The United States and Latin America in the Eisenhower Era

Stephen Rabe, who received the 1989 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize for this study of the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy in Latin America, is known among inter-Americanists for an earlier book on U.S.-Venezuelan relations, The Road to OPEC.1 In Eisenhower and Latin America he undertakes the more formidable task of explaining not only the shaping of Latin American policy during the 1950s but also, more important, Dwight D. Eisenhower's critical role in the formulation and execution of that policy. Using an impressive variety of sources from U.S. archives and collections, especially the Eisenhower Library, he has produced an account eminently worthy of the Bernath Prize. Teachers of U.S.-Latin American relations or modern diplomatic history will doubtless incorporate his major themes into their courses, and graduate students in both fields will be forced to confront the book when preparing for their preliminary examinations. The prevalent view of U.S. policy in Latin America during the 1960s was essentially straightforward and unambiguous in its contention that after World War II, U.S. policymakers, obsessed with the primacy of the European (and secondarily, Asian) theaters in the expanding Cold War, neglected Latin America. Denied a “Marshall Plan” for its development schemes, Latin America occupied center stage in Washington's perspective only where strategic issues were concerned. These, in turn, so dominated U.S. thinking that both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations virtually abandoned Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in favor of global anticommunism

Administration (probate law · Economic history · Foreign policy · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Variety (cybernetics · History · International Relations in Latin America · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Public Administration

• President Eisenhower and the Historians

  Jeff Broadwater•Canadian Review of American Studies•1991

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