And so it goes.April 26, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke with a top State Department official about fast-moving events in the Dominican Republic. A popular rebellion was on the verge of toppling a military junta and restoring the country’s democratically elected president, Juan Bosch, to power.
“This Bosch is no good,” Mr. Johnson said. “He’s no good at all,” replied Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann[...]
Two days after that phone conversation, thousands of U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Santo Domingo. By then, the White House spin machinery was in high gear. When the president went on television to declare that the military action was necessary to rescue U.S. citizens, he didn’t mention that nearly all of them had already been evacuated before the Marines arrived.
[...]
More than two months later, at a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Mann testified that Washington had asked its ambassador in Santo Domingo to see if the Dominican regime would “be willing to give us an additional message which places the request squarely on the need to save American lives.”
[...]
On May 2, LBJ pulled out the rhetorical stops, telling TV viewers that “what began as a popular democratic revolution, committed to democracy and social justice, very shortly moved and was taken over and really seized and placed into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators.”
But the evidence for Communist involvement was as flimsy as the claim about needing to save American citizens.
Most American politicians and media commentators readily accepted the official line, along with the reported death toll of 31 U.S. troops and 3,000 Dominicans, many of them civilians.[...]
In their phone conversation two days before the Marines landed, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Mann were already planning the post-invasion government of the Dominican Republic.
A tape recording of the discussion conveys large doses of imperial arrogance. “We’re going to have to really set up that government down there,” the president said, “and run it and stabilize it some way or other.”[...]
The invasion of the Dominican Republic turned out to be the first in a modern series of U.S. military interventions that produced quick victories overseas and evident satisfaction at home. The sudden and overwhelming arrival of U.S. troops in Santo Domingo was a prototype for the lightning-strike invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.
Guerilla Network News article
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