a few months after JFK’s death, Jones asked the newly sworn-in Johnson to sign an official determination that continued aid to Indonesia was in the US national interest. Johnson declined. “President Kennedy, I knew, would have signed the determination almost as a matter of routine. It was disappointing,” Jones remembers. In December, Robert McNamara, one of the advisers left behind by Kennedy, began suggesting aggressive curtailment of aid. “Thus began a shift of emphasis in American policy to a harder line,” the ambassador wrote.20 This was also the end of the Smiling Jones approach to
...more
