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Born in Laredo, with a population that was 85% Mexican-American, Mann grew up speaking both English and a border-town pidgin Spanish called Tex-Mex. His father was a lawyer who "laid down very stern standards about ethics and the law in our house." The family code was backed by the austere beliefs of the Southern Baptist Church ("We didn't even play cards"). In high school, young Mann was chosen "most popular boy" in his senior year, scored well enough in his studies (all A's and B's), but is best remembered as a diminutive (138 Ibs.) quarterback who led Laredo to an undefeated 1927 season by singing out his signals in a mixture of English and Spanish, to the vast confusion of monolingual opponents.
At Baylor University he met Nancy Aynesworth, daughter of a prominent Waco, Texas, physician. They were married in 1933 during Mann's senior year at Baylor Law School and went to Laredo, where Tom went into practice with his father and brothers for $100 a month. Then came Pearl Harbor, and Tom drove 150 miles to Corpus Christi to join the Navy. When he took his physical exam, he found he couldn't even read the largest E on the eye chart. "I had read so much in preparing those appellate cases," he says, "that I had a muscle-freeze in my eyes. The Navy wouldn't take me, and I felt pretty despondent. I was 29, and I wanted to do something for my country."
He volunteered to do legal work for the State Department, wound up in Montevideo, Uruguay, keeping a cloak-without-dagger eye on Nazi shipping in the area. Within a year he was recalled to the State Department in Washington, was made a divisional assistant in charge of "economic warfare in Latin America" —watching Axis business operations in the whole area. Just before the war ended, Mann went to Mexico City for the Chapultepec Conference. That meeting set down the concept for a U.S.-Latin American defense plan that was to become the Rio Treaty of 1947—still the Western Hemisphere's key joint-defense document.
Starting Over. Ever since, Mann has been close to Latin American affairs. In 1947, he let Spruille Braden, then Harry Truman's Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, talk him into joining the U.S. foreign service at a 40% pay cut—from the $11,000 he got in his special State Department civilian rank to $7,000 as a regular foreign service officer. "I started all over again as a second secretary at the embassy in Caracas," recalls Mann. He turned in a fine job, was recalled to Washington and in 1950 was made a deputy assistant secretary. "I was called a 'Truman-Acheson Democrat' at that time," he remembers. "Later, I was called an 'Eisenhower appointee,' and now I hear they call me a 'crony of the President.' "