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Misled by Himself: What the Johnson Tapes Reveal about the Dominican Intervention of 1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Alan McPherson
Alan McPherson*
Affiliation:
Howard University
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Abstract

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The recent release of over four hundred telephone conversations recorded in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House from April to December 1965 provide historians with exciting new evidence on the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The role of the president in that civil conflict has been up to now mysterious since Johnson rarely committed himself to paper. Critics and scholars since have somewhat exonerated him as simply another decision maker misled by a panicky country team spreading rumors of an imminent communist takeover. The tapes suggest, however, that Johnson was both aware that evidence of a takeover was insufficient and perhaps more concerned with domestic politics than with the situation in Santo Domingo. Repeatedly, close advisors attempted to dissuade him from overplaying an anti-communist rationale. But everywhere he looked in Washington Johnson saw enemies who would exploit any hesitation on his part. Soon after committing 23,000 troops, he admitted his lapses in judgment while he simultaneously sought scapegoats for them. The tapes place Johnson once and for all at the center of one of the most serious crises in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and reveal the darker side of his foreign policy instincts.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , 2003 , pp. 127 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson, Fortas, and McNamara, 23 May 1965, 5:10P.M., WH6505.29, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. All conversations are from the Johnson Library.

2. I thank the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation for a grant that allowed the research for this piece. In early 2001, the LBJ Library opened up about four hundred conversations from April 1965 to July 1965 mentioning the Dominican Republic and covering the great majority of Johnson's involvement in the crisis. In April 2002, the Library released the remaining tapes, fewer than twenty conversations, from August through December 1965. Most conversations were from the Oval Office; the Situation Room independently recorded many of those that were not. Roughly thirty hours of recordings concern the Dominican intervention. For those who cannot work at the Library, its Web site, www.lbjlib.utexas.edu, provides a finding aid, and the Library can ship copies of audio tapes ($6.00 each) or transcripts ($0.25 per page, although the Library did not make those transcripts and warns—wisely—against their accuracy). Researchers can also find most of these conversations—but not all, and not complete ones—in Michael Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). And the Department of State is preparing a volume in its Foreign Relations of the United States series that will cover the Dominican crisis and include phone conversations. As of December 2002 the volume was not published.

3. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (1972; reprint Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 150; see also Theodore Draper, The Dominican Revolt: A Case Study in American Policy (New York: Commentary, 1968), 3.

4. William Doyle, Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (New York: Kodansha International, 1999), 141; Johnson did give his side of the story in his memoirs, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Popular Library, 1971), 187–205.

5. Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle (New York: Delacorte, 1965), 211. The Department of State's Deputy Historian David Patterson said that, based on the tapes, it was obvious Johnson “micro-managed” the crisis, “Expanding the Horizons of the Foreign Relations Series,” The SHAFR Newsletter (June 1999), available at www.ohiou.edu/shafr/NEWS/1999/jun/juneart99.htm. Beschloss's Reaching for Glory also paints a president in charge of this crisis, and Doyle in Inside the Oval Office labels Johnson “the controlling executive.”

6. Fulbright speech, “The Situation in the Dominican Republic,” Congressional Record, 15 September 1965, 23855; Draper, Dominican Revolt, 5. See also Dan Kurzman, Santo Domingo: Revolt of the Damned (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1965), 19–20; and Tad Szulc, Dominican Diary (New York: Dell, 1965), 3.

7. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 18 May 1965, 12:50P.M., WH6505.23.

8. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas and Bundy, 20 May 1965, no time indicated, SR6505.05.

9. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas and Benítez, 18 May 1965, 1:32P.M., WH6505.23.

10. Mentions of the Martin mission include recordings of telephone conversations between Bundy and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 12:29P.M., WH6504.08; Johnson and McNamara, 1 May 1965, 11:30A.M., WH6505.01; Johnson and Martin, 2 May 1965, 3:42P.M., WH6505.02; Johnson and John Chancellor, 2 May 1965, 5:26P.M., WH6505.02; Bennett and Johnson, 2 May 1965, 6:24P.M., WH6505.02; Martin and Johnson, 3 May 1965, 3:15A.M., WH6505.03; Bennett and Johnson, 3 May 1965, 9:56P.M., WH6505.04; and Johnson and Situation Room, 4 May 1965, 8:16P.M., WH6505.04.

11. See Draper, Dominican Revolt, 74–77; Jerome Slater, Intervention and Negotiation: The United States and the Dominican Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 26; and Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention, 90.

12. The first mention of Fortas is in recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Mann, 26 April 1965, 9:35A.M., WH6504.05. This is also the first White House recording that concerns the crisis. Johnson says he went to see Fortas on 25 April “just to visit with him on the general picture” and that Bosch asked the U.S. government whether he should return to the Dominican Republic.

13. Laura Kalman, Abe Fortas: A Biography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 233. According to Kalman, Johnson spoke to Fortas forty times and to Bundy eighty-six times during this period.

14. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Fortas, 14 May 1965, 7:29P.M., WH6505.12.

15. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas and Johnson, 16 May 1965, 12:30P.M., WH6505.15.

16. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 18 May 1965, 12:01A.M., WH6506.20.

17. Beschloss, Reaching for Glory, 320–21, 328, explains that Bundy by May 1965 was falling out of favor with Johnson because he had agreed to participate in a teach-in on the Vietnam War. The Bundy mission to Santo Domingo may have been partly engineered to force Bundy to miss the event. Recordings of telephone conversations between Johnson and Fortas, 19 May 1965, 11:40A.M., WH6505.25; between Johnson and McNamara, 19 May 1965, 12:37P.M., WH6505.26.

18. Recording of telephone conversation between McNamara, Fortas, and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 10:50A.M., WH6504.08.

19. Recordings of telephone conversations between Fortas and Reedy, 20 May 1965, no time indicated, SR6505.02, and between Fortas and Muñoz Marín, 20 May 1965, no time indicated, SR6505.02. U.S. embassy officials or military commanders on the ground did sometimes fail to let the president know that they were acquiescing in right-wing military aggression against the rebels. See, for example, recordings of telephone conversations between Bundy and Johnson, 13 May 1965, 7:45P.M., WH6506.10, for details of an Imbert attack on a rebel radio transmitter; Johnson and Fortas, 19 May 1965, 11:40A.M., WH6505.25, on allowing Imbert to fly troops out of San Isidro airfield; and Fortas and Reedy, 20 May 1965, no time indicated, SR6505.02, on giving Johnson assurances to the opposite of what major newspapers were reporting.

20. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Moyers, 25 May 1965, 9:25P.M., WH6505.30; see also Rusk and Johnson, 24 May 1965, 7:24P.M., WH6505.30; and Draper, Dominican Revolt, 184.

21. Recording of telephone conversation between McNamara and Bundy, 23 May 1965, 8:05P.M., WH6505.30. The proposal they are discussing is Rusk telegram 1208 to Bundy and Cyrus Vance, 23 May 1965, folder Dominican Republic Davidson 5/65, box 51, Country File Latin America, National Security Files, Johnson Library.

22. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Mann, 26 April 1965, 9:35A.M., WH6504.05. Beschloss erroneously dates this conversation 24 April 1965, 9:35A.M., the day the revolt began, in Reaching for Glory, 284–85.

23. Draper, Dominican Revolt, said that Balaguer was “given the Washington buildup” in June 1965. Former Deputy Director of the CIA Ray Cline related that Johnson reacted enthusiastically to the suggestion of Balaguer as a candidate, in his Secrets, Spies and Scholars (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1976), 213. Cline does not say when the conversation took place, but it was after Johnson asked, “How the hell can I get my troops out of this damn mess?” and therefore after 28 April. See also Peter Felten, “The 1965–1966 United States Intervention in the Dominican Republic” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 1995), 321–24, which says that Balaguer was involved actively as early as June.

24. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Mansfield, 30 April 1965, 11:51A.M., WH6504.08. As was his habit when building a consensus, Johnson used similar phrases with different audiences. Wall Street Journal reporter Philip Geyelin, in Lyndon B. Johnson and the World (New York: Praeger, 1966), 237, said that Johnson “told the National Security Council: Tt would be hard for me to live in this Hemisphere if I sent in the Marines, and I couldn't live in this country if I didn't.'” A similar quotation is, “If I send in the Marines, I can't live in the Hemisphere. If I don't, I can't live at home,” from Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 265–66.

25. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 12:17P.M., WH6504.08.

26. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 1 May 1965, 2:21A.M., WH6505.01; Geyelin in Johnson and the World, 254, wrote that Johnson “was strongly reinforced by Dean Rusk, who tended to see the Dominican Republic not in isolation, but as part of a global Communist conspiracy.”

27. Quotation to Dirksen and Ford is in Michael Kryzanek, “The Dominican Intervention Revisited: An Attitudinal and Operational Analysis,” in United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge, 1961–1986, ed. John Martz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 140; on Fulbright, recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Harry Truman, 19 April 1965, 11:42A.M., WH6504.05.

28. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 6:00P.M., WH6504.09

29. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 12:17P.M., WH6504.08.

30. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Mansfield, 30 April 1965, 11:51A.M., WH6504.08.

31. Dominicans on the left have admitted a lack of preparation and of control in late April, if also a desire for it; see, for instance, J. I. Quello and Narciso Isa Conde, “Revolutionary Struggle in the Dominican Republic and Its Lessons,” World Marxist Review (Toronto) 8 (December 1965):98, 99; and Slater, Intervention and Negotiation, 35–42.

32. Draper, Dominican Revolt, 120; Slater, Intervention and Negotiation, 50; Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle, 199. Johnson himself said “we cannot tell everything we know from the FBI,” in transcript of telephone conversation between Johnson and Senator Talmadge, 23 August 1965, 3:11P.M., WH6508.09; Mann said “the kind of proof the public demands involves breaking up your intelligence sources,” cited in Kurzman, Santo Domingo, 18. Dallek wrote most recently that Johnson “knew that the evidence of Communist subversion was less clear and the dangers to foreign nationals less pronounced than he said. But he believed domestic pressures compelled him to act as he did,” in Flawed Giant, 265.

33. Szulc, Dominican Diary, 46.

34. The most direct evidence of this is from Eric Sevareid, “The Final Troubled Hours of Adlai Stevenson,” Look, 30 November 1965, 84.

35. Emphases added; recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Raborn, 29 April 1965, 8:47A.M., WH6504.06.

36. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention, 110. After 2P.M., Johnson urged all remaining Marines (about 500 men) off the Boxer, and by 3P.M., the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed the 6 Marine Expeditionary unit (1,580 men) to land. Although Lowenthal says that the Raborn-Johnson exchange took place at noon, the tape is marked 8:47A.M., so Johnson had several hours to consider his military moves.

37. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Bundy, 29 April 1965, 9:48A.M., WH6504.06.

38. Recording of telephone conversation between Fortas, Johnson, and McNamara, 30 April 1965, 10:50A.M., WH6504.08.

39. Draper, Dominican Revolt, 140–41; Geyelin, Johnson and the World, 238–39; Szulc, Dominican Diary, 33.

40. Recordings of telephone conversations between Johnson and Mansfield, 30 April 1965, 11:51A.M., WH6504.08; and Fortas and Johnson (with McNamara on the line), 30 April 1965, 10:50A.M., WH6504.08

41. Recordings of telephone conversations between Bundy and Johnson, 1:45P.M. and 6:35P.M., both 30 April 1965, WH6504.09.

42. Recording of telephone conversation between McNamara and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 5:05P.M., WH6504.09.

43. Recording of telephone conversation between McNamara, Moyers, and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 5:40P.M., WH6504.09.

44. Recording of telephone conversation between McNamara and Johnson, 30 April 1965, 6:25P.M., WH6504.09.

45. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon Johnson, 1965—I, (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1966), 30 April speech is on 461–62; 2 May speech is on 469–74. On advisors, see Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle, 210. There have been rumors that Johnson improvised about Communists after his Teleprompter malfunctioned, but Roberts writes that “after a four-hour long discussion of language to be used, Johnson decided to go all the way.” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New York: The New American Library, 1966), 523, explain that the Teleprompter did malfunction but that it only made Johnson repeat two paragraphs, not ad-lib. See also Lady Bird Johnson's diary entry in Beschloss, Reaching for Glory, 308–09.

46. Martin cited in Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention trans. Lawrence Lipson (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 258. For more on the Martin trip and the press conference, see Draper, Dominican Revolt, 134–35. According to Szulc, “[Martin's] assessment that the revolution had gone over to the Communists was the final element in convincing the Administration that this was the case,” in Dominican Diary, 106.

47. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Martin, 2 May 1965, 3:42P.M., WH6505.02. On Johnson's handling of liberals during the crisis, see Evans and Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, 518.

48. Draper noted that, in mid-May, “a strange thing happened” when U.S. officials began to backtrack, saying that communists had never taken over and that the U.S. intervention had prevented them from doing so, Dominican Revolt, 138; see also Roberts, LBJ's Inner Circle, 211.

49. Quotations from recordings of telephone conversations between Johnson and Raborn, 12 May 1965, 4:05P.M., WH6505.08; and Johnson and McNamara, 12 May 1965, 11:20A.M., WH6505.08; see also Johnson and Jack Vaughn, 3 May 1965, 11:10A.M., WH6505.03.

50. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Senator George Smathers, 15 September 1965, 12:35P.M., WH6509.05; see similar analogies by Rusk, Mann, and Bennett in Draper, Dominican Revolt, 161.

51. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Raborn, 12 May 1965, 4:05P.M., WH6505.08.

52. Recording of telephone conversation between Bundy and Johnson, 31 May 1965, 10:42A.M., WH6505.33.

53. The speech is “The Situation in the Dominican Republic,” Congressional Record, 15 September 1965, 23855; Max Frankel, “Secret U.S. Report Details Policy Shift in Dominican Crisis,” New York Times, 14 November 1965, 1; George Pope Atkins and Larman Wilson, The Dominican Republic and the United States: From Imperialism to Transnationalism (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 137; see also Peter Felten, “The Path to Dissent: Johnson, Fulbright, and the 1965 Intervention in the Dominican Republic,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26 (fall 1996): 1009–18.

54. Quotations from transcript of telephone conversation between Johnson and Senator Herman Talmadge, 23 August 1965, 3:11P.M., WH6508.09; see also transcript of Johnson and Senator Richard Russell, 14 September 1965, 6:35P.M., WH6509.04.

55. Recording of telephone conversation between Johnson and Rusk, 17 September 1965, 2:26P.M., WH6509.05; see also, on the same recording, Johnson and Senator George Smathers, 15 September 1965, 12:35P.M.; Johnson and Senator Russell Long, 15 September 1965, 6:40P.M., and Johnson and Rusk, 15 September 1965, 7:20P.M.

56. Months after the crisis, Geyelin came to similar conclusions in Johnson and the World, 237: The Dominican intervention “produced … what was probably the lowest ebb in Lyndon Johnson's standing as a world statesman in all of the first two years or more of his Presidency.” “[Johnson's] flailing around in search of [a consensus], his irrelevant rationalizations and often inaccurate reconstruction of events, conspired to turn an essentially unmanageable and, in some ways, unavoidable crisis in a fundamentally unstable and crisis-prone Caribbean nation into a crisis of confidence in the President himself. It turned an effort, born, curiously enough, of caution, and largely designed to fill what seemed to be an ominous vacuum, into an unreasoned, reckless, impulsive piece of jingoism.”