ABSTRACT
When Lyndon Baines Johnson reached the White House, Latin America watched anxiously to gauge whether his commitment to the region would match that of his predecessor. Johnson evidently felt that his first task was to reassure a world shocked by the assassination that there would be, as he phrased it, "continuity in transition." Johnson considered himself the true populist, personally able to understand the plight of Latin America's appalling poverty and inequality. The three crises that Johnson cites in his memoirs are: the violence in Panama over the sovereignty of the Canal Zone, the threat by Cuba to cut off the water supply to the US naval base at Guantanamo, and the landing of US marines in the Dominican Republic. Since the earliest stages of the postwar era, when Dean Acheson formed the mixed US—Brazilian Economic Commission, Brazil loomed as the most important Latin American country for the United States next to Mexico.
