Reply #14: It was an amazing day. Imagine what today'd be like if...? [View All]

[Octafish]

Here's what I mean about JFK approaching the problems on earth with the same, ah, vigor he used in the space race:

Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

“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

By Jim DiEugenio
From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

EXCERPT...

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)

http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html

We need to reignite the spirit of that amazing time, cobalt1999.