Nathaniel Davis was the U.S. ambassador to Chile between October 1971 and October 1973, and has been accused of complicity in the Nixon administration’s covert war against President Salvador Allende Gossens, the violent military coup that overthrew Chile’s elected government in September 1973, and the bloody repression that followed. Ambassador Davis had denied these charges to congressional investigators and the press, and has instituted a lawsuit against the creators of a film he claims alleges his complicity in the death of a young American. Now, he has taken his defense of his conduct—and that of the United States— before the court of history, in a book covering the final two years of Allende’s ill-fated attempt to build a “democratic road to socialism.”
It is a book with two levels: the first an overview of the politics of Allende’s failure and fall; the second an account and analysis of United States policy and its role in Chilean events. As a history of the decline and fall of la vía chilena, Davis offers an interpretation close to that of Christian Democratic leader Eduardo Frei, whom the author greatly admires. He sympathizes with Allende as well, blaming “the extreme left” for the fatal contradictions within Allende’s “democratic road,” but also faulting the Chilean president for a vacillating inability to put the left’s house in order and maintain his institutional strategy and a loyal opposition. There is little new in this account, which stays close to the surface of events and relies largely on a limited range of published sources, but it avoids polemics and is an intelligent exposition of the author’s point of view.
The book’s chief interest, however, is as a memoir of a historical actor, not as a historical monograph by a diplomat. Here the results are equally mixed. Ambassador Davis writes gracefully and his sketches of people are often both witty and perceptive. At the same time, his book reveals little that we do not know already. Throughout, he defends himself from charges of involvement in covert intervention in Chile’s internal affairs and the Nixon administration from allegations of destabilizing the Allende government. His book concludes with a detailed rebuttal of these charges, although it depends heavily on an uncritical acceptance of the public writings and private statements of high officials of the Central Intelligence Agency—the chief instrument of Nixon’s covert Chile policy.
In his preface, Davis suggests that his book is both a memoir and a monograph. In the end, however, it falls between these two stools—insufficiently revealing to have much value as a memoir and insufficiently original to have great worth as a monograph. At bottom, it is a measured defense of his own role and an apologia for that of the U.S. government in the overthrow of an elected president whom Davis professes to admire and the destruction of a Chilean democracy that he insists he sustained. Even in academic retirement, Ambassador Davis remains a diplomat.
