Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,849

This is the grave of Ralph Dungan.

Born in Philadelphia in 1923, Dungan grew up in the city, went into the Navy in World War II as a flight instructor, and then used the new GI Bill to attend St. Joseph’s University back at home. He graduated and also got a law degree. He was involved in local Democratic Party politics and soon became a rising figure in the Philadelphia Democrats. He got close to Senator John F. Kennedy, who hired him as an aide in 1956. He remained close to JFK as the latter rose into the presidency. He was a close advisor on the 1960 campaign and then was named Special Assistant to the President in 1961. There were two of those and the other is the much more famous Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He worked in the White House until after Kennedy’s death. Like Schlesinger, he had a foreign policy portfolio, dealing with foreign aid issues and then serving as a dealmaker in both Africa and Latin America, two areas of deep concern to the Kennedy administration in this era of anticolonial revolution and the question of where these new nations (or new governments in the case of Latin America) would side more with the Americans or the Soviets in the Cold War.

Dungan was also very much a Best and the Brightest guy and was in charge of bringing a lot of people into administration work. Another task of Dungan was as liaison between JFK and the Catholic Church, obviously a sensitive subject since the president had to deal with a ton of latent or just outright open anti-Catholicism that had not completely gone away, despite his victory in 1960. So a lot of his time was spent talking to various Catholic leaders, both in and outside the U.S. And of course the Catholics wanted Kennedy to do certain things, such as make sure that the horrors of the birth control pill never reached the American public. That was not something Kennedy was interested in and Dungan had to run interference on issues like that.

A lot of Kennedy insiders left after the 1963 assassination. Others were shifted to less central positions and that includes Dungan. Should be noted that it was in Dungan’s office that Kennedy’s family and advisors gathered in the immediate aftermath to plan the funeral, so that’s how close Dungan was to the most inside people in the administration and family. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson named Dungan ambassador to Chile. He would spend the next three years in that important and vulnerable nation. This was the years of Eduardo Frei, the moderate progressive who would engage in reforms that would both alienate the country’s far right and not satisfy the country’s far left that had leadership under Salvador Allende. Frei would later destroy his legacy by basically approving of the 1973 coup, so outraged was he by how far Allende had gone. But that a ways off. The Kennedy administration was already tremendously hands on in Chile and this was the game that men such as Dungan and Schlesinger liked to play–the American liberals promoting liberalism in Latin America through government manipulation and the power of a gun if need be.

So Dungan was already involved in promoting Frei and his party from the time he entered the Kennedy administration. Dungan and Frei were buddies as well. Dungan was a true believer in Frei’s moderate social programs. So he would promote Frei’s ideas back in the U.S. For example, he gave a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about Frei’s plans to eliminate illiteracy in rural Chile. He stated it was in the Chamber’s interest to support such programs saying it was “an indispensable step in agricultural, industrial, and commercial growth. Nowhere in the world is there an illiterate peasantry that is progressive. Nowhere is there a literate peasantry that is not.” I don’t know, seems to me the Chamber would probably want an illiterate peasantry, at least in this nation….

Dungan was also protective of Chile and the State Department against the Defense Department engaging in destabilizing programs in the nation, which was already happening in the Frei years. Dungan furiously attacked the Defense Department after one of the figures in Project Camelot, the Defense Department’s plan to use social scientists as counterinsurgency agents, showed up in Chile, barely hiding who he was working for. He was really angry, in part because he was the one who had to deal with all the anti-American protests that this kind of thing led to.

Dungan largely left the foreign policy realm after his three years in Santiago. New Jersey hired him to revitalize its laughably awful public system of higher education, largely considered among the worst in the nation at that time. Any decent student from New Jersey left New Jersey for college, or went to a private school. When he took the job, Time magazine called it a “no-lose proposition” for Dungan becaue there was no way he could make the higher ed system in the state worse. Dungan lobbied the legislature heavily for increased funding and in his decade running it, vastly increased the size of the state university system. In the decade he ran the system, overall enrollment in the state’s many public colleges tripled to 120,000. This is when Rutgers became the important institution it remains today. But he also was pretty anti-union within the higher ed system and implemented the kind of big tuition increases that are common today but that were still new then. In fact, students pelted him with eggs at least once.

After leaving his work on higher ed, Dungan went to work as chief executive of the Inter-American Development Bank, which funds a lot of projects in Latin America.

Dungan died in 2013, at the age of 90, at his home in Barbados. Tough retirement spot.

Ralph Dungan is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other Kennedy advisors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kenneth O’Donnell is in Brookline, Massachusetts and Evelyn Lincoln is in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.