by Gerard Colby
And that was Lumumba’s fatal mistake. Both men were not just American government officials; they had personal ties to powerful and growing interests in Africa. Dillon, in fact, was an investor with the Belgians in Laurance Rockefeller’s textile mill in the Congo, Filatures et Tissage Africains, and in another of Laurance’s holdings, Cegeac, which imported automobiles into the Congo.11
Perhaps Lumumba did not know of Dillon’s investments, or perhaps he was simply imprudent. In any case, he refused to equivocate on an end to Belgian control. For him, that was the bottom line. It would cost him his life.
“The impression that was left was … very bad,” noted Dillon. In fact, as he explained years later to Senate investigators who were looking into possible CIA involvement in Lumumba’s murder, the impression was “that this was an individual whom it was impossible to deal with. And the feelings of the Government as a result of this sharpened very considerably at that time.… We [had] hoped to … see what we could do to come to a better understanding with him.”12 Belgium, after all, was a close ally, host of NATO’s headquarters in Brussels.
“The concern with Lumumba was not really the concern with Lumumba as a person,” the CIA’s Branson Tweedy explained to the Senate in 1975. “It was concern at this very pregnant point in the new African development … the Congo, after all, was the largest geographical expression. Contained within it were enormously important mineral resources.…”13 And the highest percentage of those mineral resources then known lay in the Congolese province of Katanga, which was still dominated by Belgian colonial rule.
Within a few weeks, Lumumba’s assassination was proposed by staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff* at an “informal” interdepartmental meeting at the Pentagon with the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA. Shortly thereafter, at an August meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), Dillon reported that Lumumba had demanded the withdrawal of European U.N. troops from his country, charging that they were interfering with his government. This demand could undermine the efforts of U.N. Undersecretary General Ralph Bunche, a former Rockefeller Foundation grantee and current trustee of the foundation, to cut a deal with Moise Tshombe, the Belgian-backed leader of the Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga province. The plan was for a token U.N. troop presence at Tshombe’s capital in Elizabethville. In return, Katanga would not be invaded, and the U.N. troops could focus on pressuring for a new government to replace Lumumba. Sensing this plan, Lumumba recognized that subversion of his government was afoot and now demanded the withdrawal of all U.N. troops and threatened to ask for Soviet assistance. President Eisenhower, presiding over the meeting, exploded. According to a shocked NSC staff member, Eisenhower “said something—I can no longer remember his words, that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.”14
The CIA swung into high gear, ordering its Chief of Station in the Congo, Laurance Devlin, “to proceed with operation,” in other words, to replace Lumumba and his government with a pro-Western group. At the same time, the CIA made plans to send the Belgian-backed regime in Katanga logistical support, which would eventually include Helio Courier airplanes—and JAARS’s top pilot.
Once the Special Group agreed on August 25 “that planning for the Congo would not necessarily rule out ‘consideration’ of any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba,”‘15 the next step seemed preordained. On September 26 CIA scientist “Joseph Schneider” arrived in Leopoldville, the Congolese capital, and delivered deadly biological materials, including tularemia (rabbit fever), tuberculosis, anthrax, smallpox, brucellosis (undolent fever), and Venezuelan equine encephalitis (sleeping sickness). One material “was supposed to produce a disease that was … indigenous to that area [of Africa] and that could be fatal.”16 “Schneider” was actually Dr. Gottlieb of MKULTRA.
A MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL CANDIDATE
President Eisenhower himself was aware that real social and economic needs were driving the Third World’s political revolutions. But unlike Rockefeller, he sought a way to use foreign aid to reduce competition with the Soviets, not to increase it. He considered offering Nikita Khrushchev during his 1959 visit a joint U.S.-USSR aid program to underdeveloped countries through the World Bank and the International Development Association; the idea was shot down by Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson on the grounds that the Soviet ruble was not as sound as the dollar and, thus, that the United States would get the worst end of the deal. Eisenhower proposed greater trade, only to be told that it would disrupt existing trade relations. He proposed a massive 10,000-students-per-year exchange program, again getting put off by the State Department. His talks with Khrushchev at Camp David remained, therefore, more spirit than substance, but the fact that there was even some goodwill was enough for him to press for “peaceful coexistence.”
Eisenhower knew that economic competition was a “wasteful” drain on the American economy and that trade wars for markets and resources had led to real war in the past. The very intensity of trade relations and the interconnectedness of the world market in the twentieth century had already forced global military alliances that fought two world wars. Eisenhower was convinced that with the advent of atomic weapons in the last war, and now intercontinental ballistic missiles, humanity could not survive a third world war. Confronted by “serious talk of possible war,” he was aghast. “You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.”17
Nelson’s campaign for a crash spending program on fallout shelters did not impress Eisenhower as fiscally or politically responsible. Nelson kept pestering the president with studies. Eisenhower rejected them all.
In July 1959, after just six months in office as governor, Nelson Rockefeller organized a White House conference on fallout protection and used the conference to launch his drive for the White House. Eisenhower looked on helplessly as Nelson convened the Special Commission on Civil Defense and invited the press. Some commentators, feigning wisdom, mistook Nelson’s campaign for shelters as merely a personal “preoccupation” or “obsession”; more savvy politicians understood it as a cynical attempt to stoke basic fears for survival to fire up the engine of his real campaign. Nelson himself ended all doubts on that matter after the annual governors’ conference in Puerto Rico the next month gave him a more dignified launching pad (and the governors some posh accommodations at brother Laurance’s El Dorado hotel).
He embarked on a speaking tour in the states where Republican leaders were most conservative. The strategy was obvious: By calling for increased conventional arms expenditures, he hoped to woo the party’s powerful conservative wing away from the front-runner, Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The tour was the litmus test of his ability to shuck off his liberal image.
He failed. Twenty years of memories could not be erased: of Rockefeller, the New Dealer; of Truman’s architect of foreign aid; of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s promoter of national medical insurance programs for catastrophic illnesses; of the millionaire philanthropist; of the governor of an eastern liberal state.
In November, a year before the election, the Rockefeller road show arrived on Nixon’s home ground in California. Standing beneath a giant picture of Nixon at the Western States Republican Conference was not likely to win him much; the crowds were unenthusiastic, and donors said no.
By the time he reached Texas, Nelson was desperate. His reception in eight other states had ranged from lukewarm to frigid. He gambled that Texans, ever wary of the Spanish-speaking lands south of the Rio Grande, would respond to him talking about what he knew best: Latin America and the revolution of rising expectations.
Before a large crowd, he warned of the “very serious” situation in Cuba and about widespread disturbances throughout Latin America, a subtle reminder of the riots that turned Nixon’s tour into an international embarrassment the previous year. He spoke knowledgeably and forcefully, emphasizing that Latin Americans did not control their own economies, but
were dependent on the export prices of coffee, copper, tin, sugar, and bananas.
“A drop in the price of any of these commodities can cause havoc with the countries that export them.… The Soviets are just beginning to exploit the situation by offering trade agreements and promising aid on a large scale. If we are not successful in preserving and developing a strategy and vital free association of free peoples … it will cast doubt on our ability as a leader in the free world.”18
The speech was a huge publicity success, appealing to conservative Democrats as well as Republicans. Democratic House Speaker Sam Rayburn drove 100 miles to be seen publicly embracing a Republican rising star, Nelson Rockefeller. “I didn’t want you to leave Texas without seeing you,” Rayburn said. “We have been friends under three presidents.” Rayburn did not mention the $300,000 grant Nelson approved as Rockefeller Brothers Fund president for Rayburn’s library a couple of years back.19
In the end, after futilely urging “big thinking” in Houston and espousing “the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God,”20 he got his most spirited welcome in Miami—from vacationing New Yorkers.
He had failed in his effort to show he was not just a maverick millionaire who was using the inherited money to win the White House.
Back in New York, Nelson convened his council of advisers. The advisers had sounded out Wall Street early in the campaign; to Nelson’s surprise, the financiers trusted demonstrably controllable Nixon more than wealthy, uncontrollable Rockefeller. The day after Christmas, reporters were summoned to the Capitol in Albany for what most thought would be the governor’s announcement of plans to enter the New Hampshire Republican primary that February. Instead, they were handed a statement that he was withdrawing from a race he had never formally entered.
His decision was “definite and final.”21
Eisenhower kept a discreet silence. He wondered if Nelson’s decision really was definite and final.
It was not. By April 1960, John F. Kennedy was on the way to winning primaries that the Democratic bosses, including Berle, said a Catholic could not win. It was a sign that the nation was in the mood for a change. That month Nelson published an article in Foreign Affairs, hinting that the Eisenhower administration was not doing enough in foreign aid to combat Soviet economic competition in the Third World or spending enough on defense. The article’s publication coincided with two speeches.
In one speech in Philadelphia, Nelson mentioned missionaries to distant lands as examples of the kind of “concern for humanity at large” shown by Americans that should be matched with economic and military aid. “If we attempt to stand still, the world and its destiny will leave us and our destiny behind—perhaps in the dust.” Again, he called for a Western Hemispheric “economic union.”22
On the same day, Nelson, now plainly appealing to liberals and moderates of all parties, delivered a second speech at the University of Chicago’s John D. Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. The subject was the Christian heritage in American law. It was a stirring address on the nation’s moral purpose.
“This chapel in which we assemble today bears the name of my grandfather. One of the ruling axioms of his life was—in the words of my father—the conviction that ‘every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty. I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world, that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.’”23 The same words were carved on a bronze plaque at Rockefeller Center, the very embodiment of Rockefeller financial might.
Ten days later, Nelson received word that his father was dying at his winter retreat in Tucson, Arizona. Junior, no longer the Lord of Pocantico but a feeble eighty-six-year-old, had withdrawn from his sons, leaving them to their appointed tasks in the world.
Nelson and Laurance were by Junior’s side when death came in his sleep. Nelson was moved, but not to the personal degree he felt when his mother had died. What made Junior’s death so powerful was its timing, coming so soon on the heels of the death of Frank Jamieson, his closest political adviser. Jamieson’s succumbing to the cancerous result of a lifetime of cigarette smoking was a terrible blow to Nelson, greater than Junior’s death. Yet it had been Junior who played a deeper note in Nelson’s soul. As long as Junior was alive, a firm grip of family duty and honor held Nelson under rein. Junior’s traditions permeated the family’s private lives, imbuing the very prayers Nelson led over his children’s breakfast table and running unseen but felt through the labyrinth of Rockefeller Center, right into Room 5600 itself. Jamieson’s advice may have saved Nelson’s career more than once, but Junior’s looming presence had always served to back Jamieson’s wisdom.
Now, as Nelson stood at the family plot at Pocantico with the rest of the clan to bury the ashes he had brought back from Tucson, the last restraint on Nelson’s ambitions was gone.
DESCENT OF THE DOVE
On May 1, 1960, Premier Khrushchev was observing the annual May Day festivities in Moscow’s Red Square, when Air Marshall Vershinin, arriving late and in duty uniform rather than the customary parade uniform, took him aside. Something had happened, something that would shock the world, end Eisenhower’s last crusade for peace, and launch Nelson Rockefeller on a concerted drive to shape the selection of Eisenhower’s successor.
A U-2 had crashed deep inside Soviet territory. Francis Gary Powers had broken standard operating procedure for CIA secret air flights by carrying on his person nineteen items proving his identity, including U.S. Air Force identification cards and his social security card. Someone was violating the NSC’s directive requiring plausible deniability for clandestine operations.
Powers had decided to fly the falling U-2 down to 30,000 feet, forgo the CIA’s standard poisoned needle for such situations, and use his parachute. Arrested and interrogated, he promptly admitted he was a spy.
The timing of Powers’s flight was ominous. It occurred two weeks before the scheduled U.S.-Soviet Summit in Paris. Eisenhower had been impressed by the Soviets’ unilateral decision to demobilize more than 1 million men from their armed forces. They also had proposed to negotiate disarmament and were willing to continue their unilateral suspension since 1958 of nuclear testing, as long as the United States did likewise. To ensure that nothing on the United States’ part inadvertently sabotaged the summit, the president had Secretary of State Herter pledge that U.S. high-altitude flights in the tense Berlin Corridor would remain suspended indefinitely.
The State Department denied that Powers was a spy. “There was absolutely no-no-no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet air space and there never has been.”24 The flight was innocent. A “disabled” NASA pilot had been victimized.
This cover story, almost as much as the downing of the U-2, put both Eisenhower and Khrushchev in an impossible position. Eisenhower was neck-deep in a lie created by the State Department, and Khrushchev was being asked to swallow the lie at the risk of his own position in the Kremlin. Yet the Soviet premier tried to save the summit by giving Eisenhower the plausible deniability that CIA’s Powers had denied him. “I am prepared to grant that the President had no knowledge of a plane being dispatched to the Soviet Union and failing to return,” he said, “but that should alert us still more.”25 The American president might not be in control of his generals.
The flight, however, had received presidential authorization—or at least had received authorization from someone in the White House. CIA Director Allen Dulles would admit to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee only that the flight had been authorized by “a group” that oversaw all covert operations. He refused to name names, but the NSC’s Special Group at the time included the same men who recently had authorized an assassination plot against Lumumba. The Special Group included Allen Dulles, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and Assistant Secretary of Defense John Irwin II. Dulles “assumed” that Gray had Eisenhower’s approval.
Ike’s course of action—or more properly, inaction—had left him with an
untenable choice: lying again in the face of Khrushchev’s proof or admitting, as his critics charged, that he was not in control of his own administration.
On May 9, Eisenhower authorized Secretary of State Herter to acknowledge that the president had allowed U-2 flights over the Soviet Union. The president himself then announced that he had known about the flights and was taking full responsibility. He and Nixon excused the flights in the interest of preventing another Pearl Harbor. Few bought it.
The U-2 cost Eisenhower—and the world—the best opportunity for a disarmament accord since the 1955 Geneva Summit. And Nelson Rockefeller, as the first chairman of the NSC’s Special Group, had played a key role in destroying that opportunity.
Nelson listened to the administration’s desperate allusion to the need for “open skies” with knowing appreciation. “Open Skies” had been his formulation to turn a peace agenda into a propaganda sideshow at Geneva in July 1955, the same month the new U-2, whose birth he had overseen as the Special Group’s first chairman, was to make its maiden flight. Now that the “Spirit of Camp David” was going the way of the “Spirit of Geneva,” and Vice President Nixon was obliged to make a lame televised “Pearl Harbor” defense of the administration’s fumbling, Nelson saw his chance.
On May 23, he made his first formal statement on foreign affairs since withdrawing from the presidential race five months before. He praised Eisenhower’s integrity and warned Democrats not to exploit the president’s embarrassment. Then he did just that.
In blaming everyone but the president, Nelson was making no friends among Republican or Democratic leaders; he was, however, articulating the sense of frustration and confusion raging among the electorate. As anti-American riots broke out in Korea, Turkey, and Japan, Nelson used his speaking engagements in New York to push for increased arms expenditures.