Exchange: Debating U.S. Involvement in Chile in the 1970s

Abstract

JCWS. Obviously, reviewers should feel free either to praise or to condemn my work, and I deserve no say in how a review is couched. I do, however, have the right to comment on a review after its publication. Gustafson describes my work as “ideologically motivated” and “a blinkered and tendentious assault on [Richard] Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger.” If I did not hold strong views about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s brutal manipulation of the Chilean political process, I never would have pursued my research. I have concluded that their covert opposition to President Salvador Allende was unwarranted and depraved, and I have supported my position with evidence. Not only have I made thorough use of recently declassiaed U.S. documents, I have also listened to the Nixon tapes, which Gustafson apparently has not. Perhaps we should turn to Gustafson’s own comment that Allende’s socialist experiment “was a threat to the Western way of life” because it took an “electoral and democratic form.” I thought that democratic elections were a key component of our cherished Western way of life. According to Gustafson’s argument, Fidel Castro’s violent revolution produced less of a destabilizing effect on the international order, but this leaves me very confused. Does Gustafson support violence as a solution to political conoicts? If Gustafson regrets that Allende came to power peacefully and democratically rather than otherwise, does he admire the savagery of General Augusto Pinochet’s accession and rule? Bearing in mind historian Peter Novick’s own observation that