Copyright by Gregory Krauss 2007 - The University of Texas at Austin

the crisis was “interesting and informative enough” that it was sent to the White
House. 80
Beyond his personal performance, Lister’s impact during the Dominican crisis
needs to be understood in the context of the intervention. At the time, many Latin
Americans were outraged that the U.S. had interfered militarily in a sovereign state’s
affairs. 81 Historians have doubted U.S. motives as well. Eric Chester Arthur, for
example, has argued that President Johnson’s official reason for intervening in the
Dominican Republic was pretextual. The U.S. intervened, according to Chester, not
because Communists had usurped the rebel movement, but because President Johnson
and his top aides were uncomfortable with a return to power of left-leaning Juan
Bosch, the constitutionally elected president. 82 The U.S. intervention led to an
election in 1966 between Bosch and Joaquín Balaguer, the former deputy to Trujillo.
Balaguer won amidst accusations of voter fraud, allowing him to rule autocratically
until 1978 and be a force in Dominican politics for most of the next 30 years. 83
Lister’s task during the Dominican crisis thus was to provide a post-hoc
justification for a policy that critics said was not necessarily wise or based on sound
evidence. Lister undoubtedly must have felt pressure to produce only the kind of
intelligence that would justify the President’s policy—much as some intelligence
analysts felt in the lead-up to the current Iraq war. Shlaudeman recalled that he found
Lister’s mission to be “bizarre” for several reasons: because the Johnson
administration had already gone through with the intervention; because the evidence
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