Retrieving lost ideals :

Abstract

The Alliance for Progress, which was intended to intercept a social revolution that had been set in motion and enable the United States to channel the revolution toward peaceful change, promoted authoritarian and suppressive regimes instead. In Brazil, the end result of the United States promise to support socio-economic development and democratic processes was the establishment and support of a harsh military regime. The crucial question for this inquiry is what caused the marked variance between the idealistic goals of the Alliance for Progress and the decisions that were made toward Brazil in the 1960s?

Following this analysis of the operative situation, an examination is made of the American political scene in 1960. The bureaucratic politics model is applied to the American foreign policy making amalgam. An analysis based on this model reveals that when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, sought to pursue the idealistic goals of socio-economic and political development through the Alliance for Progress in Brazil, a dichotomized cast emerged in a political struggle. The career men opposed Kennedy and his men and the goals which they pursued. Although the Kennedy men were supported in their policy options by the Kennedy personality and the prominent social forces in Brazil during the initial phase of the Alliance for Progress, the action-channels of the game and the parameters of the game enhanced the many variables that accrued to the side of the career men during the Lyndon B. Johnson phase of the Alliance for Progress. A set of hypotheses is postulated as a means of drawing these variables together in an analysis of how Lyndon B. Johnson and the career men triumphed in defeating the Kennedy initiative during the period after the Kennedy assassination.

The initial task, aside from the incipient paradigm building and conceptualization, was to depict the objective environment at the inception of the Alliance for Progress. The characterization of the operative situation clarifies the motivations of the strategic actors, magnifies the misperceptions of the strategic actors, and indicates the premises which underlined their actions. The objective environment of Brazil is described in terms of economic, social, and political conditions. The Brazilian masses are depicted as having rising spokesmen in the form of a new nationalistic intelligentsia and an emerging reformist regime. These spokesmen are depicted as seeking far-reaching social change, socio-economic development, and a revision in Brazil's foreign policy. The revision which they sought implied a change from Brazil's close alignment with the United States. Key forces in this movement for change were nationalism, populism, and communism, forces which were not readily recognized as distinct from one another.

Recent critiques of American foreign policy focus on its duplicity, a characteristic which has caused nations to be skeptical of United States foreign policy proclamations. The United States decisions and actions that were taken in Brazil during the 1960s reflect the high incidence of duplicity relative to the Alliance for Progress. Bureaucratic politics analyses of American policy are rare, and a bureaucratic political analysis of United States foreign policy toward Brazil during the 1960s appears to be nonexistent. This dissertation is offered as a contribution to fill that vacuum. This analysis of American foreign policy, however, is somewhat eclectic. Since an analysis of the operative situation is deemed necessary, the analysis combines the bureaucratic politics model with an extensive analysis of Brazilian society, economy, and the political system in 1960.