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In the 1930s, under the administrations of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the United States government adopted a stance toward countries in the Western hemisphere that it called, optimistically, the "Good Neighbor policy." Meant to encourage the principle of self-determination and to cultivate respect for national sovereignty in a time of European imperial expansion, the policy was immediately put to the test by the rise of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who held onto power through a stunning campaign of terror against his citizens and those of neighboring Haiti. While Trujillo massacred his enemies real and imagined, the American government watched patiently--a failure to intervene that, writes historian Eric Paul Roorda, "demonstrated to a generation of Latin American dictators that they were free to run their countries however they wished, so long as they maintained common enemies with the United States: first the fascists, then the communists."
Trujillo made sure to keep favor in Washington by employing a powerful lobby made up of retired American military officers and industrialists. The strategy worked for decades, until Trujillo's excesses became too much to excuse. Then, Roorda writes, presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy gave aid to Trujillo's enemies, who eventually succeeded in assassinating the dictator in 1961. This well-stated, cautionary tale of foreign policy gone awry has implications for our time, and it makes for fascinating reading. --Gregory McNamee
