The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

And in the end, US officials got what they wanted. It was a huge victory. As historian John Roosa puts it, “Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.”51 This was something for almost everyone in the US government and elite media circles to celebrate, given the thinking that was dominant at the time. James Reston, a liberal columnist at the New York Times, published a piece under the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.” He noted, correctly, that “There was a great deal more contact between the anti-Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is generally realized… it is doubtful if the coup would have ever been attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from here.” Reston said that the “savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy under General Suharto is, of course, the most important” of a number of “hopeful political developments in Asia” that he saw as outweighing Washington’s more widely publicized setbacks in Vietnam.52