Roberto M. Ortiz presided over an Argentina increasingly divided by its response to the European tragedy of the 1930s and the likelihood of the spread of war to the American hemisphere. In retrospect—in the light of the series of political disasters that began with the ascent to power of Colonel Juan D. Perón—Ortiz was the last successful exponent of the old style of Argentine politics. Given his stubborn adherence to democratic principles amidst the opportunism and corruption of his political generation, it can be argued that he was the last Argentine of stature potentially capable of restoring and modernizing the country’s representative system. In his struggle against diabetic blindness there is not only the poignancy of personal misfortune but also the stuff of high political drama; for to submit to his blindness meant, as he well knew, ceding power to a man, Ramón Castillo, hostile to all the values by which he lived. All of which is to say that specialists and general readers alike would welcome a first-rate biography of Ortiz centered upon the tortured politics of his presidency.
What Félix Luna has given us instead is a superficial and meretricious paste-up. Except for a handful of interviews, his sources are the published memoirs of Ortiz’ contemporaries. He counterfeits immediacy by transcribing excerpts as though the witnesses were speaking directly to the reader; and he hypes the prose further by appending more or less relevant snippets from popular magazines of the time, in the fashion of John dos Passos’ camera eye. These sources permit some insight into the relation between Justo and Ortiz and into the byzantine machinations by which Ortiz was saddled with Castillo as his vice-president. We learn about the progress of Ortiz’ disease and also about his household economy, as both his doctors and his servants have unburdened themselves. Despite Luna’s repeated assurances that Ortiz was a passionate democrat, however, we do not learn why he was a democrat, nor what democracy meant to him in the Argentine context, nor how he reacted to all but a few of the conflicts of the time (and those, predictably, scandals or personal confrontations), nor in fact what were the issues that divided him from his fellows and were about to polarize the country at large. One must hope that Luna’s trivializing effort will only encourage others to do a needed job properly.
