Blue Book
Blue Book
Blue Book, U.S. State Department publication with the full title Consultation Among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation (1946). Compiled at the direction of Spruille Braden, who had been ambassador in Buenos Aires before returning to Washington late in 1945 as under secretary of state for American Republic affairs, the Blue Book documented Argentina's wartime relations with the Axis powers. Braden's intention was to discredit Juan Perón, the leading candidate in the Argentine presidential election of February 1946. Using captured German archives and decoded Axis telecommunications, State Department investigators produced the Blue Book in time for the election. Its data are generally accurate but pertain chiefly to the period prior to Perón's political rise in 1944; its interpretations are heavily biased against Argentina. The Blue Book boomeranged: Argentine voters saw it as U.S. interference in their internal affairs. Urged on by the slogan that the United States had handed the Peronists, "¿Braden o Perón?," they elected Perón president.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spruille Braden, Diplomats and Demagogues: The Memoirs of Spruille Braden (1971).
Additional Bibliography
Guillermo Frontera, Carlos. Las relaciones argentino-norteamericanas, 1943–1946. Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken, 2006.
Newton, Ronald C. The "Nazi Menace" in Argentina, 1931–1947. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Peltzer, Enrique. Diez años de conflicto entre la Casa Rosada y la Casa Blanca, 1936–1946. Buenos Aires: Ethos, 2002.
Ronald C. Newton