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Wealth & a Conscience. Moneyed by mines, electric power and oil deals, Spruille Braden was another rich man on the Hudson in the late '20s. His menage at Riverdale, N.Y., included a stable of South American prizefighters who slept over the garage.
The 1929 crash did not exactly give Braden a social conscience; it awakened one. Dinted but by no means bankrupt, he did some heavy thinking which later led ex-Attorney General Homer Cummings to say: "Braden just couldn't help convincing himself that he was a progressive.
It was in him all the time and had to come out." It came out in the form of money and personal support for Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 campaign. The Roosevelt victory, the laws of politics, and Braden's background made him a natural for Latin diplomacy. He soon completed his qualifications by selling all his Latin holdings.
The Braden Way. In dictator-ridden Buenos Aires last May, Spruille Braden stated his policy in one explosive sentence: the United States is against dictators everywhere. By the same token he is for freedom everywhere — period.
The difference between Braden and some other enunciators of the same doctrine is that he believes in practicing it, always and everywhere. The doctrine, and the methods by which he prefers to enforce it, have produced his most spectacular successes:
¶ He founded his diplomatic reputation on his settlement of the Chaco war (1932-35) between Paraguay and Bolivia. After three years of feckless negotiations, Braden took to the radio, bluntly addressed the Paraguayan and Bolivian people over the delegates' heads. A settlement followed quickly.
¶ In 1940, when he was Ambassador to Colombia, he was alarmed by the presence of the German-operated airline Scadta so near the Panama Canal. Well aware that Pan American Airways controlled Scadta and could throw out the Germans, Braden turned the heat on Pan Am through Washington, got action, and demonstrated one of his favorite theses: that Naziism, wherever and however it infiltrated Latin America, had to be and could be eradicated.
¶ In 1944, as U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Braden helped make possible the free elections in which President-Dictator Juan Batista's regime was voted out. Braden forbade U.S. business interests in Cuba to pony up the usual election ante ($2,000,000 in that case) and otherwise encouraged a free vote. Even Batista praised him: "He is more a man than a diplomat." So far, the Braden doctrine and the Braden way have failed in their most conspicuous, most important test—in Argentina. There, at the crest of his career as a Hemisphere Ambassador, Braden early this year locked horns with Dictator Juan Domingo Perón, threw every personal and official weight against him, and for a time seemed to be winning. Hundreds of thousands of Argentine students, workers, businessmen, army men, politicians rallied to Spruille Braden's call: "We . . . must and will establish . . . the inviolable sovereignty of people."
But the triumph was short; Perón no sooner fell than he rose again like Antaeus, seemingly stronger than ever (TIME, Oct. 29). Braden's confirmation as Assistant Secretary was before the Senate, and his critics set upon him in full cry.
They had a case.