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The Dissent. That case was partly a U.S. case, partly Latin American, and its exponents rated a hearing.
Essence of the Latin case was simply that the U.S. had no business interfering in Latin nations' affairs, for or against dictatorships. For the most part this view was expressed by a very special type of Latin: professional diplomats or Government officials, many of them good democrats according to their national lights, who had been schooled to regard the U.S. as an unavoidable, sometimes kindly but always threatening colossus.
The U.S. dissent was more varied in its sources and expression. A notable dissenter was cool, bitter Sumner Welles, who used to guide U.S., policy in Latin America. He had no use for "those well-intentioned but wholly ill-advised spokesmen for foreign governments who have assumed the role of saviors of the Argentine people." He took for a text the recent, Braden-inspired postponement of the Inter-American Conference on Peace and Security. Said Welles, dismissing the Braden argument that no conference was better than one where Argentina's authoritarians would be received as equals: "Neither the individual interests of the United States nor the cause of Inter-American unity is served when the United States Government or its representatives take action which is regarded by the peoples of the Latin American nations as derogatory to their national sovereignty."
Debating Braden's confirmation, Foreign Relations Chairman Tom Connally bumbled: "We do not expect to interfere in any wise in [Latin American] domestic affairs unless it is in the interest of some American citizen or some American properties that are involved." But Tom Connally had a better point: the Act of Chapultepec, sponsored by the U.S. State Department at the Mexico City Conference this year, had solemnly repudiated "intervention by a state in the . . . affairs of another." Just what, asked Connally, did Mr. Braden think he was doing to that policy, to which the Argentines had subscribed by U.S. and Latin invitation?
It remained for Wisconsin's Bob La Follette, more noted for his love of liberty than for his international thinking, to single out the big difficulty. La Follette did not quite dare to make an admission hard for any lover of liberty to express: that the dictated do not always and unanimously object to dictation. He compromised by asking: was it correct to assume that "the much-detested government of Colonel Perón" had no mass support?
What Is Intervention? Spruille Braden told his Senate critics that he was no "interventionist," and he meant it. To his mind, he had simply put an end to the negative intervention of silent acquiescence—the kind of thing that made him boil when Sumner Welles, and later Nelson Rockefeller, were handling U.S. affairs in Latin America. Just suppose, said Braden, that he had kept his mouth shut when he went to Buenos Aires? Argentina and all the Hemisphere would have mistaken his silence for support of the Perón regime. Libertarian Americans in Buenos Aires heartily agreed, said that if the Braden policy were reversed, the U.S. would never again be trusted below the Rio Grande.
At the upshot, the Braden policy was not reversed. But, in effect, it was somewhat dampened.