Although only presidential aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. persistently raised questions about the U.S. campaign against the Jagans, high-ranking officials privately conceded the obvious about the nature of the allegations leveled against the couple. Attorney General Robert Kennedy used revealing language, when he recalled that his brother the president “was convinced that Jagan was probably a Communist.”¹ In 1964, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy admitted in a telephone conversation with Under Secretary of State George Ball that “we don’t rate him [Jagan] a Communist; we just think he’s hopelessly imprisoned. If we knew how to spring him we would.” Bundy’s stunning confession revealed that Jagan provoked U.S. officials with his words and associations, not his deeds. Like President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala, Jagan had passed the “duck test” on communism. He and his wife had traveled to Eastern Europe and attended conferences organized by Communists. The party organ, Thunder, took a radical point of view on international events. On national television in the United States, Jagan had declined to condemn the Soviet Union. Jagan labeled himself a “Communist,” although he had a unique, complex, even baffling definition of communism. As Raymond T. Smith, the astute analyst of British Guiana at midcentury, observed, Jagan seemed to want to accept some principles of communist philosophy without worrying too much about the implications of their application in the real world of the Soviet-American confrontation.²

Prime Minister Jagan could have possibly justified his views to U.S. officials if he had lived outside of the Western Hemisphere, the traditional U.S. sphere of influence. During the Cold War, the United States argued that its credibility in international affairs depended on preserving a secure and stable hemisphere. Secretary Rusk once advised Argentine diplomats that the Soviet Union might be tempted to attack West Berlin if it perceived weakness “in our own backyard.” The United States adamantly opposed any Latin American nation establishing political or commercial ties with the Soviet bloc.³ Caribbean leaders, like Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, warned Jagan that he had to heed U.S. foreign policy concerns. Jagan could be characterized as being either naïve, stubborn, or foolish for ignoring such warnings. But Jagan’s apparent defiance of U.S. power can also be explained by his attachment to a global outlook. He did not perceive himself solely as a citizen of the Western Hemisphere. As a subject of the British Empire, he tried to emulate the United Kingdom’s policy of conducting diplomatic and commercial relations with the Soviet bloc, the People’s Republic of China, and Communist Cuba. Jagan, an Indian, admired “the Indian way,” the principles of the Congress Party, and Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru’s success at winning economic assistance from both the United States and the Soviet Union. As a student of international affairs, he understood that the United States supported Israel, a country that espoused socialist ideals.

Jagan misperceived not only Guyana’s role in the global balance of power but also the U.S. loathing of Castro’s Cuba. Since 1959, an article of faith of U.S. policymakers has been that the young Fidel Castro deceived the world. The Cuban had cloaked his Communist revolutionary aspirations within the language of reformist nationalism. U.S. officials vowed not to be fooled again. Jagan and his wife visited Cuba and spoke favorably of the Cuban Revolution. He struck a deal to sell rice to Cuba and secured a promise of Cuban economic aid. Jagan’s Cuban policy promoted British Guiana’s national interest, providing a vital market to Indian rice growers. U.S. officials, however, judged Jagan’s Cuban policy as compelling evidence that the Jagans and the PPP lied about their revolutionary intentions; they aimed to create a “second Cuba” on the South American continent. U.S. policymakers responded to the perceived threat in British Guiana in the way they responded in Cuba. The CIA, working with the AFL-CIO, incited strikes and riots that led to arson, sabotage, terrorism, and murder in the British colony. During the war against Castro’s Cuba, U.S. officials discussed creating pretexts for invading the island, including sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees, shooting Cuban exiles in Florida, or bombing the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay.⁴ A similar mindset informed official proposals of how the United States could encourage Cheddi Jagan to become a terrorist.

As did Cuba, British Guiana became entwined in U.S. domestic politics. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy had denounced the Eisenhower-Nixon foreign policy team for “losing” Cuba to communism. In part, Kennedy repaid the Republicans for claiming that the Democrats had “lost” China in the late 1940s. The Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis represented Kennedy’s greatest failure and triumph in international affairs. As revealed in his verbal assault on Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove in June 1963, Kennedy was determined to keep British Guiana from joining Cuba as a subject of debate in the 1964 presidential campaign. Partisans from the political right and left reinforced Kennedy’s political judgment. Conservative Democrats, like Senator Thomas Dodd, and right-wing newspapers, like the Dallas Morning News, deplored Jagan. Liberal Democrats, such as union leaders and African Americans, either denounced Jagan or spoke favorably of Forbes Burnham. No prominent interest group, like an Indian benevolent or friendship society, defended Jagan in the United States; between 1953 and 1969, the United States had, because of historic immigration restrictions, a minuscule population of citizens from South Asia.

Explanations for the U.S. intervention in British Guiana readily fall within the traditional categories—national security, balance of power, credibility, domestic politics, interest-group pressures—that historians of international relations offer when analyzing the motives of a powerful democratic nation. What seems certain is that another conventional interpretation—economic imperatives—does not explain the U.S. war against Jagan and the PPP. When scholars study the Cold War interventions in Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, and Chile they ask whether the United States acted to protect the respective U.S. investments in bananas, sugar, telephone companies, and copper. The United States has customarily defended the free-trade and investment principles that are central to the international capitalist system. But the United States had a minimal economic presence in impoverished British Guiana, and no U.S. businessman ever raised the issue of the political direction of the colony with U.S. officials. In fact, international capitalists preferred Jagan and the PPP over Burnham and the PNC.

Some scholars have urged historians of U.S. foreign relations to include race and gender in their explanatory models in order to gain a “deeper understanding of the cultural assumptions from which foreign policies spring.” Issues of race and gender informed the U.S. approach to British Guiana and its leaders, albeit in distinctive ways. Historian Emily Rosenberg has argued that white policymakers attach similar symbolic characteristics to women, nonwhite people, and tropical countries. They are “emotional, irrational, irresponsible, unbusinesslike, unstable, and childlike.” Women and nonwhites of the tropics are “naturally dependent” people.⁵ U.S. and United Kingdom officials focused on one woman in British Guiana—Janet Rosenberg Jagan. Their depiction of the nurse from Chicago went, however, against stereotypes. She was the “dynamic Janet,” intelligent and practical but also domineering and ruthless. Janet Jagan was “the brain behind” her husband and the “organizational wheelhouse” of the PPP. Secretaries of state anxiously inquired about the state of the Jagans’ marriage, hoping that Cheddi Jagan would pursue moderation once free of his radical, “dominating” wife. Diplomats further snickered that Janet Jagan was sexually aggressive and promiscuous. They reacted in horror, however, to stories that she had sexual relations with nonwhites, including with “splendid, virile” Cuban revolutionaries. Men kept “falling under the spell” of Janet Jagan. Only when the Cheddi Jagan had been ousted from power in late 1964 did diplomats stop fearing Janet Jagan. In 1965, U.S. Consul Delmar Carlson reported that she looked “dumpy.” Unadulterated sexism obviously fueled many of the male characterizations of Janet Jagan. Carlson excused, for example, Peter D’Aguiar’s alleged extramarital affairs. But when U.S. and United Kingdom officials called Janet Jagan smart and organized, they attached positive attributes to the leading white politician in British Guiana and a native of the United States.

By implication, Cheddi Jagan and his countrymen lacked the drive and insight of whites. Governor Ralph Grey referred to the Guyanese as “children.” Indians seemed especially dependent to U.S. officials. In his study of U.S. relations with India from 1947 to 1964, the Nehru years, Andrew J. Rotter has argued that U.S. officials perceived Indians as failing to meet Western standards of manliness. Nehru’s India angered and frustrated the United States because it declared neutrality in the Cold War and built a strong relationship with the Soviet Union. In Rotter’s view, U.S. officials decided that India pursued a deviant foreign policy less because of geopolitical realities and more because of the shortcomings of its effeminate male leaders. Indian men were not Cold Warriors because they were passive, emotional, and lacked heterosexual energy.⁶ U.S. officials did indeed refer to the Indians of Guyana as being “timid” and “docile.” Unlike “aggressive” blacks, they allegedly lacked the physical stamina to be police officers.

U.S. officials found Cheddi Jagan similarly wanting. Left unspoken in the endless reports about his wife’s sexual exploits was the question of why Jagan permitted her to betray him. U.S. officials also repeated the British observation that Jagan appeared “scrawny” after his 1964 political defeat. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administration officials notably referred to Jagan as “Cheddi” in memorandums and dispatches. By comparison, after 1957 British officials wrote about “Dr. Jagan,” honoring the degree in dentistry that Jagan had earned at prestigious Northwestern University. In 1997, a few months after her husband’s death, Janet Jagan gave her interpretation of why her husband’s international and domestic opponents treated him like a “boy” and why she had been portrayed as “a sort of Svengali” who manipulated him. As she related to a correspondent from the New York Times, “When Cheddi was first elected to Parliament 50 years ago, he broke all the traditions. He had no social background whatsoever and was what they called a coolie boy. So of course they said I wrote all his speeches because I was white, when in reality he was a brilliant intellectual and an ardent reader.”⁷

The U.S. embrace of Forbes Burnham and his black followers also bears examination. The United States has a tragic history of black slavery and racial discrimination against African Americans. U.S. foreign policymakers transferred this domestic racism to international affairs. As outlined by Michael H. Hunt in his influential study, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987), U.S. diplomats developed a “hierarchy of race.” White Anglo-Saxons stood at the top and the despised minorities in the United States, Amerindians and blacks, fell to the bottom. U.S. officials attached positive and negative characteristics to Latin Americans and East Asians and placed them in the middle of the hierarchy of race.⁸ The United States focused on British Guiana, however, during the period of the U.S. civil rights movement. U.S. leaders, especially the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, pushed for simple justice for African Americans for principled reasons and because civil rights legislation would help the United States appeal to people of color throughout the world. Kennedy and Johnson officials reacted positively to the educated, well-spoken, lawyerly Burnham. For his part, Burnham proved adept at manipulating his hosts, constantly denouncing communism and praising President Johnson for his commitment to civil rights.⁹ Burnham profited from having the support of groups and individuals associated with the civil rights movement, such as union leaders and prominent black Democrats like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Senator Dodd, the leading congressional opponent of Jagan and a friend of Burnham, also fervently opposed discrimination against African Americans.¹⁰ Burnham probably also seemed more familiar to U.S. citizens because he was the “leader of the African Christians,” as one State Department officer put it. In contrast, interest groups representing Hindus and Muslims wielded no discernible influence in the United States from 1953 to 1969.¹¹

Whether the misunderstandings and stereotypes that surround issues of gender, ethnicity, race, and religion can principally explain international relations remains a subject of scholarly debate.¹² The argument presented here emphasizes that three presidential administrations persuaded themselves that, in the context of the Cold War, the Jagans and their PPP posed unacceptable threats to U.S. vital interests. What probably can be concluded is that cultural blinders kept U.S. officials from empathizing with Cheddi Jagan and identifying Burnham’s essential nature. U.S. officials never dwelled on Cheddi Jagan’s remarkable achievements in surmounting poverty and discrimination. Jagan had a personal story, which included triumphing at U.S. universities, that usually appealed to U.S. citizens. On the other hand, the legitimate enthusiasm for black progress at home and abroad may have blinded U.S. officials in Washington to Forbes Burnham’s intentions. Burnham’s ostensible conversion to anticommunism obviously enhanced his appeal. Nonetheless, policymakers had ample warnings from intelligence analysts, U.S. diplomats in Georgetown, and British officials that Burnham was an unprincipled demagogue whose rule would prove disastrous for Guyana.

Presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. agrees that the United States deluded itself about Burnham and misjudged Cheddi Jagan. Schlesinger remains the only U.S. official to write or speak openly about British Guiana. Schlesinger’s denunciation of U.S. policy has, however, created an intellectual dilemma for him. President John F. Kennedy designed the policy that drove Jagan from power. The president’s rejection of Jagan does not fit into the laudatory profile of Kennedy in Schlesinger’s influential memoir, A Thousand Days (1965). Schlesinger has absolved Kennedy of fault for the disasters that befell Guyana by implicitly raising the “bureaucratic politics” argument. The CIA seized on British Guiana, deciding that “this was some great menace, and they got the bit between the teeth.” Covert intervention in the colony gave the CIA a “great chance to show their stuff.” As Schlesinger presents it, the CIA acted like a “rogue elephant,” trampling on the policies of governmental superiors.¹³

Political scientists properly point out that presidents are not omnipotent and that foreign policies are not always the purposeful acts of unified national governments. Powerful bureaucracies, like the CIA and the Department of Defense, may attempt to impose their will on foreign policy, intimidating the president or the Department of State. Other scholars caution, however, that intramural fights may be “struggles over tactics rather than strategy, pace rather than direction.”¹⁴ During the Cold War, elected officials, agencies, and departments shared the core anticommunist values outlined in the containment doctrine, domino theory, and NSC 68. Although Kennedy encountered willful subordinates during his presidency, Schlesinger’s suggestion that the CIA exceeded its authority in British Guiana cannot be sustained. In his confidential correspondence with Prime Minister Macmillan and his June 1963 meeting with him at Birch Grove, Kennedy demanded that the United Kingdom replace Jagan. The president cited the CIA-aided riots of 1962 and general strike of 1963 as proof that Jagan could not govern the colony. To be sure, in early 1964 McGeorge Bundy briefed President Johnson that CIA operatives, “the professionals,” were “hard-nosed” in insisting that the Colonial Office immediately evict Jagan and resume direct rule. Bundy presented this information to Johnson, however, as a tactical issue. He and Secretary Rusk agreed that Jagan must go “by hook or by crook.”

One last historiographic issue—the role of nonstate actors in international relations—deserves highlighting. The CIA used the good offices of the AFL-CIO to provide cover for its agents and as a conduit for funneling money and propaganda into British Guiana. But U.S. unions went beyond serving as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. With its “International Affairs Department” that mirrored the geographical and regional divisions of the State Department, the AFL-CIO organized itself to conduct foreign policy. The AFL-CIO financed these international operations with money from U.S. government sources. Until the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration gave scant attention to British Guiana. From the beginning of the decade, union executives like Jay Lovestone and Serafino Romualdi charged that the Jagans and the PPP opposed the free-trade union movement and favored Communist unions. They made British Guiana an issue of public debate. Once the Democrats took power in 1961, union leaders had direct access to the executive branch and repeatedly advised the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to attack the Jagans. Union leaders also took the lead in showcasing Forbes Burnham throughout the United States.

Although scholarly concerns are important to address, the significant issue to reflect on is the consequence of the U.S. intervention in British Guiana. In Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s words, a “great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan.”¹⁵ The injustices included destroying a popularly elected government, undermining democratic electoral procedures, wrecking the economy of a poor nation, and inciting racial warfare. Forbes Burnham, the vicious racist embraced by the United States, made Guyana a dangerous, brutal place and a daily nightmare for the majority Indian population. Guyana remains a devastated country with a racially polarized population. In contemporary terms, Guyana might be dubbed “collateral damage,” the sad but inevitable consequence that ensues in the fog of war. The United States fought the good war resisting Soviet tyranny and imperial designs but, at times, miscalculated and went too far in its Cold War zeal; Guyana’s destruction must be measured against Eastern Europe’s liberation. The problem with such rationalizations is that U.S. policymakers repeatedly and summarily rejected sober analyses about British Guiana’s political life provided by sources friendly to U.S. interests. In their war against the Jagans, three presidential administrations sacrificed the ideals and values they claimed to uphold in the battle against international Communism. The U.S. intervention in British Guiana is a Cold War story of imperialism, gender bias, political expediency, and racism.