Erratic Attack

At the close of his July hearings on U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, announced that no formal report would be issued. Last week, in a two-hour Senate speech, Fulbright delivered his own delayed opinion--a scalding denunciation of the intervention and its portent for U.S. policy in general. Fulbright's erratic attacks on the Administration are no longer surprising. What made this one particularly curious was the fact that, on White House orders, he had access to every scrap of information in the files--but apparently based his conclusions more heavily on the same old highly colored newspaper reports.

Fulbright called the intervention as "grievous" a mistake as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba. He accused the U.S. of intervening "not to save American lives, as was contended, but to prevent the victory of a revolutionary movement" wrongly judged to be Communist-dominated. President Johnson, said Fulbright, reacted to "exaggerated estimates of Communist influence in the rebel movement," then overreacted by sending in 20,000 troops. To make matters worse, the U.S. then took sides with Brigadier General Antonio Imbert's loyalist junta--"a corrupt and reactionary military oligarchy." Concluded Fulbright: "If we are automatically to oppose any reform movement that Communists adhere to, we are likely to end up opposing every reform movement, making ourselves the prisoners of reactionaries who wish to preserve the status quo."

Reformers & Reds. In the Senate, Fulbright's colleagues, who had access to the same files as he, rose one after another to dispute his conclusions. Said Connecticut's Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd: intervention was an "unavoidable necessity." Fulbright, he noted, "suffers from an indiscriminate infatuation with revolutions of all kinds --national, democratic or Communist."

Few would question the argument that the U.S. should support reform and social revolution in Latin America, even if it is sometimes hard to separate the genuine reformers from the Communists. And there are still, as Fulbright says, Latin Americans who cry Communism to resist change. But the U.S. has found plenty of anti-Communists to back--anti-Communists who are also reformers. It wholeheartedly supports Chile's President Eduardo Frei, who beat a Marxist to win office. It has committed $119 million to help Peru's Fernando Belaunde Terry wage a social revolution that will aid millions of backlands Indians.

With U.S. help, Venezuela's left-of-center Raul Leoni has built such a prosperous economy that he is considering his own Alianza-like program to help less-developed neighbors. Mexico's strongly independent President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz paid high compliments to U.S. Alianza efforts in his recent state-of-the-nation speech. The U.S. is pushing hard for social reform in Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, all run by authoritarian regimes that are not necessarily throwbacks to the old-line oligarchies.

Ample Evidence. In the Dominican Republic itself, the U.S. was instrumental in bringing an end to the Trujillo dictatorship. In the recent crisis, U.S. policy may well have suffered from some mistakes and misinformation. But the fact remains that the country was on the verge of a bloodbath, and that the Communists were swiftly profiting from the chaos. U.S. troops, whether 5,000 or 20,000, enforced a more or less peaceful settlement--and the U.S., in the end, was far tougher with the loyalist "reactionaries" than with the Communist-infiltrated rebels.

Last week, as Provisional President Hector Garcia-Godoy completed his second week in office, 9,200 U.S. and OAS troops were still in the Dominican Republic. Garcia-Godoy needs them there. During the revolt, the three shades of Communism--the Peking-lining Dominican Popular Movement, the Moscow-oriented Dominican Communist Party, the Castroite 14th of June Movement--controlled some 2,500 armed fighters. All three groups have been smuggling arms out of Santo Domingo to stash them in other cities and in the hills.

After Fulbright's speech, President Johnson was asked how he now felt about the intervention. His reply: "I would do it all over again, only we'd have done it earlier and tougher."

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