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BILLBOARD
New Articles/Reviews
The Second Dallas, a DVD Robert Kennedy documentary produced,
written and directed by Massimo Mazzucco. Reviewed by Jim DiEugenio
The Connely Bullet
Strong proof that Connally was hit by a
bullet from a different assassin, by Robert Harris
Journalists and JFK,
those who were in and around Dealey Plaza that day and those who made a
career of the case afterwards.
Intro By Gary King
Part
1,
Part
2,
Part
3 (new)
by Bill Kelly.
Joseph Green on the
late
Manning Marable's new full scale biography of Malcolm X.
David Mantik vs. Pat Speer on the JFK Autopsy X-rays: A Critique of
patspeer.com Chapters 18a, 18b, and 19b, by David W. Mantik
Seamus Coogan on Joseph Farrell's new book
LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy:
A Coalescence of Interests, plus a look at the fraudulent MJ
12 papers.
A Comprehensive Review by David Mantik of Hear No Evil: Social
Constructivism and the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination
by Donald Byron Thomas
The Real Wikipedia?
by JP Mroz and Jim DiEugenio
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Sirhan and the RFK
Assassination
Part I: The Grand Illusion
Part II: Rubik's Cube by Lisa Pease
Who is Anton Batey?
CTKA takes a close look at a most curious radio host who is a JFK
denier, Chomskyite, and yet happens to be in league with John McAdams
and David Von Pein. Yep, its all true.
Part 1
Part 2
The Illusion of Michael Shermer, Principles of Sleight of Hand,
reviewed by Frank Cassano
Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory on JFK, reviewed by Seamus Coogan.
Reclaiming History
Part X "How the DA Acquitted everyone but Oswald," reviewed by Jim
DiEugenio.
LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's
Assassination by Phillip F. Nelson, reviewed by Joseph
Green.
Inside the ARRB
Reviews of Douglas Horne's multi-volume study of the declassified
medical evidence in the JFK case. Reviewed by Jim DiEugenio, David
Mantik and Gary Aguilar.
COMING SOON:
A three part series on John McAdams in
anticipation of his book on the JFK case:
The 20
year Evolution of a Rightwing, Propagandist
"Is John McAdams' web site the worst ever on the JFK case?" Who is a
better murder detective, John McAdams or Inspector Clouseau?
Billy Kelly does an
update and addition to the Chicago plot to kill JFK.
Seamus Coogan on
the whole UFO's and aliens and MJ-12/Kennedy assassination linkage.
Bill Davy continues
our Wikipedia exposure series by examining an entry dealing with the JIm
Garrison investigation.
. |
Introduction:
We are reprinting this article as
a complementary
essay to the first part of
the Brian Hunt-Jim DiEugenio essay on Anton Batey and his mentor
Noam Chomsky. Batey and Chomsky try to portray President Kennedy as no
different in his foreign policy views than the president who preceded
him, Eisenhower, or those who came after him, Johnson or Nixon. Hunt and
DiEugenio corrected the record of errors and distortions with copious
footnotes to declassified CIA reports on the Bay of Pigs, and the plots
to kill Fidel Castro, and the newly declassified file of the
Assassination Records Review Board on Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from
Vietnam. We also
used books by several authors who are much more interested in
balance, good information and logic than either Batey or Chomsky are.
The following essay by Jim
DiEugenio appeared in the January-February 1999 issue of
Probe (Vol. 6 No. 2). It is
largely based on a much and sorrowfully overlooked book by Richard
Mahoney entitled
JFK: Ordeal in Africa. That book contains probably the
best look at President Kennedy’s views of foreign policy, especially in
the Third World. It concentrates on the Congo crisis of the late fifties
and early sixties, following it from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson.
Mahoney really did use the declassified record, as he visited the
Kennedy library for weeks to attain documents to fill in the record. In
examining this record, there can be no doubt about the facts, the
actions, and the conclusions. In relation to his predecessor, and his
successor, Kennedy was not a Cold Warrior, and he did not buy the Domino
Theory. And he was in conflict with those who did, hence the title of
the essay.
But this essay, and Mahoney's
book, go beyond just the Congo crisis and Kennedy's sympathy for
Lumumba. It explains why he held those beliefs about the Third World,
and why they extended to Vietnam. As Mahoney notes, Kennedy was in
Saigon when the French colonial empire there was crumbling. And it is
there where he met Edmund Gullion, the man who would be his teacher on
the subject of European colonialism. After learning his lessons, Kennedy
returned home, where he tried to break the logjam of anti-communist
boilerplate in the debate between the Dean Acheson Democrats and John
Foster Dulles Republicans. His 1957 speech on the floor of the Senate
about Algeria is still thrilling to read today--but it was a bombshell
at the time. It is that speech we have to keep in mind in explaining the
things he did not do as president: no Navy forces at the Bay of Pigs, no
invasion during the Missile Crisis, and no combat troops into Vietnam.
By the end of this essay we then see why Kennedy had those ingrained
sympathies. In his revealing conversation with Nehru, we see that he
never forgot where he came from i.e. Ireland had been subjugated by
Britain for 800 years.
The following is not Batey-Chomsky
polemics. It is actually history. It tells the truth about an important
event. But as it does so, it reveals the true character of the men who
helped mold it: Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Lumumba, Thomas Dodd, Joseph
Mobutu, Hammarskjold, Moise Tshombe, Cyrille Adoula, Johnson and,
primarily, JFK. In doing that, it becomes larger than its subject, as it
magnifies the moment and the people molding it. It therefore elucidates
a complex episode, and by doing so, it empowers the reader with real
information. Which is what good history usually does.
Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in
Africa
by Jim DiEugenio
“In assessing the
central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the
Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a
comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the
contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President
Kennedy
As Probe has noted
elsewhere (especially in last year’s discussion of Sy Hersh’s
anti-Kennedy screed, The Dark Side of Camelot), a clear strategy
of those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President
Kennedy’s assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in
office. Hersh and his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was,
where he was going, what the world would have been like if he had lived,
and who and what he represented. As with the assassination, the goal of
these people is to distort, exaggerate, and sometimes just outright
fabricate in order to obfuscate specific Kennedy tactics, strategies,
and outcomes.
This blackening of the
record—disguised as historical revisionism—has been practiced on the
left, but it is especially prevalent on the right. Political spy and
propagandist Lucianna Goldberg—such a prominent figure in the current
Clinton sex scandal—was tutored early on by the godfather of the
anti-Kennedy books, that triple-distilled rightwinger and CIA crony
Victor Lasky. In fact, at the time of Kennedy’s death, Lasky’s negative
biography of Kennedy was on the best-seller lists. Lately, Christopher
Matthews seemed to be the designated hitter on some of these issues (see
the article on page 26). Curiously, his detractors ignore Kennedy’s
efforts in a part of the world far from America, where Kennedy’s
character, who and what he stood for, and how the world may have been
different had he lived are clearly revealed. But to understand what
Kennedy was promoting in Africa, we must first explore his activities a
decade earlier.
The Self-Education of John F.
Kennedy
During Kennedy’s six years in the
House, 1947-1952, he concentrated on domestic affairs, bread and butter
issues that helped his middle class Massachusetts constituents. As Henry
Gonzalez noted in his blurb for Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street,
he met Kennedy at a housing conference in 1951 and got the
impression that young Kennedy was genuinely interested in the role that
government could play in helping most Americans. But when Kennedy, his
father, and his advisers decided to run for the upper house in 1952,
they knew that young Jack would have to educate himself in the field of
foreign affairs and gain a higher cosmopolitan profile. After all, he
was running against that effete, urbane, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot
Lodge. So Kennedy decided to take two seven-week-long trips. The first
was to Europe. The second was a little unusual in that his itinerary
consisted of places like the Middle East, India, and Indochina. (While
in India, he made the acquaintance of Prime Minister Nehru who would end
up being a lifelong friend and adviser.)
Another unusual thing about the
second trip was his schedule after he got to his stops. In
Saigon, he ditched his French military guides and sought out the names
of the best reporters and State Department officials so he would not get
the standard boilerplate on the French colonial predicament in
Indochina. After finding these sources, he would show up at their homes
and apartments unannounced. His hosts were often surprised that such a
youthful looking young man could be a congressman. Kennedy would then
pick their minds at length as to the true political conditions in that
country.
If there is a real turning point
in Kennedy’s political career it is this trip. There is little doubt
that what he saw and learned deeply affected and altered his world view
and he expressed his developing new ideas in a speech he made upon his
return on November 14, 1951. Speaking of French Indochina he said: "This
is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born
and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long."
He later added that "the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been
kindled and are now ablaze....Here colonialism is not a topic for
tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men." He then
criticized the U. S. State Department for its laid back and
lackadaisical approach to this problem:
One finds too many of our
representatives toadying to the shorter aims of other Western nations
with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and desires of the people
to which they are accredited.
The basic idea that Kennedy
brought back from this trip was that, in the Third World, the colonial
or imperial powers were bound to lose in the long run since the force of
nationalism in those nascent countries was so powerful, so volcanic,
that no extended empire could contain it indefinitely. This did not
mean that Kennedy would back any revolutionary force fighting an
imperial power. Although he understood the appeal of communism to the
revolutionaries, he was against it. He wanted to establish relations and
cooperate with leaders of the developing world who wished to find a
"third way," one that was neither Marxist nor necessarily pro-Western.
He was trying to evolve a policy that considered the particular history
and circumstances of the nations now trying to break the shackles of
poverty and ignorance inflicted upon them by the attachments of empire.
Kennedy understood and sympathized with the temperaments of those
leaders of the Third World who wished to be nonaligned with either the
Russians or the Americans and this explains his relationships with men
like Nehru and Sukarno of Indonesia. So, for Kennedy, Nixon’s opposition
toward Ho Chi Minh’s upcoming victory over the French in Vietnam was not
so much a matter of Cold War ideology, but one of cool and measured
pragmatism. As he stated in 1953, the year before the French fell:
The war would never be successful
... unless large numbers of the people of Vietnam were won over from
their sullen neutrality and open hostility. This could never be done ...
unless they were assured beyond doubt that complete independence would
be theirs at the conclusion of the war.
To say the least, this is not what
the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French
empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American
intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in
a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward
Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was
replaced by the American version.
Kennedy and Africa
Needless to say, the
Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles decision on Indochina had an epochal ring that
can be heard down to the present day. But there was another developing
area of the world where Kennedy differed with these men. In fact it is
in the news today because it still suffers from the parallel pattern of
both Indochina and Indonesia, i.e. European colonialism followed by
American intervention. In 1997, after years of attempted rebellion,
Laurent Kabila finally ousted longtime dictator Joseph Mobutu in the
huge African state of Congo. But Kabila’s government has proven quite
weak and this year, other African states have had to come to his aid to
prop him up. In late November, the new warring factions in that state
tentatively agreed to a cease-fire in Paris brokered by both France and
the United Nations. The agreement is to be formally signed in late
December. If not, this second war in two years may continue. As
commentators Nelson Kasfir and Scott Straus wrote in the Los Angeles
Times of October 19th,
What Congo so desperately needs
and never has enjoyed is a democratic assembly, one that can establish a
constitution that will allow the country’s next president to enjoy
sufficient legitimacy to get started on a long overdue development
agenda.
There was a Congolese leader who
once could have united the factions inside that country and who wanted
to develop its immense internal resources for the Congolese themselves:
Patrice Lumumba. As with Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Lumumba is not
talked about very much today. At the time, he was viewed as such a
threat that the Central Intelligence Agency, on the orders of Allen
Dulles, planned his assassination. Lumumba was killed just before
President Kennedy was inaugurated.
Yet, in the media commentaries on
the current crisis, the epochal changes before and after Kennedy’s
presidency that took place in the Congo are not mentioned. As with
Indonesia, few commentators seem cognizant of the breaks in policy there
that paved the way for three decades of dictatorship and the current
chaos. One thing nobody has noted was that Mobutu came to absolute power
after Kennedy’s death in a policy decision made by the Johnson
administration. This decision directly contradicted what Kennedy had
been doing while in office. Kennedy’s Congo effort was a major
preoccupation of his presidency in which many of his evolving ideas that
originated in 1951 were put to the test and dramatized in a complex,
whirring cauldron. The cauldron featured Third World nationalism, the
inevitable pull of Marxism, Kennedy’s sympathy for nonaligned leaders,
his antipathy for European colonialism, and the domestic opposition to
his policies both inside the government and without. This time the
domestic opposition was at least partly represented by Senator Thomas
Dodd and CIA Director Allen Dulles. This tortured three-year saga
features intrigue, power politics, poetic idealism, a magnetic African
revolutionary leader, and murder for political reasons. How did it all
begin?
Kennedy Defines Himself
In 1956, the Democrats, always
sensitive to the charge of being "soft on communism", did very little to
attack the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles foreign policy line. When they did,
it was with someone like Dean Acheson who, at times, tried to out-Dulles
John Foster Dulles. Kennedy was disturbed by this opportunistic
crowd-pleasing boilerplate. To him it did not relate to the reality he
had seen and heard firsthand in 1951. For him, the nationalistic
yearning for independence was not to be so quickly linked to the
"international Communist conspiracy." Kennedy attempted to make some
speeches for Adlai Stevenson in his race for the presidency that year.
In them he attempted to attack the Manichean world view of the
Republican administration, i.e. that either a nation was allied with
America or she was leaning toward the Communist camp:
the Afro-Asian revolution of
nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the determination of people
to control their national destinies....In my opinion, the tragic failure
of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to
comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for
good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and
by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to
do with anti-communism. (Speech in Los Angeles 9/21/56)
This was too much even for the
liberal Stevenson. According to author Richard Mahoney, "Stevenson’s
office specifically requested that the senator make no more foreign
policy statements in any way associated with the campaign." (JFK:
Ordeal in Africa p. 18)
Kennedy objected to the "for us or
against us" attitude that, in Africa, had pushed Egypt’s Gamel Abdul
Nasser into the arms of the Russians. He also objected to the
self-righteousness with which people like Dulles and Nixon expressed
this policy. John Foster Dulles’ string of bromides on the subject e.g.
"godless Communism", and the "Soviet master plan", met with this
response from Senator Kennedy: "Public thinking is still being bullied
by slogans which are either false in context or irrelevant to the new
phase of competitive coexistence in which we live." (Mahoney p. 18)
Kennedy on Algeria
Kennedy bided his time for the
most fortuitous moment to make a major oratorical broadside against both
political parties’ orthodoxies on the subject of Third World
nationalism. He found that opportunity with France’s colonial crisis of
the late 1950’s: the struggle of the African colony of Algeria to be set
free. By 1957, the French had a military force of 500,000 men in Algeria
committed to putting down this ferocious rebellion. The war degenerated
at times into torture, atrocities, and unmitigated horror, which when
exposed, split the French nation in two. It eventually caused the fall
of the French government and the rise to power of Charles De Gaulle.
On July 2, 1957, Senator Kennedy
rose to speak in the Senate chamber and delivered what the New York
Times was to call "the most comprehensive and outspoken arraignment
of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an American in public
office." (7/3/57) As historian Allan Nevins wrote later, "No speech on
foreign affairs by Mr. Kennedy attracted more attention at home and
abroad." (The Strategy of Peace, p. 67) It was the mature
fruition of all the ideas that Kennedy had been collecting and refining
since his 1951 trip into the nooks and corners of Saigon. It was
passionate yet sophisticated, hard-hitting but controlled, idealistic
yet, in a fresh and unique way, also pragmatic. Kennedy assailed the
administration, especially Nixon and Dulles, for not urging France into
a non-military solution to the bloody crisis. He even offered some
diplomatic alternatives. He attacked both the United States and France
for not seeing in Algeria a reprise of the 1954 Indochina crisis:
Yet, did we not learn in Indochina
... that we might have served both the French and our own causes
infinitely better had we taken a more firm stand much earlier than we
did? Did that tragic episode not teach us that, whether France likes it
or not, admits it or not, or has our support or not, their overseas
territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to break
free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their
steps to independence. (Ibid p. 72)
The speech ignited howls of
protest, especially from its targets, i.e. Eisenhower, John Foster
Dulles, Acheson, and Nixon. The latter called it "a brashly political"
move to embarrass the administration. He further added that, "Ike and
his staff held a full-fledged policy meeting to pool their thinking on
the whys underlying Kennedy’s damaging fishing in troubled waters." (Los
Angeles Herald-Express 7/5/57) Mahoney noted that, of the 138
editorials clipped by Kennedy’s office, 90 opposed the speech. (p. 21)
Again, Stevenson was one of Kennedy’s critics. Jackie Kennedy was so
angry with Acheson’s disparaging remarks about the speech that she
berated him in public while they were both waiting for a train at New
York’s Penn Central.
But abroad the reaction was
different. Newspapers in England and, surprisingly, in France realized
what the narrowly constricted foreign policy establishment did not:
Kennedy knew what he was talking about. The speech was a mature,
comprehensive, and penetrating analysis of a painful and complicated
topic. As one French commentator wrote at the time:
Strangely enough, as a Frenchman I
feel that, on the whole, Mr. Kennedy is more to be commended than blamed
for his forthright, frank and provocative speech.... The most striking
point of the speech ... is the important documentation it revealed and
his thorough knowledge of the French milieu.
As a result, Kennedy now became
the man to see in Washington for incoming African dignitaries. More than
one commented that they were thrilled reading the speech and noted the
impact it had on young African intellectuals studying abroad at the
time. The Algerian guerrillas hiding in the hills were amazed at its
breadth of understanding. On election night of 1960 they listened to
their wireless radios and were alternately depressed and elated as Nixon
and Kennedy traded the lead.
Ike and the Congo
Once in office, Kennedy had very
little time to prepare for his first African crisis. It had been
developing during the latter stages of the Eisenhower administration and
like Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba it was a mess at the time Kennedy inherited
it. With John Foster Dulles dead and Eisenhower embittered over the U-2
incident and what it had done for his hopes for détente, Allen Dulles
and, to a lesser extent, Nixon had an increasingly stronger pull over
National Security Council meetings. This was even more true about
subject areas which Eisenhower had little interest in or knowledge
about.
In June of 1960, Belgium had made
a deliberately abrupt withdrawal from the Congo. The idea was that the
harder the shock of colonial disengagement, the easier it would be to
establish an informal yet de facto control afterward. Before leaving,
one Belgian commander had written on a chalkboard:
Before Independence = After
Independence
As hoped for, the heady rush of
freedom proved too much for the new Congolese army. They attacked the
Europeans left behind and pillaged their property. The Belgians used
this as a pretext to drop paratroops into the country. In response, the
democratically elected premier, Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph
Kasavubu asked United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for
help. At his request, the United Nations asked Belgium to leave and
voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo.
At this point, the Belgians made a
crucial and insidious move. Realizing Hammarskjold would back the newly
elected government against the foreign invaders, Belgium began to
financially and militarily abet the secession of the Congo’s richest
province, Katanga, in the southeast corner of the state. There was a
primitive tribal rivalry that served as a figleaf for this split. But
the real reason the Belgians promoted the break was the immense mineral
wealth in Katanga. They found a native leader who would support them and
they decided to pay Moise Tshombe a multimillion dollar monthly bounty
to head the secessionist rebellion. As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, some
of the major media e.g. Time and the New York Times
actually backed the Belgians in this act. Yet, as Kwitny also notes:
Western industrial interests had
been egging Tshombe on toward succession, hoping to guarantee continued
Western ownership of the mines. They promised to supply mercenaries to
defend the province against whatever ragtag army Lumumba might assemble
to reclaim it. (Endless Enemies, p. 55)
In spite of the Belgian plotting
and Tshombe’s opportunistic betrayal, Allen Dulles blamed Lumumba for
the impending chaos. His familiar plaint to the National Security
Council was that Lumumba had now enlisted in the Communist cause. This,
even though the American embassy in Leopoldville cabled Washington that
the Belgian troops were the real root of the problem. The embassy
further stated that if the UN did not get the Belgians out, the Congo
would turn to someone who would: the Russians. Further, as Kwitny and
others have noted, Lumumba was not a Communist:
Looking at the outsiders whom
Lumumba chose to consult in times of trouble, it seems clear that his
main socialist influence in terms of ideas ... wasn’t from Eastern
Europe at all, but from the more left-leaning of the new African heads
of state, particularly, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. (p. 53)
As Mahoney makes clear in his
study, Nkrumah was a favorite of Kennedy’s who the new president backed
his entire time in office.
Eisenhower Turns on Lumumba
At this inopportune moment, July
of 1960, Lumumba visited Washington for three days. Eisenhower
deliberately avoided him by escaping to Rhode Island. Lumumba asked both
Secretary of State Christian Herter and his assistant Douglas Dillon for
help in kicking out the Belgians. The response was purposefully
noncommittal. Meanwhile, the Soviets helped Lumumba by flying in food
and medical supplies. Rebuffed by Washington, Lumumba then asked the
Russians for planes, pilots, and technicians to use against Katanga.
This was a major step in sealing his fate in the eyes of Allen Dulles.
Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (then the capital of
the Congo), wired CIA headquarters that the Congo was now experiencing
"a classic Communist effort" to subjugate the government. Within 24
hours, Dulles, apparently with Eisenhower’s approval, set in motion a
series of assassination plots that would eventually result in Lumumba’s
death. Ironically, on the day the plots originated, Lumumba made the
following radio address to his citizens:
We know that the US understands us
and we are pleased to see the US position in bringing about
international peace.... If the Congolese place their confidence in the
US, which is a good friend, they will find themselves rewarded.
(Mahoney, p. 44)
What the unsuspecting Lumumba did
not know was that Eisenhower’s advisers had already made up their mind
about him. As Douglas Dillon told the Church Committee, the National
Security Council believed that Lumumba was a "very difficult, if not
impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and
safety of the world." (Kwitny, p. 57) Imagine, the newly elected premier
of an undeveloped nation whose army could not even stop an internal
secession was now threatening the safety of the world. But, to
reiterate, there is little evidence of Lumumba even being a Communist.
As Kwitny notes, "all through his brief career ... he had publicly
pledged to respect private property and even foreign investment" (p.
72). (Kwitny also could have noted that Dillon was hardly an unbiased
source. As revealed in the book Thy Will be Done,
Dillon was a co-investor with his friend Nelson Rockefeller in
properties inside the Belgian Congo and therefore had an interest in it
remaining a puppet state.)
Lumumba wanted the UN to invade
Katanga. Hammarskjold refused. At this point Lumumba made his final,
fatal error in the eyes of the Eisenhower establishment. He invited the
Russians into the Congo so they could expel the Belgians from
Katanga. Simultaneously, the Belgians began to work on Kasavubu to split
him off from, and therefore isolate, Lumumba. The CIA now begin to go at
Lumumba full bore. The CIA station, led by Devlin, began to supersede
the State Department policy-making apparatus. Allen Dulles began to
funnel large amounts of money to Devlin in a mad rush to covertly get
rid of Lumumba. At the same time, Devlin began to work with the Belgians
by recruiting and paying off possible rivals to Lumumba i.e. Kasavubu
and Joseph Mobutu. This tactic proved successful. On September 5, 1960
Devlin got Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba as premier. But the dynamic and
resourceful Lumumba got the legislative branch of government to
reinstate him. When it appeared Lumumba would reassert himself, Dulles
redoubled his efforts to have him liquidated. (The story of these plots,
with new document releases plus the questions surrounding the mysterious
death of Hammarskjold will be related in the second part of this
article.)
With a split in the government,
Hammarskjold was in a difficult position. He decided to call a special
session of the UN to discuss the matter. At around this time,
presidential candidate Kennedy wired foreign policy insider Averill
Harriman a query asking him if Harriman felt Kennedy should openly back
Lumumba. Harriman advised him not to. Since he felt that there was
little the US could do unilaterally, he told the candidate to just stay
behind the United Nations. (Interestingly, Harriman would later switch
sides and back Tshombe and Katanga’s secession.) Kennedy, whose
sympathies were with Lumumba, took the advice and backed an undecided
UN. In public, Eisenhower backed Hammarskjold, but secretly the CIA had
united with the Belgians to topple Lumumba’s government, eliminate
Lumumba, and break off Katanga. Lumumba’s chief African ally, Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana, made a speech at the UN in September of 1960 attacking
Western policy in the Congo. Kennedy now made references in his speeches
to Nkrumah which—not so subtly—underlined his split with Eisenhower over
the Congo.
The Death of Lumumba
As of late 1960, the situation in
the Congo was a chaotic flux. Hammarskjold’s deputy on the scene,
Rajeshwar Dayal of India, refused to recognize the Kasavubu-Mobutu
regime. Dayal went further and decided to protect Lumumba and his second
in command, Antoine Gizenga, from arrest warrants made out for them by
this new government. The American ambassador on the scene, Clare
Timberlake, was now openly supporting the pretenders, Kasavubu and
Mobutu. His cables to Washington refer to Lumumba as a Communist with
ties to Moscow. With Timberlake’s sympathies now clear, and the Belgians
pumping in more war supplies to Katanga, Lumumba’s followers decided to
set up their own separatist state in the northwest Congo, the province
of Orientale with a capital at Stanleyville.
In November of 1960, Dayal
rejected the Kasavubu-Mobutu government and blamed them for playing a
role in murder plots against Lumumba. Following this declaration—and
exposure of covert action—the US openly broke with Hammarskjold on Congo
policy. The State Department issued a press release stating (incredibly)
that it had "every confidence in the good faith of Belgium." (Mahoney,
p. 55) The White House further warned the UN that if Hammarskjold tried
any compromise that would restore Lumumba to power, the U. S. would make
"drastic revision" of its Congo policy. As Kwitny notes, this clearly
implied that the US would take unilateral military action to stop a
return to power by Lumumba.
Dayal had tried to save Lumumba’s
life against Devlin’s plots by placing him under house arrest,
surrounded by UN troops in Leopoldville. On November 27th, Lumumba tried
to flee Congo territory and escape to his followers in Stanleyville.
Devlin, working with the Belgians, blocked his escape routes. He was
captured on December 1st and returned to Leopoldville. (There is a
famous film of this return featuring Lumumba bloody and beaten inside a
cage, being hoisted by a crane, which Timberlake tried to suppress at
the time.) Enraged, Lumumba’s followers in Stanleyville started a civil
war by invading nearby Kivu province and arresting the governor who had
been allied with the Leopoldville government.
At this juncture, with his
followers waging civil war, the Congolese government not recognized by
the UN, and Lumumba still alive, the possibility existed that he could
return to power. On January 17th, Lumumba was shipped to Kasai province
which was under the control of Albert Kalonji, a hated enemy of Lumumba.
There he was killed, reportedly on orders of Katangese authorities,
probably Tshombe, but surely with the help of the CIA. As author John
Morton Blum writes in his Years of Discord, the CIA cable traffic
suggests that Dulles and Devlin feared what Kennedy would do if he took
office before Lumumba was gone (p. 23). Kwitny also notes that the new
regime may have suspected Kennedy would be less partial to them than
Eisenhower was (p. 69). He further notes that Kasavubu tried a last
minute deal to get Lumumba to take a subordinate role in the government.
Lumumba refused. He was then killed three days before JFK’s
inauguration.
Although he was murdered on
January 17th, the news of his death did not reach Washington until
February 13, 1961.
Kennedy’s new Policy
Unaware of Lumumba’s death,
Kennedy requested a full-scale policy review on the Congo his first week
in office. Kennedy had made an oblique reference to the Congo situation
in his inaugural address. He had called the UN, "our last best hope" and
pledged to support "its shield of the new and the weak". Once in office
he made clear and forceful those vague insinuations. On his own, and
behind the scenes, he relayed the Russians a message that he was ready
to negotiate a truce in the Congo. Ambassador Timberlake got wind of
this and other JFK moves and he phoned Allen Dulles and Pentagon Chief
Lyman Lemnitzer to alert them that Kennedy was breaking with
Eisenhower’s policy. Timberlake called this switch a "sell-out" to the
Russians. Upon hearing of the new policy formation, Hammarskjold told
Dayal that he should expect in short order an organized backlash to
oppose Kennedy.
On February 2nd, Kennedy approved
a new Congo policy which was pretty much a brisk departure from the
previous administration. The new policy consisted of close cooperation
with the UN to bring all opposing armies, including the Belgians, under
control. In addition, the recommendation was to have the country
neutralized and not subject to any East-West competition. Thirdly, all
political prisoners should be freed. (Not knowing Lumumba was dead, this
recommendation was aimed at him without naming him specifically.)
Fourth, the secession of Katanga should be opposed. To further dramatize
his split with Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy invited Lumumba’s staunch
friend Nkrumah to Washington for an official visit. Even further, when
Nehru of India asked Kennedy to promise to commit US forces to the UN
military effort and to use diplomatic pressure to expel the Belgians,
Kennedy agreed. But although his policies were an improvement, Kennedy
made a tactical error in keeping Timberlake in place.
The Republican Timberlake now
teamed with Devlin and both ignored the new administration’s diplomatic
thrust. They continued their efforts to back the increasingly rightwing
Kasavubu-Mobutu government with Devlin also helping Tshombe in Katanga.
When Congo government troops fired on the newly strengthened and
JFK-backed UN forces, Timberlake stepped over the line. In early March
of 1961 he ordered a US naval task force to float up the Congo River.
This military deployment, with its accompanying threat of American
intervention, was not authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone
Kennedy. Coupled with this was another unauthorized act by Devlin. The
CIA, through a friendly "cut-out" corporation, flew three French jet
trainers into Katanga. Kennedy was enraged when he heard of these acts.
He apologized to Nkrumah and recalled Timberlake. He then issued a
written warning that the prime American authority in countries abroad
was the ambassador. This included authority over the CIA station.
Enter Thomas Dodd
At this point, another figure
emerged in opposition to Kennedy and his Congo policy. Clearly,
Kennedy’s new Congo policy had been a break from Eisenhower’s. It ran
contra to the covert policy that Dulles and Devlin had
fashioned. To replace the Eisenhower-Nixon political line, the
Belgian government, through the offices of public relations man Michael
Struelens, created a new political counterweight to Kennedy. He was
Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. As Mahoney notes, Dodd began to
schedule hearings in the senate on the "loss" of the Congo to communism,
a preposterous notion considering who was really running the Congo in
1961. Dodd also wrote to Kennedy’s United Nations ambassador Adlai
Stevenson that the State Department’s "blind ambition" to back the UN in
Katanga could only end in tragedy. He then released the letter to the
press before Stevenson ever got it.
One of the allies that Dodd had in
his defense of the Katanga "freedom fighters", was the urbane,
supposedly independent journalist William F. Buckley. As Kwitny wittily
notes, Buckley saw the spirit of Edmund Burke in the face of Moise
Tshombe. Dodd was a not infrequent guest on Buckley’s television show
which was then syndicated by Metromedia. Buckley’s supposed
"independence" was brought into question two decades ago by the exposure
of his employment by the CIA. But newly declassified documents by the
Assassination Records Review Board go even further in this regard. When
House Select Committee investigator Dan Hardway was going through Howard
Hunt’s Office of Security file, he discovered an interesting vein of
documents concerning Buckley. First, Buckley was not a CIA "agent" per
se. He was actually a CIA officer who was stationed for at least
a part of his term in Mexico City. Second, and dependent on Buckley’s
fictional "agent" status, it appears that both Hunt and Buckley tried to
disguise Buckley’s real status to make it appear that Buckley worked for
and under Hunt when it now appears that both men were actually upper
level types. Third, when Buckley "left" the Agency to start the
rightwing journal National Review, his professional relationship
with propaganda expert Hunt continued. These documents reveal that some
reviews and articles for that journal were actually written by Hunt, e.
g. a review of the book The Invisible Government.
In other words, the CIA was using
Buckley’s journal as a propaganda outlet. This does much to explain that
journal’s, and Buckley’s, stand on many controversial issues, including
the Congo crisis and the Kennedy assassination. It also helps to explain
the Republican William F. Buckley allying himself with Democrat Tom Dodd
in defending the Katanga "freedom-fighters."
The Death of Hammarskjold
In September of 1961, while trying
to find a way to reintegrate Katanga into the Congo, Hammarskjold was
killed in a suspicious plane accident (to be discussed in part two of
this article). At this point, with Hammarskjold gone, Timberlake
recalled, and Dodd carrying the propaganda battle to him, Kennedy made a
significant choice for his new ambassador to replace Timberlake in the
Congo. He chose Edmund Gullion for the job. As Mahoney writes:
Kennedy’s selection of Edmund
Gullion as ambassador was of singular consequence to Congo policy. In
the President’s view, Gullion was sans pareil among his Third
World ambassadors—his best and brightest. There was no ambassador in the
New Frontier whose access to the Oval Office was more secure than his.
(p. 108)
Gullion had been one of Kennedy’s
early tutors on foreign policy issues and the pair had actually first
met in 1948. Later, Gullion was one of the State Department officials
Kennedy sought out in his 1951 visit to Saigon. He had been important in
convincing Kennedy that the French position in Vietnam was a hopeless
one. In 1954, when Kennedy began attacking the Eisenhower
administration’s policy in Indochina, he had drawn on Gullion as a
source. The White House retaliated by pulling Gullion off the Vietnam
desk. As Mahoney states about the importance of Gullion’s appointment by
Kennedy:
In a very real sense, the Congo
became a testing ground of the views shared by Kennedy and Gullion on
the purpose of American power in the Third World.… Both Kennedy and
Gullion believed that the United States had to have a larger purpose in
the Third World than the containment of communism. If the US did not, it
would fall into the trap of resisting change.... By resisting change,
the US would concede the strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. (p.
108)
What Gullion and Kennedy tried to
do in the Congo was to neutralize the appeal of the extremes i.e.
fascism and communism, and attempt to forge a left-right ranging
coalition around a broad center. This policy, and Kennedy’s reluctance
to let Katanga break away, was not popular with traditional American
allies. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan questioned
Kennedy’s intransigence on Katanga, Kennedy wrote back:
In our own national history, our
experience with non-federalism and federalism demonstrates that if a
compact of government is to endure, it must provide the central
authority with at least the power to tax, and the exclusive power to
raise armies, We could not argue with the Congolese to the contrary. (Ibid.
p. 109)
This precarious situation, with
both domestic and foreign opposition mounting against him, seemed to
galvanize the usually cool and flexible Kennedy. He went to New York to
pay tribute to Hammarskjold’s memory. He then moved to supplement
Gullion inside the White House. George Ball was appointed as special
adviser on the Congo. Even in 1961, Ball had a reputation as a maverick
who was strongly opposed to US intervention in Vietnam. Ball agreed with
Kennedy and Gullion that a political center had to be found in the
Congo. The administration concentrated their efforts on the appointment
of Cyrille Adoula as the new premier. Adoula was a moderate labor leader
who, unfortunately, had little of the dynamism and charisma of Lumumba.
By the end of 1961 he had moved into the premier’s residence in
Leopoldville.
But there was one difference
between Ball and Gullion on American Congo policy post-Hammarskjold.
Ball seemed willing to compromise on the issue of Katanga’s autonomy;
perhaps even willing to negotiate it away for a withdrawal of all
mercenary forces from the Congo. But it seems that Kennedy’s visit to
New York for Hammarskjold’s wake at the UN stiffened his resolve on this
issue. Before the General Assembly, Kennedy had stated: "Let us here
resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain." He then
backed this up by allowing Stevenson to vote for a UN resolution
allowing the use of force to deport the mercenaries and advisory
personnel out of Katanga.
Dodd in Katanga
One week after the November 24,
1961 UN resolution, Senator Dodd was in Katanga. Moise Tshombe had
already labeled the resolution an act of war and had announced he would
fight the deployment of the UN force. Dodd was at Tshombe’s side when he
toured the main mining centers of Katanga attempting to drum up support
for the anticipated conflict. Dodd later did all he could to intimidate
Kennedy into withdrawing U. S. support for the mission by telling him
that Tshombe’s tour had elicited a "tremendous" popular response amid
"delirious throngs" of both blacks and whites.
While in Katanga, a curious event
occurred in the presence of Thomas Dodd. Dodd was being feted at a
private home in Elizabethville when Katangese paratroopers broke into
the house. They took hostage two UN representatives, Brian Urquhart and
George Ivan Smith. A State Department employee, Lewis Hoffacker, bravely
attempted to stop the kidnapping and managed to get Smith away from his
abductors. But he couldn’t get Urquhart away. Under heavy threats from
the UN military commander, Colonel S. S. Maitro, Urquhart was released
shortly afterwards, albeit in badly beaten condition. The event is
curious because it poses some lingering questions: 1) How did the
paratroopers know about the location of the private party? 2) Dodd was
not molested. Were the soldiers advised not to touch him? 3) Unlike
Hoffacker, it does not appear that Dodd used his influence to intervene
in the abduction. If so, why not?
Whatever the odd circumstances
surrounding this event, and whatever Dodd’s actions in it were, it
proved to be the causus belli in the war for Katanga. Shortly
afterwards, Katangese tanks blockaded the road from the UN headquarters
to the airport. The UN troops attacked the roadblocks and heavy fighting
now broke out. Supplemented by U. S. transport planes, the UN effort was
logistically sound. So the Katangese had to resort to terrorist tactics
to stay even. They used civilian homes, churches, and even hospitals to
direct fire at UN troops. The troops had no alternative except to shell
these targets. Kennedy and the UN began to take a lot of criticism for
the civilian casualties. But when the new Secretary General, U Thant,
began to waiver ever so slightly, Kennedy gave him the green light to
expand the war without consulting with the other Western allies who were
not directly involved with the military effort. When Secretary of State
Dean Rusk relayed the allies’ complaints over the expansion of the war,
Kennedy replied that "some of our friends should use their influence on
Tshombe." (Mahoney p. 117) He further told Rusk that there would be no
consideration of a cease-fire until Tshombe agreed to talk to Adoula.
The Propaganda War over Katanga
Once the shooting started in
earnest, the propaganda war also began to heat up. A full page ad
appeared in the New York Times. It compared Katanga to the Soviet
client state of Hungary in its 1956 crisis. One of the signers for the
ad was Buckley’s young conservative group, the Young Americans for
Freedom. Time magazine placed Tshombe on its cover. Kennedy
fought back by getting Eisenhower to issue a statement in support of his
policies. He also sent an emissary to break up any attempted alliance
between Dodd and southern senator Richard Russell of Georgia. When the
same State Department officer tried to get in contact with Nixon, the
former vice-president told him not to waste his time.
In December of 1961, Tshombe sent
word to Kennedy that he wanted to negotiate. Tshombe was in a weak
position as fighter jets were strafing his palace. Kennedy sent Gullion
and former UN official Ralph Bunche to mediate the talks. The session
did not go well. Tshombe, in the middle of the talks wished to leave to
consult with other dignitaries from his government. Gullion would not
allow it but he did get Tshombe to recognize the Congo’s constitution
and place his soldiers under Kasavubu’s authority. He would then be
allowed to run for the Congolese parliament. This would have been enough
for Ball to agree to a cease-fire. But immediately upon his return to
Katanga, Tshombe denounced the bargain and the violence was renewed.
Tshombe’s ploy almost worked.
Adoula’s leftist followers lost faith in him and began to leave for
Stanleyville. Britain and France defected from the mission. Congress did
not want to refinance the UN effort to put down the revolt. Even Ball
advised Kennedy to cut his losses and leave. It appears that it was
Gullion who decided to press on in the effort to break Katanga and it
seems it was his advice, and his special relationship with Kennedy, that
kept the president from losing faith.
Kennedy’s Economic Warfare
In 1962, Kennedy decided to hit
Tshombe where it hurt. A joint British-Belgian company named Union
Miniere had been bankrolling the Katangan war effort in return for
mineral rights there. Kennedy, through some British contacts now
attempted to get the company to stop paying those fees to Tshombe. Union
Miniere refused. They replied that they had billions wrapped up in
Katanga and could not afford to risk the loss. Kennedy now went through
the American ambassador in England to the Belgian representatives of the
company. He told them that unless a good part of the stipend to Katanga
was curtailed, he would unleash a terrific attack on Katanga and then
give all of Union Miniere over to Adoula when the Congo was reunified.
This did the trick. The revenues going to Tshombe were significantly
curtailed. The cutback came at an important time since Tshombe had
already run up a multimillion dollar debt in resisting the UN effort.
To counter these moves, Dodd
forged an alliance with Senator Barry Goldwater, the ultraconservative
senator from Arizona. Their clear message to Tshombe was that he should
hold out until the 1964 presidential election in which Goldwater had
already expressed an interest in running. Kennedy countered by bringing
Adoula to both New York and Washington. In his speech at the United
Nations, Adoula paid tribute to "our national hero Patrice Lumumba" and
also criticized Belgium. (Mahoney, p. 134) At his visit to the White
House, Adoula pointed to a portrait of Andrew Jackson and told Kennedy
how much he admired Old Hickory. Remembering his history, and clearly
referring to Tshombe and Katanga, Kennedy made a toast to Adoula quoting
Jackson’s famous reply to secessionist John Calhoun, "Our federal union;
it must be preserved." Two months after the visit, Kennedy wrote a
letter to Adoula:
These three months have been
trying for us. I am searching for an agreement to end the armaments race
and you are searching for an agreement to reunite your country.... You
may be assured that we will spare no effort in bringing about this end.
(Ibid p. 135)
The supporters of Tshombe needed
to retaliate for the success of the Adoula visit. Tshombe’s press agent,
Michel Struelens arranged for him to appear on a segment of Meet the
Press, a rally at Madison Square Garden, and a press conference at
the National Press Club in Washington. Dodd invited Tshombe to testify
before his subcommittee. In the face of all this advance fanfare,
Kennedy made it clear that he was considering not granting Tshombe a
visa into the country. Gullion and Stevenson argued that it was not a
legal necessity since Tshombe was not a real representative of the
Congolese government. Kennedy’s legal adviser, Abram Chayes argued
against the denial. In the end, Kennedy again sided with Gullion and
denied the visa. Again, Kennedy took a barrage of criticism for this
maneuver. His father’s old friend, Arthur Krock, accused the
administration of evasion and of denying Tshombe his right to be heard.
The John Birch Society now formally entered on Katanga’s side. Even
Herbert Hoover lent his name to pro-Katanga statements.
The Last Round
Denied access to the US, Tshombe
now set about rearming his military. Kennedy decided to push for
economic sanctions followed by a blockade. But Kennedy tried one last
time to open negotiations with Tshombe. But by October of 1962 these had
proved futile. Moreover, Adoula misinterpreted Kennedy’s negotiation
attempt as backing out on his commitment to the Congo. Adoula now turned
to the UN and the Russians in hopes of one last knockout blow against
Tshombe. On November 2, 1962 the first clashes began. Gullion worked
overtime to get Adoula to stop courting the Russians. Kennedy then wrote
to Rusk and Ball that he wanted both men to come to a conclusion on what
the American role should be in the renewed hostilities. Finally, Ball
decided on the use of force, even if it meant the direct use of American
air power.
On December 24, 1962 Katangese
forces fired on a UN helicopter and outpost. The UN now moved with a
combined land and air strike code-named Operation Grand Slam. By
December 29th, Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga was under heavy
siege. By the second week of January, the UN advance was proceeding on
all fronts. By January 22nd, Katanga’s secession effort was over. As
Stevenson said later, it was the UN’s finest hour. Kennedy wrote
congratulatory notes to all those involved. To George McGhee, special
State Department emissary on the Congo, Kennedy wrote that the task had
been "extraordinarily difficult" but now they were entitled to "a little
sense of pride." (Mahoney p. 156)
The Congo: 1963
A few months after Katanga had
capitulated and Tshombe had fled to Rhodesia, the UN, because of the
huge expense of the expedition, was ready to withdraw. Kennedy urged U
Thant to keep the force in the Congo; he even offered to finance part of
the mission if it was held over. But the UN wanted its forces out, even
though it looked like Adoula’s position was weakening and the Congolese
army itself was not stable or reliable. Kennedy had a difficult choice:
he could quit the Congo along with the UN, or the US could try to stay
and assume some responsibility for the mess it was at least partly
responsible for. Kennedy chose to stay. But not before he did all he
could to try to keep the UN there longer. This even included going to
the UN himself on September 20, 1963 to address the General Assembly on
this very subject:
a project undertaken in the
excitement of crisis begins to lose its appeal as the problems drag on
and the bills pile up.... I believe that this Assembly should do
whatever is necessary to preserve the gains already made and to protect
the new nation in its struggle for progress. Let us complete what we
have started.
The personal appearance and the
speech were enough to turn the UN around. The body voted to keep the
peacekeeping mission in place another year. Adoula wired Kennedy his
sincere gratitude.
But in October and November things
began to collapse. President Kasavubu decided to disband Parliament and
this ignited an already simmering leftist rebellion. Gizenga’s followers
called for strikes and army mutinies. They tried to assassinate Mobutu.
Kennedy followed the new crisis and wanted a retraining of the Congolese
army in order to avert a new civil war. But there was a difference
between what Kennedy wanted and what the Pentagon delivered. By October
of 1963, Mobutu had already become a favorite of the Fort Benning crowd
in the Army, the group that would eventually charter at that military
site the School of the Americas, an institution that would spawn a whole
generation of rightwing Third World dictators. Kennedy had wanted the
retraining carried out by Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert who
wanted the retraining to be implemented not just by the US but by five
other western countries. Kennedy also agreed with U Thant that there
should be African representation in the leadership of that program. Yet
Mobutu, with the backing of his Pentagon allies, including Army Chief
Earle Wheeler, managed to resist both of these White House wishes. In
November, Kennedy ordered a progress report on the retraining issue. The
Pentagon had done little and blamed the paltry effort on the UN.
1964: LBJ reverses Kennedy’s
policies
In 1964, the leftist rebellion
picked up strength and began taking whole provinces. President Johnson
and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy decided that a weakened
Adoula had to be strengthened with a show of American help. The CIA sent
Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties against the rebels. When the UN
finally withdrew, the US now became an ally of Belgium and
intervened with arms, airplanes and advisors. Incredibly, as Jonathan
Kwitny notes, Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the Congo
government (p. 79). Further, Tshombe now blamed the revolts on
China! To quote Kwitny:
In a move suspiciously reminiscent
of a standard US intelligence agency ploy, Tshombe produced what he said
were some captured military documents, and a Chinese defector who
announced that China was attempting to take over the Congo as part of a
plot to conquer all of Africa. (p. 79)
With this, the Mobutu-Tshombe
alliance now lost all semblance of a Gullion-Kennedy styled moderate
coalition. Now, rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were
allowed to join the Congolese army in the war on the "Chinese-inspired
left". Further, as Kwitny also notes, this dramatic reversal was done
under the auspices of the United States. The UN had now been dropped as
a stabilizing, multilateral force. This meant, of course, that the tilt
to the right would now go unabated. By 1965, the new American and
Belgian supplemented force had put down the major part of the rebellion.
General Mobutu then got rid of President Kasavubu. (Adoula had already
been replaced by Tshombe.) In 1966, Mobutu installed himself as military
dictator. The rest is a familiar story. Mobutu, like Suharto in
Indonesia, allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside
investment. The riches of the Congo, like those of Indonesia, were mined
by huge western corporations, whose owners and officers grew wealthy
while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in abject poverty. As with the
economy, Mobutu stifled political dissent as well. And, like Suharto,
Mobutu grew into one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in
Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars (Kwitny p.
87). Just one Swiss bank account was worth $143 million. And like
Suharto, Mobutu fell after three decades of a corrupt dictatorship,
leaving most of his citizenry in an anarchic, post-colonial state
similar to where they had been at the beginning of his reign.
The policies before and after
Kennedy’s in this tale help explain much about the chaos and confusion
going on in Congo today. It’s a story you won’t read in many papers or
see on television. In itself, the events which occurred there from 1959
to 1966 form a milestone. As Kwitny writes:
The democratic experiment had no
example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and
the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the
precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African
history, the very first political assassination, and the very first
junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a
major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America.
(p. 75)
Whatever Kennedy’s failures as a
tactician, whatever his equivocations were on taking quick and decisive
action, he realized that nationalism would have to have its place in
American foreign policy. As Mahoney concludes, Kennedy did what no other
president before or after him had done. He established "a common ground
between African ideals and American self-interest in the midst of the
Cold War." (p. 248) As Kwitny notes, this was the basis of Lumumba’s
(undying) appeal:
Lumumba is a hero to Africans not
because he promoted socialism, which he didn’t, but because he resisted
foreign intervention. He stood up to outsiders, if only by getting
himself killed. Most Africans ... would say that the principal outsider
he stood up to was the United States. (p. 72)
Mahoney relates an anecdote which
helps explain why Kennedy understood the appeal of Lumumba. It has
little to do with his 1951 trip to Saigon, although it may help explain
why he sought out the people he did while he was there. The vignette
illuminates a lot about the Kennedy mystery, i.e. why the son of a
multimillionaire ended up being on the side of African black nationalism
abroad and integration at home. In January of 1962, in the midst of the
Congo crisis, Kennedy was talking to Nehru of India when, presumably,
the great Indian leader was lecturing him on the subject of colonialism.
Kennedy replied:
I grew up in a community where the
people were hardly a generation away from colonial rule. And I can claim
the company of many historians in saying that the colonialism to which
my immediate ancestors were subject was more sterile, oppressive and
even cruel than that of India.
Kennedy, of course, was referring
to the conquest and subjugation of Ireland by the British. A
colonization that has now lasted for 800 years. Clearly, Kennedy never
forgot where his family came from.
It is also clear that in his brief
intervention in the politics of the newly liberated continent of Africa,
its new progressive leaders realized Kennedy’s sensitivity to their
painful and precarious position. They also seem to have realized what
Kennedy the politician was up against, and what may have caused his
death.
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana—a clear
leftist who Kennedy had backed against heavy odds and who was perhaps
the greatest of that period’s African leaders—was overcome with sadness
upon hearing of the young American president’s death. In a speech at
that time, he told his citizens that Africa would forever remember
Kennedy’s great sensitivity to that continent’s special problems.
(Mahoney, p. 235) Later, when the American ambassador handed Nkrumah a
copy of the Warren Report, he thumbed through it and pointed to the name
of Allen Dulles as a member of the Warren Commission. He handed it back
abruptly, muttering simply, "Whitewash."
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