A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Fearing that, even with Kennedy’s endorsement, it would take AID months of paperwork and preparation before anything happened in Guinea, Attwood persuaded the President to send Sargent Shriver to Guinea in June. Shriver and Touré hit it off immediately. Guinea, which had been attacking the Peace Corps as a CIA subsidiary, now invited it into the country; the government radio stopped reviling the United States; and personal relations between Guineans and Americans began to improve. In December, after a clumsy Russian intervention into Guinean politics, Sékou Touré expelled the Soviet Ambassador. By the spring of 1962, American aid was beginning to arrive: food, teachers, money. And, when Touré came to New York in October for the UN General Assembly, the President asked him down to Washington. Kennedy met him at the airport and took him back to the White House, where they talked over the problems of Guinea for an hour in the Cabinet Room. Then Kennedy brought him over to the Mansion, introduced him to Jacqueline and Caroline and gave him a formal luncheon. On his return to Conakry, Sékou Touré reported to his people:

  At the end of our talks with President Kennedy, I and the Guinean delegation expressed our satisfaction to have found in the United States President a man quite open to African problems and determined to promote the American contribution to their happy solution.

  We took this opportunity to congratulate the American Government for the aid which it has so generously granted to Guinea and to express to him our satisfaction regarding the firmness with which the United States struggles against racial discrimination and for the complete integration of the the colored people into American society.

  From this time on Touré felt that he had a friend at the White House and sent personal messages at the slightest pretext.

  The Attwood-Kennedy policy was able to succeed, of course, because it came at the right time. But, if Washington had persisted in its conviction that Guinea was irreclaimable, we would not have been in the position to take advantage of the Soviet errors. Attwood discharged his mission brilliantly despite personal difficulties sadly caused by an attack of polio. Kennedy, greatly admiring, rated him very high among his ambassadors. When he left Guinea in 1963, later moving on to Kenya, James Loeb went to Conakry and carried forward his work.

  In the case of Nkrumah of Ghana, the new American policy, as Houphouët-Boigny predicted to Robert Kennedy, found harder going. Relations between Ghana and the United States had started downhill after September 1960, when Secretary of State Herter (“somewhat unwisely, I think,” Kennedy said at the time) described Nkrumah “very definitely as moving toward the Soviet bloc” and when neither Herter nor Eisenhower received Nkrumah who had come to New York for the UN. By the time Kennedy’s ambassador arrived in Accra at the end of January, the Ghanian cabinet met to consider whether he should be allowed to present his credentials at all. The murder of Lumumba brought a well-organized outburst of anti-American rioting, following which Nkrumah served as the gracious host for Leonid Brezhnev, the president of the Soviet Union.

  At the same time, there remained one great foothold for the west in Ghana, and this was the project, originally conceived by the British colonial administration, for a dam on the Volta River. As Commander Robert Jackson, chairman of the Gold Coast Development Commission, had outlined its possibilities in 1955, a Volta dam would not only create a great lake to help meet internal needs for irrigation, fish and transport, but could generate hydroelectric power and make possible the installation of a smelter to convert Ghana’s bauxite resources into aluminum; it would be the key to Ghana’s economic future.

  The British and Canadian aluminum industry had considered aiding the Volta Dam until the increase in the British bank rate in 1958 made participation too costly. Then Nkrumah appealed to Washington, where Douglas Dillon called the project to the attention of Edgar Kaiser and Chad Calhoun of Kaiser Industries. After study, the Kaiser people pronounced the dam economically feasible. In the course of 1960 the United States government held out for a moment the possibility of participation, and Kaiser and Calhoun tried to put together a consortium of aluminum companies to back the project. But, as relations with Ghana grew worse, most of the group, except Reynolds Metals, withdrew, leaving Kaiser with 90 per cent of the consortium.

  In the beginning of 1961, there still remained the hope of getting support from the new administration. Calhoun talked with George Ball and Abram Chayes at State and asked Barbara Ward Jackson, the British economist and wife of Commander (now Sir) Robert Jackson to raise the matter with Kennedy. Lady Jackson, who was herself deeply interested in the economic and political development of Ghana, did so at once. Kennedy was fond of Barbara Ward, and her counsel reinforced his own instinct to go ahead with the project. In the meantime, word arrived that Nkrumah was coming to New York for the UN. Barbara urged the President to see him. She described Nkrumah as temperamental, mercurial and caught in the shifting sands of the cold war, but argued that, if he could be kept neutral and close to the United Nations, much could be gained. “It is worth a risk and could conceivably be a triumph.”

  Kennedy agreed, and Nkrumah appeared at the White House early in March. The visit was a success. The Kennedys liked him, and Nkrumah was so moved that on the plane to New York he scrawled Kennedy a warm personal note on a yellow lined pad expressing his pleasure at the meeting and his hope for future friendship. In July Kennedy wrote him that the United States planned to go ahead with the Volta project.

  In the meantime, Nkrumah had set forth on a swing around the communist circuit. With each statement in each new communist capital he seemed to move further from a position of non-alignment. When he reached Peking in September, his communiqué after a talk with Mao actually included some of the same phrases he had scribbled to Kennedy on the plane in March: the sands of the cold war were indeed constantly shifting. The Iron Curtain tour resulted in so apparently fervent an embrace of the communists as to raise new questions about the Volta Dam at just the moment when Abram Chayes had brought the agreement to the point of signature. Nor did Nkrumah strengthen his case by undertaking new measures of internal repression on his return to Ghana.

  Kennedy now began to wonder whether it was appropriate to invest a large share of the limited funds set aside for Africa in a single project in a single country—above all, in a country which was not providing stirring examples either of liberalism at home or non-alignment in the world. Congress was increasingly unhappy; Albert Gore and Kennedy’s old African subcommittee were hostile to American support for the dam. Public opinion was critical; Robert Kennedy was opposed; even Adlai Stevenson suggested that aid to the project be suspended. Only Chayes, Bowles, Williams and Fredericks at State were solidly in favor. On the other hand, Kaiser and Calhoun, whom Kennedy sent to Accra in October for tough talk with Nkrumah, returned with his cordial assurances that Ghana would stay on a course of true neutrality; and a circular inquiry to our other African embassies showed that most African governments, including some of Nkrumah’s political enemies, hoped we would go ahead. Kennedy now sent a special mission to Ghana, headed by Clarence Randall, a steel magnate of profound and well-publicized conservatism, and including Chayes. The purpose was partly to tell more home truths to Nkrumah and partly to provide political cover for a decision to proceed with the project. (I noted: “Typical of JFK’s administrative methods: if he wanted the mission to veto the project, he would have sent Chester Bowles.”)

  At the same time, the British weighed in heavily. Macmillan wrote Kennedy in November that he did not believe Nkrumah had yet gone over to the Russians. If the United States were now to pull out, Macmillan said, the Africans would regard it as an attempt to use financial power to dictate the national policy of independent African states; the Russians would move in; and cancellation might have the same consequences in West Africa that John Foster Dulles’s repudiation of the Aswan Dam had in Egypt in 1956. But, if the west backed the Volta Dam, it would be convincing proof to the Africans, who were tending to regard the Soviet system as peculiarly well designe
d to bring about industrialization, that industrial development could be combined with freedom.

  The President, as usual, was interested in the long run. He probably had made up his mind early in the year to support the project. He was impressed by Barbara Ward’s several interventions, and he had high regard for Edgar Kaiser as an aggressive and intelligent businessman. At the lowest point—in September—Kennedy and Edgar Kaiser even discovered that each had recently received a phone call from his famous father with the same complaint: “What in hell are you up to with that communist Nkrumah?” The President well understood that cancellation of the Volta Dam now would set back his whole African policy, while support would dramatize the new American attitude toward non-alignment throughout Africa. He hoped that this policy would preserve a positive American presence within Ghana and that Nkrumah’s nationalism would in the end prevail over his leanings toward the east. He made the final decision to go ahead in November. When the National Security Council was informed of the decision, the President said, “The Attorney General has not yet spoken, but I can feel the hot breath of his disapproval on the back of my neck.” The agreement was signed in Accra in January. The total American government investment—all in the form of loans—amounted to somewhat over $40 million.

  The policy did not allow for the vagaries of Nkrumah. The Ghanian leader proceeded in the next years to transform his country in the direction less of African socialism than of African totalitarianism. The Osagyefo or Redeemer, as he called himself (or “His Messianic Dedication” or “The Nation’s Pillar of Fire and Fount of Honor”), established a dictatorship, crushed all opposition, turned violently against the west and set himself up as a virtual deity. Kennedy watched these developments with deepening concern. He followed Ghana with keen interest; one morning a desk officer at State answered his phone to find himself talking directly to the President about the capsid, a blight threatening Ghana’s cocoa crop. In 1963 Kennedy evidently wished that he had been tougher in the first place. By this time he instructed AID to extend no more long-term credits to Ghana. Yet even then his view was that the final beneficiaries of the Volta Dam would be not the government of Kwame Nkrumah but the people of Ghana.

  6. THE CONGO

  Of all the African problems, the one that most commanded the President’s attention was the Congo. Independence had descended like a hurricane on the unprepared country in July 1960. In a few days the new state was in chaos: the Force Publique had mutinied; Katanga and other provinces were proclaiming their independence; Belgian paratroopers were coming back to restore order. In desperation Prime Minister Lumumba appealed to the United Nations. On July 14 the Security Council voted to provide the central government with enough military assistance to pacify the country.

  Lumumba also cabled N. S. Khrushchev “to watch hourly over the situation”; and Khrushchev responded in his own way. By September several hundred Soviet ‘technicians’ were in Leopoldville, Russian military equipment was going to Lumumba’s army, and communist sympathizers were moving into the central government. Lumumba obviously preferred this to assistance from the United Nations; and in consequence President Joseph Kasavubu dismissed him early in September. In another week Kasavubu, closing the Soviet and Czech embassies, placed his main reliance on the UN peace-keeping force. The Russians, having just missed establishing a powerful military and political presence in this rich, large and strategic land, now turned savagely against the UN. Khrushchev, still watching hourly over the situation, vetoed subsequent Security Council action, launched violent attacks against Hammarskjöld and soon advanced the troika proposal. He accompanied this barrage by vigorous support for Lumumba and, after Lumumba’s arrest and murder, for his heir, Antoine Gizenga.

  In January 1961 Kennedy inherited a Congo still in chaos, divided among the Kasavubu government in Leopoldville, the Gizenga group in Stanleyville and the pro-Belgian secessionist regime of Moise Tshombe in Elisabethville. Overshadowing everything was the prospect that Soviet meddling in the chaos might lead to a Russian base in the heart of Africa. From the start the new Presi dent had a simple and constant view: that, unless the United Nations filled the vacuum in the Congo, there would be no alternative but a direct Soviet-American confrontation. As one crisis after another flared up in the months to come, he used to say that, if we didn’t have the UN operation, the only way to block Soviet domination of the Congo would be to go in with our own forces. The UN could not bring the great powers together in the Congo, but at least it could keep them apart.

  This policy would not work, however, unless the central government in Leopoldville possessed authority. It was here that the secession of Katanga assumed its significance. Katanga, containing the bulk of the country’s mineral wealth, produced nearly half the tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings of the Congo. In Elisabethville, Tshombe, a shrewd, humorous and cynical politician, backed by the Belgian Union Minière du Haut Katanga, was using the revenue from the copper mines to hire white mercenaries and mount propaganda campaigns in America and Europe. Moreover, the example of Katanga was stimulating secessionist dreams elsewhere in the Congo.

  A unified Congo therefore seemed the condition for the success of the UN policy. Moreover, the question of Katanga was becoming a crucial test of American intentions throughout Africa. Every new state was meticulously scrutinizing our actions to detect evidences of support for Tshombe, whom the rest of Africa regarded as the white colonists’ black man. “If we don’t have a Congo policy,” as Wayne Fredericks remarked, “we don’t have an African policy.”

  In the summer of 1961 the Congolese parliament elected a coalition government under a sober trade unionist named Cyrille Adoula. At the request of the new government, the UN forces now began action to end the secession. UN troops took over key installations in Elisabethville and, as they extended their operations in September, they encountered resistance from Tshombe’s forces. Several days of desultory fighting followed.

  The outbreak of hostilities brought down a storm of criticism on the UN. Great Britain and France both thought that the UN army had exceeded the charter in conducting what seemed to be offensive operations. In New York an extremely effective lobby, run by a Belgian named Michael Struelens, sent out dramatic accounts of what it called Katanga’s fight for self-determination. Soon the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters described Katanga as “the Hungary of 1961,” and a number of Senators, especially Dodd of Connecticut, propagated the gospel in Washington. Hammarskjöld, concerned by the fighting, flew to the Congo to arrange a cease-fire and promote negotiations between Leopoldville and Elisabethville. This was his last mission.

  In the meantime, Edmund Gullion arrived in the Congo in August as Kennedy’s new ambassador. A Kentuckian, who had grown up amidst family recollections of the American Civil War, he saw the Congo, like the United States a century before, poised between nationhood and disintegration. If the Katanga secession were not ended, then, in Gullion’s view, the Congo would break up and the communists would pick up most of the pieces. This was also the fear of Williams and Fredericks in the Bureau of African Affairs and of Stevenson and Cleveland on the UN side. The Bureau of European Affairs, on the other hand, shared the British and French doubts about the UN action. As for the high command of State, it regarded the Congo problem with gloomy suspicion. Rusk, it seemed, thought about it as little as possible; Harriman, who had been favorably impressed by Tshombe after a meeting in Geneva, dissented from the prevailing policy; and, though George Ball defended the policy in an exceedingly able speech—the only sustained exposition of the Congo problem from the seventh floor of the State Department during the thirty months of the crisis—he had moments of wariness and reservation. Nor was the White House staff wholeheartedly in favor of the UN action. But Kennedy, with his old confidence in Gullion, subdued occasional doubts to give consistent support to the UN policy. He was backing the UN, as he once explained to Macmillan, as the best insurance against the conflict of great powers in th
e Congo. Our own national experience, he added, demonstrated that, if a compact of government was 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.

  Hostilities continued in the Congo despite a nominal UN ceasefire until in mid-December 1961 Tshombe sent Washington a message requesting the President’s help in arranging a meeting with Adoula. Kennedy promptly appointed Gullion his personal rep resentative and dispatched his own plane to fly the antagonists to a ‘neutral’ site at Kitona. He was determined to shift the conflict from a military to a political context, and his pressure resulted in the signing in January of the Kitona agreement in which Tshombe accepted the authority of the central government.

  Gullion, however, remained skeptical. He felt that Tshombe was playing for time and would not abide by the agreement. This forecast turned out to be right. Tshombe, hoping that Struelens, the Belgian mining companies and the British might work a change in American policy, began systematically to evade the accord. He even wanted to lobby in Washington himself, a visit discouraged by the State Department. (This decision roused the ire of Arthur Krock of the New York Times. Krock was a mainstay of the Metropolitan Club, notorious for its exclusion of Negroes’, and Kennedy offered a deal: “I’ll give Tshombe a visa and Arthur can give him a dinner at the Metropolitan Club.”)

  During the summer of 1962 British, Belgian and American officials worked together on a new unification plan which U Thant put into final form and sponsored in September. Once again Tshombe accepted the plan and once again stalled on its execution. Gullion now began to feel that the solution was to unleash the UN troops and let them destroy Tshombe’s army. But Ralph Dungan and Carl Kaysen, who were following the Congo for the White House, had become openly critical of deeper American involvement in the Congo. They doubted whether a communist take-over was still an imminent threat, even if it had been in 1961, and they’regarded the conflict as essentially an internal matter; as someone put it, “Every nation has a right to its own War of the Roses.” I must confess that I inclined toward this view myself.