The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (review)

The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. By Stephen C. Rabe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 257 pp. Cloth, $39.95. Paper, $17.95.

Those of us who teach U.S. foreign policy for a living know what went wrong with the Kennedy administration's policy toward Latin America: its reformist instincts were overwhelmed by a cold war fixation on containing the spread of communism. But today's students are as distant from John Kennedy's era as senior professors are from that of Warren Harding, and they often want something more substantial than our simple explanation. We can point these students to shelves of memoirs and entire rooms of documents, but we have been unable to offer them a single book that provides a convincing scholarly explanation of why Kennedy's ambitious policy flopped. Stephen Rabe's new volume serves this purpose admirably; it uses an equal mix of secondary sources and recently declassified primary materials to fill the most significant gap in the literature on U.S. policy toward Latin America.

Rabe begins his analysis with JFK's pledge of Washington's leadership for a "vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of Latin American people" (p. 2). If that were all there was to his policy, then Kennedy could only be accused of immoderate ambition, but by organizing his volume around the Kennedy administration's actions rather than its rhetoric, Rabe reduces the Alliance for Progress to its proper proportion--one chapter out of eight.

After an introductory chapter that stresses both the continuity of Eisenhower-era cold war thinking and what Rabe argues was JFK's new ingredient--a concern for the region's poor--the first substantive chapter, "Gunboat Diplomacy," focuses on Kennedy's early use of force in Haiti and especially the Dominican Republic. The chapter's conclusion sets the volume's leitmotif: the administration's fear of communism was invariably greater than its commitment to social and political reform.

The following chapter, "Destabilization Policies," focuses on Kennedy-era efforts to undermine Argentina's Arturo Frondizi (who declined to support the U.S. anticommunist crusade against Cuba), Brazil's João Goulart (who was considered a closet communist), and Guatemala's Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes (whose only sin was to allow former president Arévalo to return from exile). Next comes a chapter on the "Kennedy Doctrine"--JFK's assertion of the right to intervene in cases involving the potential for communist expansion--a chapter designed around the case of Guyana, where the British were transferring power to the electorate which, in turn, seemed intent upon electing a prime minister that Washington perceived as a dangerous radical. To solve this sticky problem of voters lacking sufficient wisdom to elect an appropriate leader, the Kennedy administration strong-armed the British into rescheduling elections under a new form of proportional representation, and that ended Cheddi Jagan's electoral hopes.

Turning the coin over, Rabe's next chapter on "Constitutional Defenses" explains how the Kennedy administration assisted Latin America's anticommunist constitutional leaders who agreed to promote socioeconomic reform. Primary among these leaders was Venezuela's Rómulo Betancourt, who told a U.S. audience that "we should continue constantly and unremittingly our actions against this regime in Cuba" (p. 107), but Kennedy's highly selective embrace of constitutionalism also included covert funding to ensure that the Chilean Christian Democrats could triumph over their more radical democratic adversaries, and that the Peruvian civilian elite could stand up to its military establishment.

The two final chapters, "Counterinsurgency Doctrines" and "Alliance for Progress, analyze the region-wide effort to keep the lid on the revolution of rising expectations (through military and police assistance...