00:00:00BENNETT: We had that very close relationship, the three principal Americans
on the island. I was the Ambassador in residence, [Ellsworth] Bunker was the
Ambassador from the OAS [Organization of American States] and in charge of
stitching together a provisional government, and General [Bruce] Palmer was
commander of the troops. We had either lunch or dinner together every single
day. Palmer stayed with me the first few days and then got his own quarters. I
offered Bunker a stay in the residence, but he thought that as an international
figure he should stay over at the hotel, which was the correct decision. But I
had the best cook, and every day we'd have at least one meal together. I
remember that very clearly because my cook could make eggs Florentine: you know,
the spinach base under the eggs. Ellsworth liked that, so we had that every day,
00:01:00it seemed to me, months on months. The result of this close cooperation was that
we were all kept immediately informed of anything that was an incipient problem
and we never had any big problems among us. We had a wonderful relationship, and
all three of us got together for dinner just last winter--well, a year ago, a
few months before Ellsworth's death. I still see Palmer. Bunker was a wonderful
man, and he had just the kind of cool to handle that kind of situation.
RICHARD RUSK: How about Thomas [C.] Mann? Was he a good person for that
particular slot? That particular time?
BENNETT: Well, Tom had already moved upstairs to being Under Secretary, so he was--
RICHARD RUSK: For Latin American affairs?
BENNETT: Yes, he was out of the day-to-day operation by that time. [Jack Hood]
Vaughn was Assistant Secretary for Latin America. And he had come, if I
remember, from the Peace Corps, by way of being--from there to Ambassador to
00:02:00Panama and then back to the Assistant Secretaryship. He was the liberal man on
the scene. And Tom, as your father said, tended to be a hard-line realist on
Latin America, although he knew the Latins extremely well having grown up in a
Tex-Mex community. Later he was a notably successful Ambassador to Mexico, one
of our most sensitive diplomatic posts. He understood the Latins, and the Latins
understood and liked and respected him.
SCHOENBAUM: Now, how did Bunker go about his job? Who was in charge of the
country when he arrived and how did he go about--
BENNETT: Well, this military junta under [Pedro Bartolome] Benoit, and then that
moved around and [Francisco Rivero] Jimenez of the Navy played a big role. After
we sorted out the first problems of relief and the evacuations, the three
ambassadors began interviewing all the different sectors of Dominican opinion.
They used the penthouse at the Ambassador Hotel which had a big sitting room,
and they had a stream of people going in there. I don't recollect exactly, but
00:03:00it seems to me they traveled to other towns and talked to people there as well.
I believe that's accurate.
SCHOENBAUM: And it took him a better part of a year to put things together?
BENNETT: No, no, no. They came down in June, at the very beginning, then went
back to Washington, and then came back, I'd say in July, and started working in
earnest on a provisional government which was sworn in the first week of
September. Once you had the provisional government, we reverted to more or less
normal operations. I presented credentials again, and you had a bilateral
embassy in its proper relationship. They had a foreign minister and all that.
Bunker then would come back and forth from time to time. The man chosen as
Provisional President, [Hector] Garcia-Godoy, who has since died, was a splendid
00:04:00individual, a man without any personal flaws. He had been a friend of mine when
I was in the Embassy twenty years before. We were all young together; used to go
to dances that sort of thing. So, it was a very easy relationship.
RICHARD RUSK: He'd also been Foreign Minister for Juan Bosch. So, he was very
sympathetic, and in close touch with Bosch.
BENNETT: That's right. I'm glad you recalled that. Yes, he was very sympathetic.
RICHARD RUSK: So in a way, LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson] did go back to Bosch, at
least with the negotiations, a year or so after this thing blew up.
BENNETT: But Garcia-Godoy was never considered a Bosch man. I mean, he was not
of that party. He had served as Foreign Minister, that's true, and he had also
been, I believe, Ambassador to London. He was essentially non-partisan.
RICHARD RUSK: He was just his own man.
BENNETT: He was an eminent citizen who was non-political basically. He came from
a prominent family; I guess he'd had presidents in his family background, and
00:05:00all that. As Provisional President he was under terrible pressure because he
knew what the military could do to him. He was always calling on Bunker or me,
mainly Bunker as the OAS representative, for help in standing up to the
military. I remember some pretty ominous nights there when it looked as though
they were about to throw him out. That would have been a defeat for all of us to
have the provisional government thrown out. Yes, I remember one night we were at
Garcia-Godoy's house. He lived in a simple villa, he wasn't in the Presidential
Palace or anything like that. He had the Dominican military in one room, Bunker
and I were in another room, and Hector, the Provisional President, was sort of
in the middle. The military had given him some kind of an ultimatum, and he knew
it was the wrong thing to do. And yet he was afraid that if he didn't make some
00:06:00concessions, then they'd just shove him out of office. And Bunker and I in the
other room were saying, "Stand up to them. Go back and tell them you won't do
this." Somehow we got through that night. Well, that was just one of the
continual crises there and the uncertain moments you had in that situation. The
point I wanted to make is that we were often charged, and Mr. [James William]
Fulbright charged the Administration at the time, "Well, these people are all in
your pocket. Why don't you make them behave?" Well, it's simply not that simple,
and Ellsworth Bunker and I often reflected together on that fact that we could
put in twenty-six hours every day, and we could threaten and we could cajole and
could plead and we could argue, and we could lay out a line of what seemed to us
the right thing to do, but the final decision was made by those people. Those
Dominican military minds had signals going back and forth in those brains, and
00:07:00you couldn't get in there. So, they make the final decision.
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. My dad makes that point. He makes it consistently.
BENNETT: No matter how much influence we are supposed to have, we don't have the
final decision.
RICHARD RUSK: You know, this whole thing, this negotiation process which
Ellsworth Bunker was involved with and the OAS approach sounds like the type of
thing my dad would have been real big on. I wonder if the fine hand of Dean Rusk
was somehow involved, at least at the Washington end.
BENNETT: I'm sure it was, because Ellsworth came back and forth quite a lot and
he always saw the Secretary and the President. He had great prestige in
Washington. And he dealt at the top level. He was a splendid man, he was
absolutely ramrod straight. He was a Vermonter, as you know. He wore a
blue-white seersucker. He was always ramrod straight and cool, no matter how hot
00:08:00the day was. He had a very correct, formal bearing, and people just respected
that. He established his presence, and the press--he wouldn't tell the press
anything that he didn't want to tell them, and yet they never rode him for that.
He'd just come out of a meeting, "No, I don't have anything for you today," and
stride on to his car. And they took it because he just had that manner.
RICHARD RUSK: Juan Bosch refusing to come back at the time when it would have
made a lot of sense for him to return: the critics--well, again, I'm taking a
lot of this stuff from Theodore Draper's article in Commentary, December 1965,
called "The Dominican Crisis."
BENNETT: Yeah, I remember that.
RICHARD RUSK: Case study of American policy. Makes the point that Bosch did want
to come back right at the beinning of this blowout. Matter of fact, he made the
calls initiating contact in requesting transportation back. Our government more
00:09:00or less froze him out at that point and later on tried to encourage him to come
back. But at that point, Juan Bosch saw himself as being more of a figurehead in
the process, and that he was not really legitimately under consideration as a
major player. Is there any truth to that part of Draper's story?
BENNETT: Personally, I think that's a typical example of Bosch's self-pity and
technique of weaving a spider web of intrigue directed against himself. Whereas
the fact was he was a physical coward, and that was widely known. I'm not just
casting aspersions; he was afraid to come back there. That was widely commented
at the time.
RICHARD RUSK: You knew him personally well enough to know that?
BENNETT: I didn't know him personally. He had already gone out of office by the
time I arrived there. No, I didn't know him personally. But everybody who knew him--
SCHOENBAUM: Never heard that.
00:10:00
BENNETT: You haven't? I would have thought that was rather widespread. I'm not
clear how much of that is in [John Bartlow] Martin's book, the idea of
cowardice. But certainly many Dominicans considered him a physical coward: that
he was willing for other people to get shot at, but not willing to risk his own
skin. But that's an example, I think, of the line peddled by Jaime Benitez, in
favor of Bosch, to people who wanted to believe that sort of thing, who are
always ready to believe their own government is--pushing people around.
RICHARD RUSK: I'll conclude with a question that critics pose in this situation,
and that is the outcome of our intervention was good for American interests and
probably for Dominican interests. Yet we did violate some principles along the
00:11:00way. The OAS charter for one, which states that a country cannot intervene in
the internal affairs of another country. Now you've had twenty years to look
back on it, how does it all wash out for you? Do you think of it now as you did
at the time, that this was a legitimate action on our part? And you still see it
that way, as what is worth the violation of that individual principle?
BENNETT: Yes, I think I would say that. I mean, in looking back, obviously there
are some things we could have done better. There were some things we shouldn't
have done, possibly. But I'm thinking of day-to-day details more than I am of
the general thrust of the policy, which I think was right and which I think has
paid off. It was a policy of necessity rather than of conviction that American
intervention is good for everybody. Nobody said that and nobody felt that, and
00:12:00the charges that we were just thirsting to intervene and waiting for the chance,
that's all balderdash.
RICHARD RUSK: The real issue was the chance of a second [Fidel Ruz] Castro,
second Cuba --
BENNETT: Well, the first issue was the safety of our own citizens. When we'd
been told by the local authorities they couldn't guarantee them, when you had
instances such as that shooting at the hotel, people calling from downtown
saying, "Please come get me, I'm in mortal danger," the fact that citizens of
forty countries chose voluntarily to be evacuated.
RICHARD RUSK: What was the total number of citizens that came out?
BENNETT: Something around forty-two hundred, I believe; between four thousand
and forty-two hundred, which is an enormous number in a country that size. I
remember a few months later there had been some trouble out in Bangladesh. I
think seven hundred and sixty or nine hundred and sixty people were evacuated by
the U. S. Navy. That was front page in the New York Times, and so forth. Here
00:13:00were forty-five hundred people on a small island right next door. It's funny how
Latin America is given a different treatment from other areas of the world,
sometimes too exaggerated, sometimes too played down. I remember former Senator
[Paul] Douglas saying that the American always tended to jump over Latin America
in their view of the world, they looked at other places, that we took Latin
America and the Caribbean area for granted. Then when something happened there,
there was all hell to pay. And I found that to be true.
RICHARD RUSK: By golly, this has been a good interview.
END OF SIDE 1
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