The two present volumes of the presidential papers contain almost every public statement emanating from the White House between November 22, 1963, and December 31, 1964. Interspersed among speeches and formal declarations are news conferences, ceremonial toasts, and occasional banter with the press. Editorial notes are inserted wherever necessary, and a well-organized and useful index to the 820 chronologically arranged items has been provided. These ably edited papers are, however, of only limited value to Latin Americanists, not only because the items devoted to Latin America are few, but also because the same policy statements recur repeatedly, especially in the 1964 campaign speeches.
The central theme running through President Johnson’s Latin American pronouncements is the Alliance for Progress. In his first foreign policy declaration (November 26, 1963) the new president immediately pledged his support to the strengthening of the Alliance. Thereafter, hardly a document touching hemispheric affairs fails to mention it. A reading of these documents indicates that Johnson sought to carry on the Franklin D. Roosevelt-John F. Kennedy tradition of befriending and assisting the other American republics. Moreover, he repeatedly proclaimed that the Alliance goal of social justice was equal in importance to those of political democracy and economic development. As he put it, the Alliance was designed to carry out a “peaceful democratic social revolution” (I, 679). Nevertheless, the Johnson administration has since been criticized for paying little heed to the social reform aspect of the Alliance. Even the sincerity of the president’s commitment to encouraging democratic government has been challenged by critics who detect a tendency on the part of the administration to bolster unconstitutional military regimes for the sake of stability.
During his first thirteen months in office Lyndon Johnson was not confronted with any crisis comparable to the 1965 Dominican civil war. The most serious problem that he faced was the disruption in U.S.-Panamanian relations provoked by the Canal Zone riots of January 1964. Judging from the number of items devoted to this affair, the President followed developments in Panama with intense interest. More trouble came in February as a result of Cuba’s decision to stop the water supply to the Guantanamo Naval Base. Rather than insisting on American rights, Johnson boasted that he “believed it far wiser to send an admiral to cut the water off than to send a battalion of Marines to turn it back on” (I, 305). With slight variations this statement appeared in the foreign policy section of almost every campaign speech. The proud claim that he resisted popular pressure to send in the Marines now appears ironic in the light of our subsequent unilateral intervention in the Dominican Republic. With regard to other major developments the president issued statements endorsing the Brazilian revolution of April 1964, the election of Eduardo Frei as president of Chile in September 1964, and the peaceful settlement of the Chamizal dispute with Mexico the same year.
In general, the president’s Latin American pronouncements exude characteristic Johnsonian optimism. But such claims as “this has been a good week for this hemisphere” (I, 437), and “the last 6 months have been good for democracy and progress in the Americas” (II, 1040), do not reveal any real awareness of the length of the road that the developing nations of this hemisphere must travel to reach the objectives of the Alliance for Progress.
