courtship of Washington paid off. By 1955, John Foster Dulles’s State Department was celebrating the strongman as “one of the hemisphere’s foremost spokesmen against the Communist movement.” That same year, Vice President Nixon visited the Dominican Republic and made a public display of embracing Trujillo. The United States should overlook the notorious defects of the Dominican dictator, Nixon later advised Eisenhower’s cabinet, because, after all, “Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them.”
