In Brazil, as in England, you don’t have to be a resident of your constituency to run for offices in the national government. Although there were many local issues and local personalities involved, the underlying national issue of the campaign of 1962 was whether Brazil, in the so-called cold war, should incline towards Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Communist powers, or towards the United States, and its Alliance for Progress program. Lacerda opposed the Communists. Brizola spoke their language. In our curious age, when, among the Western peoples whose institutions the Communists are undermining, anyone who vigorously opposes them is spoken of as a controversial figure, Lacerda has been, almost since boyhood, the most controversial of controversial figures in Brazilian public life.
It was in Washington that I first met Carlos Lacerda.
Ever since our uproarious motor trip into the hills of Minas Gerais in the days when driving a car in backcountry Brazil was a sporting proposition I’ve always had my face fixed for a laugh when I went to call on the Whites. By the fall of 1952 they had moved to Washington from Rio. This time I could hear Bill’s and Connie’s voices laughing inside when I rang the doorbell of their Georgetown apartment.
From the livingroom I could hear a voice with a foreign accent pronouncing the words: “Oopaylong Ca-seedy.” Immediately I was introduced to a tall strikingly handsome man. In one hand he was brandishing a pearlhandled cap pistol. A glittering holster was draped over one shoulder. Perched on his head above his shellrimmed glasses was a small boy’s cowboy hat.
The Whites explained him as a Brazilian journalist who had come to Washington to receive an award from the Inter-American Press Association. His English was fluent but erratic. His high spirits were catching. He shared our taste for the absurd. We all laughed our heads off about Oopalong Ca-seedy.
Connie had been helping him buy Wild West equipment for his children before starting home. They had been showing it off to Bill with appropriate gestures. The Whites’ living room was littered with wrapping paper, striped jumpers, cowboy suits, towheaded dolls, assorted gadgets from the Five and Ten.
His taxi was waiting to take him to the airport. We helped him pack up his purchases into a couple of shoppingbags and very reluctantly bade him goodby.
In the excitement I’d failed to catch his name. “He’s the nicest man in Brazil,” the Whites told me after he’d gone. “His name is Carlos Lacerda.”
A number of years went by before I ran into Carlos Lacerda again at a luncheon in one of the mountain resorts near Petrópolis. The Brazilian friend who was driving us up from Rio started to tell his life history as soon as we were free of the dense traffic of the city.
In those days the Petrópolis road climbed the steep slope hairpin by hairpin through great trees and flowery underbrush. My friend would catch his breath in the middle of a sentence while he swung the little car around another curve. His wife could talk of nothing but how excited she was about meeting Carlos Lacerda. She’d voted for him twice, she said she was going to vote for him again. We were going to pick him up at his country place and take him along to lunch with a lady named Lota de Macedo Soares.
Dona Lota had just built the modernest of modern Brazilian houses. We were looking forward to seeing the house. Our friend’s wife said she had seen plenty of modern houses. It was Lacerda she wanted to see.
“He’s charming to meet,” the husband said, “but when you put a typewriter in front of him he becomes vindictive. He’s a terrible man. Didn’t he kill Vargas?”
“I thought Vargas shot himself.”
“Lacerda’s attacks in his newspaper drove him to it … Carlos Lacerda’s the most dangerous man in Brazil.”
“How come?”
My Brazilian friend couldn’t answer. He was busy avoiding an onrushing truck on a particularly sharp curve. We all breathed again when he pulled off the road at the top of the hill to a stall where he bought us coffee and crisp little meatpies. While we munched, and looked down over the tops of the trees at the incredible view of the bay of Guanabara simmering in the sunny haze between purple toothshaped mountains, he continued his briefing.
Weaned on Controversy
Lacerda’s ideas, began my friend, are those of many generous-minded men in our time in many different countries the world over, but he takes them so seriously. He began to laugh. The trouble with Carlos is that once he starts talking he doesn’t know when to stop. Controversial. He can’t open his mouth without stirring up controversy.
He was brought up from the cradle in an atmosphere of controversy. The whole family was in politics. Carlos was born in Rio the year the First World War began, but his grandfather, Sebastião Lacerda, who was a justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, insisted on registering his birth at the old family home at Vassouras on the Paraíba River in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
The state of Rio, a weirdly beautiful region of halfabandoned great houses and plantations that have been running down ever since the emancipation of the slaves, has always been separate from the city, which in the days before the federal district was moved into the interior, was the capital of Brazil.
Carlos’ father, Maurício Lacerda, was a rather erratic Socialist deputy. He came back from Europe after the Russian revolution declaring himself to be a Maximalist. The Maximalists were the extreme left wing of the Russian Socialists before Lenin taught everybody in Russia to think the same way. The father was too busy with a number of things to pay much attention to his family, so young Carlos was raised at his grandfather’s place on the Paraíba River. This was a small fruit farm established by Carlos’ greatgrandparents. The wife, who was Portuguese, sold mangoes while the husband, by profession a baker, baked bread. Out of the proceeds they sent Carlos’ grandfather to study law in São Paulo where another member of the family had already made a name for himself as a jurist. Perhaps Carlos’ countryman’s fondness for growing things originated in these early days at Vassoura. He says the Paraíba River was as important to his boyhood as the Mississippi was to Mark Twain’s.
Carlos was a precocious lad. At sixteen he was already on his own in Rio, studying law and picking up a little money writing for the newspapers. He was developing a prodigious ability for hard work.
This was in 1930, the year when a widespread rising of military men and politicians installed Getúlio Vargas in the presidency. Brazil was suffering its share of the political upheavals that followed in the wake of the Great Depression.
Vargas ousted the business-oriented regime of President Washington Luíz, who was such a good friend of the White House that Herbert Hoover sent him home on a battleship after a state visit to the United States. Washington Luíz was the last of a line of Brazilian statesmen who considered friendship with the United States virtually part of their oath of office. Now the stockmarket crash had made a dent in American prestige.
Portugal, Spain, and Italy were already under various sorts of Fascist dictatorships. Hitler’s baleful star was rising in the north. Among the people of Europe Fascism was the rage. Vargas looked to Europe for guidance rather than to the United States.
Up to Vargas’ time politics in Brazil had been the business of oligarchical groups. Vargas appealed to the masses. His eventual denial of any of the rights of political agitation helped by a spirit of contradiction to arouse the public and make politics one of the great Brazilian preoccupations.
Carlos Lacerda took to politics like a duck to water. He early showed a sharp pen for invective and a talent for public speaking. He had charm, good looks, and reckless personal courage. He was fired by all the enthusiasms of his father’s utopian socialism.