Authors: Jim Newton
Nixon retreated into his hard, lonely shell, and rejected sound advice. Eisenhower, among others, advised him to refuse Kennedy’s debate challenge. It would, many people warned him, elevate the junior senator from Massachusetts to share a stage with the vice president. And it would undermine a fundamental premise of the Republican campaign to have them spar as equals. But Nixon liked to debate. He had won in college by dint of hard work, and he had held his own against Khrushchev. He was sure he could handle Kennedy. Conversely, when Len Hall, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, pleaded with Nixon to court the support of newspaper editorial boards, Nixon refused. “What for?” he asked. “They’re all against me anyway.”
The world does not wait on American politics. The stirrings of liberation, cynically incited by Moscow in its colonial designs, insured that 1960 would produce its share of crises. Even as Kennedy and Nixon girded for their historic encounter, Laotian peasants rose up against their king, and the Congolese rebelled against the colonial rule of Belgium.
In the summer and fall of 1960, tiny, mountainous Laos disintegrated into factions, with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union sniffing at the possibilities. In August, Eisenhower was warned that “the situation remains so confused that anarchy is likely to develop.” It deteriorated from there, and American sources reported on December 11 that howitzers were being unloaded from Soviet aircraft at a Laotian airport. Within a week, fighting was under way, and the U.S. embassy was shelled. The government of Laos, struggling for survival, asked for American help, and Eisenhower, from Walter Reed hospital, where he was for a checkup, authorized the dispatch of Thai and U.S. aircraft to resupply the government. That swift response repelled the Communist forces for the moment but did not secure a victory. As the year ended, Ike pledged to defend Laos even if it meant the United States fighting unilaterally in the region.
In the Congo, meanwhile, Belgium succumbed to the pressure for independence on June 30. Unrest followed. No sooner had the Congo liberated itself than violent bands turned on the white population. Belgium deployed troops in defense of those residents, and the new government complained that the former colonial military was exercising an authority it no longer possessed (Belgium and the new government had drafted a treaty that would bar such intrusions, but it had not been ratified at the time of independence). Complicating matters further, a mineral-rich section of the Congo known as the Katanga Province declared its independence from the new nation on July 11 and invited Belgian troops to protect whites there. The splintering of the Congo was encouraged by Belgium, and Katanga was joined by rebellion in another province, the diamond-mining area of Kasai. With the new nation on the brink of disintegrating, the United States reached out to the Congo’s new prime minister, the handsome, charismatic Patrice Lumumba, to attempt a settlement.
Lumumba arrived in New York on July 24, woefully unprepared to discuss his nation’s future. He had no agenda for the talks; he forgot even to bring money. American officials feigned respect for him but in fact regarded him as an oddity. Ralph Bunche, the great American diplomat and civil rights leader and winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, considered Lumumba “crazy,” and the Belgians charged that he was a Communist. The CIA and the administration considered him an opportunist, not a Communist, but worried that he might seek refuge under Soviet protection. Communist or not, Ike saw Lumumba as flaky and ill equipped to manage a modern nation. Ike hoped that Lumumba’s government would fall while he was away. To encourage that, he proposed a three-week tour of the United States.
Lumumba’s visit had its ups and downs: the prime minister was flattered by Secretary Herter’s welcome but disappointed not to meet Eisenhower; the Belgian ambassador complained of the ceremony for Lumumba, which he said angered Belgians just as it would annoy the United States if Belgium were to host a state gathering for Castro. Back in the Congo, a UN force invited by the Congolese government enforced a tenuous peace, but the Soviets stoked the unrest, and Eisenhower was perturbed when Lumumba gave an interview to the Soviet news agency. “The communists,” Ike warned Herter on August 1, “are trying to take control of this.” Once again, Ike readied for conflict. If the Soviets tried to enter the Congo by force, he insisted, “we would all be in the fight.”
The Soviets did not send troops, but Lumumba continued to duel with Belgium and the United Nations, demanding a full and immediate withdrawal of Belgian forces and an end to the Katanga Province secession. If he did not get his way, Lumumba hinted that he might turn to the Soviet Union to supply what the West could or would not. Good to his word, when the UN did not respond as quickly as Lumumba wished, he summoned Soviet help. Soon Eastern bloc equipment and advisers were streaming into the Congo. On August 18, a CIA operative there wired his superiors that embassy officials and others believed a “classic communist effort” to overthrow the government was under way. “Decisive period not far off,” the operative cabled in clipped prose. “Whether or not Lumumba actually commie or just playing commie game to assist his solidifying power, anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo, and there may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.”
One Cuba was one too many for Ike. The National Security Council met on August 18, and Eisenhower said he wanted a plan to stabilize the Congo. What he heard was not encouraging. The UN secretary-general regarded Lumumba as “an impossible person” (and possibly under the influence of “dope”), and Allen Dulles reported that Lumumba “was in Soviet pay.” Eisenhower listened to those reports and firmly replied that the United States would not permit Lumumba to expel the UN forces. There was, he insisted, no indication that the Congolese people were opposed to UN peacekeeping efforts; there was only evidence that Lumumba himself was threatened. Ike adamantly refused to stand by while the UN withdrew from the Congo and was replaced by Soviet arms and equipment. That was a prospect, the note taker recorded, “too ghastly to contemplate.”
What Eisenhower said—or did not say—next has been the object of inquiry by historians and investigators ever since. According to Robert Johnson, who kept the minutes of that meeting, Eisenhower indicated with words Johnson could not recall but that “came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.” Johnson was shocked that the president would issue such an order and retained the memory of that moment for decades. As time went on, however, he came to doubt himself, in part because he recognized how uncharacteristic it would have been for Eisenhower to recommend the dispatch of a foreign leader before a roomful of advisers. Others at the meeting vehemently denied that Ike made any such statement, and the minutes of the meeting that Johnson prepared included no mention of it. Douglas Dillon, the acting secretary of state at that moment, recalled that Eisenhower may well have said that Lumumba was a danger to the world and should be gotten rid of but never ordered him killed. The minutes do, in fact, reflect the suggestion of Maurice Stans, Eisenhower’s budget director, that the United States “throw Lumumba out by peaceful means.”
Whether Ike—who a few weeks later muttered that he wished Lumumba would “fall into a river of crocodiles”—wanted him dead or merely out of the way, Allen Dulles believed he had received presidential authorization to eliminate him. A few days later, the CIA initiated its efforts to depose Lumumba, a mission in which it regarded no methods as off-limits. In September, Dulles cabled the agency’s Léopoldville station chief to urge “every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.” Clandestine plots were hatched and pursued; CIA cables mused darkly of rifles needed for “hunting season,” while one particularly ingenious plot involved slipping Lumumba a tube of poisoned toothpaste.
Lumumba’s enemies were not confined to the West. The Congo’s new president dumped him from office, but Lumumba continued to agitate and muscle his way back into a position of leadership. After Lumumba was fired, both the president and the now-former prime minister turned to the army chief of staff, Mobutu Sese Seko, and ordered him to arrest the other. Instead, Mobutu seized power for himself, retained the president, and turned on Lumumba, who fled to his home province to escape arrest. Mobutu was himself a curiosity. The first reports described the chaos in his office, with children and dogs milling about as he propounded on the role of “councils of students” in running the government. But he was a curiosity the United States could live with. He expelled the Soviet advisers, and Washington breathed easier. Deposed and on the run, Lumumba no longer posed much of a threat to the United States or Belgium, but neither the CIA nor Belgian intelligence was ready to forget about him.
Richard Nixon had rejected the advice of his betters in deciding to debate John Kennedy. He rejected it on substance, believing himself the better debater, and on style: Nixon refused to pick a suit that would match the set or to wear makeup that would improve his camera appearance. He paid the price. His performance in the first televised debate, broadcast on September 26, was substantively solid but telegenically disastrous. Still recovering from the injury to his knee, the vice president perspired. Almost from the outset, his upper lip gleamed, making him look ill at ease; he wore a gray suit that blended into the set’s background, and he insisted on turning toward Kennedy, while Kennedy looked steadily into the camera. From the perspective of viewers, he seemed shifty while Kennedy appeared direct. Kennedy reminded viewers that he and Nixon had come to Congress the same year, and he demonstrated by his clear answers and his superior composure that he was every bit Nixon’s equal. Although many observers scored it a tie, television viewers favored Kennedy, and with seventy million Americans watching the debate on TV, that was a powerful victory, evening the race.
Eisenhower writhed as Nixon lost momentum. If Nixon’s future was at stake, so, too, was Ike’s legacy. Kennedy’s campaign promised change—a break from an America that he characterized as spent and sputtering. Kennedy’s success required Americans to join him in rejecting what Eisenhower took pride in having built. Kennedy’s most memorable criticism was at best misleading and at worst deceptive: beginning in 1958 and with increasing fervor as the campaign was engaged, he charged that Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to take a commanding lead in building the nuclear arsenal. In February 1960, Kennedy asserted that “everyone agrees now” that a “missile gap” existed between the two nations.
But once he secured his party’s nomination, Kennedy was provided with estimates of Soviet and U.S. military strength. He thus knew—or at least had been told—that the United States far exceeded the Soviet Union in nuclear capacity. But ever since
Sputnik
, he and other Democrats had been lambasting the Eisenhower administration for its supposed indifference to Soviet strength. He was not about to stop now. Kennedy continued to criticize the administration’s attitude toward space, missile, and technological superiority, extracting maximum political advantage from a claim he knew to be at least contested by official estimates, if not outright false.
Even Kennedy’s much-admired speech on his religion and its place in his public and political life opened with a ringing critique of Eisenhower, including a challenge to the administration’s military and technological record. Far more important than Kennedy’s Catholicism, the candidate argued, were:
the spread of communist influence until it now festers only 90 miles from the coast of Florida, the humiliating treatment of our president and vice president by those who no longer respect our power, the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctors’ bills, the families forced to give up their farms, an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign.
Ike rebutted Kennedy’s claims of a missile gap but refused to do so in detail, in part because the estimates of Soviet and U.S. strength were based on the top secret work of the U-2 and other intelligence methods. Even Nixon seemed tacitly to accept some of Kennedy’s critique: Eager to escape criticism of Eisenhower, Nixon embraced the GOP’s commitment to increased defense spending. Ike watched the campaign unfold with gnawing apprehension, torn by his desire to protect his legacy, by his mounting distrust of Kennedy, and by his abiding uncertainty about Nixon’s abilities.
Khrushchev, meanwhile, spent much of October reminding Americans—Eisenhower, in particular—of what an erratic menace the Soviet Union represented with him as its leader. On the first of the month, he delivered a caustic, freewheeling address to the United Nations, berating Eisenhower for the U-2 episode and rambling on about lynching and American support for Spain’s Franco, among other criticisms. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations dismissed the speech as a “spectacle,” but the Soviet premier was not done yet. Eleven days later, during a debate over a Soviet resolution on colonialism, the delegate from the Philippines rose in support of the proposal but suggested broadening it to condemn Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as well. Khrushchev banged his desk in protest and demanded recognition. Receiving it, he thundered at the delegate, calling him a “jerk” and a “stooge of American imperialism.” The assembly then degenerated into chaotic name-calling and demands for attention. It climaxed with Khrushchev waving his shoe in fervid protest and banging it on his desk. The president of the assembly shattered his gavel trying to restore order, then gave up and adjourned the session.
Nixon’s campaign carried a slim advantage into the final weeks, leading in twenty-two states with 161 electoral votes, while Kennedy led in fourteen states with 123 votes. The big states, however, remained too close to call, and Nixon struggled. On October 14, Eisenhower called Nixon’s headquarters but was told Nixon was asleep. Then Nixon called the White House looking for Attorney General Rogers, and the switchboard operator alerted Ike’s secretary, Whitman, that Nixon was on the line. He was transferred to Ike’s office. Once connected, Nixon got a condescending earful. Eisenhower began by admitting that he had missed the previous night’s debate, then proceeded to critique Nixon’s performance anyway. The president recommended slowing down, thinking over questions before blurting out answers, trying to appear more thoughtful, less glib. Nixon considered himself an effective communicator; Ike was the one notorious for garbling his syntax and was, to boot, a stroke victim who occasionally groped for the right word. Who, Nixon must have wondered, was lecturing whom? Whitman filed away the episode under “Things I shall never understand.”