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

by Vincent Bevins

JFK wasn’t going to build a United States government from scratch. He would be inheriting the state as it existed—and the CIA operations already underway around the globe. On January 17, 1961, three days before he was sworn in, as he was still writing that lofty speech, the whole world got a stark reminder of that when Patrice Lumumba, the young, energetic, and popular leader of the Congo, was executed. Lumumba had become prime minister in the wake of a decolonization process that was even more chaotic than Indonesia’s had been a decade earlier. The end of Belgian control left the few independence leaders in the Congo scrambling to set up a government. Lumumba was dynamic and renowned for the fast-paced speeches that rolled over the radio waves across the territory. When the nation won independence, he was compared to the Sputnik satellite, and regular people looked forward to nothing less than a cosmic turnabout.14