[Allen] Dulles, Doug Dillon (then serving as a State Department undersecretary), and William Burden, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, led the charge within the Eisenhower administration to first demonize and then dispose of Lumumba. All three men had financial interests in the Congo. ... The Eisenhower administration’s increasingly militant policy toward Lumumba took shape over cocktails in clublike environments such as the Africa-America Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. ...
Dulles quickly embraced the idea that Lumumba was a diabolical agent of Communist subversion. In truth, Lumumba had less of a connection to Moscow than any other emerging African leader. He explicitly tried to keep his struggling nation out of the superpower vortex, vowing that the Congo would “never be a satellite of Russia or of the United States.”
“We want no part of the Cold War,” Lumumba declared. “We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.” But in the Dulles worldview, there was no such thing as neutrality. And anyone who professed such notions belonged to the enemy camp. At a July 22, 1960, National Security Council meeting in the Eisenhower White House—just three weeks after Lumumba’s independence day speech—Dulles denounced the Congolese leader as “a Castro or worse. . . . It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists.”
Doug Dillon strongly backed Dulles’s distraught view of Lumumba as a Soviet accomplice. It was an alarmist view calculated to convince Eisenhower that the African leader had to be terminated. As it turned out, the president required little persuasion. By the summer of 1960, Ike was sick, tired, and cranky—and he had little patience or understanding for Third World freedom struggles. Conferring with the British foreign minister Lord Home, Eisenhower quipped that he hoped “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles.” At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower’s lethal order. “I was surprised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled.”
Over the next several months, the CIA, working with its allies in Belgian intelligence, engineered a military coup led by a cocky, ruthless, twenty-nine-year-old colonel named Joseph Mobutu that forced Lumumba out of office and placed him under house arrest. But that was not enough for the CIA.
....
After Kennedy’s inauguration, the CIA continued to keep Lumumba’s death under wraps. On January 26, Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo. The CIA director said nothing about Lumumba’s assassination, though his fate was well known by then within the agency. ... The Kennedy White House remained in the dark about Lumumba for a full month after his murder. When JFK finally heard of the leader’s death, the news came not from Dulles but from UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson.
Jacques Lowe, the young photographer who had been unobtrusively documenting the Kennedy story from the earliest days of his presidential run, was in the Oval Office when JFK received the phone call from Stevenson. .... The photos Lowe was allowed to take during the intense rush of JFK’s brief presidency were windows into its troubled soul. None was more powerful than the picture that the young photographer snapped at the moment when Kennedy was told of Lumumba’s fate. The photo is one of the most searing documents of the Kennedy presidency. In the close-up shot, JFK looks physically stricken as he absorbs the news on the phone, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hand clasped to his face. It was an image of such anguish that it seemed to come from some harrowing time deep in his presidency instead of in its earliest bloom. The picture contains all of the sorrows that were to come.
Lowe later recalled the moment: “I was alone with the president; his hand went to his head in utter despair. ‘Oh, no,’ I heard him groan . . . [Lumumba] was considered a trouble-maker and a leftist by many Americans. But Kennedy’s attitude toward black Africa was that many who were considered leftists were in fact nationalists and patriots. . . . He felt that Africa presented an opportunity for the West, and speaking as an American, unhindered by a colonial heritage, he had made friends in Africa. . . . The call therefore left him heartbroken, for he knew that the murder would be a prelude to chaos . . . it was a poignant moment.”
