See the daily introduction for 1963-12-09  [from the Norton edition]

Over the weekend, the President had requested a special review of U.S. policy toward Cuba, with an eye toward doing more to thwart Fidel Castro; Johnson also had confirmed his decision to invite Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos to the United States. Johnson believed that close U.S.-Mexican ties formed a key to the success of the Alliance for Progress. Yet he also remained convinced that the alliance could not succeed with the bureaucratic structure he had inherited, and so Johnson had set McGeorge Bundy to the task of considering a revised setup while he searched for a replacement to Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Edwin Martin.

The day before, Bundy had produced a memorandum reflecting the President’s basic position on the question. The national security adviser asserted that the Latin American affairs post “works best when there is a single officer in Washington with full authority over all aspects of our Latin American policy and activity, under the Secretary of State and the President.[note 1] McGeorge Bundy, “Basic Argument for Establishing an Undersecretary for Latin American Affairs and Answers to Arguments against It,” 8 December 1963, Bundy Memos to the President, Box 1, National Security File, Lyndon Johnson Library. Accordingly, he saw no reason not to create a position of under secretary of state for Latin American affairs, in the hope of providing “an important psychological boost to the Alliance for Progress.[note 2] Ibid. Such a move would not form a precedent for the creation of similar posts for other regions of the world, Bundy surmised, because Dean Rusk, George Ball, and Averell Harriman already performed the function for every region but Latin America.[note 3] Ibid.

The problem, Bundy realized, came in filling the position with “an officer of undoubted stature who commands the confidence of leaders in Congress, the executive branch, and the Latin American world.[note 4] Ibid. Johnson had just such a figure in mind, as he revealed in his 3:30 call to Thomas Mann, then serving as ambassador to Mexico. Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, a border community where most of the population was of Hispanic descent, Mann was fluent in both Spanish and English. He trained as a lawyer but joined the State Department in 1943, where he served in a variety of Latin American embassies over the next 15 years. He returned to the United States in 1958, when Dwight Eisenhower appointed him assistant secretary of state for economic affairs; two years later, he was elevated to chief policymaker for Latin America, a post that he held until mid-1961. Mann’s association with the Eisenhower administration, which had offered a Latin American policy parsimonious on economic aid and sparing in its support for social democrats (at least until Fidel Castro came to power), appeared to provide some indication of a change in perspective regarding the alliance, as well as a source of irritation to more than a few administration officials who regarded Mann as too conservative. As it turned out, Mann’s selection was determined more by personality than policy; alliance politics remained largely on the course set for it by the Kennedy administration. The call nonetheless cemented the return to Washington of a diplomat who would play a key role in the Johnson administration over the next two months, as crises flared with Panama and Cuba.[note 5] Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp.106–60.