Given the political atmosphere that surrounded the 1970 Chilean presidential election, and even the global tensions of the Cold War at the time, the initial outrage that United States President Richard M. Nixon expressed at the nomination of Chile’s leftist candidate, Salvador Allende, is easy to grasp. After all, Nixon had been elected to the US Senate 20 some years prior to Allende’s victory, and a much younger Nixon had established himself as a prominent anti-communist, garnering national attention. Then, there was Allende: 1970 Chile’s newly, democratically-elected Marxist president, a man who had campaigned under the auspices of a left-leaning party called Unidad Popular (UP). Allende’s party was comprised of a largely diverse electoral bloc of leftist factions, including Chile’s Socialists and Communists. From the outset, the significance of the Allende victory seemed to portend for Chile, at least, a democratic realization of the revolution that many had hoped would midwife a future of democracy, pluralism, and liberty.
Despite the fact that a leftist cohort of fractious political groups was able to achieve this, Nixon’s rage about the 1970 Allende presidential victory in Chile hardly comes into focus if one assumes that the election alone was enough to make Nixon holler “that sonofabitch … that bastard Allende” deep inside of White House walls. No. In fact, unless the Allende election gets ramified further, much of the significance of…