This book gives the opinions of twelve persons on why Perón came to power and ruled Argentina for a decade. It also offers background material to this epoch through selections from the works of ten other writers such as Ricardo Levene, George Pendle, Thomas F. McGann, James R. Scobie, Gino Germani, and Arthur Whitaker.
Franklin Lucero, Robert Alexander, Eva Perón, George Blanksten and others attempt to explain the immediate circumstances leading to Perón’s winning and consolidating his power. The accounts of those who witnessed the events of October 1945, and of those who rendered judgment on them afterwards, stress Perón’s own charisma, his control of the Argentine labor unions, his appeal to the descamisados, and the aid of his extraordinary wife. Yet logic itself does not explain all these events. As General Franklin Lucero confesses, Perón somehow persuaded his intimates that he was incorruptible.
This book is valuable as a text, but Joseph Barager’s introduction is so admirably written that the student is left with little sense of discovery in reading the selections themselves.
