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Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy. by Thomas Tunstall Allcock, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 294 pp. $60.00.

Thomas Tunstall Allcock sets out to assess Lyndon Johnson’s policy toward Latin America by focusing on Thomas Mann, who was given responsibility for U.S. policy in the region as Johnson ascended to the White House in late 1963. Allcock argues that Johnson’s record in dealing with Latin America was “mixed” (p. 4), meaning better than that of most other Cold War presidents, and he says Mann was the reason. To support this assessment, Allcock puts forth three arguments, all of which revise existing historiography. The first is that Mann, who served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and coordinator of the Alliance for Progress aid program and even supervised projects the U.S. Agency for International Development undertook in Latin America, was not the “reactionary, conservative figure” (p. 3) historians have made him out to be. To be sure, he was a committed anti-Communist and a supporter of private U.S. investment as a force for development in the region. But Allcock convincingly paints Mann as a Good Neighbor–era practitioner of political non-intervention, which many confused with support for dictators. Mann was conspicuous in challenging early plans for invasions of Guatemala and Cuba. Less well-known is that Mann was also a New Dealer who pushed his colleagues, especially in the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower, to promote public infrastructure investment such as the Social Progress Trust Fund as a means of staving off revolution. He also believed in “restraining the worst excesses of ruthless corporate interests” (p. 25) — for instance, by supporting labor and higher taxes in Latin America. However, because he was aware of the slow pace of development in Latin America, he did not share the optimism of Kennedy-era liberal internationalists and modernization theorists, who set unrealistic economic targets and promised billions in aid that the Congress would never approve. Allcock details Mann’s conflicts with John F. Kennedy’s advisers, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Goodwin, and largely blames them for Mann’s unfavorable depiction in the press when Johnson took over. Allcock adds that Mann was “one of the most successful ambassadors in the history of US-Mexican relations” (p. 40). This book is the first to delve deeply into Mann’s early career and uncover a notable pattern of sober and consistent judgment. However, Allcock is not the first to appreciate Mann’s largely non-ideological pragmatism or his considerable familiarity with Latin America. A second argument is that Johnson himself always remained interested in and committed to Latin America, ardently hoping to prevent “another Cuba” and revitalize the flailing Alliance for Progress. Debunking the notion that Johnson abandoned all foreign priorities save Vietnam, Allcock gives detailed attention to the Latin American crises that the president and Mann navigated, starting with their successful parrying with Panama after the Flag Riots of 1964, when Mann advised Johnson to make some