The 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic by 22,000 US combat troops ended a period of almost 40 years during which the United States had repeatedly forsworn intervention in Latin America - and it shocked both domestic and international observers. The inter-American system was badly damaged, and the rift between the liberal intelligentsia and the US government, soon to be widened by the war in Vietnam, was in many ways initiated in Santo Domingo. Drawing on nearly 150 personal interviews with individuals in the Dominican Republic and the United States, on rare access to classified US government documents, and on his own first-hand experiences during the crisis, Abraham F. Lowenthal rejects official, liberal and radical accounts of the intervention. Instead, he explains it as the product of fundamental premises, of decision-making procedures and of bureaucratic politics. In a new preface, Lowenthal discusses the Dominican intervention in its Cold War context and in comparative and theoretical perspective. As the issue of US military action is raised anew - from Iraq to Bosnia - the lessons of the Dominican crisis will continue to command attention.