William Everett Kane is a practicing lawyer. Like other practicing lawyers before him who have directed themselves to inter-American themes (for example, William D. Rogers, Robert Crassweller, Peter Nehemkis) he has written a very readable book. His prose is sharp and succinct; moreover, his book is laudably short.
The title is misleading. What we have here is a good, synthetic history of United States-Latin American relations from the time of Latin American independence down to our day, the account being organized around the matter of United States intervention. The focus is not upon civil strife per se, but rather upon those elements, aspects and events of civil strife that have prompted the United States government to a concern for United States security and have occasioned a United States response.
Taking account of its rather more restricted focus, I am inclined to put this work in that category of praiseworthy and useful volumes that includes Laurence Duggan’s The Americas: The Search for Hemispheric Security (1949), Thomas Palmer’s Search for a Latin American Policy (1957), and Robert Burr’s Our Troubled Hemisphere (1967). Like those books, this one is directed toward the general, intelligent reader whose knowledge of inter-American relations and their history is adequate for the purposes of informed and responsible citizenship. Like those books, this one has a point of view that is forcefully and persuasively argued. Like those, this one is for the most part admirably balanced and objective, it being characterized by neither the strident language and easy sloganeering of the spokesmen of the radical left, nor by the chauvinistic bombast and simplistic analyses of the antediluvian right.
This is not, however, a work of original scholarship; and, while its approach is fresh, it really breaks little new ground in respect of conception or interpretation. It is based very heavily upon secondary, albeit often exemplary, sources: Bemis, Munro, Perkins, Whitaker among many, many others. But readers who are moderately well acquainted with the writings in the field will learn here little that is new to them.
Beyond that, the attentive and knowledgeable reader must be struck by the works Mr. Kane does not cite. Neither the Duggan nor the Palmer volume is alluded to, for instance, nor are the two admirable studies by Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (1961) and The United States and Latin American Wars, 1932-1942 (1966). Also, he makes surprisingly little use of Latin American sources, although there is internal evidence that he is competent in the employment of the regions languages.
Despite William D. Rogers’s assertion in the foreword that the book “sheds some dazzling new light,” I am bound to state my belief that Mr. Kane’s principal premises and conclusions have been for some time well-established in the public domain: (1) that, with very minor exceptions, the United States has restricted its interventions to the Caribbean area; (2) that conventional Marxist-Leninist explanations of United States “imperialism” simply do not adequately fit the facts of the historical record; (3) that United States actions in the Caribbean—and by extension in South America—are to be understood as reflecting an obsessive concern for security and regional “stability;” (4) that since World War II the United States has had little sensitive appreciation of the forces of “populist-nationalism” in Latin America, the United States government having been too ready to identify unrest and rebellion in Latin America with “international communism”; (5) that the post World War II policy of the United States toward Latin American military establishments has been a tissue of contradictions and inconsistencies, and that it has poorly served the long-term interests of either the United States or the states of Latin America; (6) that our interventions in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), and the Dominican Republic (1965) were unnecessary and ill-advised.
Although the book was published in 1972, it takes no account of the very substantial changes that have occurred in hemispheric relations since 1968 and the accession of President Nixon. The effects of the Nixon doctrine and of the President’s and Dr. Kissinger’s assessment of global realities have yet to make themselves fully evident. Clearly, though, those effects will be monumental. Mr. Kane’s book is, therefore, what he says it is: history. And one who reads the book today gets the impression that it is history that is rapidly receding, pertinent to a radically different era.
