Pat M. Holt, 87; Latin American Affairs Expert

Pat M. Holt had expressed doubts about U.S.-led anti-Castro activities before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Courtesy Of Family)

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-U.S. mobs -- and Fidel Castro's Cuban rebellion in 1959.

Mr. Holt's profile grew in relation to renewed U.S. attention on Central America and South America.

Most memorably, he cautioned against U.S.-led anti-Castro activities. About Easter 1961, he wrote a memorandum outlining his thoughts to committee Chairman J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.).

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 John F. 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 U.S. 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.

While on the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Holt was skeptical of President Lyndon B. Johnson's stated reasons for the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Mr. Holt's investigation of State Department and CIA documents and a follow-up memo to Fulbright downplayed the president's assertion of communist meddling in the Dominican Republic. That led to extensive committee hearings and Fulbright's deepening skepticism toward Johnson's policies, not just in the Dominican Republican but also in the course of the Vietnam War.

Pat Mayo Holt was born Sept. 5, 1920, in Gatesville, Tex., where his father published a weekly paper.

He graduated in 1940 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism and economics and received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1941. On a $1,500 Pulitzer traveling scholarship, he got married and spent a year working at a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia.

After serving in the Army during World War II, Mr. Holt spent the late 1940s in Washington working for Congressional Quarterly News Features and Reporter magazine.

His books included "Colombia Today -- and Tomorrow" (1964), "United States Policy in Foreign Affairs" (1971) and "Secret Intelligence and Public Policy" (1995). He was formerly on the board of the Institute of Current World Affairs, which offers traveling fellowships to young people.

Mr. Holt was a longtime Bethesda resident and a former president of the Montgomery County parent-teacher association. He had lived in Arlington since 1998.

His wife of 59 years, LaVerne Bryson Holt, died in 2000. Survivors include two sons, Philip Holt of Laramie, Wyo., and Michael Holt of St. Louis Park, Minn.; and two granddaughters.