Cold War, Rockefeller Philanthropy, and Medical Education in Brazil during the 1950s

The objective is to analyse how Rockefeller Foundation staff in Brazil during the 1950´s interpreted and handled the pressures of the United States’ political environment and the demands of the Brazilian scientific and political context in their decisions based on the communications, reports, diaries and recommendations to RF administrators in New York. A sensitive political issue for Rockefeller men in Brazil and in New York was to deal with the fact that the Brazilian universities hosted an extensive “red network,” made up of academics and intellectuals sympathetic to or affiliated with the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), legalized in the country's democratization in 1945. Even after being outlawed in 1948, the PCB maintained its influence in the scientific and medical communities. In sum, the aim is to understand Cold War science and medicine “on the ground” or the relationships between RF, the Brazilian government (the Ministry of Education) and the medical community in a Cold War environment. A key issue is to understand how the Rockefeller Foundation leaders dealt with the constraints of the Cold War, in particular the McCarthyist wave, United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, better known as the Cox-Reece Committee of Investigation (1952–1953), and other pressures that affected the RF’s funding policies. The RF office in the city of Rio de Janeiro, under the administration of Robert Briggs Watson (1954-1962), implemented a policy of routinely (and consistently throughout the period) checking the political and ideological background of candidates (or potential candidates) applying to receive US philanthropic support and funds on medical education. In short, I suggest that the Cold War philanthropic diplomacy in science and medicine can be understood from this case as a temporally and spatially multifaceted process, combining international, national, local and even individual dynamics.