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

by Vincent Bevins

Most crucially, he thought Americans failed to understand what nationalism was in the context of emerging countries, and its difference from communism. Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism. Exasperated, Jones often stressed that to Americans, this might look like an instinctive anti-Western disposition,

When Jones finally met Presiden Sukarno—as he is called in Indonesian—he was deeply impressed. He wrote: “To meet him was like suddenly coming under a sunlamp, such was the quality of his magnetism.” He quickly noticed, he said, Sukarno’s “enormous brilliant brown eyes, and a flashing smile that conveyed an all-embracing warmth.” He would watch, amazed, as Sukarno spoke eloquently on “the world, the flesh, and the devil: about movie stars and Malthus, Jean Jaures and Jefferson, folklore, and philosophy,” then wolf down a huge meal, and dance for hours. Even more impressive to Jones, who had lived a relatively comfortable life, was that this remarkable man—about the same age as Jones—learned to eat this way, and became so steeped in knowledge, while spending years behind bars for opposing Dutch colonial rule.48 Along the way, he had learned to speak in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, in addition to Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Dutch.49

Sukarno’s natural predilection toward inclusion was extremely well suited to the historical moment. Indonesia is an archipelago whose islands sprawl across two million square miles of sea and are home to hundreds of distinct nationalities speaking more than seven hundred languages. Nothing brought them together other than the artificial boundaries imposed by a racist foreign power. The young nation needed a shared sense of identity more than anything else. Sukarno was the prophet of that identity. In 1945, he provided an ingenious, impassioned basis for what it meant to be Indonesian when he put forward the Pancasila, or five principles. They were, and remain: belief in God, justice and civilization, Indonesian unity, democracy, and social justice. In practice, they combine the broad affirmation of religion (that would likely mean Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism), revolutionary independence, and social democracy. They certainly didn’t exclude the communists, either, since the vast majority of them were abangan Muslims like Sukarno, or Balinese Hindus like his mother. Even if a tiny minority of high-level communists might have been without religion, they were happy enough to sign off on Pancasila within a few years.

The Republic of Indonesia adopted a national slogan—Bhinneka Tunngal Ika, meaning “unity in diversity” in Old Javanese, the language spoken by the largest number of people, most of whom live in the middle of that central island. Pancasila, or Pantja Sila, is itself derived from Sanskrit, which was used in the pre-Islam days across the Nusantara archipelago, when much of the islands were strongly influenced by cultural and religious elements originating on the Indian subcontinent. (“Indonesia” itself simply means “Indies islands,” and is derived, like the name “India,” from the Indus River). It was under Sukarno’s watch that the young country chose to make Bahasa Indonesia the official Indonesian language. A leader of less wisdom might have been inclined to make his native Javanese into the official tongue, but this is a hard language to learn and easily could have been seen as a kind of chauvinistic or even colonial imposition from the strongest island. Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two. This was a significant achievement; nearby countries in Southeast Asia still have not established truly national languages.56

That term, “Third World,” was born in 1951 in France, but it really only came into its own in 1955, in Indonesia. As historian Christopher J. Lee has written, it was the Konferensi Asia-Afrika, held in Bandung in April, that really solidified the idea of the Third World.60 This remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union. It didn’t happen automatically; it was the result of concerted efforts by a few of the world’s new leaders. In 1954, Indonesia got together with Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Pakistan, and India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the same leader who gave the Kennedy brothers a lecture over dinner. They formed the Colombo Group, named after the Sri Lankan capital, where they met, and began planning a bigger meeting. Indonesia’s prime minister initially proposed a 1955 conference as a response to the founding of SEATO, the US-sponsored copy of NATO in Southeast Asia. But the invitation list soon expanded rapidly, as Nehru invited China (this necessarily excluded Taiwan), while apartheid South Africa and both Koreas (technically still at war) as well as Israel (whose presence might have upset Arab nations) weren’t invited. The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening spee...

We are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. Sacrifices made by our forefathers and by the people of our own and younger generations. For me, this hall is filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa; it also contains within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us. Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe.… All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world.…

Sukarno at Bandung

How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa, know these things, for we have experienced them.… Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey’s end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.…

Sukarno at Bandung

And, I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.

Sukarno at Bandung

The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anticolonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote: “A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, and a word that shall echo for evermore.” Yes, it shall echo for evermore.

Sukarno at Bandung

For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the “nation” was not based on race or language—it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs—but is constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice. With Bandung, the Third World could be united by its own common purposes, such as antiracism and economic sovereignty, Sukarno believed.

From the United States, the keenest observer of the conference was Richard Wright, the black novelist and journalist. The former communist and author of Native Son wrote an entire book on his experience there, which went on to influence much anticolonial and antiracist thought. Once he found out about “a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the Earth,” a conference of “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race,” he wrote, he had to go and document it.66

In the end, they came up with ten basic principles that would come to govern relations between Third World states: 1. Respect for human rights and the United Nations Charter. 2. Respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations. 3. Recognition of the equality of all races and the equality of all nations large and small. 4. Non-intervention: abstention from interference in the internal affairs of another country. 5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself. 6. Abstention from the use of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, and abstention from exerting pressure on other countries. 7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression against any country. 8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means. 9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation. 10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

Result of Bandung

In the Congo, people began listening to La Voix de l’Afrique from Egypt and All India Radio, which featured broadcasts in Swahili, as a man named Patrice Lumumba was beginning to form the Mouvement National Congolais, a very “Spirit of Bandung” independence movement that rejected ethnic divisions and sought to build the Congolese nation out of anticolonial struggle.71

In 1958, the first Asian-African Conference on Women was held in Colombo, and launched a transnational Third World feminist movement. For the 1961 Cairo Women’s Conference, Egyptian organizer Bahia Karam wrote in her introduction to the proceedings: “For the first time in modern history, feminine history that is, that such a gathering of Afro-Asian woman has taken place… it was indeed a great pleasure, an encouragement to meet delegates from countries in Africa which the imperialists had never before allowed to leave the boundaries of their land.”72 The press in Egypt, for example, began to focus on the lives of women from around the Third World, including Indonesia, discussing the “ties of sisterhood and solidarity between the women of Africa and Asia.”73

the Bandung Conference countries would go on to found the Afro-Asian Journalist Association, an attempt by people from the Third World to cover the Third World without relying on the white men, usually sent from rich countries to work as foreign corresponden...

Within Indonesia, Sukarno had cemented himself in the minds of the people as the leader of a new kind of revolution. Francisca, absolutely inspired, would be able to recite parts of Sukarno’s opening speech at Bandung by heart long afterward. In Washington, the attitude was very different. The response was racist condescension. State Department officials called the meeting the “Darktown Strutters Ball.”74 But to Eisenhower, Wisner, and the Dulles brothers, Sukarno’s behavior was no joke. For them, by now, neutralism itself was an o...

one more event in 1955, in Indonesia, alarmed the anticommunists in power in Washington even more. The CIA spent a million dollars trying to influence the parliamentary elections in September of that year. The Agency’s chosen partners, the Masjumi, were solidly to the right of Sukarno. Nevertheless, Sukarno and his supporters did well.76 Even worse for the Americans, the PKI came in fourth place, with 17 percent of the votes cast. It was the best performance in the history of the Indonesian Communist Party.

The division between North and South Vietnam was supposed to be resolved by an election that would unite the country under a single government. But Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic leader of majority-Buddhist South Vietnam whom the United States had handpicked before he turned out to be hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, knew that he would lose badly to Ho Chi Minh. So Diem decided to cancel the vote. Washington went along with this, just as it did when Diem fraudulently declared he had won an election in 1955 with 98.2 percent of the vote.7 From that moment on, the government in North Vietnam, and many communists in the South, believed they had the right to directly oppose Diem’s US-backed regime.

The PKI was the most efficient, professional organization in the country. Crucially, in a country plagued with corruption and patronage, it had a reputation for being the cleanest of all the major parties.10 Its leaders were disciplined and dedicated, and Howard Jones saw quickly that they actually delivered on what they promised, especially to peasants and the poor. Jones was not the only one in the US government who understood why the Communists kept winning. The vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that “a democratic government was [probably] not the best kind for Indonesia” because “the Communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized.”11 And most importantly, Jones recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside, delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people’s needs. The party was “working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged,” he worried.12

The most important of the PKI programs in his region was carried out by the Indonesian Farmers Alliance (BTI), which sought to enforce peasants’ rights within the existing legal framework and push for land reform. BTI members told Sakono and his family that “the land belongs to those who work it, and it can’t be taken away,” and even more importantly, they surveyed and recorded holdings, made sure laws were enforced, and helped improve agricultural efficiency.

The Indonesian Women’s Movement, or Gerwani, opposed the traditional practice of polygamy, which Sukarno embraced very publicly while president. Gerwani became one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. It was organized along feminist, socialist, and nationalist lines, and focused on opposing traditional constraints put on women, promoting the education of girls and demanding space for women in the public sphere.16

Sakono also developed a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and ideology. “You see, the Communist Party in the United States never grew because it didn’t have the right roots,” he concluded. “But in Indonesia we have so much injustice and exploitation. There’s a relation between the material conditions of our society and the ideology which flowers here. And injustice is very fertile soil for its roots to grow.”

Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.

The 1958 operation in Indonesia was one of the largest in the CIA’s history, and it was patterned on the successful coup in Guatemala—in other words, it was exactly what the People’s Daily writers such as Zain had been worried about four years earlier, as they carefully reported on the events in Central America.28 But this one failed. The Indonesian Army put down the rebellions, greatly increasing their power within the country as a result, and no more US military missions were uncovered. Sukarno, of course, felt deeply betrayed. He put it in very personal terms. He said, “I love America, but I’m a disappointed lover.”29 Jones did not enjoy the position that Wisner’s CIA operations put him in one bit. Reflecting later on the tragic, absurd failure of the operation, Jones turned back to the nature of his country to find an explanation. “Washington policymakers had not been privy to all the facts nor really grasped the inwardness of the situation, but had proceeded on the assumption that Communism was the main issue,” he wrote. “This was the all too common weakness of Americans—to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors. There were no grays in the world landscape. There was either good or evil, right or wrong, hero or villain.”30

the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation.

They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

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

After a frenzied set of meetings in Washington, he made a personal request. Like Sukarno four years earlier, he wanted to have an exchange with a sex worker, the story goes. This inspired “revulsion,” adding to the distaste US officials already felt for him. In the middle of the twentieth century, black men in the US were brutally tortured and murdered for alleged sexual transgressions involving white women, including for simply whistling. Washington didn’t like the way Lumumba talked politics, either. Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon said “he was gripped by this fervor that I can only describe as messianic.”17 New CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell called him a “mad dog.” On July 21, Allen Dulles said it was safe to assume he had been “bought by the communists.”18 On August 25, the White House gave the order, and the CIA drew up plans to have him killed.19

Lumumba’s death made waves all around the world. People marched in the streets in Oslo, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and New Delhi. Belgian embassies were attacked in Cairo, Warsaw, and Belgrade. Moscow named a university after him. Mobutu took over the second-largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, staged public executions of his rivals, built a dictatorship, and became one of Washington’s closest Cold War allies in Africa.24

It seems very possible the US officials could have toppled Castro, as they toppled so many other governments in the region over the years, if they had applied more pressure, or developed another strategy entirely. But the Bay of Pigs failure was so spectacular, and so obvious, that their hands were tied. The United States had shot its shot, and couldn’t try anything so public again.

Kennedy’s “anguish and dejection” were evident to everyone around him. Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles said that Kennedy was clearly “quite shattered.” Kennedy himself related that it was the worst experience of his life.26 He said he felt personally guilty for those who had died in the invasion. And it was a national humiliation. After the Bay of Pigs, two things changed for the JFK presidency, which had started with such idealism. From then on, he would have to deal with the CIA Wisner had created and with the problems it had bequeathed to him, and he would now govern while being accused of being soft on communism himself.

The first major blow was a 1959 law, passed just as Benny was heading to Kansas, that took some economic rights away from foreign nationals. In practice, this included the country’s large ethnic Chinese population. It was not Sukarno who pushed for this—it was the military—but he let the racist law, a deviation from Indonesia’s foundational values, pass. The Army also organized violent anti-Chinese riots—for which it did not seek Sukarno’s approval. The military used US funds to plot these pogroms.1 The situation was terrifying.

The Tan family did not realize until they arrived in 1962 that Brazil was in political crisis. At least, it surely looked that way to the United States. By far the largest country in Latin America and for a long time Washington’s most important ally in the region, Brazil appeared to be wobbling away from the US orbit. This didn’t just trouble the North Americans—it troubled much of Brazil’s elite, too. Unlike in Indonesia, Washington’s officials here did not have to adjust to a vastly different local culture and then plant the seeds of an anticommunist movement. In Brazil, they were able to work easily with conservative political forces that had emerged from Brazil’s own history.

1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—or, rather, when the Pope drew an arbitrary line down a very badly drawn map to split the New World between Spain and Portugal. The indigenous population who fell into the newly designated Portuguese territories lived differently from those who lived in modern-day Mexico or Peru. There was no large, centrally governed empire like the Aztec or Inca, but smaller, more self-sufficient groups. In the very early years, Europeans made tentative alliances with these tribes, intermarrying and fighting and losing battles and forming new alliances and being captured only to escape and send (largely true, if sensational) accounts of cannibalism back to Europe.

By the time the Europeans had subdued the native population, they decided that indigenous Brazilians, who were dying from disease and brutal enslavement, did not provide enough free labor for the extraction of natural resources for export. So Brazil imported almost five million human beings from Africa, far more than the United States did, and equal to almost half of all slaves brought to the Americas. Just as in the US, enslavement in Brazil was unimaginably cruel. In addition to the whip, stocks, and iron collars studded with spikes to prevent escape, slave owners affixed iron masks, which prevented the slaves from committing suicide by shoving earth into their own mouths.6

in Brazil, the Portuguese royal family fled Napoleon’s invading forces and set up shop in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, bringing the capital of the empire to the colonies. Thousands of Europeans did their best to set up a royal court in Rio, and they established a local monarchy, which ruled until 1889 and still has some (unofficial) influence today. Soon after the liberation of African-descendant Brazilians, in 1888, the largest country in South America promptly embarked upon a policy of explicit branqueamento, or whitening. The idea was to bring in white immigrants, and to breed the African blood out of the population through “miscegenation.”

One of JFK’s best biographers put it this way, How could he square professions of self-determination—a central principle of the Alliance—with the reality of secret American interventions in Cuba, Brazil, British Guiana, Peru, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and every country that seemed vulnerable to left-wing subversion? (And that was just the beginning: A June National Security directive approved by the president had listed four additional Latin American countries “sufficiently threatened by Communist-inspired insurgency”—Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela.…)32

Washington officials knew, as did everyone else, that if Jango was going down, it would be the military that would depose him. Just as in Indonesia, the Armed Forces in Brazil were the country’s most reliably anticommunist force. But their allegiance to this ideology went far deeper than was the case in Indonesia. It was even deeper than the Cold War. In some ways the Americans could not hope for a better ally, and this perfect anticommunist partnership grew out of a powerful legend going back to 1935, when a younger President Vargas had used a sputtering left-wing revolt to crack down on communists and build a dictatorship.

The Brazilian Communist Party was founded in 1922, largely by immigrants and former anarchists.36 When they immediately joined Lenin’s recently established Communist International, Moscow had little idea what to do with them. The Comintern classified Brazil as a large “semicolonial” country, in the same category as China, and put it on the back burner. At the time, the directive the Brazilians got from the Soviets was to form a united front with the national “bourgeoisie” against imperialism, without Communist leadership

Most of the civilians in the Communist Party and the ANL didn’t know any preparations were underway for a rebellion. And it started on accident, up in Natal, in poor northeastern Brazil, after soldiers there became enraged by the dismissal of some colleagues. The Communist Party there asked the soldiers to wait, but to no avail. The rebellion exploded, and rebels actually took control of the city for a time, commandeering cars and robbing the banks. When the uprising reached Recife, also in the northeast, the government’s response was a slaughter, as the military put down the uprising and executed the leftist rebels. “It was brutal, tremendous repression! They killed left and right, crooked and straight. The life of a communist wasn’t worth ten bits of raw honey,” said Lieutenant Lamartine Coutinho, using an old Portuguese expression we might translate as “wasn’t worth shit.”

The Vargas government used the real event, from then on somewhat incorrectly referred to as “Intentona Comunista,” or Communist Uprising, to crack down on the left and his critics in general, and then as an excuse to consolidate dictatorial powers. Vargas declared a state of emergency, created the “Committee for the Repression of Communism,” suspended individual liberties, and began to round up the country’s leftists. Many of the Intentona’s leaders were executed, though the popular Prestes remained in jail. Authorities banned left-wing books.42 The tale of violent communist subversion served the needs of the right-wing elements in the military and government so effectively that they created another one. In 1937, a general “found” a document outlining the “Plano Cohen,” a Jewish-communist plot (capitalizing on antisemitism on the fascist right) that included directives to invade the houses of wealthy Brazilians and rape them.43 Vargas used this entirely fabricated plan to authorize a new military coup, promulgate a new constitution, and take control of a full-fledged dictatorship.44 The 1935 Intentona served as a foundational legend for the Armed Forces, and for the increasingly virulent anticommunist movement that overtook the military and society in general. Every year, on November 27, the military gathered in front of a memorial structure on Praia Vermelha, or “Red Beach,” to commemorate the defense against the communist rebellion. And a powerful myth took shape.

Communists with knives drawn, ready to stab you in your sleep, became a common trope in Brazil’s voluminous anticommunist material over the next few decades. In the press, you could also find illustrations indicating that communists were insects that could only be “exterminated” with liberty, the family, and morality. Communism was called a plague, a virus, or cancer, terms that were also hurled at communists at the time in nearby Argentina.46 More often than not, communism was associated with pure evil or witchcraft, drawn with the use of demons or Satanic beasts, such as dragons, snakes, and goats. There was often the implication, or outright depiction, of sexual perversion and deviancy.47

The association between Jango and clandestine communism did not just lurk on the dark, right-wing fringes of Brazilian society. A January 1964 cartoon in O Globo, the newspaper published by what is still Brazil’s most important media group, ran with the headline “The Literacy Campaign,” referring to Jango’s plan to teach more people to learn to read and write. On the right sat a dirty man in ragged clothes, his face the picture of ignorance. On the left, his teacher, pointing at him and cackling. Behind the instructor, protruding from his suit, is a long devil’s tail, with a hammer and sickle stamped on its pointy tip.54

In the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy ordered his ambassador in South Vietnam to facilitate the removal of President Diem. As an ally, Diem was now causing Washington more trouble than he was worth. The CIA passed the word along to a local general, and on November 1, 1963, Diem was kidnapped along with his brother, and they were both shot and stabbed in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Kennedy hadn’t actually wanted Diem killed, but he knew that he was responsible for his death, and the assassination shook and badly depressed the young president.55 A few weeks later, Kennedy himself was murdered, while driving through Dallas.

LBJ was liberal, probably more so than Kennedy, and regarded as the “Master of the Senate,” where he had served as its incredibly powerful leader for six years.58 But when it came to foreign policy, he was less experienced. He had none of Kennedy’s appreciation for the historical battles between imperialism and national revolution in the Third World. According to biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, who knew him well, Johnson held an all-too-common American belief that the rest of the world was basically just like the USA, but a bit behind. He held a “belief in the universal applicability of American values, the existence of a global consensus,” she wrote. But LBJ didn’t have the confidence in his own mastery of foreign policy to challenge the men left behind by Kennedy.59 So he often neglected foreign affairs, deferring to the wisdom of these advisers.

At that commemoration on November 27, 1963, Army General Jair Dantas Ribeiro gave a terse, ominous speech. “In the quiet of the night, driven by principles never understood, extremist groups took off on an inglorious endeavor,” he began. “Without flag and without cause, without ideals and without a destination, the action of these adventurers found no echo in the heart of the nation, whose Christian structure is entirely immune to hate and extremism.” Speaking with Jango in the audience, he continued: Those hateful terrorists of 1935, raising the communist shield that means only ruin and rancor, propagating humanitarian popular sentiments that, in reality, served only to hide subaltern proposals and thirst for power, murdering treacherously in the shadow of night, our armed brothers, wrote a black page in the History of Brazil.… We should not, however, suppress this story: that attempt remains an example for these pests, who want to install an anti-democratic regime.… For now and forever, the example of the Army and its vigilance will remain, and serve as a warning.61

The coup against Jango began on March 31, 1964, and many of the plotters were motivated by the belief that communists had built some kind of revolutionary plan around Goulart. This was entirely false, but it was also entirely consistent with the fanatical anticommunism of the time, all the way back to the McCarthy hearings and the mythology surrounding the Intentona. Wherever there were communists, no matter how limited in number, and no matter what their stated declarations, they must have a secret, nefarious plot.

As the coup began, the US State Department began an operation it dubbed Brother Sam, and made tankers, ammunition, and aircraft carriers available to the conspirators.70 None of these were needed. The Brazilian Congress declared the presidency “vacant,” in clear violation of the constitution. Then, after that first Institutional Act removed about forty of their left-wing colleagues from office, 361 of Brazil’s remaining lawmakers voted to install General Castelo Branco as president. Almost all of Brazil’s media supported the coup.71 US assistance began to pour back in.72 With Jango gone, the military delivered a very different kind of speech at the 1964 memorial of the 1935 Intentona. General Pery Constant Beviláqua declared, “The fatherland is here! There it is in this beautiful flag! As we contemplate it, we feel your presence, you heroes of November 1935!”73 Ambassador Lincoln Gordon called the 1964 coup “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”74 As Brazilian historian Marco Napolitano puts it, “Just as in a Hollywood film, there was a happy ending (for the plotters, that is). The communist bad guys and their sympathizers were deposed. The good guys were in power. And best of all: this was achieved without the United States needing to appear as a visible agent of the conspiracy.”75 This was huge, and novel. In Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961), anyone who was paying attention knew that Washington had b...

Sukarno was again talking about the unity of Marxism, Islam, and nationalism, and repackaged it into one of his trademark acronyms—NASAKOM, for Nasionalisme, Agama (Religion), and Komunisme. He talked of forming a NASAKOM cabinet, but the right wing of Indonesian politics blocked the Communists.3 General Nasution, head of the Armed Forces and point man for Washington, told Ambassador Howard Jones in 1960 that the military would never allow the PKI to participate at the executive level of government.4 In reality the three political forces in the country were not nationalism, religion, and communism but rather the PKI, Sukarno, and the military.

In early 1963, the countries brought together by the Bandung Conference founded the Afro-Asian Journalist Association at a Jakarta conference. Francisca was asked to serve as an official interpreter at the meeting, and she stayed on as they founded the Afro-Asian Journalist, published by the Lumumba Foundation (named after murdered Congolese leader) in Jakarta. They kept her busy translating pieces from multiple languages and a wide range of countries. The Afro-Asian Journalist published what has been called “socialist cosmopolitan journalism,” and viewed world struggles as one interconnected fight. The magazine was much more eclectic and liberal than many of the world’s actually existing socialist publications; the editors valued cultural pluralism and artistic innovation, publishing anti-imperialist cartoons and features from a wide range of global contributors.5