The Tango War Page 17

  “He sent me this ring,” said Carlos. He was wearing the ring his mother once gave his father as a birthday gift. “Look at how clear the initials still are,” said Flor. CS, father and son, Chuhei and Carlos Shimomura. “This ring carries much memory,” Chuhei had written, the first communication with his son in more than thirty years. “I can never in my life forget that time, the flower of my youth … Do not take it off.”

  In 1942, when Chuhei Shimomura reached Japan, the imperial military sent him to serve in the occupied Philippines. By the time the intermediary put him in touch with Carlos, Chuhei had become a wealthy owner of portside warehousing facilities, living in his ancestral home with a Japanese wife and two sons. A few months after the ring arrived in the mail, Carlos went to meet his father at the Lima airport.

  “From the moment he appeared in the door of the airplane, I said, ‘There is my father.’” At Flor de Maria’s house, where she had prepared a meal, their mother was waiting. “We all greeted each other,” Carlos said, as if the moment had been touched with formality. “Then my father sat down and cried. I had never seen a man cry like that.”

  Chuhei Shimomura would stay in Peru for several days, but that first evening he made his good-byes quickly, unable even to wait for the meal, not able to talk. He asked his son to take him to the nearby neighborhood where they had all lived as a family. The two men stood outside their old house. It was eleven o’clock at night.

  “Look, it’s all just the same as it was, all the same!” Chuhei said. They gazed at the house for a while. “Son, do you know the song ‘Caminito’?” Of course Carlos did. And together they sang the tango composed in Argentina and known throughout Latin America. “Little path that time has erased … I live in sadness…”

  When one of their half brothers wrote to them of Chuhei’s death in 1984, including with the letter a photo of his Buddhist funeral, Carlos and Flor had a Mass said in Lima. But the rupture that came with the family’s experience of political kidnapping during the war had marked them in ways that could not be erased.

  “My mother and my aunts told me that as a child I was always looking for my father,” Flor de Maria said. Her brother’s house sat on the flight path for Lima’s airport, and the last planes of the evening seemed close above our heads as they descended for landing, making a roaring chamber around her words. It impressed me that, seventy years after the fact, the estimable professor looked bereft when she spoke of those years. “They said I looked for him in rooms of the house. ‘What time is Daddy coming?’”

  Carlos weighed in, as if to calm the strong feelings of the conversation. “Bueno, they are the lessons of life,” he said. But Flor would not be quieted.

  “For thirty-six years, to need my father, every day of my life…” It occurred to me that even though Flor de Maria Shimomura had never spent a moment breathing stale air in the hold of a swaying ship, had never spent years surrounded by barbed wire or looked up to see guns pointed at her, she, too, had led a life captive to the kidnap program. As long as witnesses such as these were alive, I thought, we might still have a chance to hear of historical mistakes made in the name of national security, in a war remembered as honorable. But when they are gone?

  Carlos and Flor de Maria Shimomura drove me through the streets of Callao to Lima, choosing a route along the sea. On one side, cliffs loomed; on the other side, lines of white foam caught headlights from the road as waves rose and broke. The emotions of the last hours had spent themselves, and brother and sister began to sing, upbeat songs from their mother’s homeland in northern Peru and the melancholic but comforting tango, “Caminito,” about the familiar “little path” once walked with such joy and love.

  “Don’t tell her if she passes by again … that my tears watered your soil…”

  PART III

  The Illusionists

  8.

  SEDUCTION

  The Nazi intellectual imperialism of ideas is just as serious a threat as the possibility of a military invasion.

  —NELSON ROCKEFELLER, U.S. COORDINATOR OF INTER-AMERICAN AFFAIRS, 1940

  Young Nelson Rockefeller looked out over the extensive holdings that spread around his ranch in Venezuela, where the family oil business was well entrenched. Not yet thirty, Nelson directed a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey and controlled vast reserves in the country. Rockefeller was already an aficionado of Latin American art, a proclivity he received from his mother, Abby. And he did his best to speak Spanish.

  On his 1939 visit to Venezuela, Rockefeller decided that the best way to preserve the status quo that allowed companies like his to prosper in Latin America was good public relations with host nations. But with war on the horizon, the image of the United States, its commercial interests, and its people were being challenged in these very places where Rockefeller not only had business, but for which he was developing affection.

  When he returned to New York, the ambitious young man prepared a short memo with colleagues from other family businesses, the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller Center, and had it delivered to President Roosevelt. Nazi propaganda and its infiltration into Latin America media must be fought, the memo said, fire with fire. The outcome of the three-page paper was the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), which became known as the Rockefeller Office for its director—Nelson Rockefeller. The CIAA’s mission: economic and psychological warfare in Latin America.

  Working with the FBI, the Rockefeller Office contributed to blacklists the names of companies suspected of aiding the enemy or simply owned by ethnic Germans, Japanese, and Italians, cutting off their trade with the United States. After Pearl Harbor, the Rockefeller’s CIAA was the engine behind an all-out propaganda blitz.

  Even before the United States entered the war, Rockefeller hired staff in New York and key Latin cities for the CIAA. At first, said one former staff member, “almost all our efforts were directed into organizing the pro-Western elites of Venezuela and Brazil into a private network of influence.” Soon, however, they set their sights on the wider population.

  The Italians and especially the Reich through Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment Joseph Goebbels were providing stories, including opinion pieces in Spanish and Portuguese—even signed “By Adolf Hitler”—for regional publications. With steady flows of money, sometimes out of Rockefeller’s own pocket, the CIAA was determined to overcome the Reich’s head start in spreading its own version of the truth.

  Rockefeller reached out to Henry Luce of Time magazine, radio broadcasting companies, film studios, and producers of U.S. products from Lux Soap to Coca-Cola, making sure the Treasury Department gave an exemption for the advertising costs of corporations that worked with him. Advertising from these U.S. companies through the CIAA soon reached 40 percent of the total advertising revenue of radio stations and newspapers in Latin America, virtually supporting the media that took the ads, impressing readers and listeners with the pleasures and products that came along with the American way of life. Rockefeller mobilized a staff of twelve hundred journalists, ad men, and public-opinion experts, such as future pollster George Gallup.

  The slick magazine On Guard, a typical CIAA offering, was based on the model of Henry Luce’s Life magazine, featuring pictures by the world’s best photographers. With the cover banner “For the Defense of the Americas,” On Guard soon outsold the Reich-subsidized magazine that aimed at the same general audience. A typical issue of On Guard in Portuguese featured photos of battle-ready Mexicans drilling in Baja California and U.S. Army guards on watch at a seaside fort in Puerto Rico. An article talks about the “slavery” conditions of the occupied French and shows churches going up in flames at the hands of Germans—photos certain to strike fear into the hearts of pious Latin Catholics.

  Rockefeller’s most audacious counterpropaganda weapon, however, was unabashed glitz. He recruited Hollywood stars such as Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Bing Crosby, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as “Goodwill
Ambassadors.” They hobnobbed across the continent with government officials and the social upper crust, appeared on radio, and gave interviews. George Balanchine and the American Ballet Caravan performed in Latin American cities for five months, premiering two productions that would become known as masterpieces: the Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial (Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2). Aaron Copland visited fellow composers in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina and oversaw public performances of his ballet Billy the Kid, which treats the bandit as an antihero and reprises cowboy songs. Waldo Frank, a socialist novelist and literary critic who wrote for the New Yorker and the New Republic, gave public lectures and interviews. Frank was arguably better known in Latin America than in the United States for his book Our America (1919), in which he explores a vision of North and South America united across ethnicities and geography to fulfill a common progressive destiny. As a Goodwill Ambassador, Frank endeared himself to the region when he opened lectures saying, “I come here to learn.”

  Nevertheless, a look at the lines outside cinemas in busy downtown Latin capitals showed Rockefeller that he might reap the highest return for investment and reach the most people by combining Goodwill Ambassadors with the most magical medium of the time—movies. For years Latin countries had railed at the cinema stereotypes Hollywood used to portray people who lived south of the Rio Grande as “bad hombres,” greasers, slick Latin lovers who lose the girl to American he-men, women who were voluptuous but brainless, gunslingers, and some wizards who knew about witchcraft and potions. Instead, Good Neighbor films would portray Latin Americans as who they were, building a bridge between the Latin movie-loving public and U.S. audiences.

  The CIAA embarked on a program of seduction by celluloid. Rockefeller reached out to Hollywood through John Hay Whitney, a refined millionaire from one of New York’s best families and chief of the CIAA’s Motion Picture Division. Together, “Jock” Whitney and Rockefeller recruited two paragons of American creativity as Goodwill Ambassadors to Latin America: Walt Disney and Orson Welles.

  In the case of Welles, the appointment would be catastrophic. In the case of Walt Disney, however, it worked spectacularly well.

  While half of this world is being forced to shout “Heil Hitler,” our answer is to say, “Saludos Amigos.”

  —WALT DISNEY ON A HOLLYWOOD RADIO PROGRAM, DECEMBER 12, 1942

  Brazilians knew Mr. Walt Disney before he ever set foot in South America—he was the father of Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s appeal cut through politics. Word had it that George V, the king of England, wouldn’t go to a movie exhibition unless one of Mickey’s cartoons was also on the bill; Mussolini loved Topolino; FDR requested that a Mickey Mouse cartoon be included when he screened movies for guests in an upstairs hall of the White House. Disney feigned puzzlement and sounded aggrieved when he heard that the Fuehrer was not a fan.

  “Imagine that!” he wrote in a magazine article. “Well Mickey is going to save Mr. A. Hitler from drowning or something some day … Then won’t Mr. A. Hitler be ashamed.”

  In fact, Goebbels thought Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a “masterpiece,” and once gave Der Führer a Christmas package containing eighteen Mickey Mouse cartoons; Hitler was “pleased to no end,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. Goebbels’ censors in the German Ministry of Propaganda did ban some Disney films, such as The Barnyard Battle, judging it “offensive to national dignity.” (Barnyard portrayed an army of mice fighting cats wearing German army helmets.) But Disney cartoons ran in German movie theaters even as Hitler ranted against imported foreign cultural products. And the German public loved their Mickey Maus.

  Mickey represented an image of Americans that Nelson Rockefeller wanted to promote. The Mouse lived in a small town not unlike those found in early twentieth-century Kansas and Missouri where Disney grew up. He invented can-do solutions to vexing problems, such as using Pluto’s wagging tail as a windshield wiper in a storm. And anyone might relate to Mickey’s dilemmas. Take the inevitable appearance of ants, squirrels, and dancing flies that devour The Picnic when Mickey and Minnie are distracted, or the menagerie of buzzing, humming, and crawling insects in Mickey’s Garden that only grow larger when they come into contact with bug spray. Disney films and comics peppered the globe in thirty-seven languages. Their very existence was good propaganda.

  Best of all, as a person Walt Disney was the kind of Goodwill Ambassador who stood for values that harked back to an imagined simple “all-American” past. Born in Chicago and brought up on a farm, Disney moved to California at age twenty-one, but in a way he never left the Midwest. He kept its Heartland habits of friendliness and plain living. His worldview was not overly preoccupied with cultural relativity or political engagement. Young Walt grew up poor, worked newspaper routes and lunchtime jobs, and didn’t go to college. But he was more apt to attribute his underprivileged boyhood to his father’s lack of ambition to rise above harsh circumstances than he was to blame the economic and political system in which his family lived. By the time he was forty, he was wealthy and influential. You would hear no critique of America’s faults from Walt Disney. “There’s enough ugliness and cynicism in the world without me adding to it,” he said.

  Disney was also a consummate businessman. His Walt Disney Studios was the Google or Apple of its day, operating on the cutting edge of technological advances. Boyishly athletic, although often found with a cigarette in hand, Disney agreed to come to Latin America, but he did not agree with Rockefeller’s idea of a typical Goodwill tour. He wouldn’t meet mayors and presidents or attend formal events, and he insisted upon bringing along a team to work on film ideas. He was already on his way to being a billionaire, but more than anything Walt Disney was a workaholic who once said, “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”

  That was all fine with Rockefeller and Jock Whitney. They agreed to underwrite expenses for the traveling film team that Disney and his people came to call El Grupo: the boss, his wife Lillian, fifteen writers and artists. Rockefeller also agreed to back two films from the trip for up to $50,000 each. Thus in August 1941, after a two-day air journey (no night flying) from Los Angeles to Miami to the Bahamas to Belém, El Grupo’s Clipper set down upon the blue waters of Rio’s Guanabara Bay.

  The members of El Grupo strolled among crowds in the Brazilian capital and roamed tropical gardens, rode horseback on Argentine ranches, floated in the balsa boats of Lake Titicaca on the border between Bolivia and Peru. At night in Rio, they went dancing at the elegant Urca Casino with its stunning view of the bay, where they could dine on French cuisine served upon Limoges porcelain and drink from Czech crystal. By day they worked hard, thinking film with pencils and pads in hand; at the same time, they made themselves available to locals they met. A picture from Life magazine shows Disney behind his handheld camera shooting beachgoers while lying flat on his stomach—fully clothed—on the strand in Copacabana. In another shot, Mary Blair, a twenty-nine-year-old artist from Oklahoma, carves out an image of Mickey Mouse for onlookers from damp sand. One fine day on the terrace of the luxurious Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, Disney donned his hat to mime the steps of the traditional zamba with dancers who arrived to show how it was done; footage by another member of El Grupo shows Walt light-footed and adept, the dance’s signature white scarf in hand as accordionists play and artists around him try their luck with the steps.

  Disney’s warning that he wouldn’t meet local lights evaporated. He good-naturedly played the role of popular guest at galas, nightclubs, and events in his honor. Everywhere they went, El Grupo sketched and took notes, photographed, and recorded the music they heard—samba on Rio streets, the urban tango and rural zamba in Argentina, the cueca, the panpipes and wooden flutes of Chile and Peru. Disney was unable or unwilling to learn enough Spanish or Portuguese to converse with those he met in the street, but he had other ways to communicate. He stood on his head for a gathered crowd or posed for pictures, sometimes surrounded by children.
/>
  “Walt Disney is far more successful as an enterprise and as a person than we could have dreamed,” wrote Jock Whitney in a report to Rockefeller in New York. “His public demeanor is flawless. He is unruffled by adulation and pressure—just signs every autograph and keeps smiling.”

  The era of what political scientists would later call “soft power”—using means other than brute force, such as communications, to bring countries into alignment with diplomatic goals—had truly begun. Disney’s journey also influenced his growing creative enterprise.

  Before the Goodwill tour, Walt Disney had rarely set foot outside the United States, and few others in the group were well traveled. South America hit them like a sensual avalanche with its vibrant colors, lush foliage, and new rhythms in music and dance. Disney constantly recorded what he saw with a small sixteen-millimeter camera—the pictures show his artists on beaches, in traditional markets, covering their sketch pads with images of exotic plants and birds, and with renderings of details of Latin life they were seeing for the first time. They noted the way rural Peruvian women carried their babies wrapped on their backs; the way mounted Argentine gauchos hurled their traditional throwing weapons, called bolas—weights attached to the end of leather cords—and watched them fly through the air. Wooly Andean llamas were a new animal to them—they watched the creatures sprint and fall captured, legs tangled up in the bolas.

  Latin America changed the eye of Disney Studios, a shift personified in the artist Mary Blair, who would shape the distinctive look of Disney for the next twenty years, from feature films to the Disneyland theme parks. Mary Blair’s watercolors of the late 1930s showed dark, stormy skies or huge trees washed gray and black; in one of her first Disney works, concepts for a tale about a dog that would become Lady and the Tramp, Christmas shoppers walk heads down in the cold, huddled inside thick coats. They would be her last work of the kind.