal
but not unimportant. This study suggests the need for more research in
national and regional sources in Latin American countries where the
Alliance was effected. Moreover by signaling the importance of the
Alliance as a cultural initiative (in the production of comic books for
Latin Americans, for example) Taffet suggests that much more work might
be undertaken in Latin America to uncover the cultural component of
American development and aid policy.

A second area for further work is in the assessment of the Alliance
outside the parameters of its conception. Taffet expertly follows and
takes in new directions a long tradition in the literature that has
assessed success and failure largely as a function of the ideals,
politics, and economic policy that explicitly underlay Alliance
development and execution - success, then, as measured by the terms the
Alliance itself established. But Taffet's assessment suggests that if  one
were to begin with a larger set of research hypotheses on the  Alliance in
a context of imperial expansion as well as the historical  moment in
distinct Latin American national histories, then our
understanding of success and failure might hinge on a set of factors
beyond the contradictions built into policy -- bureaucratic weaknesses  in
the Alliance, for example, and President Kennedy's related need to
micromanage the program.

A third area for future research and analysis might begin by combining  an
oddity in Alliance expectations with policy contradictions that  transcend
foreign policies. There is an absurdity in the United States  trying to
sell democracy to Latin America in the early 1960s (one  recognized by
Latin Americans) while the Kennedy Administration failed  or was not
strong enough to end segregation in the South. At the same  time, there
are hard questions that should be asked about why Salvador  Allende's
election in Chile must necessarily be viewed as an Alliance  "failure."
Would this mean that Antonio López's support of Hugo Chávez  marks an
Alliance failure as well? There is more work to be done on how  the
Alliance fit into larger domestic and foreign policy problems during  the
Cold War. Taffet does excellent work, for example, in showing how
Congress pulled the rug out from under the Alliance by not providing
necessary financial support. But he does so in a section that is set
apart from other parts of the story. Scholars might reasonably ask a
range of questions that would more closely integrate the Alliance with  an
analysis of congressional and other national political developments
around urban growth, social welfare spending, poverty, and questions of
race, among a range of important problems.

In Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Taffet asks readers to step
back from the largely economic assessments of the past in viewing the
Alliance as more than a simple equation of money and progress according
to specific sets of numbers. He has done a formidable job of showing  that
the problem is messier than that -- and has opened our eyes to new
possibilities.

---------------------------------
Review by W. Michael Weis, Illinois Wesleyan University

[This review initially appeared in the Journal of American History 95:1
(June 2008), 269, and is reprinted here, in revised form, with the
permission of the editors - ed.]

There is still not a definitive history of the Alliance for Progress,
which is ironic really, because few initiatives dealing with United
States-Latin American relations began with so much fanfare and few  caught
the imagination of people when it was announced.1 Although this  is not is
not the definitive history of the Alliance either, Jeffrey  Taffet has
written an outstanding book on an important topic. The  Alliance for
Progress represents one of the few moments in the post  World War II
period that Latin America received any real attention from  United States
policy makers. The Alliance captures the essence of the  1960s: it was
idealistic and compassionate, beautifully articulated,  based on solid but
contradictory social science theory, and abandoned  before it had the
chance to achieve its ambitious goals. To paraphrase  Todd Gitlin, who
wrote about the various protest movements in the  decade, "what was
happening was not what we thought was happening." The  Alliance was not
what everyone thought it was. Increasingly I believe  that the Alliance
for Progress was merely a slogan that meant something  different to
everyone who uttered it.

Jeffrey Taffet has done a lot to help us understand just what happened
and why. This work is not an exhaustive history of the program, but
rather a series of case studies that highlight the purposes and pitfalls
of using aid to achieve foreign policy goals. He shows that the Alliance
failed for three basic reasons. First, there was an inherent conflict
between the lofty humanitarian goals and a desire to fight the cold war.
Also, political considerations proved more important in developing aid
priorities than development or humanitarian considerations. Finally, as
an anticommunist tool the Alliance supported the very people who opposed
its political and economic goals. Perhaps more than anything, the
Alliance for Progress devolved into another foreign aid program that
rewarded friends, hurt enemies, and promoted American economic interests
and ideology.

Few programs have started as auspiciously as the Alliance. Brazilian
president Juscelino Kubitschek had conceived the Alliance in his
"Operation Pan America" in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's infamous
"goodwill" tour of 1958. Although the Eisenhower administration did  alter
its Latin American policies by creating an Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB) and Social Progress Fund, among others, it was US
President John F. Kennedy who came up with the Alliance moniker and
promised to win the "race between revolution and evolution." At its  heart
the Alliance was designed to prevent another Cuban Revolution and  if was
Kennedy's child it was also Fidel's.

Taffet presents four case studies (Brazil, Chile, the Dominican
Republic, and Colombia) that comprise the heart of the book and are
excellent. Colombia received more Alliance than any other country and  yet
by the end of the decade was perhaps the most unstable place in the
hemisphere. This should not be surprising in that the nations that
received the most aid in the 1950s, Guatemala and Bolivia, were the most
unstable areas in that decade.2 Each of the case studies shows that aid
was not a very effective tool at achieving United States economic
development goals.

Brazil has received more scholarly attention than most Latin American
nations and it was in Brazil that the Alliance's failure was perhaps  most
cruel and ironic.3 As the mediator between the United States and  Latin
America, Brazil seemed the obvious choice to become the Alliance's
centerpiece. But Kubitschek's successors, Janio Quadros and Joao
Goulart, loathed the program (much as Nixon did when he became
president) and Brazilian-American relations quickly deteriorated.
Although Goulart advocated the "basic reforms" articulated in the Punta
del Este charter, the Kennedy administration distrusted his demagoguery.
By 1963 Alliance funds were used to encourage conservatives to overthrow
democracy, leading to the 1964 military coup.

Similarly, American efforts to make Chile's Eduardo Frei the champion of
the "democratic left" failed to stop the radicalization of Chilean
politics and the victory of Salvador Allende in the 1970 election. Only
in the Dominican Republic did the aid have a desired effect on political
changes, but these occurred after the massive 1965 military intervention
and thus the United States would have provided the necessary assistance
without an Alliance.

It is hard to say what would have happened to the Alliance had John
Kennedy lived. Clearly he seemed to be backtracking on his initial
ambitious pronouncements, evidenced by Assistant Secretary of State  Edwin
Martin's cautious acceptance of certain military coups in 1963. It  is
also true that nation-building in Latin America lost its importance  once
the bullets started flying in Southeast Asia. Whatever its likely  fate
with JFK, once Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency the Alliance  lost
its cachet and relations with Latin America returned to inattention.

Ultimately, the Alliance for Progress failed as a development program,
although it was at least a moderate success as an anticommunist tool. As
Taffet indicates, the rhetoric of the Alliance made it seem different,
but it application proved it to be just another aid program. This work  is
destined to be the standard reference work on the topic. It is
well-researched and well-written and provides a compelling story of a
failure that was not as noble as it seemed.

Notes

1 One of the few histories still useable is Jerome Levinson & Juan de
Onis, The Alliance that Lost its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance
for Progress (Chicago, 1970). The standard history of hemispheric
relations during the 1960s does not focus on the Alliance, although
covers it. See: Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World:
John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel
Hill, 1999).
2 James Siekmeier, "Latin America Economic Nationalism and United
States-Latin American Relations, 1945-1961." The Latin Americanist 52:3
(October, 2008), 59-76.
3 W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors and Coups d' Etat: Brazilian-American
relations, 1945-1964 (Albuquerque, 1993); Ruth Leacock, Requiem for
Revolution: The United States and Brazil, 1961-1969 Kent, OH, 1990);
Phyllis R. Parker, Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964 (Austin,
1979); Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil
(Philadelphia, 1977).


---------------------------------
Author's Response by Jeffrey F. Taffet, United States Merchant Marine

It is a great pleasure and honor to participate in this roundtable with
such a distinguished group of scholars. I would like to thank Tom Maddux
for his organizing efforts, Dustin Walcher for his thoughtful
introduction, and the reviewers, Max Paul Friedman, Michel Gobat, Andrew
J. Kirkendall, David M. K. Sheinin, and W. Michael Weis, for their
careful reading of my work and their perceptive comments.

My first inclination was to write only a few sentences because the
reviewers have done such an outstanding job of highlighting the
strengths and weaknesses of my book. I probably should follow my first
instincts, but somehow, even after spending so much time on the book, it
is hard to resist the temptation to write just a little more about the
Alliance for Progress. The reviewers had such insightful questions, and  I
wanted to make the most of this opportunity to engage them. That said,  I
don't think it makes sense to reply to each point they made, and I  will
be (somewhat) brief.

In writing the book, I hoped to produce something that my undergraduates
would find accessible as an introduction to the relationship between aid
and international power, and that knowledgeable scholars would find
useful in advancing their understanding of the Alliance for Progress.  The
issue I still find most interesting, and that hopefully engages both  sets
of readers, is the complexity of the United States' effort. Thus, I  was
quite pleased to see Weis' comment that he has come to believe that  "the
Alliance for Progress was merely a slogan that meant something  different
to everyone who uttered it." This idea is echoed in David  Sheinin's
review, most pointedly in his concluding remark, that my book  shows the
messiness of the Alliance for Progress. While it was not the  initial
reason I opted to do a set of case studies, as I got deeper into  the
research I was struck by how distinctive the program became in each
country and how it evolved over time. The Alliance for Progress in Chile
was not the Alliance for Progress in Colombia, and the Alliance for
Progress in Brazil in 1962 was not the Alliance for Progress in Brazil  of
1964 or 1966.

Sheinin opens his review with a great story about a gentleman whose
success in life can be attributed directly to the Alliance for Progress.
On the other hand, Friedman posits that the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations constructed an "Alliance against Progress." I think it  is
intriguing to be able to say that both are right: the Alliance for
Progress simultaneously created and undermined development processes. I
do not believe that this is a wishy-washy answer; it is an answer that
reflects the historical complexity of the situation and the many ways of
defining success and failure.

Kirkendall and Gobat both note that the Alliance for Progress is even
more complex than I argued. Kirkendall writes, accurately, that the
program might look different had I considered more intently the Latin
American interest in development theory and practice. Gobat is correct  in
saying that my focus on the realm of policymakers means that I do not
really answer questions about aid leading to polarization of Latin
American societies, nor do I address how the Alliance for Progress
altered civil-military relations. Weis suggests simply that the book is
not a comprehensive study, which is true. By way of explanation, I can
only say that rather than to try to be comprehensive about the Alliance
for Progress, I decided to advance a set of arguments that might help
recast ideas about the constantly shifting relationship between aid and
geopolitics. I thought this was a more important goal, and an approach
that might appeal to readers who had little interest in Latin America
during the 1960s. I would like to think that the five reviews, each in
their own way, reflect something of the wisdom of my decision. I am
extraordinarily pleased that reviewers believeI was successful at what I
tried to accomplish.

I enjoyed reading the set of ideas Sheinin lays out about the ways my
book allows for reconceptualizing the relationship between aid and
inter-American relations and the work still to be done in this area. I
was especially struck by his comment that thinking about the Alliance  for
Progress in the larger context of imperial expansion could help in
developing a greater appreciation of the program's impact and
importance, especially in the long run. His point is excellent. By
thinking about the Alliance for Progress as an imperial project, not an
anti-communist one, its meaning certainly does become clearer. I think  it
was only as I was finishing the manuscript that I could fully
appreciate this insight and its implications, and while I do say
something very brief about this right at the end of my conclusion, it
needs more attention. I have long believed that the interplay between
traditional ideologies about regional domination and the embrace of Cold
War paranoia is what makes the study of U.S.-Latin American relations in
this period so fascinating. I am hopeful that other readers will, like
Sheinin, be able to make the connection between the two and see how
exploring the Alliance for Progress experience can raise important
questions about its place the context of U.S. empire.

In his comment that the fundamental problem of the Alliance for Progress
lies deeper than I recognize, I believe Friedman is coming to this
question from other side, seeing anti-communism and not empire as the  key
problem. He writes that the United States "worked doggedly to  deprive of
power the very sectors of Latin American societies most  interested in
carrying out the kind of 'peaceful revolution' necessary  for reducing
poverty and inequality..." He adds that, "When leaders  arose who might
carry out peaceful revolution of this sort... the full  power of the
United States was brought to bear against them." I thought  I said that.
As Gobat observed, I do contend that, "Ultimately... the  program's
failure stemmed mainly from U.S. officials' unwillingness to  engage their
most natural Latin American allies as real partners."  Friedman, I think,
seems to have wanted to see even more criticism about  not engaging the
Latin American left. I certainly agree that the United  States should have
done a better job of giving Goulart, Juan Bosch, and  even Eduardo Frei a
greater say in the management of aid programs.  Salvador Allende is
another matter. To imagine, as Friedman does, that  the United States
government might have really embraced the Chilean  Marxist leader is
simply not realistic. The Alliance for Progress was a  political program,
and the political goal was keeping people like  Allende out of power. On
the other side of the ideological spectrum, if  I read him correctly,
Friedman seems to be worried that I am not
sufficiently critical of the embrace of militarist and anti-democratic
regimes. As he notes, while I do say that these kinds of governments  were
"cheap and effective," I did not do so to compliment the wisdom of
embracing them, only to explain the awful logic behind U.S. policy.

Perhaps I should have tried to step back a bit further to weave a larger
narrative. However, I believe that one of the interesting things about
the Alliance for Progress and its failures is that the many principals
made rational decisions at each moment given their broader comprehension
of the world and the situations they each faced. I tried to argue that,
to understand what evolved, it is necessary to examine the day-to-day
decision making, and that only from this perspective can larger
analytical arguments flow. For this reason, I believe that studying the
Alliance for Progress can help in appreciating more than just U.S. aid
programs; it can serve as a model for seeing the lack of consistency and
clarity in any foreign policy managed by many people over an extended
period of time.


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