Volume 8, Number 3 · February 23, 1967
A Long Way from Michigan
By John Gerassi
Overtaken by Events: The Dominican Crisis—from the Fall of Trujillo to the Civil War
by John Bartlow Martin
Doubleday, 821 pp., $7.95
Rarely has a government functionary revealed so much about the intricacies of power, its uses and abuses, as does John Bartlow Martin in Overtaken by Events. Describing himself as a 'Liberal,' a friend of Adlai Stevenson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Martin served President Kennedy as Ambassador to the Dominican Republic until Juan Bosch was overthrown in 1963, and President Johnson as special envoy to that country during its frustrated revolution in 1965. His main purpose in describing those missions, and filling the gap between them, is to stress the good intentions of American policy in the Dominican Republic and, generally, in Latin America—and to show that its failures are mainly caused by uncontrollable events. But as an old Saturday Evening Post journalist he allows his feel for the full story to get the better of him, and as it does, the 'events' keep piling up with such nagging consistency that his logic is itself overtaken.
Review, 4444 words
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