During his trip Eisenhower insisted to his hosts that the United States “would not intervene in their local affairs.” As he put it in his 1965 autobiography, he knew that memories of such interventions in the era of “gunboat diplomacy” still burned red-hot, and he asserted that since the 1930s, “intervention as an American policy had gone into the discard, replaced by the policy of the Good Neighbor.” This statement is wholly false. The Guatemala intervention against Arbenz in 1954 contradicted Ike’s claim; so too did his Cuba policy, whose details were being hammered out at the very moment he
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