For a long time this site has tried to point out that the Congo struggle was one of the most important, yet underreported, foreign policy episodes that took place during the Kennedy administration. Sloughed off by the likes of MSM toady David Halberstam, it took writers like Jonathan Kwitny and Richard Mahoney to actually understand the huge stakes that were on the table in that conflict, namely European imperialism vs African nationalism. Kennedy had radically revised America's Congo policy from Dwight Eisenhower to favor the latter. Not knowing he was dead, JFK was trying to support Congo's democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba. JFK was also one of the few Western leaders trying to help UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold stop the Europeans from crushing Congo's newly won independence.
In September of 1961, just eight months after Lumumba was murdered, Hammarskjold died in a plane crash. It was officially ruled an accident. But there were doubts from the beginning. For example, Harry Truman told the New York Times, that Hammarskjold was on the verge of getting something done "when they killed him." It now turns out that Kennedy's ambassador to Congo, Edmund Gullion, also suspected Hammarskjold's plane was shot down. And he suspected it the night it happened. This key fact was not revealed for fifty years.
Below we link to three stories in the press of late that have finally circulated about the true circumstances of what happened to the Secretary General, the man who Kennedy called, "the greatest statesman of the 20th century."
- RAF veteran ‘admitted 1961 killing of UN secretary general’
- Coups and murder: the sinister world of apartheid’s secret mercenaries
- Dag Hammarskjöld's plane may have been shot down, ambassador warned
It is nice that the MSM is finally catching up to what we wrote about 20 years ago in Probe Magazine. In particular:
- Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa
- Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold
In the first of these two articles, Jim DiEugenio lays out the overall struggle of Kennedy and Hammarskjold to keep Congo free and united against the imperial forces of Belgium and England. In the second, Lisa Pease examines the murders of Lumumba and Hammarskjold within eight months of each other. Those assassinations left Kennedy standing alone. When he was killed, the imperialists triumphed.
During the ensuing decade, CTKA continued to focus on this important story, again underscoring the links between Kennedy and Hammarskjold, but now reinforced by the work of historian Greg Poulgrain with regard to their cooperation over Indonesia. See:
Finally, two decades later, the MSM is acknowledging that work. We don't like to toot our own horn, but ... Honk! Honk!