Thomas C. Mann Oral History Interview

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened July, 1979
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

MCKINZIE: Mr. Ambassador, a lot of people are interested in why people go into Government service in the first place. I know that you are originally from Laredo.

MANN: Yes, I was born and reared there. My father was a lawyer, and I had practiced law eight years when Pearl Harbor came. In the process of reading law I had had a muscle freeze, so that I was, particularly in one eye, very nearsighted. I couldn't read the first big letter P without glasses, and I think that was

[2]

the reason I failed my medical exam.

I was still young enough and idealistic enough to want to get in the military, and I tried and tried and was turned down because I flunked physicals.

A man named Dean Ritchey walked into my office. I believe he was the dean of the law school of the University of Virginia. He said that the Board of Economic Welfare was looking for people who could speak Spanish and English and knew a little bit of civil law as well as common law to negotiate some tin contracts. And would I go down for a limited period of time to negotiate? I said I would do anything, and I went to Washington.

By the time I got to Washington Mr. [Cordell] Hull and Mr. [Henry A.] Wallace -- I believe Mr. Wallace was the head of the BEW at that time -- had a jurisdictional fight over who was going to control Government people

[3]

abroad, and Mr. Hull had won. And then I was no longer in the Board of Economic Warfare (if, indeed, I was ever in it) but in the Auxiliary Foreign Service, a temporary service to distinguish it from the career, because we had taken no exams.

And then I was sent to Montevideo to help to advise the Embassy and the Uruguayan Government on freezing of German and Japanese trade credits, which Treasury was particularly interested in at that time. And so I went to Montevideo, and then I was brought back from there, so that you might say my career in the Foreign Service was never planned; it was totally by accident, the accident I just described, a jurisdictional problem.

MCKINZIE: When you went on these missions during the war, I understand a great deal of your work involved safeguarding sources of materials and keeping trade flowing into the United States

[4]

that was essential for the war effort.

MANN: Really in those days I was brought back to Washington by John Dickey, who was later president of, I think, Dartmouth or one of the Ivy League colleges. He was in charge of what we used to call the economic warfare activities of the whole State Department. It was really a Treasury-Commerce-State Department combined operation. And I was put in charge of what was called the "Proclaimed List of Certain Bloc Nationals," for all of Latin American. My job was, with people from Commerce and Treasury and other agencies, to pass on the evidence concerning particular individuals and determine whether they were capable of aiding the enemy. If they were, then they were placed on this Proclaimed List (the English had a comparable list by another name). And then their funds were blocked in the U.S. and England. These individuals could not use U.S.

[5]

banking facilities, U.S. transportation, or anything else, and they were considered to be enemy nationals. They were enemy nationals living outside the enemy-held territory.

Now, I think we made mistakes in that Proclaimed List. In wartime people get very passionate. I don't think that everything we did was fair and just. If I had it to do over again, I would do it somewhat differently. But I was a very young man and we were fighting a war, and I don't think it was a bad program either. I'm talking only about the fringes of the program, not about the program itself.

MCKINZIE: You mean to say that you think that some of the, people who were on the list were certainly loyal to the Latin-American countries?

MANN: I think a German is sort of like an Englishman or an American, or even the Jewish people; they have very deep-seated loyalties to the

[6]

homeland. A lot of us are that way. There were a lot of Germans in Latin America with considerable property, and some of them had been there two or three generations. We had the example of the Fifth Column of France. And the Nazis did make an effort to organize people of German descent throughout all of Latin America. Many of them had married into very prominent Latin-American families, so they were socially prominent and wealthy, and they did constitute a problem -- I don't known -- I started to say danger, and I think danger to some extent. It's in this estimation of the degree of danger that really I have my doubts about. I don't really have doubts about their innate loyalties to their homeland. I think we were right about 98 percent of the time, because any kind of proceeding like that, there is a margin of error. We didn't have all the facts. We couldn't have all the facts. Even courts make errors, you know.

[7]

MCKINZIE: During that time there was a good deal of work going on in the State Department with Leo Pasvolsky -- and Harley Notter, I think, was involved in some of it -- on postwar planning. Were you aware of what they were talking about for the future of U.S.-Latin-American relations?

MANN: No, I really wasn't in on that. We were working, like everybody else in those days during the war, very long hours in the office, and we didn't really have much time to gossip or find out what other people were doing. We had our job, and it was a full-time job; believe me, it was seven days a week, if I remember correctly.

We were also physically separated from the State Department. We were in the Commerce Department Building physically at that time, and, as I say, it was a joint operation. It was really Treasury. Treasury always was the most advanced, let's say, in taking these measures against enemy aliens of all kinds,

[8]

under the Trading With the Enemy Act.

MCKINZIE: Well, how did that lead you from that work into getting preparations for the Chapultapec Conference of 1945?

MANN: Well, that was also an accident. Having been in charge of this work for Latin America I was asked to go to the Chapultapec Conference as a technical adviser (whether I was on the delegation or not I don't remember) on economic warfare measures. The war was drawing to a close. But it had not ended at that time. Yalta and the Chapultapec Conference came along together. [Edward R., Jr.] Stettinius went from Yalta to Chapultapec.

We had made a determined effort in Latin America to get support from Latin-American states for this and other programs, with mixed success. In some cases, we were successful, in others, we failed.

[9]

Nelson Rockefeller, by this time Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, had been the coordinator of Inter-American Cultural Affairs, his chief, his right hand, was a very distinguished lawyer then named John Lockhart. I think he was Nelson's personal lawyer. And John took a liking to me in that conference, just the work we were doing there, and when I got back to Washington I was assigned over to Inter-American Affairs for the first time -- political affairs for the first time -- really during the regime of Nelson Rockefeller. But before I could actually get over there (the red tape takes about two months), Nelson had been replaced by [Spruille] Braden, whom I had not known either. So, that's the way I really got started in Inter-American Affairs.

I never really intended to stay in the Foreign Service; I intended to go back to my law practice. So, all of this was relatively

[10]

unimportant to me -- where I was, what building, or what work I was doing at that particular time, because I thought it was temporary in any case. And I guess it was Braden and Ellis Briggs, his chief adviser, who convinced me that I should apply for the career service. And so I did apply, took the exam, and went into the career service during Braden's time.

MCKINZIE: It must have been fairly satisfying work, then.

MANN: I wouldn't change anything that I had done in my life; it's been a fascinating life and a very rewarding one. I don't have any bitter feelings about it. In fact, I think I've been a very fortunate man.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that you were a technical adviser at Chapultapec. There were a lot of important ideas in the air at Chapultapec.

[11]

MANN: Now, I got into them at that time with Adolph Berle. I was with Adolph Berle at that time, taking notes for him -- and I don't see anybody that can draft like Adolph Berle, as well or as quickly. He had really an extraordinary mind. I was with him, and it may have been through Adolph Berle, as much as John Lockwood (you don't know about these things) that I was transferred when I got back. I was told that they liked the work I was doing and they wanted me over there, and that's all I really know about it.

MCKINZIE: "Monday morning quarterbacks" have said about Chapultapec that the United States was doing two things at once; they were preparing for a kind of globalist approach to the world at the upcoming San Francisco Conference, but yet, at the same time, they were trying to work a pretty tight regional arrangement with Latin America. I was wondering if, at the time, people

[12]

were talking about that, or if you recall what they were talking about?

MANN: That was one of the main issues. We were committed to going to what you call the global approach, which means the United Nations, and this was on the eve of the San Francisco meeting in '45 of the United Nations. And I think, within the U.S. Government at that time, largely thanks to Nelson Rockefeller and other people who understood the area, the United States also wanted to find some way to preserve the inter-American system which had been built up over the years and at that time was the only successful international organization going. It still is the oldest and, at that time, the only one.

So, this precipitated a whole series of issues about regionalism, the role of regions within the U.N. The Latin-Americans themselves at that moment -- which is really a honeymoon

[13]

period for the U.S. and Mexico in our relations -- were even more determined than we were to maintain the integrity of the OAS [Organization of American States] system. So, many of your articles in the charter are there because the Latin-Americans led the fight and were supported by the U.S. all the way through. I wasn't at the San Francisco meeting, but I am familiar with the background of all of that.

Chapultapec may be the most important foreign ministers meeting that's ever been held, really, possibly with the exception of the Bogata one where the charter was adopted. But I think even the outlines of the charter were laid at Chapultapec. The Rio Treaty was part of this problem of how you worked this into the U.N. structure, and I think more real policy decisions were made at that conference. But I played a very small part in this in any conference.

MCKINZIE: Particularly about going ahead with

[14]

the regional system and...

MANN: That's right. And the Rio Treaty that grew out of that. There was, as I say, a very good feeling. There's a very good book on the inter-American system written by a professor named [Arthur P.] Whitaker. I think he's at Pennsylvania; in fact, I know he was. It's called the Western Hemisphere Idea, and I think it's the best little book on that topic that's ever been written. The inter-American system has always been divided by certain things -- in the early days, particularly, by religion, Catholicism versus Protestantism. This is a very big thing within the Latin-American mind, not in our mind so much. But the church was identified in Mexico, for example, with opposition to revolution and change. All the church property was expropriated. It's no longer a big problem, but it was in the early days. Language has always been a barrier, and

[15]

culture. I can remember in my first post in Montevideo listening, with a great deal of interest and profit, to Uruguayan intellectuals talking in those days about the U.S. culture as a materialistic one. They ridiculed what they called "plumbing and comfort;" they couldn't pronounce "comfort" in the way we do, and it was a very derogatory term. The most important thing in life in the United States, in that view, was how much money you had, how big your house was, whether you had sanitation and plumbing. They said the most important thing in life was the spirit. Now, this is traditional Latin American point of view before and during the forties. There was a feeling that the U.S., being big and successful, was going to engulf their culture and standardize everything like we have standardized everything in the 50 states; all the towns look alike and this kind of thing. They loathed that. But that generations gone now.

[16]

Another big gulf was just the disparity in wealth and military power; it breeds fear, envy, or whatever one wants to call it -- I'm not sure which is fair, but it was a barrier.

Then the bonds that held us together were a common belief in certain ideals concerning individual liberty and the dignity of man. Now, the founders of the Latin-American republics were more influenced by [Jean Jacques] Rousseau and the French revolution than they were by ours. But since the French revolution didn't succeed, they adopted the forms of the American republic. And this attachment to a common set of ideals about the value of freedom, the value of the dignity of man, and so forth fitted in with their ideas, of anti-materialism. Jefferson would have, in those days, had a great deal in common with them.

The other big tie, and what made the honeymoon possible, was their dependence on

[17]

the U.S. to protect them against European aggression. They've always rallied around in times of danger. The Second World War presented a real danger to them in the opinion of most Latin-American intellectuals of the time, people who really thought and decided things.

I can remember some things in Uruguay, to give you just an example about how great their military dependence was. The British controlled the seas, and we did later on, so trade came to a virtual standstill except for certain kinds of materials, mainly raw materials that were needed to fuel the war machines. The meat, coffee, and things that they traditionally had exported and lived by, the world could do without; but it couldn't do with other raw materials essential to the war effort. So, trade was pretty well controlled, particularly by the availability of shipping. And Uruguay was cut off, entirely dependent on outside sources

[18]

for example, in the days after Pearl Harbor before the submarine packs had been brought under control. We would send down tankers of fuel oil to Montevideo, and out of eight we might lose five or six. So, it was a great cost to us. After all, the American people came through in the pinch. I think they felt the same way, pretty much, about England.

We did supply Latin America at a great cost in ships, in lives, and in scarce materials, and in return they gave us such things as tin (which we needed to make containers for the food for soldiers out of and so forth), so it was a two-way street. They built up enormous reserves in this trade as the war went on. In those early days they weren't really exporting much; we were all trying to stay alive, really, to keep the sea lanes open.

Now, that changed in a couple of years, but those two years were tough years, and the people

[19]

were at Chapultapec lived through that time, so they were influenced by that.

MCKINZIE: To what extent did Latin-Americans envision some sort of future social economic relation with the United States? They did have, in 1945, those huge balances, and there was some discussion, as I understand it, about how those balances could be spent in a way so as not to disrupt the U.S. economy after the war.

MANN: And so as not to be wasted in terms of their own economic and social developments.

At the time of Chapultapec proper, in '45, there was some thought about that, but I think not really in great depth, because there were so many other problems and we were just there a limited period of time. My instinct or feeling was that there was, at that moment, no real feeling of conflict in economic interests. We felt that our economic interests ran parallel

[20]

to each other. Nobody had really thought about a large aid program, for example, in terms of money; at least, if they thought about it, they hadn't brought it up in an inter-American meeting that I knew about.

MCKINZIE: Latin Americans included?

MANN: Latin Americans included, yes. The reason I say that is because I remember vividly how surprised I was when [Juscelino] Kubitschek of Brazil came out with his initiative, really an effort to rally Latin-American states around Brazil, to put pressure on the U.S. to expend large sums of money. I don't have the time sequence in this, but...

MCKINZIE: It was before the Rio Conference, because one of the difficulties of the U.S. in 1947 was to keep that conference on strictly matters of security, so it wouldn't get into the subject of social economic things.

[21]

MANN: But my impression, at that time, was that the initiative really came from Kubitschek more than any other person. And this was sparked mainly by domestic, political, Brazilian considerations more than anything else.

Now the reception he got was not negative in the beginning, but it took awhile for this idea to grab hold in Latin America. And I can't tell you the time sequence, but a very significant change took place in U.S. –Latin-American economic relations after the Kubitschek initiative -- Operation Pan-America or whatever it was called. This did change since then; the Latin Americans, in a relatively short period of time lined up behind this idea that was based on alleged conflict of interest, unlike the spirit of Chapultapec, let's say. The idea was that we were wealthy and they were, in comparison, poor, and that there was the

[22]

obligation of the wealthy nations, particular the U.S., to finance development programs. This wasn't, at that time, a world-wide thing. The whole pressure was focused on the U.S., because they hadn't really gotten into that world organization part of it yet.

They felt the U.S. should find someway to funnel some more funds, capital funds, to Latin America with no strings attached, so they could use it in economic and social development or any other way they wanted.

Now, that became an aspiration; I can't tell you exactly when, but I would date it with Kubitschek, whatever the books say about his regime. And there was a man named Augusto Schmidt who was, I think, the author of the idea, really, and was pretty high up in Kubitschek's organization and had Kubitschek's ear. He was responsible, more maybe than Kubitschek, but the president gets all the blame

[23]

and all the credit of things that happen. He was a Brazilian businessman and sort of a politician and demagogue.

MCKINZIE: Your work was appreciated by Nelson Rockefeller, but when you got back and decided to take the job, it was really Spruille Braden for whom you worked. Spruille Braden has written a great deal, and he had very strong views about Latin-American development, Latin-American politics; and he had his own problems in Argentina. He's quite different in personality and in approach from Rockefeller. Did that create any difficulties for you?

MANN: No. I don't think I was ever in the office at the time Nelson's people were there. Now, I have to say two or three things about that. In the first place, this whole idea of exporting democracy was a new idea to me at that time. I just simply accepted, as a very young man,

[24]

in the beginning, that the U.S. did have a mission to export democracy. And Carl Spaeth, who was later dean of the law school out in Stanford, a very brilliant guy, and, I know, one of Nelson's proteges (we had served together in Montevideo in '42; he must have stayed on when Nelson left) believed this very strongly.

Now, you have to understand that Braden's views, in 1946 were very different (which is not unusual in human beings) from what they were ten or fifteen years later. He became conservative. But in 1946 his view was essentially what I would consider a liberal point of view -- at least, liberal in the Wilsonian sense that if the government isn't democratic, we were going to have to bring pressure to bear on them to hold elections.

MCKINZIE: That's the basic explanation of his troubles with [Juan] Peron?

MANN: That's correct. Braden promoted me, after a

[25]

short while, to special assistant, so I knew Braden and worked with him very closely, and he is a close personal friend in every sense of the word.

And Nelson Rockefeller was essentially conservative, in the sense that he was saying, "Every nation is sovereign and essentially has the right to manage its own affairs." And that was what he was mistakenly fired for, in my opinion.

Now, I didn't have any convictions on this at the time. I didn't know much about the subject, and I mistakenly assumed that Foreign Service career people who had been around 20 or 30 years knew more about politics than I did. I'd been in there three months, you see, so I just went along.

But the pressure of the New York Times and the Washington Post and public opinion was in favor of this same sense of mission. It's a very strong current running through our system, and

[26]

nobody really had the nerve, except Nelson, to stand up to it in those days. You have to understand that we were in a state of euphoria; we'd just come out of a victory in the Second World War, we had a monopoly on the world's supply of gold, we had the only large industrial system in the whole world that was intact. We didn't have a balance of payments problem; we had a dollar gap problem. We were really at the pinnacle of power in the years that we were talking about, and the idea prevalent among liberals was that we have a responsibility to use this great power in a way that would benefit mankind. And I think that was sincere.

But like everything else, if carried to extreme, it becomes absurd. There's an English writer who talked about the American "illusion of omnipotence" in those years. I think it came out in Harpers', one of the most incisive I've ever read. His main thesis was that the American people thought that any policy that the U.S. people supported and was voted by Congress

[27]

would prevail. This whole series of victories, and at relatively low-cost in the World War fueled this kind of illusion of omnipotence, you see. And I would say that Braden was no different from 98 percent of the intellectuals in those days, and the smart one, the wise ones, in retrospect (and this is my own personal judgement), was Nelson Rockefeller. I wouldn't want Braden to know that, because he is a personal friend, and I admire him. He's a man of great integrity, and I don't think I feel any kinder toward anybody that I've ever worked with than Spruille Braden. I helped write the Blue Book, and I did it with gusto. We went after Peron. And in that Foreign Minister's meeting (which I think was one of the most interesting that I ever attended), I listened carefully to the Latin-American delegates. We took a beating at that meeting in spite of being at the pinnacle of our power.

Now, it wouldn't be unusual for that to

[28]

happen now, but for that to happen then indicated to me that they felt very, very strongly about some things in a direction entirely opposite from what we thought. And if you read the debates of that conference on this whole business of exporting democracy and so forth, I think they are very well-done -- the Latin-American speeches, not ours; I wouldn't bother reading those, because I don't think we did very well. They pointed out that there's no such thing as a perfect democracy anywhere in the world, that democracy is an ideal and a very difficult one to achieve, and that the right of a sovereign state to manage its own internal affairs was worth something. And it set me to thinking. A few years later I became a non-interventionist in terms of the right of a nation to run its own affairs.

MCKINZIE: As you say, the definition of intervention and non-intervention is a sticky one.

[29]

MANN: Well, governments never define key words in international law. Now, I don't know whether this is good or bad; I suspect it's bad. But an Englishman summed up the reason. He said, "Definitions of words like 'aggression' and 'intervention' are a signpost for the guilty and a trap for the innocent," because a nation can take a definition and technically fit its actions within that definition. Even though the thrust and spirit of what they are doing is illegal, then it becomes legal. So, one of the great deficiencies of international law (as I found out later) is that no key word is really defined anywhere. There isn't any super government or any effective court; each nation has its own definition.

Now, I can tell you what my definition of the law of intervention is, and I don't think there is any doubt that this is what it is; I've done a lot of work on that. The law of intervention, essentially, is designed to make unlawful an attempt by one state to coerce another

[30]

state into following a particular foreign or domestic policy. It is intended to safeguard the right of a state to manage its own affairs and to safeguard the right of a state to determine its own foreign policy and its own domestic policy without threats of coercion for the other side. It came along much later than self-defense, and it has nothing to do with the rule of self-defense; it's an entirely separate branch of the law. Intervention requires a purpose and an intent.

If the U.S. devalued its currency, for example, this may have a catastrophic effect on the economies of many countries. It may force them to change certain of their internal policies. They may devalue, or they may have to do this, that, or the other; there are any number of options. But that is not intervention, because there is no intention. The purpose of the United States action was not to force the government of another country to alter its monetary

[31]

or fiscal policy.

Now, let me give you some illustrations of intervention. When Wilson went into Mexico and said, essentially, "We're going to teach them how to run their government," he was trying to force Mexico to do something which that government, rightly or wrongly didn't want to do. And that's coercion -- the forcing of the will of a sovereign state to do something or refrain from doing something.

It was intervention when Russia went into Czechoslovakia and Hungary to arrest a trend in certain changes in their domestic and foreign policies, in both fields, and to bring them back under subservience.

It's intervention in my opinion when the United Nations (I'm not saying the rule is good or bad; I'm just telling you what it is in my opinion) begins to dictate to South Africa, whatever one's opinion may be about the morality of the position, how they should handle their

[32]

racial question -- just the same as it would have been illegal for England to dictate to us how we handled our slavery problem, let's say, during the Civil War. And it's all based on the theory of sovereignty of states. Each state is sovereign; there is no super state. When you read the U.N. Charter this just jumps right out at you. And it's a limited area that we're talking about. It's a matter of purpose, like most laws are a matter of purpose. Most domestic laws are a matter of purpose; if you shoot somebody when he's about to kill you, that's legal, and if you shoot somebody because you're mad at him, that's something else. And this is really what it's all about.

MCKINZIE: Well, even within those parameters you set out there, there are some sticky areas. Would it be intervention, in your view, for the United States to set up, as the United States did, an aid program in Latin America in which there was something called the "Servicio," which

[33]

was a combination U.S. and Latin-American national organization, a part of the Latin-American Government, in which a U.S. national assumed the leadership? If the United States was not able to affect policy changes for whatever reasons and threatened to withdraw its aid money, does that constitute intervention in that?

MANN: I don't think so. I won't say that the threat of withdrawal of aid or the withdrawal of aid could under no circumstance constitute intervention. But I would say this, that no nation has a vested right, has any right, to receive something from another nation; we're all equally sovereign. And if the U.S., because it has internal problems (which there are now) has begun to cut back on the size of the aid program, that's not intervention. I happened to think this is probably economically necessary, and I think that's one of the mistakes I made then, not really

[34]

understanding fully how fast we were spending money and how this was going to affect the soundness of the dollar. I've said it, but I didn't really understand it in depth.

Now, the other country comes in and says, "We think that we should find some way to share the wealth, and we want you to give us" -- speaking in the coldest terms, but I think they are fair -- "in money, in goods, or something, funds or other things that will help us to speed up the rate of our progress."

And we say to them, "All right, let's set down and work out a program, and if we can agree on it, we will put so much into the pot; we will do this, that, and the other." Now, that's essentially what the aid program relationship is, whether it was Point IV or later.

Now, let me give you an illustration to show you, if you take that theory that you just mentioned literally, how it leads to absurdities. When I was in charge of Latin-American affairs

[35]

the last time, some of my best friends were Colombians. There was a president of Colombia who I thought was a good man, in the sense that he was honest and doing the best job he could. But their fiscal and monetary policies were just absurd, and the result was that they had a multiple rate of exchange and they were running deficits that threatened the collapse of the whole economy.

The Colombian Ambassador came in and said to me that, "We have elections coming up in six or eight months" (or a year; I've forgotten what it was). "We know that we need to exercise discipline, to belt-tighten, and to quit spending, but if we quit spending at this moment, this will affect the election. Therefore, what we need is a loan of "X" million dollars."

I said, "Let me talk to the staff and we'll look into it."

I turned it over to the experts, and they

[36]

came back and said it would cost us several hundred million dollars just to postpone disaster for a period of "X" months.

And my decision was that we're not going to do it because it's not in the U.S. interest and it isn't even in the interest of Colombia. If we did do it for the purpose of enabling this particular man to get more votes in the election, that would have been intervention, to continue aid would have been intervention. I'm just trying to emphasize the importance of intention.

Now, we looked at it strictly from the standpoint of whether it was a good use of the U.S. taxpayers' money, whether it would bring social and economic progress to the Colombian people as a whole. And the answer to that was no. And I think that whenever your decision on aid is based on that kind of reason, then it's absurd to call it intervention.

[37]

Now, I know that there's certain intellectuals who say that everything we do is intervention, and, therefore, the law has no meaning. Well, now, if you follow that out logically, then there isn't any law about intervention and we're back to the law of the jungle.

This is just one of the many laws that's designed to preserve the right of the sovereign state to manage its own affairs. It doesn't give them the right to command anybody to do something that they don't have any obligation to do. That's the difference. To me, it's very clear, and I really have spent a lot of time reading on that. If you go back and read on this, which is one of the things I'm writing about, for the first hundred years this nation followed a policy of strict non-intervention. Jefferson laid it down; [John Quincy] Adams reaffirmed it; it was reaffirmed by [Abraham] Lincoln, who was the biggest non-interventionist of all, because he was afraid that England was

[38]

going to intervene in U.S. affairs. So, you have an unbroken line of instructions to administer it out of the State Department, quoting many of the Presidents.

MCKINZIE: [James] Monroe's thing notwithstanding.

MANN: Now, let me say this: Monroe was talking about self-defense. Self-defense is as different from intervention as a steak is from a potato. They have no relationship to each other at all. The purposes of self-defense is not to dictate to a country how to manage its affairs; it's to enable a country to survive against a real or threatened attack. Now, there are many things wrong with the law of self-defense, but it should never be confused with intervention. This was simply my position of the Dominican crisis. I fought like hell for a time not to give walkie-talkies to one side or the other, because I thought that would be intervention.

[39]

That was taking sides in an internal struggle. But once I became convinced, and it didn't take me very long (in fact, everybody was convinced) that if the rebels won, the Communist military component in the rebel movement had the military strength to take over and would take over -- that you would have another Cuba -- then all my problems disappeared, because I didn't think we were dealing with the problem of intervention; we were dealing with a problem of self-defense.

Now, let me say about Monroe that the Doctrine is an awful thing; nobody ought to defend the Monroe Doctrine. But the Monroe Doctrine was built up over the years by a series of additions to Monroe's original statement in 1832. The original statement is still sound. And it was never called a doctrine by Monroe, Jefferson, or [James] Madison...

MCKINZIE: It was [James] Polk, I guess, who first

[40]

used that, maybe in the Mexican war.

MANN: Yes. What Polk did was wrong in my opinion. Well, I don't know; anyway, that's debatable.

MCKINZIE: But now, you had to deal with that kind of heritage of all that in the minds of Latin Americans, when you go to these conferences in the Truman period.

MANN: That's one of the things that I think needs to be done. I think we need to separate out, to explain clearly what Monroe's policy was -- it wasn't a doctrine -- and how that was added onto by so-called corollaries of Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, [Woodrow] Wilson, and everybody else. It became a Doctrine. Years ago, this scholar was asked what he thought of the Monroe Doctrine, and he said that he didn't know because he didn't know what it meant. And I think that's a very valid comment. It depends upon what period of time you're talking about.

[41]

MCKINZIE: When you had finally joined the staff in the Department of State and they were planning for the Bogota Conference, did you have a lot of responsibility for preparing for it?

MANN: No, I didn't. I was posted in Venezuala during that conference, and except for talking with Walter Donnelly, who was my Ambassador there in Venezuala, I had very little to do with it. I've heard a lot about it, but I didn't really participate in that.

MCKINZIE: By 1947, when the Marshall plan had been proposed as a solution for the problems of Europe, there was, in a lot of Latin-American circles, a considerable furor for a comparable development program for Latin-America. I understand that the Bogota Conference had been postponed a time or two, hoping that the issue would cool off a little bit, and that, in addition

[42]

to the charter for the OAS, the big problem was that of economic development by that time. I was wondering what your own perception of how the development idea had changed, was, and how you felt about it?

MANN: Well, I was always in favor of an active aid program for Latin America; I'm not sure that I would do exactly the same things again if I had to do it over again. Toward the end, I'd say the last five or six years, I became convinced that excessive aid was not only a waste of money, but a disservice to the country that we were making the money available to (either in the form of a soft loan or a hard loan) unless the policies of that country made it possible for one to at least hope that the aid would actually promote economic and social progress. You should watch to see if all the economic indicators were wrong -- if they were running chronic budgetary deficits; the national debt

[43]

was going up; the balance of payments deficits, how long and how big they were; the rate of inflation; the rate of growth in the GNP; all of these things -- let us say, ten indicators that you can tell pretty well how an economy is going. These indicators are red in the U.S. today -- not all of them, but most of them are.

And I became a proponent of selective aid. The Latins always said that aid should be proportioned out; one school of thought was in proportion to population. Therefore, Brazil would receive a whole lot more than another country, and it would become a sort of an automatic process based on population. That never did strike me as very realistic, and toward the end I talked a lot about self-help and said that if the aid wasn't going to benefit the people of the country concerned it wasn't a service to them, much less to us, to make it. It's hard to tell what your thoughts were at a

[44]

particular time, because at the very beginning of the aid program I was as enthusiastic about it as anybody. I hadn't realized that, let's say, the miracle of recovery under the Marshall plan in Germany could not be duplicated in Bolivia. I hadn't thought it through; I don't think anybody had thought it through, to tell the truth. I'm talking about the very early days of the aid program, particularly, I guess, during the Eisenhower time more than Truman's time, because the aid program under Truman was very modest. It was mostly in the field of education, Point IV, as I remember.

MCKINZIE: Well, sort of going along with education, there was an agricultural part of it and a health component, what they call "the three basic needs of mankind," or something like that. It was originally perceived to go hand in hand with the extension of private investment in Latin America, and that was a problem they never really resolved

[45]

during that period, because it got hung up on matters of investment and convertability guarantees. And I wonder if you had...

MANN: Well, it's too early in history to make any judgment on whether we made a mistake. Now, in the thirties, during the Great Depression, Latin America defaulted on debts wholesale. There are a lot of very intelligent people that doubt whether not only Latin America is ever going to pay back all these debts that were contracted during the aid program, but whether the U.S. is going to pay back the five hundred billion dollars that we owe. I was talking with somebody from Wall Street not long ago, and he told me that a lot of people in New York financial circles were saying now that the main cause of lack of confidence in the dollar was that Europeans, at least, were beginning to doubt that the U.S. would ever pay its debt.

Now, if all we're doing is living beyond our

[46]

means and borrowing against the future, and all we end up by doing this is destroying confidence in currency, contracts, and so forth, then I don't think that any of the aid programs would be justified; but this judgment can't be made yet.

It is necessary for the U.S. and Latin America to begin not only to balance their budgets, but to pay off their debts. And I reached the conclusion late in life that a government is no different than an individual, that you have to live within your means. There are a lot of ways you can live beyond your means. One of them is by confiscating a rich man's property. Another way is by borrowing against the future, which is easier to do, because it doesn't hurt anybody that's around to yell.

MCKINZIE: But you didn't think at that early time that the Government was beyond its means in Latin America with such modest programs as Point IV?

[47]

MANN: No, I don't think so, really. I think Truman should be applauded for going into this cautiously, and I think all experience after Truman's time demonstrates that maybe we were not cautious enough after Truman's time. We really started with Eisenhower, if my memory's right, first through the Ex-Im Bank and then through large-scale grants, soft loans, and all these other things. My doubts grew with the magnitude of the program. But the magnitude of the aid program and the circumstances under which some of those loans were made, let me give you an illustration.

I think this is objective; I don't have any figures and I may be wrong, but I doubt it. If you figure the amount of dollars put into West Germany under the Marshall plan, on a per capita basis, and the number of dollars put in over a period of years in Bolivia, on a similar per capita basis, in one case you had a miracle of recovery and in the other case

[48]

you had no visible progress whatever.

Now, the overall end result, in my opinion, of the aid program in Bolivia was to burden the Bolivian peasant, the Bolivian people in general, with a very large national debt that likely they will never be able to repay unless they get oil, impose more discipline on themselves, and a number of things happen. I don't say it's impossible, but it seems to me unlikely.

Now, I think an intelligent man has to say, "Was this a favor or was this a disservice to the economy and the people of Bolivia?" They weren't really able to take advantage of the money.

MCKINZIE: But can you really see it in purely economic terms? There is a political dimension to that, isn't there, that sometimes those kinds of aid efforts have to be made for political purposes?

MANN: Well, I don't know how you measure the lot, let's say, of the Bolivian Indian, which is the

[49]

bulk of the population, right now as compared with what it was just say during Eisenhower's time -- how much progress there has been. Doubtless there has been some, but it would be very hard to prove that he's any better off than he would have been without aid. Because I don't think he ever got any benefits from the aid. One of the problems in Bolivia was that they were so torn politically; they had so much corruption, so much smuggling in and out and all this kind of thing, and so little planning. You have to have a base to build on, you know. It doesn't have to be a large base, but you have to have a group of public servants who at least know how to manage a government, how to use the money, how to spend it, what to invest it in. And the reason the Marshall plan worked so much better in Europe than our aid program in Latin America was not because we didn't use the same policies, the same dollars, and even the identical

[50]

technicians; it was because we didn't have the same base to build upon. That's my opinion.

I don't know how else you could explain it, because all of the other components were the same -- the policies were the same. If anything, the terms Latin America got were more lenient.

MCKINZIE: What can you say about private investment in Latin America at that time? This was, a policy of the Truman administration, to support private investment, and yet there is very little really, that the State Department can do or that the Foreign Service can do to foster private investment. I know there were some attempts to negotiate bilateral treaties with countries about convertibility and the right to take out profits.

MANN: Well, what we were saying to the Latin Americans, I think, was technically sound. I think that the

[51]

difficulty was that it's politically difficult to follow the rules, and I guess the best proof of that is we haven't followed our own advice. I have mixed feelings about that. Let's talk about today, because the climates are different. Today, it's very obvious that nationalism is on the rise, and I am a non-interventionist and I don't believe we should try to force investment on a country.

One of the problems in foreign relations, I think, is that governments, under some economic pressure, are very apt to say that private investment is welcome, and then the minute they go in and commit themselves, invest their money so they can't take it out, they're liable to begin talking of confiscation.

Now, this has been going on for sure in the thirties in different degrees, but that problem's always been there. Government doesn't have very much control over that, because policy has always been (standard policy) that an American

[52]

citizen has the right to protection by his government, in our view of international law. So, very often, somebody would go in and make investment even against the advice of the Embassy, but that doesn't lessen the obligation of the Embassy, under our policy and our view of international law, to protect the man's property.

And I think maybe in the future we ought to come to change a little bit, to modify that policy, by, in effect, saying that the U.S. Government is not going to protect (the word used in the law, I think) American investors who go in and risk their money against the advice of the Government. But so far as I know, it's never been done up to this time.

The American business community is a very competitive bunch, and it's happened many, many times in many countries that a government will be obviously nationalistic and will, let's

[53]

say, confiscate a whole bunch of properties. The competitors of these people, human nature being what it is, will say, "Well, that's because my competitor didn't know how to handle the situation. I can go in there and I'm not going to get into this same trouble." And he'll go right in on the heels of that and invest some more. And that's one of the problems, really, in terms of somebody sitting in the State Department or even in the White House. What do you do when somebody goes in against everybody else's judgment, invests millions of dollars of stockholders money? And not many people stop to think that corporations are not owned by families, like they used to be in the 1860s; they are owned by individuals, including a lot of retired people, and, as we used to say, "the widows and the orphans." So, respect for property rights are something that are pretty important; the respect for contracts are important, because

[54]

we live in a contract society. Now, that's the political side of it.

On the economic side of it, that's a more complicated argument. The U.S. position, which I think is substantially correct, is that capital brings in not only just the capital itself, but it invests that capital in productive enterprise, it creates jobs, it increases exports, earnings, it pays taxes, and, therefore, does a pretty good job of promoting delivery. But above all, it brings in technology and managerial know-how. The intelligent Latin Americans that I've talked to put technology and managerial know-how first, because this is in itself a very important component of progress.

Now, on the other side of the picture, I'm not saying that foreign private investors are exempt from the frailties that afflict all mankind; we're fallible and imperfect and we all sometimes may do stupid things. If it's true that a corporation intervened in the

[55]

internal political affairs of Chile, that's very bad. It's bad not only for the corporation, but it's bad for the whole private sector. And yet the Government has very little control -- the U.S. Government -- over private activities. We have no way of knowing, really, in advance. Certainly, during my time, we discouraged anybody paying any attention to internal politics, and we told everybody that that wasn't any of their business; their business was business, and politics was the business of Government.

MCKINZIE: In the period from say 1946 through '52 or 3, there was a lot of talk in Washington about the "revolution of rising expectations" on the part of the masses of people in Latin American countries. A lot of those people who did that kind of talking about the revolution of rising expectations said that some kind of quick social change was going to have to be made and that it was going to have to be a change bringing

[56]

about a rapid rise in the standard of living; otherwise, there was going to be massive revolution throughout Latin America. Now, this filters into a report here and there in the Government, and you can read a lot of popular articles during that time about it. How did it look from your perspective, and did you share that? I talked to Paul Daniels yesterday, and he said, "Well, the revolution of rising expectations has been with us for a hundred years and will be with us for another hundred."

MANN: I think Paul's substantially right, but I would modify that only by saying that communications are so much more rapid now than they have ever been before -- the radio and TV and newspapers and everything -- so these things happen at a faster clip.

One of the things we don't understand in looking at historical precedence, is what effect the mass media is going to have on the speed

[57]

of the political trends or even the direction of political trends. There's less time for people to think than there used to be; people act with much more impulse and, I think, too quickly on many occasions. But I'll tell you what I think. Number one, I don't think that it is wise to mislead people by saying -- there's nothing in history to indicate it -- that it's humanly possible to transform an economy, lifestyles, ways of doing things, in a generation, much less in a decade. And I always had voiced some very strong reservations about political phrases such as "decade of progress," which was interpreted to mean by many Americans around the President that this whole thing was going to be transformed. Injustice in the world was going to be done away with, poverty was going to be done away with, if not in a decade, very soon after that.

I just don't believe that; nothing in

[58]

history indicates to me that that will ever take place. On the other hand, I think that people should try to make as fast a rate of progress as they can and to be more responsible in telling the people what the possibilities are. It borders on demagoguery to talk about changing everything overnight. That's not the way I read history, and it's not the way this country developed, either; it developed over two hundred years.

MCKINZIE: To what extent did the organizations that the United States encouraged exist for the sheer purpose of holding the Western Hemisphere together? You could argue that there was no military threat to the Western Hemisphere and that, therefore, the Rio Pact, at least so far as it applied to possible invasion by Soviet forces, was unnecessary; that maybe the OAS -- the political component of that -- was in some ways unnecessary, but nonetheless was fostered simply as a way of keeping Latin America together,

[59]

so that you could deal with a bloc rather than with 20 individual republics.

MANN: Well, the way I feel now and the hopes I had during this period of euphoria and the illusion of omnipotence are different. If you're asking for my present opinion, I would say that I think international organizations have some utility; people mix together, different nations and cultures. They are a forum, where they discuss problems. They have great weaknesses, even in the discussion area, because people are apt to go and make a speech in the U.N. or the OAS for home consumption instead of making a speech for the purpose they are supposed to make it for, which is to work out differences with other countries.

I have reservations (that Harold Nicholson expressed very well, I think) about the disadvantages of multilateral diplomacy and the disadvantages of negotiating out in the open. I think it

[60]

makes it very, very difficult even to maintain peace, because people are then under enormous pressures from their public opinion.

There's a lot to be said for the old school who argued that diplomats would, if allowed to do so by the politics of their countries, be a fraternity interested in peace and in resolving differences if they were not domestic politicians interested in advancing their own political careers. More and more diplomacy is now conducted at the summit. I don't think that there's much doubt that Nixon's trip to the Near East right now is, at least in part, motivated by political difficulties at home. There are a lot of us career people who think that's really a kind of a dangerous trend; it's been in motion only since Wilson's time. And to say that the old professional diplomat, before our time, didn't do a very good job maintaining peace and balance of power politics in Europe, I'd have to say that I agree

[61]

with that, too.

And I don't see much parallelism between peace and democracy; I used to think there was, but there's none at all, really. Democratic nations, starting with Athens, have been the most aggressive, expansionistic, imperialistic, and oppressive, much more so than the Czar of Russia at his best -- at his worst. But this is a separate subject.

MCKINZIE: Well, I know you are very interested in the whole idea of the U.S. and its, what you call, "period of euphoria" after the war. Do you think that these things like the meeting at Rio in '47 and the formation of the OAS in 1948 were attempts to pull it together and keep it together?

MANN: I think people hoped; I don't say believed. But realistic people -- even John Foster Dulles, who was very conservative about most things -- I

[62]

think had hopes that this could be kind of a super state that would make war impossible. And he had hopes that the whole collective security system set up around the Security Council would work. Of course, it became obvious in less than two years that it wouldn't work. The primary purpose for which the League of Nations and the U.N. were formed, is the maintenance of peace and the deterrence of aggression. They failed in both of those things. It is just realistic to admit it.

So, all you have left isn't anything more than a forum for changing opinions and debating, and I think it's a mistake to tell the American people that they are going to accomplish a great deal more than they are capable of accomplishing. And that's one of the things that I'm going to say.

I'm not anti-U.N. I think I'm realistic about what the U.N. can do. I think the Israelies, for example, are realistic now; what

[63]

sane man would want to put the security of his own nation dependent on a vote in the U.N., if you know how those votes are influenced and how they are made? It's really a totally different organization in 1974 from what it was planned to be in 1945; it hardly resembles it. And one of the things that I think some of my colleagues were slow in accepting was the fact that this was the reality.

I was impressed during the Dominican crisis with interpretations by legal advisors in the State Department of OAS charter provisions, which cast doubt, in their opinion, on whether the U.S. had the right of unilateral self-defense. That just scared the pants off of me -- the people who were just so peace-minded and were just going to leave all the issues to the decision of the U.N.

Now, we had the same thing in the OAS. Whether we moved into the Dominican Republic

[64]

wisely or unwisely, time will tell, but, certainly, I think it's obvious that one of the main criticisms was that we couldn't move a peg without first consulting the OAS. And the argument they used was that we consulted the OAS before the October '62 missile crisis. Well, the reason we consulted with the OAS there was because it was militarily impossible to assemble the troops in less than two weeks for the showdown, and we took advantage of this period to do this. We didn't have those two weeks in the D.R. Maybe we should have had them if we had known certain things that developed very quickly.

So, the danger is that we will expect too much of the organization. Now, if politicians will stop talking about turning the great problems of war and peace over to the U.N. (which sounds to me like Pilate washing his hands, as if this is a solution), I would feel easier about it in my own mind. And yet, at the same time, I think

[65]

they do serve a purpose. I think they spend too much money. I think our contribution to all the international organizations was fair in the forties; I think it's no longer realistic in the seventies. There are other nations that are much better able to pay. I mean, really, when you think about the Arab states, who are in about the same position in terms of gold and hard currency that we were in the forties, paying just an infinitesimal share, and the U.S. paying the lion's share of the cost of the U.N. and all these agencies, it's much too big. It becomes sort of a political boondoggle to get into everything. I think that's obviously silly, and some day it will be realized and corrected.

MCKINZIE: How did your work change when the Korean war started?

MANN: Oh, I don't know that my work changed very much. We were interested in getting support.

[66]

The Korean thing was tied into the U.N., and this is when it really broke down -- when the Russians vetoed and walked out. It was the walkout that made it possible for [Dean] Acheson to go to the General Assembly and get a majority vote.

But that was the last time, really, that the U.N. has been really very much interested in doing anything to deter aggression against anybody except a very small state attacking another very small state -- when there's no danger involved and no risk, no cost really, involved. But in any confrontation between major powers from that time forward, they've been hesitant. And it became important, in view of the General Assembly's role, to rally as much support as we could. We did go to Colombia, and I think we got a contingent of troops from Colombia. I'm sure we went to all the countries asking for them; we got only

[67]

one or two or three, maybe just one. I've forgotten now.

MCKINZIE: But there are always, in cases like that, problems of safeguarding the sources of materials, because the United States simply didn't have all these things that it took to fight the Korean war, tin, copper, and the rest of it. I have the impression that a lot of activity was underway to be sure that those sources of supply weren't cut off.

MANN: Oh, I'm sure that was true. It wasn't as intense as it was in the Second World War, but I'm sure it was generally the same kind of activity: negotiations to acquire raw materials, at a reasonable price, that were needed to prosecute the war. But even in the Korean war, we were still in this period of what I would call good feeling with Latin America.

MCKINZIE: Whatever problems would have come up would

[68]

either be handled bilaterally or through the OAS?

MANN: Or in the U.N., depending upon what kind of problems there were. On the whole, we didn't really have much trouble even up to the Dominican crisis. We had two-thirds of the votes in the OAS; I doubt if you'll ever get that again, because nationalism is now very strong, and I think exotic doctrines have made their inroads to a great extent. I don't think Latin Americans today, the younger generation, are as interested in individual freedom and liberty. I think they are more socialist minded, and that weakens the system to a great extent. Even Americans, I think, are moving in that direction.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that there were a couple of issues over which you were willing to go to the mat in the Truman administration, one of which concerned a loan to Pemex Oil.

[69]

MANN: The only thing I could remember on which I really had any disagreement at all with what was represented to me to be the President's policy was over a loan to Pemex for 500 million dollars. This was in the first days of the Truman administration, perhaps, and I was new in the State Department and took the position in opposition to it. Mr. Miller agreed with that, having previously approved it. But I made it clear that I would carry out any order from the Secretary or the President, that I wasn't an anarchist, but that I would not recommend to either one that the loan be made. And it never was made. There was a lot of criticism directed primarily against Miller (instead of me, where it should have been directed, I guess), that he was the tool of the oil companies, this, that, and the other, and that he or his firm was in the pay of them. And there was lots in the newspapers in those times about that,

[70]

threatened investigations which never really came off, because they had too weak a case, I think, and they didn't really want to have it.

Mr. Wolverton told me he was going to have a hearing and I said, "Well, I have only one request. Let's not make it secret; let's open it to the press, let's let everybody in on it." It's the only time I wanted an open hearing on a foreign relations problem.

MCKINZIE: And your opposition was basically on the grounds that Pemex wasn't a good investment?

MANN: Wasn't a good investment for Mexico. It was a political maneuver more than it was an economic thing, and that was my primary concern. The other was that I doubted the wisdom (I've always believed this rather strongly) in subsidizing a government corporation whose assets consisted of confiscated American properties. I would doubt that that would be very wise today because

[71]

it would set a precedent. We live in a contract society; I think the sanctity of contracts are important. I know that this is old-fashioned, but I believe it. I think it will be demonstrated to be true. And for property rights, I don't think they are more important than human rights, but they are very important. If property rights aren't respected, then I think we are going to be living in a different world; I've always believed that and never hesitate to say so.

MCKINZIE: But you are willing to put your job, I take it, on the line there.

MANN: I was at that time. I wouldn't have receded from that position, and I was prepared to be fired. I thought the chances were 50-50 that I would be. But Eddie Miller used to say his secret weapon was that he didn't have any ambition to be in politics or to be in the State Department. And I'd guess, if that's true, that

[72]

I had even less ambition than anybody to be in Government. I'm a lawyer and always thought maybe I should be back doing what I was trained to do.

MCKINZIE: Could you talk about where Latin America and Latin-American policy fit in the larger scheme of things? Dean Acheson, at least, is notorious, or popular, for his "Europe first" policy. Did you feel that you were getting proper hearings and that an adequate amount of attention was being given to the area?

MANN: Yes, I never had any complaints of that kind. Now, there are rivalries between bureaus, and bureaucrats complain. Dulles was oriented too much, some of the bureaus said (the Europeanists), towards Japan and the Far East. Acheson was a believer in Europe, that the security and destiny of the U.S. was tied to Western Europe.

I don't think any of my generation of

[73]

Latin Americanists would have said that U.S. interests would be served by cutting loose from the Far East or Europe. So, I never really had any difficulty along those lines. I think we were spending money at such a prodigious rate at that time that there wasn't any real reason for that. Nobody was being cut out. Congress, to this day, doesn't have any mechanism for determining whether the amount of their appropriations have any relationship to income; we Americans just do things. So, there was never any question of, "You have to take third priority because we have a limited amount of funds," and that's the only place I think we would have had any trouble.

Now, the Latins complained a lot about this, but I don't really believe that people ought to take that too seriously. You know, if you pay a lot of attention to the Latins then they develop a feeling of "Big Brother's looking over my shoulder too much," and if you

[74]

ignore him, "Big Brother isn't looking over my shoulder enough." I've never seen the time when we were showing just the right amount of attention without showing too much attention, and I think that's human nature. I don't think that's something that policymakers ought to give a lot of concern to.

Doesn't everybody have to have his gripes? Don't husbands and wives have to have their gripes once in a while? I don't think that's anything that's really important; I never have. I just wish we could get back to the days when we could say to them (as I think Kissinger's more or less said), "Now, look, you're a sovereign state, just as sovereign as we are, and you are entitled to run your own affairs. As far as we're concerned, you're going to run them." I'd like to see that.

MCKINZIE: Were you involved at all in the military aid that was going in small amounts to Latin

[75]

America?

MANN: Yes, involved in the sense that I had to approve it and support it on the Hill. It was always such a small amount. Now, that was a tempest in a teapot. The amount of grant aid (let's talk about grants first) was very small, 60, 80, 90 million dollars a year. The amounts of aid were infinitesimal compared to what we were giving to any number of other countries in the world, the Far East, Israel. And they weren't using very sophisticated equipment, anyway. The only objection we had, economically, with sophisticated equipment is that it took so much money to buy and even more money to maintain it. They didn't have any hope of keeping up with new and escalating levels of sophisticated equipment and, therefore, they should not have the most expensive things.

Now, they didn't agree with that; that was always a problem.

[76]

MCKINZIE: How important in all that was the argument which was advanced in the military and in the Pentagon by some people that at whatever cost, the United States ought to provide it, one way or the other (either through sale or grant) because if the U.S. didn't, those countries, believing, as they did, that they need it for whatever reasons, would get it someplace else? You'd then end up with forces that were not compatible in terms of equipment.

MANN: I think that's very valid. And not only that, but I always thought there was a certain value in maintaining contact between our military and the Latin-American military. I thought it was the benefit of all countries, and history demonstrated the validity of the contention that if we refused to sell it to them, they're going to buy it from Europe; that's exactly what they did. Then, if they buy equipment from Europe, we're not capable of maintaining spare

[77]

parts or even knowing how to maintain it; that's not our equipment.

So, then, that means that other military missions come in. While I suppose it's no great thing if, let's say, American military, missions are replaced by French (although the French are sometimes very hostile to us in recent years), I would be concerned, let's say, if you had U.S.S.R. MAGS all over the hemisphere and Russian equipment all over the hemisphere which only the Russians could maintain; and I think for obvious reasons we can't see that clear into the future; we don't know what the consequences of that would be. And really, when you examine the other side of the argument, it's part of this mission sense, again; we are going to teach these people, and we are going to decide how much of their budget can be spent on defense.

Now, we're spending 50 percent of our budget,

[78]

but they can't spend but 10 percent. That gets pretty hard to defend when you go in there. You start explaining to a president or a foreign minister of another country that we spend 50 percent on our defense budget, but "We figure you shouldn't spend more than 10 because more of your people are illiterate. Therefore, we want you to spend 30 percent on education and 40 percent on health and welfare or something;" and that's essentially what the case was against the sale of military equipment. It's, again, this idea of trying to intervene -- what I would call classic intervention -- in their internal affairs.

Either they're sovereign states and capable of managing their own affairs or they're not, and I have always believed they are. And in fact, I think the Latin Americans know better how to manage their affairs than we do. I'm sure they do.

[79]

MCKINZIE: How in the world did you go from all of that experience to become the deputy chief of the U.S. mission in Athens in 1953?

MANN: Because I had been over the same ground so often, and I just thought that a short interlude would be good. And it's the only time I ever asked to be transferred, not to a post, but outside the area.

MCKINZIE: Just a matter of being stale, you think?

MANN: Yes. I wanted to get away so I could look at it in the perspective of how the Europeans looked at it or how somebody else looked at it, to think about it for a while and hope to read a while and not just see the same problems and the same faces shuttling back and forth between Washington and some post in Latin America all my life.

MCKINZIE: For a person who is in Foreign Service,

[80]

I know you are not supposed to be at all interested in politics domestically, but you couldn't help but be speculative, I suppose, when the 1952 elections were coming up. Did you anticipate that [Dwight D.] Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles would make any large changes in Latin-American policy?

MANN: No, I'll tell you, except for emphasis and slogans, I don't think that foreign policy changes that radically. I think there was less change from Truman to Eisenhower than from Eisenhower to [John F.] Kennedy, but I'd have to define that again. The change wasn't in Jack Kennedy's mind, in my opinion, but the change was in the minds of people -- I could name them -- around him who thought they knew what the policy ought to be. None of those people had line responsibility anywhere. They were all staff people. But Jack Kennedy was a consummate politician, one of the best.

[81]

He had all kinds of people around him, and each one thought that he was mirroring the President's thoughts. I thought, myself, Jack Kennedy was a pretty good President. He had a lot of commonsense. Now, he made a mistake, I think, at the Bay of Pigs, but there's a reason for that; he was so new. One of the big mistakes that Eisenhower made and Jack Kennedy made was this agreement that between election day and inauguration day there'd be no consultation with the bureaucracy. I think that was a big mistake. I tried to violate that and couldn't get anybody to talk to me -- including Dean Rusk -- in violation of Eisenhower's instructions. I wanted to tell them about problems that needed attention. I got saddled with the Bay of Pigs after it was already launched, and because of that same election. In the campaign, Eisenhower was attacked, because we had lost Cuba, by the Democrats. And so to counter that move (my good

[82]

friend, Dick Rubottom, had been in charge of the area during all of that time), I don't know whose request it was, but I was ordered to the Latin-American Section. I had been working for Eisenhower on economic affairs, mainly in the Common Market in Europe, during that four and a half-year period. I was Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs. And I was ordered over into the Latin-American Section and I said, "My four years are more than up and I don't want it. It's not the law, but it's certainly a custom that nobody's asked to stay in the Department more than four years." I spent most of my time in Washington in the Foreign Service, always over my protest. And I walked into the job, I guess, in late September or early October, and I found this expedition in being; I had never heard of it. The next thing, before I could really get briefed in on what had happened; was about to happen, and what had

[83]

happened, the election came and Mr. Kennedy won. And so then I knew that it was so complicated, involving intervention, self-defense, international law, and a lot of things -- just enormously complicated -- that Kennedy ought to start, with his team, looking into this and getting briefed, so that when January the 20th came they wouldn't be caught cold. But there was an unwise agreement that there were to be no conversations on any official subject after the election and until inauguration.

So, when poor Jack Kennedy came in on January 20 and assumed the responsibilities of office, he didn't even know his Cabinet. I think he had met Rusk after the election, for the first time. He just put together a Cabinet of people that were comparative strangers in the sense that he had never worked with them. And so they just fell between the stools because they didn't have time to understand and decide anything.

[84]

MCKINZIE: Well, there is a liaison, though, between the White House staff of the outgoing President and the White House staff of the incoming President.

MANN: Well, I want to tell you that I was in charge of the bureau (I was Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs at the time), and Dean Rusk had an office down on the ground floor, reading papers. Now, they read papers, but notwithstanding my instructions from President Eisenhower, which were, "Don't talk to anybody in the incoming administration," I tried to talk to Dean Rusk and others to point out what the difficulties were, and never succeeded.

MCKINZIE: You couldn't get in, or they just didn't want to hear?

MANN: They said that the two, incoming and outgoing, Presidents had made an agreement not to discuss and they didn't want to discuss anything until

[85]

after January 20. And I thought that was very bad; it worked to their disadvantage, and I think that was the real cause of the confusion concerning Bay of Pigs.

MCKINZIE: Do you recall that as being the case between the Truman and Eisenhower years?

MANN: None at all. None at all.

Now what did happen, every time there was a change (now this will amuse you maybe, at least I was amused by it), a new bunch of politicians would descend (I'm giving you the State Department career point of view) on Washington after victory. And they want to clean out with a good broom. And I was asked (I don't remember how it was), by some businessman who came through after Truman left, "Do you believe in private enterprise?" and really asinine questions like that. At that time I was a Truman "appointee" (I think that was the word that they used), and

[86]

that carried a certain connotation with it -- a potential disloyalty to the President, that maybe you were a little bit strange in some of your economic or political doctrines; presumably there was something wrong with you somewhere or you wouldn't have been over there working for Mr. Truman.

And then when Eisenhower left, I got the same thing; I was an Eisenhower appointee. And my response to each group of newcomers was, "I had the honor of serving President Truman, whom I considered to be a fine public servant, and I am just pleased and happy to have done it."

When they came in the next time I said, "I was pleased to serve President Eisenhower. I respect him and apologize for nothing." And that gets you a lot farther than shaking an quivering over your job, but it's kind of silly. That's one of the things that happen in politics -- one of the many silly things that

[87]

happens in politics.

But I don't remember any transitional difficulties except during the Jack Kennedy administration. I'm sure that in my case, for example, there were four or five people I could name trying to get me fired, but they never could. In fact, I resigned when Kennedy was President, because I had always planned to resign on my 50th birthday. But I was asked to stay on in Mexico for a year until after elections. We had bought a house in Washington for retirement. I then rented it for one year the ink wasn't dry really on the lease contract when Jack Kennedy was killed, so we had to live in a hotel for a year because we couldn't get our house back.

Johnson had ordered me to Washington, and I couldn't get away; it took me four and a half years really to have my resignation accepted after I first resigned. I got tired of it, physically

[88]

tired of it, I needed a rest and change, but I found out that you couldn't retire at the minimum age, without sacrificing your pension, without presidential permission. And I just couldn't get the presidential permission. I had a financial problem then, it cost me about three thousand dollars a year out of my own pocket while I was in the Foreign Service to pay bills, and we had only one child. I don't know how some of the guys in my days made it; I think salaries are too high now, but in my day they were pretty low.

MCKINZIE: You mentioned that you were involved with a dispute between Spruille Braden and Ambassador [George S.] Messersmith, or, if not involved, that you were knowledgeable about what was going on.

MANN: Well, Mr. Messersmith's position, as Ambassador to the Argentine, essentially was that we should let Peron manage his own affairs. Braden's position

[89]

was opposite to that, that we should be hostile to Peron. And being two very strong-minded men, they weren't able to work out their difficulties. The result was that it came out into the open in the press, as I remember, and, maybe at the suggestion of somebody on Braden's staff, it was decided to send somebody down to talk to Ambassador Messersmith and see if we couldn't find some way to work this out.

And nobody wanted to go, so, of course, the most junior man on the staff was sent down to talk. I was in the career service by that time, I suppose a Class 4, and the Ambassador had had a very distinguished career and was up in years. (He turned out to be, later on, a very good friend of mine, left me part of his books. They are both friends of mine, really.)

I went down to see him. I don't think the White House had anything to do with this; it's

[90]

possible they did, but I don't know it if they did. My message was, "Why don't we stop fighting, at least out in the open, about this thing? It's putting a lot of pressure on Washington and it's embarrassing."

And Messersmith, I think sensing that Truman was kind of getting fed up with Braden and all of the infighting and. all of the talk anyway, chose to interpret what I'd say as not an offer of peace, but sort of a surrender. And I've always been loyal to my bosses. He called in a secretary and started dictating a letter (which I don't know was ever sent), in effect saying, "The time hasn't come to fire Braden yet," (this was to Mr. Truman, which showed me that he didn't know much about Mr. Truman, either) "but I will let you know when it's time."

Then I said, "Mr. Ambassador, you've missed the purport of my message. My message is that unless you can do this, you will be the one that

[91]

will be fired."

Now, for a Class 4 officer to say that to a very senior one was quite a thing. And so that didn't please Mr. Messersmith very much at my first meeting with him, really.

MCKINZIE: You just went into his office and sat down and told him that?

MANN: I flew down to Buenos Aires and had this conversation. When I got back -- there's a funny angle to it -- he had dictated two letters, one to Tom Cabot in Boston, Jack Cabot's brother, and the other to Tom Mann; but they both started off, "Dear Tom." His secretary got the two Toms mixed up, and she sent me Tom Cabot's letter and, I presume, sent Tom Cabot the letter to me, which I never saw. But this was obviously a letter written to some other Tom, because he talks in there about this young whippersnapper who came down to tell him how to run his affairs

[92]

and how he was going to see to it that he was disciplined by the Foreign Service. So, I read the letter and just made a note, "Dear Mr. Ambassador, you made another mistake. Tom Mann," put it back in the envelope and sent it to him (I think that's what made him like me) and never heard anymore about it.

The result was, after a lot of infighting (which I don't remember much about, because I'm always bored with domestic politics), that Messersmith was fired and Braden was asked to go, but received some kind of medal or recognition before he went. I think really what happened was that the Secretary at that time, [James F.] Byrnes or whoever it was, got fed up with all the bickering going on. It was kind of silly, and I think, had I been older and wiser, I would have had the same reaction to it.

I was always loyal to Braden, and I then

[93]

got to know Messersmith when he was in Mexico with private industry. He'd come up to the State Department and we became fast friends; he had a house in Cuernavaca and he died. I went over there with his widow, whose funeral I attended over in Maryland when she died later, and at his request I have some books from George Messersmith's library.

MCKINZIE: When you went down to talk to Messersmith, had you talked to Spruille Braden extensively about what you could tell him?

MANN: I had instructions, oh sure. I had instructions on what I was going to say; to be as diplomatic as possible, try to patch it up. I don't think anybody hoped that they would agree on that, and as I've already said in other places, I became convinced later on -- not so much because of this, but because of what happened under Eddie Miller -- that all of this kind of stuff was really not only illegal, but futile. That was part of the

[94]

learning process, and I have no doubt that Spruille was a very honorable man, honest, totally loyal to his friends, and so was George Messersmith. It's one of those things; they were both really fine men. And Spruille's views on all these things, I think, changed a good deal after he left Government. George Messersmith was always a conservative.

MCKINZIE: What about when Spruille Braden left and Miller took charge? I had the impression that Miller's views were a little different from the very beginning than Spruille's. Do you know, from your own experience, whether that presented any problems to Miller? I've seen some small correspondence on that.

MANN: Yes, he never had what you'd call a very good press, because the Washington Post and New York Times were gung-ho against dictatorships. I had a good press until I took a position on this issue,

[95]

and I can tell you it does affect your press, the editorial page especially; it affects everything. You can see this if you read over the New York Times and Washington Post editorials over a period of years, when Herbert Matthews was in charge of the editorial page. Bob Esterbrook used to be editor of the editorial page of the Washington Post. He got exiled to the U.N. over this. This is a religion with these people, so you pay a price when you say that.

MCKINZIE: You were saying that you felt you were in a fairly low position in those days, but even in that kind of position you were in, surely you had to be very conscious of what the press could do to you.

MANN: Well, yes, but I don't know. I'm sort of a strange fellow. I guess part of it was naivete; I just assumed everybody was honest, and it took me a long time to figure out that that

[96]

wasn't exactly the way things went. And I guess my training was to just speak up and say what you think; anyway, I did. And I never really thought much about the press until I was under attack. I was under very heavy attack in '64.

MCKINZIE: In Panama, wasn't it?

MANN: Well, it started before Panama. People on Johnson's staff were up there lobbying on the Hill against my confirmation to a job I didn't want, the Assistant Secretary's job in 1964, before I even arrived on the scene, before Panama happened. And that was really a struggle for power between two factions of the Democratic Party, the conservative and the liberal. (I don't know what those words mean; those are two I can't define anymore. I thought about trying to, but I don't know how to define those.)

And, in my opinion, the McGovern thing is nothing but a continuation of this same fight

[97]

under different names; it's a struggle for power. And I don't have any doubt that in '64 there was a great deal of hope that Bobby [Robert F.] Kennedy would gain control of the Party. I told you I thought a great deal of Jack Kennedy. I can't really say the same about Bobby, and my feelings about the younger brother, Ted, are mixed; he's not as bad as Bobby, but he's not Jack either.

And I think that I happened to be Johnson's first appointee when he came in as President. It was, as I say, not because of my importance, but because he wanted to serve notice that he was going to put his own men in key positions.

And so I was against a rapprochement with [Fidel] Castro, against easing up and considering Castro as a harmless fellow. That's really what led them into the Bay of Pigs, I think; it really started on that as much as non-intervention, and the difference between non-intervention, self defense, and a few things like that. But I have

[98]

no doubt that Bobby Kennedy, and a half a dozen people who I could name, really intended to keep control of the Party apparatus, in spite of the transfer of power from Jack to Lyndon. And if you know Lyndon, he felt just as strongly as Mr. Truman did about the responsibility of the President, and there wasn't any chance of that.

The only mistake that was made was in not making a wholesale change at the beginning.

But Johnson had the idea always, "Let us reason together." He thought if this country bumpkin from Texas could just expose himself long enough to this Harvard bunch, they would come to understand that he was at least trying to do a good job. But that wasn't what they were talking about; they were talking about power.

MCKINZIE: In the course of which you get caught.

[99]

MANN: I just happened to be in the middle, which I never really objected to; I understood it. And I never really had any doubts about the correctness of what I was trying to do. Maybe I didn't do it the right way, maybe I didn't say the right things; I got too tired and I lost my temper a few times. But looking back I wouldn't have done anything very different.

Acheson, Dean, 66, 72
Auxiliary Foreign Service, U.S., 3

Berle, Adolph A., Jr., 11
Board of Economic Warfare, 2-7
Bogota Conference, 1948, 41
Bolivia, U.S. aid program in, analyzed, 47-49
Braden, Spruille, 9, 10, 23, 24-25, 27, 88-94
Brazil, 20, 21, 22-23
Briggs, Ellis, 10,

Cabot, Thomas, 91
Castro, Fidel, 97
Chapultapec Conference, 1945, 8, 10-13, 19
Colombia, request for U.S. aid denied, 35-36
Cuba, Bay of Pigs, 81, 82-83, 85, 97

Daniels, Paul, 56
Dickey, John, 4
Dominican Republic, U.S. intervention in, 1965, 38-39, 63-64
Dulles, John F., 61-62, 72

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 81, 84
Esterbrook, Robert, 95

Foreign policy, U.S., and change of administrations, 80-81
Foreign Service, U.S., democratic ideals promoted by, 23-28

General Assembly, UN, censure of North Korea for aggression, 1950, 66

Hull, Cordell, 2-3 2-3

Inter-American Affairs Division, U.S. State Department, 9
Intervention, foreign affairs, examples of, 31-32, 63-64
Intervention, international law of, defined, 28-30, 32-39

Johnson, Lyndon B., 87, 97, 98

Kennedy, Edward, 97
Kennedy, John F., 80-81, 83, 87, 97
Kennedy, Robert F., 97, 98
Korean War, 65-67
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 20, 21, 22-23

Latin America:

• • aid from U.S., pressure for, 20-22
    cultural values, contrasted with U.S., 14-15
    German fifth column in, World War II, 6
    military aid to, U.S., 74-78
    private investment in by U.S., facets of, 50-55
    regional system, 12-13, 14
    "revolution of rising expectations" in, 55-58
    U.S. aid program for, evaluated, 41-49
    U.S., dependence on, 16-18
    U.S. policy toward, priority of, 72-74
• Lockhart, John, 9

  Mann, Thomas C., background, 1-4
  Marshall Plan, 47-49
  Matthews, Herbert, 95
  Messersmith, George S., 88-94
  Mexico, Pemex Oil, proposed U.S. loan to, 68-70
  Miller, Edward G., 69, 71, 94
  Monroe Doctrine, 38-40
  Multilateral diplomacy, 58-60

  New York Times, 25, 94-95
  Nixon, Richard M., 60

  "Operation Pan-America," 21
  Organization of American States, 13, 42, 58, 59, 61, 63-64, 68

  Pasvolsky, Leo, 7
  Pemex Oil Corporation, Mexico, 68-70
  Peron, Juan D., 24, 27, 88
  Presidential transition, Eisenhower-Kennedy, 1960-61, 81-85, 86
  Presidential transition, Truman-Eisenhower, 1952-53, 85-86
  Press, U.S., foreign policy, influence on, 25, 94-96
  "Proclaimed List of Certain Bloc Nations," 4-6

  Ritchey, Dean, 2
  Rockefeller, Nelson A., 9, 12, 23, 25, 26, 27
  Rubottom, Richard, 82
  Rusk, Dean, 83, 84

  Schmidt, Augusto, 22
  Spaeth, Carl, 24
  Stettinius, Edward R., 8

  Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, 13, 14, 58, 61
  Truman, Harry S., 47

  United Nations, collective security among nations, failure to secure, 62-65, 66
  United Nations, San Francisco Conference on organization of, 11, 12, 13
  Uruguay, Montevideo, U.S. Embassy, 3, 15, 17-18

  Wallace, Henry A., 2
  Washington Post, 25, 94-95
  Whitaker, Arthur P., 14
  Wilson, Woodrow, 31