Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of
Intervention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. 291 pages.
If forced to distinguish between the journalist and the academic,
one definition might be that academics are almost always found working on
topics after it's too late to do anything about it. To be sure, it's easier:
sources are more widely available, the target has stopped moving, and
passions have cooled. In this book, Richard Immerman, assistant professor
of history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, weighs in on U.S.
intervention in Guatemala in 1954. In the 1980s an increasing number of
university presses published historical studies of U.S. covert activities.
Yesterday's denial becomes today's footnote demolishing the denial, but
where were the professors when we needed them?
Better late than never, one assumes. Drawing on his Boston College
Ph.D. dissertation (1978), Immerman ends up with 75 pages of endnotes and
bibliography. The 200 pages of narrative present a well-crafted balance
between Guatemalan history and its economy, the cold war milieu in
Washington, the CIA at work, U.S. propaganda efforts and diplomatic
maneuvering in the U.N. and elsewhere, the coup itself, and finally the
cover-up. It was all so tidy that the CIA couldn't resist trying the same
thing in Cuba seven years later.
ISBN 0-292-71083-6
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