Bowing to the United States I: The Build-Up

Abstract

When the Kennedy Administration bustled into office in January 1961, it immediately began reconsidering the United States’ policy towards the Congo. ‘One of the principal purposes of the new policy’ which thus emerged was ‘to reorient the United States position so that it will have the support of world opinion generally, and in particular the support of principal segments of opinion in Africa and Asia’.² The President took a close interest in the subject, so much so that at times he was ‘laughingly called the Congo desk officer’. One of Kennedy’s concerns was to promote the Congo’s unity, for fear that the United States’ communist adversaries would ‘pick up some of the pieces’ if it broke up.³ In Leopoldville there were intimate contacts between the United States mission and the UN — ‘virtually a day-to-day and hour-to-hour communication’.⁴ After the September 1961 fighting, an Under-Secretary in the State Department urged that the United States ‘build up UN fighting power to the point where Tshombe will realize he cannot win’.⁵ And the President himself was reported to have been decisive in determining (against military advice) that the United States would back the UN to the extent, if necessary, of throwing Tshombe out by force.⁶

Tshombe ‘would rather go back to eating nuts than capitulate. … The leading Africans, it is true, have their Cadillacs but they have had nuts much longer and are much nearer to them and they do not worry about returning to the jungle’. (The Foreign Secretary)¹