cold drinks and cold wars
PEPSI MAY TASTE SWEET, BUT THE SOFT DRINK HAS BEEN
INVOLVED IN SOME SURPRISINGLY HARD POLITICS.Writer Andrew MuellerTHE NOTION THAT AMERICAN
FOREIGN POLICY IS CONDUCTED
PRIMARILY IN THE INTERESTS OF
CORPORATIONS IS A FAVOURITE
THEME OF FOIL-HATTED
FULMINATORS. AS CONSPIRACY
THEORIES GENERALLY ARE, THIS
NOTION IS MISGUIDED: A MEANS BY
WHICH THE FOOLISH CAN PERSUADE
THEMSELVES THAT THEY UNDERSTAND
COMPLEXITY, THAT THERE IS MEANING
IN CHAOS. INTERESTINGLY, IT’S NOT
ALWAYS ALTOGETHER WRONG.
..........................................
On September 11, 1973, Chilean President
Salvador Allende was removed by coup d’état;
he shot himself as troops closed in on La
Moneda Palace, the presidential residence in
Santiago. It is well known that, at the very least,
the U.S. was pleased with this outcome – even
the C.I.A.’s oicial account acknowledges trying
and failing to foment the overthrow of Allende
shortly after his election in 1970, and that the
Agency had foreknowledge of the 1973 plot
by Chile’s military. As Washington saw it in
those fervid Cold War years, Allende was an
unacceptable socialist: in 1971, he had made
a point of welcoming Fidel Castro on a
month-long oicial visit, at a time when
few other Latin American countries were
even speaking to Cuba.
It is perhaps less widely appreciated that
America’s second-favourite soft drink may
have played a role in Allende’s demise. The
1970 plot against Allende, in particular, seems
to have been heavily encouraged by PepsiCo
chairman Donald Kendall, who made a couple
of key calls to Pepsi’s former lawyer, a certain
Richard Nixon, by then president of the United
States. PepsiCo, like many other American
corporations, feared that Allende intended to
nationalise its subsidiaries operating in Chile.On September 14, 1970, 10 days after Chile
elected Allende president, Kendall met with
Nixon in the White House – an encounter
not recorded in the oicial log. The following
morning, at Nixon’s behest, Kendall and a
close friend, conservative Chilean newspaper
publisher Agustin Edwards, whom Kendall
had recently hired as PepsiCo vice-president,
had breakfast with National Security Adviser
Henry Kissinger and Attorney-General John
Mitchell. After that, Kendall and Edwards
met with C.I.A. director Richard Helms –
and not long after that, Nixon gave Helms
permission to move against Allende.Richard Nixon and Pepsi had, as the
expression goes, a relationship. Back in
1959, when Nixon was serving as U.S.
vice-president, he’d visited Moscow to
open the American National Exhibition
at Sokolniki Park. At Kendall’s urging,
and in full view of cameras, Nixon urged
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to try a
Pepsi: it was a colossal publicity coup,
and the beginning of an opening which
permitted Pepsi to become, in the 1970s,
the first capitalist product sold in the
USSR. After Nixon lost the 1960presidential election to John F. Kennedy,
Pepsi found him a position at its preferred
law firm. This allowed Nixon to maintain
his network in preparation for a political
relaunch, negotiating on Pepsi’s behalf with
Lebanese President Fouad Chehab, Japanese
Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda and Taiwanese
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, among others.It would be absurdly reductive to suggest that
the U.S. sought to undermine the elected
government of a sovereign state purely because
a fizzy drink manufacturer snapped its fingers:
many other strategic concerns were in play.
But it was not the first time that the U.S.
appeared less interested in making the world
safe for democracy than merely safe for
American capitalism. Several American
interventions in Central America had been,
by the most charitable of interpretations,
heavily coincidental with the interests of
United Fruit, the behemoth whose dominance
of the countries in which it operated gave
us the phrase ‘banana republic’.When Nixon reached the White House in
1969, having been sustained through his
wilderness years partially by Pepsi’s retainer,
he replaced the White House’s Coca-Cola
machines with the Pepsi equivalent. This
was reversed in 1976 by President Jimmy
Carter – who, like Coke, was a product of
Georgia, and had benefited from Coke’s
largesse on the campaign trail, including
the use of its corporate jets. As the ancient
American political wisdom has it: you
dance with who brung you. •095 SMITH JOURNAL