A long, dirty history of foreign government lobbying

TRelationships between foreign governments and members of Congress make headlines and attract attention. First, on May 3, the Department of Justice charged Texas Representative Henry Cuellar with bribery, money laundering, and performing work on behalf of a foreign government. Then, on May 15, the trial began of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, who was charged with using his office to facilitate beneficial transactions and agreements involving selected businessmen and the governments of Egypt and Qatar. The Menendez case revealed sensational and salacious details – from piles of cash to gold bars found in the senator’s mansion – that attracted mass media attention. Cuellar declared his innocence, and Menendez pleaded not guilty.

But while these two cases are making headlines, they are far from the first time foreign governments have been able to court members of Congress. Such efforts – often illegal – have long been a way to shape American policy to benefit other countries. Foreign governments often pursue a two-pronged strategy in which they court policymakers through lobbying and other means while working to shape American public opinion to limit the options of members of Congress and the President. These strategies have yielded enormous benefits in the past, although they have sometimes resulted in scandals.

Perhaps the most significant instance of an inglorious regime that came to shape American politics occurred when dictator Rafael Trujillo took control of the Dominican Republic in 1930. Trujillo quickly endeared himself to a segment of his nation’s population by rebuilding the capital after the San Zenón hurricane in 1930, paying the cancellation of the Dominican Republic’s foreign debts and adopting an anti-Black policy. U.S. State Department officials could not overlook the fact that Trujillo had murdered opponents and their family members while demanding loyalty to his political party and payments from almost every business in his country.

To counter such views and acquire American weapons, Trujillo spent the next three decades trying to shape American public opinion and policy in his favor. To this end, he used lobbying, public relations, and other strategies, setting the standard for regimes seeking to cultivate favorable relationships with members of Congress for years to come.

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Trujillo’s agents first recognized Congress as an essential instrument in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the late 1930s. In October 1937, the dictator encouraged the general slaughter of hundreds of Haitian workers and civilians in the so-called Parsley Massacre. These atrocities triggered a wave of backlash that temporarily isolated the Dominican regime from the international community.

In an attempt to quell the outcry coming from the United States, Trujillo’s officials ordered diplomats to compare his racist and anti-black policies with racism and segregation in the U.S. and enlisted the lobbying services of Joseph Davies, a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But that didn’t help silence the passionate condemnations coming from New York Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr., among others. and Massachusetts Senator David Walsh.

To silence such criticism, Trujillo officials established favorable contacts with Fish and Walsh that included the exchange of money and goods. Fish received at least $25,000 from the dictator’s agents under the guise of an oil investment, but the New York representative denied the bribery allegations for years to come.

Walsh’s treatment was slightly different. A few weeks after the Parsley Massacre, Trujillo welcomed him to the Caribbean. There, Walsh received what he estimated was at least $1,000 in crates of alcohol and mahogany furniture. Much more valuable, however, were six mosaics torn from the walls of the Iglesia de San Nicolás de Barí church, built in 1503 as one of the first Catholic churches in the Western Hemisphere. Religion was not only trinkets and celebrations, but also the perfect means for the dictator to win over the Catholic Walsh.

This courtship worked. Although they had once called him a genocidal despot, Fish and Walsh began to vigorously defend Trujillo as a Christian statesman, and would continue to do so until his death.

As observers questioned such accounts, Trujillo’s agents refined the formula and turned to more acceptable forms of lobbying in hopes of maintaining a favorable image in Congress. For decades, the Dominican government has used the services of former members of Congress from both parties, including New York Rep. William Pheiffer and Montana Sen. Burton Wheeler.

Wheeler – whose company had a $12,500 contract with the Compañía Dominicana de Aviación – demonstrated the value of such connections in 1948. He assured Dominican officials that it was his words to President Harry S. Truman that facilitated the replacement of U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic George Butler , Trujillo’s critic, with the more docile Ralph Ackerman.

In an effort to shape the views of Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg, known for his moral integrity, Trujillo sponsored William A. Morgan, a respected physician well known among Washington politicians, who tried to arrange stays in the Caribbean for Vandenberg’s family members. These efforts were unsuccessful. Morgan ultimately provided only friendly medical advice in the months before Vandenberg’s death in 1951.

But that didn’t discourage Trujillo. He redirected the doctor to court other members of Congress because of their shared interest in Washington politicians’ favorite sport, golf.

One of Trujillo’s most valuable allies, former U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings, hosted a biannual golf tournament in Pinehurst, North Carolina. After hiring Cummings, the dictator began inviting other Dominican allies like Morgan to the tournament, and also provided the dictator with legal advice and invaluable connections. The tournaments allowed Trujillo’s supporters to play alongside the most powerful figures in both politics and industry. Over drinks at the club or strolling the fairways, members of Congress and Truman’s close friend, Leslie Biffle, among others, heard laudatory descriptions of the Dominican dictator’s achievements.

Not surprisingly, given these advances, a group of members of both parties and both houses of Congress – including Wisconsin Representative Gardner Withrow, South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and Florida Senator George Smathers – have consistently rejected the dictator’s involvement in murders and the disappearance of his critics on American soil. This was made even easier by the fact that during the Cold War, Trujillo regularly supported the US in its fight against the Soviet Union. When Fidel Castro took power in neighboring Cuba in 1959, these members of Congress recognized Trujillo as an indispensable and reliable anti-communist ally in the turbulent Caribbean Basin. Despite these justifications, even after the dictator’s death in 1961, rumors circulated that these and other members of Congress had received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes – although nothing was ever proven.

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To avoid such negative media attention, other regimes with unfavorable reputations have often relied more heavily on acceptable forms of lobbying to reshape American public opinion and exert pressure in the halls of Congress. For example, in the 1950s, Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar retained the influential public relations firm of George Peabody and Associates, while Portuguese foreign companies and the Boston-based Portuguese-American Foreign Affairs Commission distributed treaties and pamphlets, pages of which appeared in local media and the Congressional record.

In the mid-1960s, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) adopted a more bombastic strategy in an attempt to maintain its system of white supremacy. In an attempt to reverse the UN embargo and end US trade sanctions, Rhodesian officials unleashed a wave of racist propaganda on the US and contacted a range of right-wing organizations, from Young Americans for Freedom to the John Birch Society. They also sponsored chapters of the Friends of Rhodesian Independence throughout the United States, whose members bombarded congressmen with letters and petitions.

These efforts paid off. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr., supported by a bipartisan conservative coalition, successfully passed an amendment in 1971 that forced the U.S. government to bypass the United Nations and continue to import chromium from Rhodesia. For half a dozen years, countless conservative and right-wing organizations defended this provision as a blow to the Soviet Union and international communism – even as it supported a white supremacist regime.

This story shows that Cuellar and Menendez’s accusations are not unusual. Lobbying by foreign governments is ubiquitous, routine and often goes unnoticed. These governments have spent – ​​and will continue to invest – millions in efforts to gain allies in Congress and shape American public opinion in their favor. In the 21st century, these governments may also benefit from a modernized version of the Rhodesian strategy of social media manipulation.

These governments understand that courting members of Congress and using those who have access to top decision-makers in the executive branch can yield real benefits, as they did for Trujillo and Rhodesian officials working to save the white supremacist regime.

While most of these cases will not rise to the level of criminal charges or attract attention, they will have a profound impact on American policy and could twist it in a direction that is not in the best interests of the United States.

Aaron Coy Moulton is Associate Professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.