backed by loyalist military commanders, to stop the ongoing process of political radicalization, and that the only way to pre-empt Goulart's move was a grassroots revolutionary movement. According to many authors, Brizola's uncompromising radicalism denied his brother-in-law's government the ability to "compromise and conciliate" and to adopt a feasible reformist agenda. According to American scholar Alfred Stepan, Brizola's "rhetoric of resentment" gained Goulart a few supporters, but also many powerful and strategically located foes - as was the case when Brizola, out of a public rostrum, called a commanding general, to his face, a "gorilla". Some say Brizola's reasons for this were egotistical; according to Rose, "Leonel Brizola was concerned only with Leonel Brizola". Other authors say Brizola advocated a reformist agenda centered on concrete issues (land reform, extension of the franchise, foreign capital controls), whose acceptance was regarded as unbearable and indigestible by the ruling classes and their international allies, and whose deployment was foreign to the contemporaneous political system. In a March 1964 State Department telegram sent to the American ambassador in Brazil, U.S. support of the incoming military coup was equated with denying Goulart and Brizola a position of democratic legitimacy that allowed them to adopt their "extremist" plans. Some earlier American policymakers had expressed their repugnance at the prospect of supporting Goulart's agenda of reforms as "an attempt to force the US to finance an inimical regime". According to José Murilo de Carvalho, Brizola's aggressive stance towards the reforming process was more coherent than Goulart's, who supported a reformist agenda but eschewed the necessary use of force to foster it. Goulart's ambivalence towards his in-law did not win him any international support: U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon regarded Goulart as an opportunist who was "mesmerized" by Brizola. Exile and return (1964–1979) In April 1964, a coup d'état overthrew Goulart. Brizola was the only political leader to support for the president, sheltering him in Porto Alegre and hoping a bid to rouse the local army units towards the restoration of the toppled régime could be made. Brizola engaged himself in schemes to confront the military putschists, including giving a fiery public speech at the Porto Alegre City Hall, exhorting army NCOs to "occupy barracks and arrest the generals", which earned him the lasting hatred of the dictatorship's military commanders. After an unsuccessful month in Rio Grande, Brizola fled in early May 1964 to Uruguay, where Goulart was already