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 Belaúnde Terry wage a social revolution that will aid millions of backlands Indians.
With U.S. help, Venezuela's left-of-center Raúl 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 Díaz 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.