Doing It Their Way

The first part of Richard M. Nixon's 1958 vice presidential tour of Latin America was mostly uneventful, although Peru offered a hint of what was to come when students stoned Nixon during his visit to the national university. His handlers were nervous about Venezuela, the scheduled last stop on the tour. Just a few months earlier, popular protests had put to an end a ten-year Washington-backed dictatorship, which had given lucrative contracts to American mining and oil interests. And Eisenhower's granting of asylum to a number of the old regime's most hated officials, including the head of the murderous National Security Police, did nothing to ease tensions between Washington and the new democratic government. But buoyed by pro-American rallies that took place in a number of cities, the vice president insisted that the trip continue as planned.
Stepping out of his DC-6 onto the tarmac, Nixon, along with his wife, Pat, was confronted with an angry crowd that had assembled on the balcony of the terminal, screaming "Go home," "Get out, dog," and "We won't forget Guatemala"—a reference to the U.S.-orchestrated overthrow of that country's democratically elected president four years earlier. Members of Nixon's entourage had to pass under the balcony to get to their motorcade and when they did a torrent of spit fell on them that some of the stricken at first thought was rain. On the highway out of the airport, hostile drivers tried to sideswipe the vice president's limousine. Upon entering Caracas's narrow city streets, the motorcade was surrounded by a mob and attacked with sticks, rocks, and steel pipes. Nixon was eventually rescued, but nor before his Secret Service detachment drew their guns and not before Eisenhower readied the armed forces to evacuate his vice president if need be. An embassy official later surveyed the limousine and remarked that "it was hard to believe that that black Cadillac with diplomatic license plates 63-CD had borne the Vice President of the United States. The rear windows were shattered, sputum was all over it and the windshield was juSt a white smear as the driver had tried to remove the spit with the wipers." After holing up at the U.S. ambassador's residence, Nixon left the next day "through a tear gas mist"—the Streets had been preemptively gassed to prevent demonstrators from gathering.