Jones knew what Britain was doing. But he was shocked by Sukarno’s response. After a small rebellion in northern Borneo convinced him the locals were against becoming Malaysian, the president declared himself very openly, and very forcefully, opposed to the creation of Malaysia on these terms. Much to the chagrin of British authorities, Sukarno declared in early 1963 that the formation of Malaysia was “the product of the brain, the thinking, the goals, the effort, and the initiative of neocolonialism.” Sukarno’s confrontational approach had the enthusiastic support of the PKI, tentative support from the military, and likely the support of much of the population.11 The episode came to be known as Konfrontasi—“confrontation” in both Indonesian and Malaysian—after Foreign Minister Subandrio coined the term.
He made those declarations just as his economic advisers went to Washington to negotiate with officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Indonesia was suffering economically in the early 1960s, and locked in discussions with the US. There were two major issues. First, Sukarno had dedicated a huge portion of national resources since 1958 to the military, and to the pursuit of disputes over West New Guinea and now Malaysia. Second, Indonesia had begun to rewrite the regulations governing its oil industry after expelling the Dutch, greatly concerning US officials. The New York Times published an editorial warning that Sukarno was “inexorably addicted to nationalistic excess” and adding: “How he deals with the oil companies will be a major test of his intentions.”12
The IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies.13 Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight. The PKI denounced the measures as an attack on the poor, but the government pressed forward anyway, seemingly committed to securing the next aid package from Washington.
Konfrontasi threw all these delicate international negotiations into question. Indonesian troops began to engage in low-level, cat-and-mouse skirmishes at the Malaysian border on the island of Borneo. The US government was concerned about its alliance with the British, whose support it wanted to keep in Vietnam.
Sukarno badly overestimated the leverage he had in forcing the issue with the UK and the UN. Some of his moves alienated allies in the Non-Aligned Movement he had helped found.14 Even many of his friends in other Third World nations believed he was making a mistake. But to him, Malaysia’s expansion represented an existential threat to Indonesia’s territorial integrity, and Sukarno was far from certain postcolonial independence would last. He had lived through numerous assassination attempts; he was watching war restart in Vietnam; and just a few years earlier, the United States had dropped bombs all over the country, in an attempt to break it up.
Indonesian leftists knew that the British had used their “Special Branch,” or police intelligence, to capture, bribe, and infiltrate the Malaysian communist movement and make sure decolonization there happened as they planned.15 With the UK carving up Malaysia in an obvious attempt to curb the forces of left-wing nationalism—of which Sukarno was perhaps the world’s most famous proponent—just across a porous border in Indonesian Borneo, a little bit of unease and suspicion was probably inevitable.
US officials, however, could usually only see reactions like this as irrational paranoia, a view shared by Modernization Theorist Lucian Pye, who went as far as to see anti-Americanism in postcolonial states as a psychological pathology.16
As tensions rose on the international stage, things became more difficult for regular Indonesians. The economic crisis made it hard to acquire basic goods, and life became confusing for those not swept up in the politics of the dispute.
Magdalena
In the village of Purwokerto, Central Java, one quiet young woman began to feel the squeeze.17
Magdalena grew up in a troubled peasant family, always tossed back and forth as a result of marital strife, sickness, and poverty. Like most residents of Java (with the notable exception of the ethnic Chinese), she was Muslim, but she never got very deep into studies of the Quran. At school, she loved gamelan, the traditional Javanese music form, in which a small percussive orchestra plays meditative, meandering ensemble pieces, which can rise and fall slowly for hours. But she was pulled away from all of that fairly quickly. At thirteen, she dropped out to work as a maid in a nearby household. At fifteen, her mother fell ill, so she came back home and began to sell what they could to their neighbors for some money: bits of wood, salads, cooked meals, fried cassava, whatever they could to get by. And at the age of sixteen, as talk of Konfrontasi dominated conversation in the capital and the economy continued to flounder, that little business dried up.
She had never been to a big city, but word was it was easier to get a job in Jakarta. An aunt of hers, Le, had some connections in the capital and told her she could help her get set up there. So she got on the train, and rode for a full day, moving slowly westward on tracks originally put down by the Dutch a hundred years earlier, and arrived in Jakarta, all alone. As she passed by the National Monument, she marveled at its scale—about ten times as high as any building she’d ever seen.
They were right about the job prospects. Almost immediately, she started working at a T-shirt factory. Her new employer put her in a small, shared apartment attached to the company’s office, with all the other girls. In the morning, she’d put on her uniform and wait. Just after six, she and all the other girls piled into a big truck, which took them from their little home in Jatinegara, East Jakarta, and rode through the morning to Duren Tiga in the South, as the city sped by. They worked from seven to four, and the pay wasn’t bad. The men washed the cloth, and the women cut it into the right shapes. Someone else, somewhere else, put it all together.
Conditions were OK, Magdalena thought. And she learned, right away, that this was because of SOBSI, the trade union network affiliated with the PKI that had organized most of the workers in the country. She joined, like everyone else did, and after a few months got a minor administrative role in her local union, without many real duties. She came, cut the cloth, and went home.
That was her first, very minor, introduction to Indonesian politics. She barely understood the revolutionary slogans or ideological jargon coming through the radio at work. She remembers hearing the word “NASAKOM” once and not having the slightest clue what it meant. She hardly knew anything about the Communist Party, or if it had anything to do with her job. SOBSI was part of the gig, she knew that, and it helped out a lot.
“They would support us, they had our backs, and their strategy worked,” she said. “It really worked. That’s what we knew.”
When she got off work, she was usually too tired to do much—and a bit too young and lonely to venture out into the big city. She kept her head down, and just observed. She didn’t talk politics after work—she would lie around and make small talk with her best friend in Jakarta, Siti, maybe gossiping about boys, discussing which girls had boyfriends or husbands. Though she had always been single, she had learned early, growing up back home, that she was considered very pretty. Dating was something she might try later. For now, she was working on building some savings for a life that was just a little more secure.
The radio reports came and went, and she kept working. If she heard the words “Lyndon Johnson” at the end of 1963, she didn’t know what they meant.
But John F. Kennedy’s death meant a lot for Indonesia indeed.
The End of the Jones Method
Indonesia was one place where Lyndon Johnson took a different approach from his successor. He had a lot less time for Sukarno. Just three days before he died, Jack Kennedy had reiterated his clear, if slightly cynical, commitment to the strategy of ongoing engagement with Sukarno—the very strategy that Smiling Jones had long been advocating. He said
, according to White House aide Michael Forrestal, that “Indonesia is a nation of 100 million with perhaps more resources than any other nation in Asia.… It doesn’t make any sense for the U.S. to go out of our way to permanently alienate this large group of people sitting on these resources, unless there is some very, very, persuasive reason.” Konfrontasi was not enough for Kennedy to abandon Sukarno and Jones.18
Johnson wasn’t interested in direct engagement with Indonesia, and he didn’t want to spend political capital pushing Asia policies that were unpopular in Congress. Kennedy had met Sukarno, understood Indonesia, and cared about the issue. JFK had agreed with Jones that a visit to Jakarta could have smoothed the whole thing over. Of course, the military counterinsurgency program Kennedy put in place was still underway. But Johnson was not going to fight any political battles for those one hundred million people and the resources under their feet.
Howard Jones remembers the shift, wistfully: “Regarding himself as the leader not only of the new Asian-African nations but all the ‘new emerging forces,’ I am sure [Sukarno] felt that an understanding, if not an alliance between himself and the man considered the leader of the Western world, was possible. He was being wooed by Khrushchev and Mao—why, then, should not the leader of the other world bloc be equally interested in working with him?”
Jones believed Sukarno would back off on Malaysia as long as that didn’t mean national humiliation, and he had told Kennedy a presidential visit to Indonesia was probably just what was needed. Kennedy agreed, and planned to come.19 But a few months after JFK’s death, Jones asked the newly sworn-in Johnson to sign an official determination that continued aid to Indonesia was in the US national interest. Johnson declined. “President Kennedy, I knew, would have signed the determination almost as a matter of routine. It was disappointing,” Jones remembers. In December, Robert McNamara, one of the advisers left behind by Kennedy, began suggesting aggressive curtailment of aid. “Thus began a shift of emphasis in American policy to a harder line,” the ambassador wrote.20 This was also the end of the Smiling Jones approach to uniting the two countries, the strategy he had developed for nearly a decade.
Johnson did make a deal, with the British. In exchange for their support in Vietnam, where things were also beginning to escalate, Washington would back them on the creation of Malaysia.21
Sukarno noticed a shift in the way the world’s most powerful country was treating him. He went so far as to speculate that JFK was killed in order to stop him from visiting Indonesia and cementing an alliance between Washington and Jakarta.22
The debate raged in Washington as to whether or not Indonesia deserved more assistance. And Sukarno was watching. In response to that discussion, the Indonesian president gave a speech in March 1964, just as Brazil’s generals were putting the finishing touches on US-backed plots. Though he expressed gratitude for aid that was offered without political strings attached, one line, delivered in English, predictably made headlines—and traveled quickly back to Washington. When anyone offers aid that comes with political demands, he said that his message to them was: “Go to hell with your aid!”
As Jones put it, “He had really done it now.”23
Whatever goodwill there was for Sukarno in Washington began to dissipate. Over the next few months all direct aid to the national government dried up completely. Crucially, one program continued. The US continued to pour money directly into the Armed Forces, and military advisers continued to work closely with Indonesian Army high command.
Sukarno became more publicly anti-American, and with more gusto than ever before. The Soviet Union had been entirely uninterested in backing Konfrontasi, so Indonesia formed closer ties with Asian socialist countries. Domestically, an anti-American campaign escalated, with the Communists often leading the charge. The government instituted a de facto ban on American movies, even though Sukarno had always loved them. Protests erupted against American citizens and American businesses, though Jones himself maintained cordial relations with the government.24
Then there was another explosion, much closer than the one in Brazil, whose waves quickly crashed onto the shores of Java. In the Gulf of Tonkin, a US destroyer called Maddox was in Vietnamese waters, violating the international twelve-mile limit, attempting to intercept North Vietnamese communications. On August 2, three Vietnamese patrol boats approached the Maddox, and the US opened fire, killing four sailors. The Vietnamese shot back, and then fled. On August 3, Johnson said that patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin would continue, warning against “further unprovoked military action.” On August 4, nothing happened. But US vessels thought something was happening, and they began “firing at their own shadows.”25 This second, nonexistent confrontation was used as pretext for the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” which gave Johnson the authority to start a full war in Vietnam.
Three days later, Sukarno defiantly established relations with Ho Chi Minh’s government in the northern half of Vietnam. “I think your Asian policy is wrong,” he told Howard Jones directly. “It is not popular with Asian people generally. It looks to them as if you are interfering with the affairs of Asian nations.… Why should you become involved?” Needless to say, this was a scandalous position in Washington. But most Indonesians agreed with Sukarno. To people like Francisca and Sakono and Magdalena, the Vietnamese were fighting for national independence.26
On August 17, Sukarno gave another fiery speech, and declared a “year of living dangerously.” He spoke of a “Jakarta-Phnom Penh-Hanoi-Peking-Pyongyang axis… forged by the course of history” and subtly attacked Army generals for profiting off the state enterprises they controlled. A few months later, in angry retaliation for Malaysia’s accession to the UN Security Council, Sukarno decided to pull Indonesia out of the UN in protest. He also accused the CIA of trying to kill him.27
Howard Jones made plans to leave Jakarta for Honolulu, where he would take over at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. As he made his final preparations, he continued to make last-minute pleas to the men who would take over for him, arguing that personal diplomacy with Sukarno offered the best chance for reversing the tide in Jakarta. But he knew that in this position he was isolated, quite literally on an island, and the water was coming up around him. The Howard Jones approach to Indonesia was over.
In his short resignation letter to President Johnson, he wrote, “Indonesia is a beautiful country with gentle, friendly people. I have great faith in the Indonesian people and believe they will ultimately work their way out of their present difficulties.” He continued, “I am convinced that there is basic empathy between the people of America and Indonesia.”28
As Jones prepared to leave the country, Foreign Minister Subandrio—the same man whom Jones unintentionally lied to back in 1958 about the CIA’s role in the civil war—sent him a small, hand-written invitation. He wanted to dine with the ambassador and his wife one last time. They met on May 18 to say goodbye over a simple lunch. On the menu that day: lumpia (Indonesia’s version of Chinese fried egg rolls), the customary white rice, sweet and sour gurame fish, shrimp cooked with lime and pepper, and fried pigeon.29
The sendoff Jones got from the US press was a little less gracious. After he announced his departure, the Washington Post affirmed, in a piece that gave ample space to critics of his tenure, that he was “Sukarno’s pal,” and called the man “almost angelically naive.”30 The Los Angeles Times was a bit more direct in a different version of the same story, and asked, in the headline, if Jones was a “patsy.”31
Clandestine Operations
When Jones’s diplomatic approach collapsed, both the US and the British governments escalated secret activities in Indonesia. Their full nature is still hidden to us, but they included “black operations” and preparations for psychological warfare. The British created the position of “director of political warfare” in Singapore in December 1964. The US government approved a secret plan on March 4, 1965, though the funding source and the amount of money provided remain
classified. Most of the secret activities were probably carried out by CIA and MI6. Given the way these organizations operated, it is almost certain that operations also included placing untrue or provocative stories in the Indonesian and international press. They wanted to goad the Communists into taking action.
Since the early 1960s, both the American and British governments had believed, and discussed often, that the ideal situation would be a “premature PKI coup” that could provoke an Army response. It’s possible that some version of this plan had been worked on secretly, under the cover of Kennedy’s civic action program, since 1962.32
At one of the last meetings he held as ambassador, Howard Jones himself told State Department officials behind closed doors in the Philippines, “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.”33
Some of the more conservative elements in Indonesia were dissatisfied with Sukarno’s turn to the left. The most prominent of these was the Army, but they also included some Muslim groups. In some parts of the country, local landowners were in low-level conflict with the PKI. After the passage of a very moderate land reform package, the Communist Party took it upon itself to attempt to put pressure on landlords to respect the law, leading to some clashes, especially in East Java and Bali.34
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