Pat M. Holt, 87, specialist on Latin America
WASHINGTON - Pat M. Holt, 87, a top Latin American affairs expert with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who expressed misgivings shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, died Sept. 24 at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington County. He had septicemia, a blood infection.
Mr. Holt served on the committee from 1950 to 1977, the last three years as chief of staff.
He was a generalist before he was named as resident authority on Latin America, an assignment he described as having befallen him in early 1958 because a colleague spoke up on his behalf: "Oh, give it to Pat. At least he's been there."
That, he said in a 1980 Senate oral history interview, was the committee's generally lax attitude toward Latin America.
He said senators came to recognize their error in judgment after Vice President Richard M. Nixon's disastrous high-profile 1958 trip to South America - Nixon faced anti-US mobs - and Fidel Castro's Cuban rebellion in 1959.
Mr. Holt's profile grew in relation to renewed US attention on Central America and South America.
Most memorably, he cautioned against US-led anti-Castro activities.
About Easter 1961, he wrote a memorandum outlining his thoughts to committee chairman J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas.
Mr. Holt said in the 1980 interview: "The point was made that one of the things which distinguished us from the Soviet Union was respect for law, and by God, we ought to respect it.
"And then, finally," he said, "the argument was made that the threat to United States interests posed by Cuba was not great enough to warrant this kind of effort, in any event. The phrase, which has frequently been quoted, we used was that Cuba is a thorn in the flesh; it's not a dagger in the heart."
Fulbright met with President Kennedy and gave him the memo shortly before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Later, the president told the senator, "You're the only guy in town who can say, 'I told you so.' "
Mr. Holt remained open to normalizing relations with Cuba. In 1974, he flew to Cuba and met with Castro in a short-lived attempt to change US policy that isolated the island nation.
In retirement, as a foreign affairs columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, Mr. Holt continued to favor lifting the trade embargo on Cuba and criticized what he saw as hostility regarding the United States' use of diplomacy as a frequent and unproductive response to world crises.
