Kennedy (114 page)

I
T WAS NOT POSSIBLE
for John Kennedy to organize his approach to foreign affairs as arbitrarily as the chapters of this or any book. Military conflicts required more than military solutions. The Communists exploited genuine non-Communist grievances. The problems of aid and trade, the need for conventional and unconventional forces, the roles of allies and neutrals, all were tangled together. Nowhere were these interrelationships more complex than in those situations in the new and developing nations which Khrushchev somewhat hypocritically called “wars of liberation.” The extent of U.S. commitment and of Communist power involvement differed from one to the other, but the dilemma facing John Kennedy in each one was essentially the same: how to disengage the Russians from the “liberation” movement and prevent a Communist military conquest without precipitating a major Soviet-American military confrontation.

On Inauguration Day, 1961, three such dilemmas were on Kennedy’s desk, with dire predictions of catastrophe before the year was out: the Congo, Laos and South Vietnam. In none of these cases were those predictions fulfilled, even by the end of Kennedy’s term. Supporting the UN in the Congo, seeking a neutral coalition in Laos and trying to broaden the political appeal of the local regime in Vietnam, he rejected the purely militaristic and automatically anti-Communist answer to pursue more meaningful objectives in all three countries. While these objectives also remained unfulfilled, their conflicts were at least adequately managed and confined, partly because of his growing grasp of their nonmilitary implications, partly because the Sino-Soviet split restrained
as well as aggravated these situations, and partly because of the lessons John Kennedy had learned since the Bay of Pigs.

The chaos in the Congo would have resembed an implausibly slapstick comic opera were it not for its grim toll of human life. After nearly eighty years of rule by a nation one-eighteenth as large, the former Belgian colony was cast adrift in the summer of 1960 in the name of independence without any solid preparation for independence. Its forces of law and order were lawless and disorderly. Its richest province promptly seceded. Its national capital soon contained almost as many self-proclaimed premiers and presidents as native college graduates. Its power centers were leaderless and its leaders powerless. It was a nation with little sense of nationhood, torn by rivalries between dozens of local political parties and hundreds of tribes. Inflation, graft, tribal friction and unemployment were rampant.

Belgian technicians were driven out and then sorely missed. Blacks massacred blacks as well as whites, and white fought against white to see which black man would prevail. President Kasavubu dismissed Prime Minister Lumumba, who dismissed Kasavubu. Lumumba attacked provincial leader Tshombe for not recognizing the authority of the Central Government, and was in turn arrested by Colonel Mobutu for saying he was the Central Government. Troops holding Lumumba for mutiny mutinied. Unity conferences produced further disunity. And rushing in to fill this gaping power vacuum with advice, technicians, trucks, transport planes and equipment—with troops to follow, if necessary—was the Soviet Union, eager to build a power base in the heart of Africa.

The only effective counter to Communist penetration and domination in the Congo was the United Nations, free from the taints of white supremacy and the appearance of direct big-power intervention. This country’s unilateral intervention might have produced a needless, endless jungle war. When, in 1960, the United Nations was asked by the Congolese Government to intervene, the United States supported that effort. By the combination of a Soviet boycott of the operation, a favorable majority in the Assembly and the forceful initiative of the Secretary General, a surprisingly bold UN presence was established.

But tensions were mounting again as John Kennedy prepared to take office. Afro-Asian nations disillusioned by the UN’s impartiality threatened to undermine its operation by the withdrawal of their troops. Soviet anger at Hammarskjöld’s role was rising.

The Kennedy Congo policy was largely an extension of the Eisenhower
policy. Its aim was the restoration of stability and order to a reunited, independent and viable Congo, free from Communist domination and free from both civil war and cold war conflicts. The chief channel of this policy was our support—diplomatic, economic and, to the extent of providing air transport, military—of the United Nations in its effort to pacify the country and reconcile its factions.

Kennedy did not want the Congo to become another Laos, draining American energies and goodwill in a jungle war against Communist-supported local troops. Nor did he want it to become another Cuba, providing Communism with a strategically located military base, vast natural resources and a fertile breeding ground of subversives and guerrillas.

His first move—taken during his first week in office—was to relieve the widespread hunger and human distress that had been created by the collapse of the Congolese economy. From our surplus stocks, he dispatched rice, corn meal, dry milk and other foodstuffs in an emergency airlift.

But little more than two weeks later he faced a sterner test. Patrice Lumumba, the erratic admirer of Ghana’s Nkrumah who had served briefly as the Congo’s first premier—a man who both used and was used by Soviet ambitions—was assassinated. As Communist and African nationalist mobs turned out to protest in front of Western embassies and even inside the UN chambers, the Soviets savagely demanded the removal of the UN from the Congo and the removal of Hammarskjöld—as an “accomplice and organizer of murders”—from the UN. They quickly recognized Lumumba’s old Vice Premier, Antoine Gizenga (much more of a Marxist than Lumumba), as the legitimate head of the Congo, and promised him “all possible assistance and support.” The threat of military force was clearly implied.

Kennedy, in an opening statement at his February 15 news conference, pledged support to the United Nations presence, backing to the UN-recognized government of President Kasavubu, and resistance to any government’s attempt to intervene unilaterally “in the internal affairs of the Republic of the Congo.” “There should be no misunderstanding of the position of the United States,” he said, if “any government is really planning to take so dangerous and irresponsible a step.”

The Russians, no more eager for a major confrontation there than we, did not take that step. The military logistics and the political balance were both against them. The General Assembly voted to back up the Hammarskjöld effort; and the Gizenga movement and Communist influence began to fade. A new constitution, a broader-based government and a renewed UN economic as well as police-keeping effort in time eased the crisis, despite Hammarskjöld’s death; and a new U.S. effort
to woo Africa, discussed in an earlier chapter, brought a waning of Khrushchev’s influence on the entire continent.

The secession of Moise Tshombe’s Katanga Province, however, was a more difficult hurdle. It was always clear to Kennedy that, if the Central Congolese Government fell over this hurdle, Gizenga or some other Communist-backed leader would not be long moving in. Katanga, with less than one-twelfth of the Congo’s territory and one-twentieth of its population, produced three-fifths of its revenue and possessed the bulk of its mineral wealth—particularly the rich copper and cobalt mines of the giant Union Minière combine. Tshombe, the province’s shrewd leader, used these resources and revenues to enlist help from powerful European investors, to pay white mercenaries in his army and to employ lobbyists in the UN and Washington. White supremacists in the United States Senate praised him as a black anti-Communist hero. Other black African nations, looking upon him as a tool for white neo-colonialism, urged swift action to crush him. West European nations, eager to keep Katanga’s copper, cobalt, diamond and uranium mines safe and running, urged a go-slow policy. The African and European desks in Kennedy’s State Department reflected a similar split.

Kennedy’s own thinking was divided in quite a different way. The unification of the Congo was consistent with over-all American policy in Africa. UN pacification of Katanga was preferable to a bloody civil war that could drag in the other African states on both sides—the black nationalists against the white supremacists—and ultimately drag in the great powers as well. He was concerned, however, that the UN did not have the means to achieve this goal, and he wanted no undertakings launched which would shift the burden of achieving it to direct American action. He recognized the unpopularity in this country of supporting with funds and planes a UN peace-keeping operation that was neither peaceful nor aimed at Communists. He disliked disagreeing with the British, French and other Allies who were more inclined to protect Katanga—although Belgium’s Paul Spaak, he felt, had shown great courage and restraint in reversing that nation’s encouragement of Tshombe’s secession. But backed by his able Ambassador, Edward Gullion, he believed that world peace, the effort to keep Communism out of Africa and our relations with the other African nations were all best served by opposing all tribal secessions in the Congo, and by supporting instead the UN’s precedent-setting role as a nation-builder.

For nearly two years, during 1961-1962, the Congo question constantly intruded upon the President’s agenda, as a variety of tactics, special missions and subtle shifts in U.S. policy Were tried and failed. A series of clashes, cease-fires and conferences of Congolese leaders produced no reintegration, only a continuing drain on the UN’s finances and
on Kennedy’s patience with both sides. By late 1962 the Soviets had begun casting hungry eyes in the Congo’s direction once again. India, for both financial and political reasons, threatened to withdraw her troops, which formed the heart of the UN contingent. Tshombe talked cooperation, thus persuading the British and Belgians to hold off the economic sanctions the U.S. requested; but he had both the funds and forces to sit tight. Congolese Premier Adoula, showing little talent for maneuver or political flexibility, was in danger of overthrow or replacement by a more radical regime committed to the conquest of Katanga by force. If the UN would not do it, Communist bloc arms would be sought directly or through Algeria and Ghana.

Both the President and UN Secretary General U Thant had tried in vain a variety of approaches to break the deadlock. The UN now prepared for a greater show of military strength to bring Katanga to terms. U Thant requested from the U.S. additional transport planes and equipment. The Department of State, however—with a somewhat alarmist view of the pace of the deterioration and the prospects of Soviet intervention—proposed to the President that we persuade U Thant to accept in addition a squadron of U.S. fighter aircraft, to be flown by our Air Force, thus ending Katanga’s resistance in a hurry. U Thant and the Afro-Asian bloc, the President was told, were so committed to Tshombe’s downfall that they would ignore in this case the tradition against using big-power forces in a UN peace-keeping operation.

The most startling feature of this startling proposal was its backing. Many of the “doves” were all for it and most of the “hawks” were highly skeptical. It struck me, in the aftermath of the Cuban success of some two months earlier, as evidence of a desire by the peace-lovers to show their belief in military solutions, too. But the President was skeptical. Sending American combat forces against non-Communist Katanga would be hard to explain to the Congress, the Allies and the American people, he said, unless we could make a better case for the threat of a Communist takeover. The confidence engendered throughout the West by our careful approach to the Cuban missiles might well be lost by a hasty move not yet proven to be necessary.

On December 14, 1962, when it appeared that the proposal would not actually place the air squadron in combat or even under the UN command, he indicated tentative approval—if both Adoula and U Thant would request it. But on December 17, with both of them reported hesitant, and with the air squadron advocates now calling for its combat use under UN direction, he ruled against an immediate move, sought proof of its necessity by authorizing a military survey mission and deferred all decisions until that had been made. In the meantime, he authorized compliance with U Thant’s original request for more American planes, trucks and armored personnel carriers.

In an ironic anticlimax, before Kennedy’s military mission could complete its report, the UN’s new offensive—prematurely launched by Katangan disorders and poor UN communications—swept into Jadotville and ended the resistance. Katanga was reintegrated, Belgium and the Congo were basically reconciled, and the Soviets were left looking in on the outside.