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WE CANNOT REMAIN SILENT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

We are meanwhile undertaking complementary measures with our available resources to help strengthen resistance forces. These include covert support for pro-democracy street rallies (next big one being April 2 here in Rio, and others being programmed), discreet passage of word that USG [United States Government] deeply concerned at events, and encouragement [of] democratic and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, Armed Forces, friendly labor and student groups, Church, and business. We may be requesting modest supplementary funds for other covert action programs in near future.-Telegram from U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon to Washington, March 27, 1964

The movement which overthrew President Goulart was a purely, 100 percent-not 99.44-but 100 percent a purely Brazilian movement. Neither the American Embassy nor I personally played any part in the process whatsoever.-Former U.S. ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon, U.S. Senate Hearings, February 7, 1966

Cândido Portinari, at the time considered "Brazil's most renowned artist," painted the portrait of President Jânio Quadros that graced the cover of the June 30, 1961, issue of Time magazine. Brazil's chief executive, only five months in office, stares somberly at the readers of the nation's number one news weekly. His dark hair and mustache and matching black-rimmed glasses cast a foreboding shadow over the red-framed magazine. Time's editors billed the inside story as "the most definitive report to date on the President of South America's greatest and most complex country." The inside spread charted the politician's meteoric rise to power, discussed his independent foreign policy that refused to adapt to a bipolar Cold War paradigm, and compared him to the nation as a whole: "Jânio Quadros has burst on the world like Brazil itself-temperamental, bristling with independence, bursting with ambition, haunted by poverty, fighting to learn, greedy for greatness."

As was true of most press coverage of Latin America at that time, the Cuban Revolution provided the backdrop for the feature article. "In the drive to rebuild U.S. prestige and influence after Cuba, an obvious place to start is Brazil, which most experts regard as the key nation in Latin America. A strong healthy Brazil does not guarantee democracy in Latin America, but it is certain that if Brazil does not make it, few other nations will." Time's notion of Brazil as a continental kingpin suggested the "domino theory" that had come to justify the U.S. intervention in Vietnam and in other places. Were that country to "fall" to communism, other nations would follow suit.

The day after Quadros took office, the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs drafted a secret memo recommending how the U.S. government should deal with the new administration. The document registered concern about "Quadros's inclination toward an independent foreign policy" and suggested that Washington should offer assistance in meeting Brazil's balance of payments deficit. Policymakers also encouraged the administration "to help Brazil to meet the problem of its depressed Northeast territory through the new Social Development program." In offering its background justification for this action, the memo argued: "Brazilian leaders believe that their country is destined to become one of great world powers. Brazil has been resentful in the past with being treated by the United States as if it were just another of the Latin American 'banana' republics. It has sought a special relationship ... desiring to be consulted by the U.S. on matters affecting the hemisphere. Also, Brazil has led the demands that the United States embark on a large-scale aid program for Latin America on the same scale as the Marshall Plan. It feels the $500 million social development program proposed by the United States is a step in the right direction although it is disappointed by the magnitude." The memo's final sentence offered a dire warning: "A Governor of one of the economically depressed provinces of Northeast Brazil has recently requested U.S. assistance on an urgent basis to combat growing Communist influence in that poverty-stricken area through a rural land development program." Notably, Cold War threats loomed prominently behind promises of poverty-alleviation programs.

Two months after Time's cover story about Brazil's mercurial and quixotic president, Quadros resigned from office, defeated by, in his own words, "terrible forces [that] came forward to fight me and to defame me." At the time, left-leaning Vice President João Goulart was leading a trade mission to "Red" China. Goulart, a protégé of former president Getúlio Vargas, had served as his labor minister in 1953-54. He had run as the vice presidential candidate of the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Party, Ptb) in 1955, handily winning on a split ticket that elected centrist Juscelino Kubitschek as president. He continued in office in 1961 by outpolling other parties' vice presidential candidates and continuing as second in command under conservative-leaning Jânio Quadros.

Opposition to Goulart quickly coalesced among conservative, anti-Vargas, and anti-PTB forces. Commanders of the armed forces threatened to block his ascension to the presidency. Military leaders loyal to Goulart and the constitution, as well as Goulart's brother-in-law, Governor Leonel Brizola, countered with threats of a civil war. Eventually, the contending sides reached a compromise. Goulart would be sworn in as president, but with limited power, and Brazil would adopt a parliamentary system led by a prime minister.

The stage was set and the actors in place. Goulart's term in office would last a mere thirty-three months, cut short on April 1, 1964, by the military takeover that marked the beginning of twenty-one years of authoritarian rule. Anti-Goulart forces declared victory, dubbing their power grab a "revolution" that had defeated, so they claimed, an imminent left-wing revolution. Appropriating and recasting the term "revolution" into its opposite was one of many ways the generals played with political reality. Rather than aborting a revolution, the military stepped in to overturn the moderate reforms put forth by Goulart in early 1964.11 They pledged to weed out corruption in government, curtail inflation, and halt the country's alleged rush toward communism.

Although the military had pushed Goulart from power, the coup makers argued that he had actually abandoned the presidential office and violated the constitution by leaving the country without congressional permission. It remained a minor detail that Goulart was still at his ranch on Brazilian territory. The generals' loyal congressional supporters swiftly voted Ranieri Mazzilli, the speaker of the house, as provisional president, and U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon urged the White House to recognize immediately the new government. President Johnson promptly backed Mazzilli on April 2. The brief message issued from the Oval Office began: "Please accept my warmest good wishes on your installation as President of the United States of Brazil. The American people have watched with anxiety the political and economic difficulties through which your great nation has been passing, and have admired the resolute will of the Brazilian community to resolve these difficulties within a framework of constitutional democracy and without civil strife."

The next day in a telephone exchange between Thomas Mann, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, and President Johnson, Mann commented: "I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am." To which the president replied, "I am." Mann continued, "I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the hemisphere in three years." Johnson concurred, "I hope they give us some credit, instead of hell." Johnson got his wish. The new military government quickly aligned itself with Washington, and Brazilian nationalists and left-wing critics immediately credited the United States with having masterminded the coup.

Following a constitutional provision requiring the Brazilian congress to select a new president within thirty days if the presidency and vice-presidency became vacant, a purged legislature "elected" General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. Although he was not the initiator of the plot to oust Goulart, other officers called in Castelo Branco to lead the military conspiracy. His long military career and close relationship to the United States positioned him as the perfect candidate for the country's top political post. He was a graduate of the Brazilian Military Academy (1921), the French École Superieur de Guerre (1938), and the U.S. Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (1943). When Brazil joined the Allies in World War II, he served in the general staff of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy. After the war he was the commander of the Fourth Army in the Brazilian Northeast and was the Army chief of staff immediately before assuming the presidency. He held the U.S. Legion of Merit and a Bronze Star. In a report sent to Washington soon after Castelo Branco's ascension to the presidency, Ambassador Gordon assured the State Department that the general "admires and appreciates [the] role U.S. has played since World War II as a defender of freedom."

On April 20, 1964, Gordon held his first private talk in Brasília with the new president. The ambassador congratulated the general and indicated that Washington "looked on [the] April Revolution as [a] possible turning point in affairs [of ] Latin America and [the] World as well as Brazil, provided proper use [is] made of [the] opportunity." After a warning to Castelo Branco that "revolutionary excesses," including the withdrawal of political rights from the internationally renowned economist Celso Furtado, had been "especially badly received," most of their conversation focused on the initiative to Latin America begun by Kennedy, renewed economic aid to Brazil, and the international political scene. Gordon reported that he "left the interview with the feeling that this was a most auspicious beginning." Latin America's greatest country, which had been on the road to chaos and communism, was now, according to Gordon, on the path to prosperity and democracy. Although in retrospect Gordon has argued that at the time of the coup he had assumed that the military would put Brazil in order and quickly retreat to the barracks, this proved not to be the case. Instead the armed forces clung to power for two more decades. This chapter examines the contentious events that led to the 1964 coup, the behind-the-scenes analyses and maneuvering from the White House and State Department, the response on the floor of Congress to the military takeover, and the U.S. media's portrayal of the "revolution" that seemingly was taking place in Brazil.

Cold Warriors in Tropical Lands

Lincoln Gordon assumed his post as U.S. ambassador to Brazil in the immediate aftermath of the presidential succession crisis of August 1961. A thatch of gray hair, an ever-present pipe, and sophisticated public declarations offered the image of an Ivy League professor turned public servant. A summa cum laude Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar who had earned a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford in 1936, Gordon had served the U.S. government in various capacities during and after World War II. Among many activities, he helped develop the Marshall Plan into a concrete program. In 1955, he returned to Harvard with a chair in international economic relations, working in the business school and the Center for International Affairs, and dabbled in research about economic development in Brazil. The Kennedy administration tapped him to join the team elaborating a new policy initiative toward Latin America that eventually became the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy appointed Gordon ambassador to Brazil soon thereafter. In an oral history interview in 1964, Gordon speculated on why Kennedy chose him for the ambassadorial post: "I suppose the reasons were pretty clear in my case. This is the biggest country in the hemisphere, and the Alliance for Progress was the principal expression of the Kennedy administration's Latin American policy. I knew a good deal about Brazil, having worked here on a research project for a couple of years. I was already widely acquainted among Brazilians; I had a reading knowledge of Portuguese and at least a foundation for speaking knowledge; and I was much involved in the Alliance for Progress. Here was an opportunity to help its application in the largest country in Latin America."

The historian Thomas E. Skidmore has assessed Gordon's appointment in slightly different terms: "Lincoln Gordon was clearly a real Cold Warrior whose mission, as he saw it, was to make sure that Brazil didn't go communist." While at Oxford, Gordon had witnessed firsthand the escalating conditions that would lead to World War II. The Nazi experience hardened his resolve that threats to Western civilization needed to be annihilated, and so emerged his stance on communism after the Cold War consensus became pervasive. Like many of his peers, Gordon viewed the world in Manichaean terms: a country either was with the United States or had aligned itself with communism.

Brazil was still in turmoil over the presidential succession when Gordon arrived in Rio on October 13, 1961, and presented his credentials to the newly sworn-in president. In Washington, policymakers were taking a wait-and-see attitude about Goulart: "Pending the clarification of U.S. orientation, we propose to deal with the new government on the assumption that there has been no break in the continuity of the traditionally close and cordial relation between the United States and Brazil. As for President Goulart, we are prepared to give him the reasonable benefit of the doubt, while trying to encourage him to believe cooperation with the United States is to his and Brazil's advantage." 25 Over the next three years, this policy would shift dramatically.

The Grand Alliance

On September 15, 1961, former president Kubitschek visited President Kennedy in the White House. During their formal meeting, Kubitschek addressed the potential deterioration in relations between the two countries. He insisted that he knew Goulart extremely well, particularly since Goulart had been his vice president, and could say that he was "a careful man and not a Communist." He also predicted that "Brazil would remain a truly democratic country." After their formal meeting, Kennedy and Kubitschek moved out onto the White House porch for an informal conversation. They spoke of many other issues during their meeting. According to a White House memo, the Brazilian politician reminded Kennedy that "in May of 1958, after the incident-marked journey of Mr. Nixon through Latin America, he had written to President Eisenhower urging a careful reappraisal of the situation in the Hemisphere and suggested that U.S. policies toward Latin American countries be reformulated." Kubitschek proposed a comprehensive U.S.-sponsored Latin American development program, named Operation Pan America. Kubitschek explained that, although both Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles showed interest in his ideas, they never translated it into constructive action as he thought Kennedy was determined to do. The Brazilian politician lamented that their terms in office had not coincided "so that an active program could be carried out on foundations that were well understood by both parties." Kubitschek went on to explain that Kennedy's new initiative to assist Latin American economic development was particularly important for the Brazilian Northeast, where most of the twenty-five million residents lived in serious poverty.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from WE CANNOT REMAIN SILENT by James N. Green Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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