Essay: DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: The Necessary Risk

COMPARED with most other areas of cold-war conflict, the Dominican Republic is a small country, its civil war a minuscule affair. Yet in the six weeks since the first of 20,500 U.S. Marines and paratroopers landed in Santo Domingo, the Johnson Administration has faced a drumfire of criticism unequaled in range and volume since John F. Kennedy tried and failed to blast Fidel Castro out of power at the Bay of Pigs.

In the Dominican crisis, as in the Cuban fiasco, the deepest source of disquiet is the widespread assumption—at home and abroad—that the U.S. intervention marks a return to "gunboat diplomacy."...