Lincoln Gordon

Lincoln Gordon was American ambassador in Rio when the Brazilian military removed the government in 1964, and the declassified record of what he did has been argued about ever since. He was a Harvard economist and a Rhodes scholar who worked on wartime production planning and the Marshall Plan before Kennedy sent him to Brazil in 1961 as an architect of the Alliance for Progress - the programme meant to make Latin American reform an alternative to revolution. What he found was Joao Goulart, a president the Americans read as tolerating communists, presiding over inflation above eighty per cent and pressing land and literacy reforms that the officer corps and the landowners regarded as the prelude to something worse. Gordon's cables urged Washington that Goulart was steering towards a personal dictatorship. In late March 1964 he recommended, and Johnson approved, Operation Brother Sam: a naval task force with an aircraft carrier, fuel and ammunition, positioned to support the conspirators if they needed it. They did not - Goulart left for Uruguay within days - and the ships turned back before arriving, so the intervention never happened. What did happen was that the United States had committed itself in advance and recognised the new government almost immediately. Gordon called it a democratic rebellion at the time and spent decades afterwards insisting the coup was Brazilian in origin, which is true, and that American support was marginal, which the tapes make harder to sustain. He later ran Johns Hopkins and wrote on Brazil for the rest of his long life. The dictatorship he helped legitimise lasted twenty-one years.

• Lived: 1913 CE – 2009 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: diplomat, scholar