A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  But the President was still determined to use American influence to bring about unification. Fearing, however, that neither his European allies nor American public opinion would countenance a renewal of the UN war against Katanga, he bent every effort to achieve a political solution. To this end he persuaded Spaak of Belgium to endorse the U Thant plan and sent George McGhee to the Congo to urge Tshombe to comply and thereby avoid a military confrontation. McGhee found Tshombe contemptuous of the Americans and confident of his own strength. Matters dragged unhappily on, with the Adoula government growing feebler every day, till the time limit which U Thant had attached to his plan expired in December. Tshombe now denounced the plan and declaimed, with flourishes, about a “scorched earth” policy. On Christmas Eve his troops resumed the harassment of the UN forces. After four days of accepting Katangan fire without retaliation, the UN army received U Thant’s reluctant permission to respond.

  Things were tense in the White House in the few days after Christmas. There was strong pressure throughout Washington to stop the UN forces from taking the offensive, while forceful cables were arriving from Gullion at Leopoldville saying that, if we did so, it would mean the end of American influence in the Congo and drive the central government (even if without Adoula) to accept Soviet assistance. But the fighting around Elisabethville suddenly acquired a momentum of its own. Before we really knew what was happening, Tshombe’s resistance collapsed. It all occurred so quickly that it outstripped both instructions from the UN headquarters in New York and any revolt in western public opinion as well as any intervention by Moscow. I do not know what Kennedy would have done if the fighting had stretched out. But he had already decided to lend American fighter planes to the UN force if they were requested; and this suggests that he was ready, if necessary, to go very far down the military road to secure a unified Congo.

  The Katanga secession thus came to an end. There remained the problems of reconstruction and these were overwhelming. During 1963 Kennedy kept up his interest both in economic assistance to the Congo and in the extension of the UN military presence; he secured the latter from a U Thant highly dubious about the continued financial drain on the UN. But, in time, the Adoula government fell, and in another year Tshombe, who had fled the country in June 1963, renounced his secessionism and returned as Prime Minister of the unified Congo. With impressive agility, Tshombe, having lost his principle, at least recovered what he evidently valued a good deal more—his power. It was an ironic denouement—as if, after having been beaten in the Civil War, Jefferson Davis had returned as president of the triumphant American Union.

  The Congo policy did more, however, than simply settle a constitutional argument and preserve the Congo as a nation. It gave the United Nations its greatest success in peace-keeping and its greatest effort in technical assistance (though at a cost, for the expense of the Congo operations led to a UN financial crisis, relieved for a moment by the UN bond issue of 1963 but at a later moment threatening the very existence of the organization). More than that, it averted a possible Soviet-American clash in the heart of Africa. Above all, it consolidated the growing confidence of the new African states in the American President.

  7. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST APARTHEID

  Of all the preoccupations of African nationalism, the most obsessive was with South Africa, where apartheid—the policy of systematic exclusion of Africans and Asians from the life of the community—was becoming each year more cruel and abhorrent. Blocked from doing anything about apartheid on the spot, the other African states had long since appealed to the United Nations, which for some years had responded by passing resolutions of exhortation and condemnation. This ritualistic exercise had no effect on South Africa, and by 1961 the other African states were concluding that something more was required. The African resolutions of that year therefore demanded political and economic sanctions against apartheid. But even Asian nations considered this an extreme use of UN power, and the resolution as finally voted left it to individual states to consider such action as was open to them.

  As South Africa, far from showing any inclination to abandon its practices, proceeded to tighten its system more each year, the question of sanctions was bound to recur. In the autumn of 1962, after more repression, the African states put in a new resolution calling on UN members to break their political and economic relations with South Africa and even asking the Security Council to consider expelling South Africa from the UN if it did not change its policies.

  The United States had joined regularly in the ceremonial condemnation of apartheid. We also sought through diplomatic channels to persuade the South African government of the hopelessness of its course. An aide mémoire to Pretoria in September 1961 thus recorded our inability to cooperate with South Africa in ways which would lend support to apartheid. But a program of UN sanctions presented other questions; and the 1962 resolution embodying this program was one of those unrealistic declarations, at once grandiose and ineffectual, which made Kennedy so impatient. So long as South Africa’s major trading partners declined to participate, for example, the call for an economic boycott would be meaningless. I worked with Ambassador Francis Plimpton on the speech he gave to the General Assembly in November explaining our opposition to this resolution, and the following passage was a simple paraphrase of words spoken to me by the President:

  Would the passage of a resolution recommending sanctions bring about the practical result we seek?

  We do not believe this would bring us closer to our objective—the abandonment of apartheid in South Africa. We see little value in a resolution which would be primarily a means for a discharge of our emotions, which would be unlikely to be fully implemented and which calls for measures which could be easily evaded by the country to which they are addressed—with the result of calling into question the whole efficacy of the sanction process.

  We doubted, moreover, whether the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter, on which the appeal for sanctions relied, applied to the South African problem. Because of both the cogency in these arguments and the basic confidence in Kennedy’s purposes, our refusal to support sanctions in 1962 was readily accepted by the Africans, though the General Assembly passed the resolution by a heavy majority.

  We knew, however, that the matter would come up with fresh intensity in 1963. The first all-African association, the Organization of African Unity, met at Addis Ababa in May and laid plans for a new campaign of pressure against South Africa and Portugal. The OAU called, in effect, for the United States to choose between Africa and the colonial powers. After the meeting, friendly African leaders like Houphouët-Boigny and Nyerere warned us that in the case of South Africa we could no longer rest on purely verbal condemnation of apartheid. Reflecting on these developments, Mennen Williams wrote a memorandum in mid-June arguing that we must now prepare to back up disapproval with action. The indicated area, in his view, was the sale of arms.

  In June 1962, in connection with the establishment of a United States military tracking station in South Africa, we had agreed to sell South Africa arms for use against communist aggression; this limitation was meant to exclude arms which could be used to enforce apartheid, but the distinction was not always clear, and the partial embargo had proved ineffective. Williams now recommended that we examine the possibility of moving to a full embargo, pointing out that even this would fall far short of the sanctions voted in 1962 by the General Assembly. A few days later Adlai Stevenson wrote Kennedy in similar vein: “It seems clear that we are approaching a decisive situation from which the Africans will draw conclusions about the long-run nature of our policies.”

  The proposal of a total arms embargo encountered instant opposition in the upper levels of the State Department. One high official argued that it would gain us only a transitory political truce with the African leaders, who would be satisfied with nothing less than a full economic embargo, and that it would lose us the tangible advantages of our present cooperation with South Africa on a wide range o
f defense matters. An even higher official suggested that, if we embarked on the policy of sanctions against nations whose internal arrangements we disapproved, we must logically end by severing relations with perhaps half the existing community or states. The question, as this officer saw it, was whether we should precipitate crises in relations with other nations over such issues or work doggedly and persistently toward a decent world community within the existing international structure. We were not, he said, the selfelected gendarmes for the political and social problems of other countries.

  These were not easy questions; and they involved, of course, the Portuguese colonies as well as South Africa. The choice seemed almost to be between the military risk of losing the Azores and the South African tracking stations and the political risk of losing Africa. The Portuguese and South African cases were, however, separable; and, of the two, the Portuguese problem was the more difficult.

  Kennedy, who hoped to present a test ban treaty to the Senate that summer, had to take into account the possibility that the loss of the Azores, on top of a test ban, might open the way to a Republican attack on the administration for alleged neglect of vital national interests. He made this concern very clear in a meeting in the Cabinet Room on July 18 to consider our African policy in the UN. Why, he asked, should we take the initiative in pressing a resolution on Portugal? What if we hung back, did nothing and let nature take its course? He hated, he said, to have the United States become the scapegoat. We could not afford to lose the Azores with the test ban coming up. Let us not try to shepherd everyone around. Let the Portuguese Foreign Minister find out for himself how bad things were. We should not take the lead nor give the impression that we could do much for him—or would do much against him. He asked Stevenson what the probable French attitude would be, and Adlai said that France, as usual, would seek the best of both worlds. The President said, “Well, let us try that this time.”

  But South Africa was a different matter; and, indeed, pressure here could do something in African eyes to make up for restraint in the case of Portugal. I had brought the State Department debate to the attention of the Attorney General, and Robert Kennedy had raised the South African problem with Robert McNamara. The question of the choice between the military and political risks had not been presented to McNamara before. He promptly said that the South African decision should be made on political, not on military, grounds—a view which he soon registered formally with Rusk.

  Still the prospect of a total UN arms embargo troubled the President and the Secretary of State as setting a precedent for collective sanctions which might lead the UN down a road imperiling its very existence. Instead, the Department favored a call upon UN states to refrain from supplying arms which could be used to suppress the African population. Then Kennedy, in a brilliant stroke, went further and proposed a unilateral declaration that as a matter of national policy the United States would sell no additional arms to South Africa after the first of the year, so long as South Africa practiced apartheid. On August 2 Stevenson announced this decision in the Security Council. Five days later he cast the American vote for a resolution calling on all states “to cease forthwith the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition of all types and military vehicles to South Africa.” Britain and France abstained. This action could not long satisfy the insatiable African demand for stronger measures against apartheid; but it preserved the new African faith in American policy.

  At the same time, developments within the United States were further increasing African confidence in Kennedy. The distance between the American and African Negro had narrowed greatly since 1956. By 1962 American Negro leaders were meeting at Arden House to frame their recommendations on African policy, and African politicians were reading bulletins from Oxford and Birmingham as if they were local news. The acceleration of the American civil rights struggle cast Kennedy himself more and more as the champion of the American Negro against his traditional oppressors. The American President’s speeches about freedom and justice and his use of American troops to protect Negro rights made a deep impression in Africa. Azikiwe of Nigeria wrote Kennedy in the summer of 1963: “I congratulate you on your efforts to bring peace to your people and wish you God’s guidance in the struggle to overcome racial segregation.” “I thank President Kennedy, the young and dynamic President of your country,” said President Léon M’Ba of Gabon in dedicating a new American chancellery in Libreville, “for the great campaign which he has undertaken—and it is a difficult one—against segregation. . . . The United States cannot do otherwise because it is the defender of liberty, equality and fraternity, and because it is the great friend of all of the nations of the world.”

  The struggle against segregation at home gave substance to our condemnations of apartheid in the United Nations and helped the Africans accept our reasoned objection to sanctions. But, more than this, it made Africans perceive the United States for a moment as “the defender of liberty, equality and fraternity.” The American President’s gallant leadership in the civil rights fight sealed the vast regard and affection for him in African hearts.

  XXII

  The World of Diversity

  KENNEDY’S THIRD WORLD POLICY—the policy of helping the new nations to strength and independence—involved more than a change in American attitudes toward colonialism and non-alignment. For the travail of nationhood required above all economic and social progress. To throw serious weight behind the independence movement, the President had to redesign our existing programs of economic assistance, devise new instruments of social betterment and infuse the whole effort with a fresh idealism.

  American assistance to foreign nations had gone through a number of phases since the Second World War. Immediately after the war, during the UNRRA period, foreign aid went mostly for humanitarian purposes. At the end of the forties, in the era of the Marshall Plan, it went for the reconstruction of developed economies shattered by the war. In the fifties attention shifted to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, and aid went mainly for military assistance. This was for several reasons. The Korean War gave priority to the military aspect of the communist offensive in the third world. John Foster Dulles’s diplomacy, moreover, conceived aid in large measure as a means of enlisting allies and establishing strong military positions (as in Laos). And the annual agony of getting the aid bill through Congress was somewhat eased when it could be presented as a hard, anti-communist, military program.*

  In the meantime, the aid organization had been going steadily downhill since the great days of the Marshall Plan. As the change of venue increased its problems, changes of leadership reduced its capacity to deal with them. Moreover, once the original élan waned, the aid effort began to suffer from bureaucratosclerosis. The Economic Cooperation Administration of 1948–51, so splendidly managed by Paul Hoffman and Averell Harriman, thus passed through a succession of phases, each more pallid than the last—the Mutual Security Administration in 1951, the Foreign Operations Administration in 1953, the International Cooperation Administration in 1955. The aid agency had eight different chiefs in the eight Eisenhower years, one of whom had not even believed in foreign aid, or at least had voted against it in Congress. By 1960 foreign aid policy had been static for nearly a decade, in its conceptions as well as its programs. ICA’s main responsibility was a far-flung but random program of technical assistance. This continuation of Truman’s Point Four had become a bits-and-pieces operation—help to an agricultural college here, to a rural development project there, to a school somewhere else. In addition, ICA occasionally doled out funds to support the budgets of shaky governments or achieve other short-term political results. “They ran it,” one New Frontiersman said of ICA, “as if it were a country store.” It was a tired organization, going faithfully through assigned motions but lacking coherence or urgency. A vague but perceptible malaise about the whole effort was beginning to infect Congress and the country.

  1. NEW DIRECTIONS IN FOREIGN AID

  In the meantime, a new a
nalysis of the aid problem was emerging from the universities and the foundations. At the start, development had been seen as a relatively self-contained economic process, calling only for the injection of capital and technical skill* into a dormant economy. In time economists began to see that development had to be studied in a broader institutional and cultural context. The substantial increase of output and living standards, it was becoming evident, required the modernization of entire social structures and ways of thought and life—and for this capital was not enough. “It is sometimes easier to build a million-ton steel plant,” as Kusum Nair wrote of the Indian experience,” . . . than to change a man’s outlook on such matters as the use of irrigation water, fertilizers and contraceptives.”*

  As in the case of military strategy, the new approach was most fully explored along the banks of the Charles River. Here a group of economists at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were evolving a comprehensive view, shaped in great part by their own experience, of the development process. They all, for example, had been exposed to Keynesianism in New Deal days. While Keynes himself had written about mature economies, his analysis supplied a framework for an approach to underdevelopment, because it identified strategic relationships within the economy, as between savings and investment and between the national budget and the level of economic activity. Another common experience was wartime work in such agencies as the Office of Strategic Services (Edward S. Mason, Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen) or the Strategic Bombing Survey (J. K. Galbraith), where economists, whether in order to pick out bombing targets or to assess the significance of the damage wrought, had to think in terms of leverage points within the economic system. Both depression and war thus forced attention on the dynamics of whole economies. Some of the Cambridge group later worked in the Marshall Plan (Lincoln Gordon); others took part in Ford Foundation and other development missions in the fifties (Mason, Galbraith, David Bell). By the late fifties the study of development economics centered in the seminar organized at Harvard by Galbraith, with the later collaboration of Mason and Bell, and in the work carried on by Max Millikan, Rostow, P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan and others at the MIT Center for International Studies.