Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Community Revolution in Latin America, The

Rabe, Stephen G. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Community Revolution in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC and London, England: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 257 pp.

As a long-time history teacher, I still find myself pondering what we learn by examining the past. Certainly, there is an intellectual excitement that drives our research. But Stephen Rabe's fine study of the Kennedy Administration's Latin American policy reminds us of other possibilities. Without doing great damage to the notion of historical specificity, close attention to past policies can often indicate something about how the present will unfold if the same path is taken.

Readers of Rabe's study might well approach this text by pondering Kennedy's policies towards Latin America, the region he considered the "most dangerous area" for the United States, in light of President George W. Bush's current "crusade" against his more amorphously defined zone of danger, international "terrorism."

Rabe frames his exploration of Kennedy's approach to U.S.-Latin American relations around the same set of contradictions that bedeviled U.S. policies toward Latin America under Wilson. Why was it that a president who specifically set out to redress longstanding grievances on the part of Latin American countries ended up not only failing to achieve his economic and social reform goals in the region, but actually expanding destructive U.S. activities there? Rabe provides a carefully documented account of the process by which the United States reintroduced "gunboat" diplomacy into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and further extended U.S. meddling into Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. In 1962, the CIA spent $5 million on political campaigns in Brazil, funneled Alliance for Progress aid to friendly state governors, and undercut social reform programs in the drought-ridden Northeast by "assisting anti-Goulart oligarchs." (p. 69). The result was the rise of even more demands for reform, a U.S.-supported military coup, and 20 years of dictatorship. At the same time, the CIA authorized more than $3 million of covert aid to campaigns of the Christian Democratic Party in Chile, resulting in the rise of a stronger reform movement, a U.S.-supported military coup, and 16 years of dictatorship. "The covert intervention [in Chile]," Rabe argues, "may have...weakened the democratic process by urging Chileans to view political opponents as mortal enemies." (p. 115). At a moment in which the U.S. foreign policy team once again argues the urgency and efficacy of using covert means to support "democracy" abroad, Rabe's conclusions warrant some attention.

During the very short Kennedy administration, military leaders in Latin America, most of whom had received newly available U.S. training, overthrew six popularly elected presidents. Kennedy's administration dedicated 55% of its military aid in Latin America to the bolstering of internal security in the region, but a report from the Office of the Assistant secretary of Defense in 1965 recommended that "unless repressive military measures are an acceptable solution," (p. 146), the U.S. should refrain from augmenting the political and military capabilities of the region's soldiers. Two decades of intense military intervention confirmed the prophetic nature ofthat observation.

While much of the literature on U.S. intervention during the Kennedy era has appeared before, Rabe strengthens these arguments through new documentary sources (always contending against the government's continued unwillingness to release critical records). Some cases, particularly that of the administration's program to undermine the government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (Guyana), are significant additions. Kennedy browbeat the British into reversing their Guyanese policy by arguing, with a huge leap of convoluted logic, that to move towards an independent Guiana under Jagan would result in the "election of a belligerent, rash person in the 1964 American presidential race," (p. 91). This move ultimately aided the rise to power of an authoritarian demagogue (Forbes Burnham) who left behind a legacy of race hatred and political corruption in the small nation.

If Rabe's study provides highly valuable insights into this period of intensified U.S. operations in Latin America, much less clear is the question of why Kennedy followed a program that seemed to undercut his own beliefs in the importance of social, economic and political reforms. Was the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy's main policy instrument in the hemisphere, a new approach to inter-American relations or part of a long-term U.S. demand for hegemony in its sphere of interests? Did Kennedy care about Latin America, or was the region a Cold War stand in for his "real" concerns? Rabe provides a convincing argument that Kennedy was personally devoted to Latin America, spending "extraordinary amounts of time and energy" on the region (p. 195). Ultimately, however, "Kennedy's absolute determination to prevent a second Communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 19) was so all-consuming that any movement that sponsored some degree of internal reform or independence from the United States was immediately read as threatening. Yet the question still remains whether Kennedy's policy was an inevitable artifact of the Cold War. A longer historical perspective would link Kennedy to Wilson, Cleveland, or earlier administrations, for in the past 200 years there always seems to have been a greater "threat" available that has prevented the United States from supporting ostensible reform goals in the region. In the end, we have preferred familiar military allies in the region, with disastrous consequences for Latin Americans. Maybe we can learn from Rabe's fine study before the same mistakes are repeated yet again.