Tact & Timing

Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was plainly reaching for political respectability. Clad in diplomatic cutaway, silk tie and striped trousers, he had clinked champagne glasses earlier this month with Warren R. Austin, chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, during Austin's Caribbean tour. Before Austin left the Dominican Republic, the 400-year-old University of Santo Domingo gave him an honorary degree.

The benign Generalissimo also busied himself making the best possible impression on the five traveling investigators of the Inter-American Peace Commission. Largely as the result of Haitian charges that he was behind a December plot to overthrow the government of Haiti, the Organization of American States had determined to find out why there was so little peace in the turbulent Caribbean.

Trujillo argued persuasively that all the trouble in his part of the world was due to the tireless intrigues of Dominican, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan exiles, plotting with the Cuban, Guatemalan, Haitian, Costa Rican and Mexican governments to oust him.

Last week, with the Peace Commission back in Washington, President Trujillo asked his Congress to revoke the extraordinary power granted him last December to declare war on his own responsibility. Thus, with deft timing, he moved to recall an act which had provoked even more criticism than his alleged part in the Haitian plot. Thus the wily dictator also washed his hands in public and waited hopefully for an amiable whitewash at the hands of the Peace Commission.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.