out St. Louis, which like many American cities had grown too fast to clean up after itself. “The new is there before the old is gone. What in one era is functional and elegant and fashionable survives into the following era as grotesque decay.”
about the canned music in the lounge car on the train to Texas: what of the person “who doesn’t like
about trying to write while crossing northern Mexico trapped by an Indiana voice, which boomed, with “unquenchable loquaciousness,” through the cars: “What-cha carryin’ that ink around fur?”
Nevertheless, the trip was a welcome respite. With a steam engine helping, the diesel ascended a mountain pass, wound its way down the other side, and brought the train on time into Mexico City on the evening of the twenty-first. The American embassy, where Kennan stayed, was preparing for its Washington’s birthday reception the next day.
The event, held on the veranda, required routine skills: clutching drinks in the left hand to keep the right one dry for shaking others; looking for places to stash empty glasses so they wouldn’t get stepped on; being patient with the wife of a senior colleague who wanted to know about the Russians: “They’re all slaves aren’t they? Why don’t we
A weekend in Cuernavaca placed Kennan in a simulated Moorish palace owned by American friends, where the ceiling, wall paneling, furniture, and art—all imported from Europe—were not simulated. “I lay sleepless, through the long night, under the huge crimson draperies which had once served a prince of the Church and still bore his insignia—while mosquitoes buzzed around my pillow.” Outside the night breeze flitted aimlessly among the cloisters: the wind “of exiled royalty, of the hopelessly rich, of the tortured intellectuals,” of people like himself who had wandered in, amid “unhappy antiques, crowded together, like creatures in a zoo.” Kennan’s host, the next morning by the swimming pool, was also curious about the Russians: “I don’t see why we don’t go right over there and drop the bomb on those fellows. What are we waiting for?”
Four forest fires were visible on the road back into Mexico City, a frequent occurrence because the mountains were badly eroded. Water tables were sinking at an alarming rate. Population pressures were overtaking improvements in agriculture, industrial productivity, and public health. Mexico would remain inhospitable to earthly hope, which was why the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, a brief stop on the way to the airport, moved Kennan deeply. There were of course hustlers outside the cathedral, and there was oppressive ostentation within. But who could doubt the need for “
After several short stops in Central America, Kennan flew on to Caracas, a city that defied even his descriptive powers. So he instead wrote its history: how the Spanish had located it at a comfortable elevation inland, connected to its port by a wagon track; how the British had replaced this with a narrow-gauge railroad; how the Americans had arrived to pump oil out and to pump wealth back in; how the city was now so expensive that this particular American wanted to hide in his hotel, fearing “the financial consequences of any contact with the shops or the taxi drivers.” All the evils apparent at home from imposing a new technology on an unprepared people were magnified a hundredfold in Venezuela. One day the “morphine” would be withdrawn, and “a terrible awakening” would follow.
Perhaps because the culture was Portuguese and hence familiar, Kennan liked Rio de Janeiro better. The Brazilians had inherited a gentleness “for which one can only bear them respect and affection.” It was striking on the beaches, which displayed every shade of color, “a vast panorama of racial tolerance and maturity which could stand as a model for other peoples.” Still, it was depressing to sense “the gulf between the rich and the poor, the desperation with which people seek to leap over that gulf, and the lack of imagination they show in the enjoyment of their new emoluments when the leap has been successfully completed.” His reputation, by now, had caught up with him: Rio was plastered with “To Death With Kennan” signs, put up by local communists, and he had been accorded four mock funerals. Only in Sao Paulo, though, where the security was exasperatingly thorough, did he began to feel “like a hunted beast, and to ask myself whether it was really possible that I was as sinister as all this.”
There were further stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima—the Argentine president, Juan Peron, somehow mistook Kennan for the head of the CIA—but the trip by this time was tiring him out, teaching him little, and making him homesick. He was impressed by a demonstration, in Panama, of how the canal locks worked and, upon arrival in Miami, by the “relaxed, unemotional but utterly objective and self-respecting attitude” with which a railroad ticket clerk explained to a trainee how to change a reservation: “I went out onto the station platform with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense.”18
Back in Washington, Kennan wrote a long report and submitted it to Acheson on March 29. He acknowledged the imprudence of generalizing about so vast a region, because differences in Latin America were often more significant than similarities. Nevertheless, some patterns were clear. One was location: human development was harder than in North America, with its broad plains, unifying rivers, and temperate climate. Compounding this problem had been the arrival, “like men from Mars,” of the European conquerors: “History, it seems to me, bears no record of anything more terrible having been done to entire peoples.” Slavery followed, as did the splendor and pretense of Latin American cities, built to compensate for the squalor of the countryside from which they sprang. All of this had produced a culture of “exaggerated self-centeredness and egotism,” conveying the illusion “of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.” This was a world “where geography and history are alike tragic, but where no one must ever admit it.”
So what was Washington’s responsibility in an era in which Latin American communists, even if only loosely linked to Moscow, might seek to exploit the hopelessness that surrounded them by seizing power? That part of the world was of little military significance to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but there was a bandwagon psychology in international relations: multiple victories for communism could be demoralizing. One such victory somewhere, however—Kennan thought Guatemala the most likely possibility—might have an inoculating effect, shattering complacency about communism elsewhere. The problem, in any event, would be for the Latin Americans to handle: the United States could not return to the military interventions of the early twentieth century. It might, at most, apply economic pressure quietly. In public, its hands would have to be clean.
The United States could afford to relax, therefore, in managing its hemisphere, for the Latin Americans needed it more than it needed them. That meant tolerating rule by whatever means local rulers considered appropriate: they should not be held to the standards of American domestic democracy. It meant respecting their sovereignty, cooperating with them only when they wanted it. It meant that they, in turn, could not make their countries “the seats of dangerous intrigue against us.” No great power would ever have shown such restraint in dealing with
