[A snub from the White House, a controversial stay at Blair House,
an encounter with Dave Chappelle’s mother and a CIA-arranged tryst
— what happened when Congo’s beleaguered leader visited D.C. in
1960.]
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HOW THE U.S. ISSUED ITS FIRST EVER ORDER TO ASSASSINATE A FOREIGN
LEADER  
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Stuart A. Reid
October 17, 2023
Politico
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_ A snub from the White House, a controversial stay at Blair House,
an encounter with Dave Chappelle’s mother and a CIA-arranged tryst
— what happened when Congo’s beleaguered leader visited D.C. in
1960. _

The Prime Minister of Congo Patrice Lumumba speaks with U.S.
Secretary of State Christian Herter in Washington in July 1960.,
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

 

_Adapted from __The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a
Cold War Assassination_
[[link removed]]_ by
Stuart A. Reid. Published October 17, 2023, by Alfred A. Knopf, an
imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Stuart A. Reid._

July 1960 was an inopportune time for Patrice Lumumba, the barely
35-year-old prime minister of the Congo, to visit Washington, D.C. His
country had become independent from Belgium only on June 30. Within
days, the army had mutinied, Belgian forces had intervened without
permission, a province had seceded, and the U.N. had sent in a massive
peacekeeping operation. And amid the chaos, Lumumba had made a
troubling appeal to the Soviet Union, suggesting that his fledgling
nation might require its help. At a National Security Council meeting
just days before the Congolese leader would arrive in Washington,
Allen Dulles, the pipe-smoking director of the CIA, told the room that
Lumumba had been “bought by the Communists” and was “a Castro or
worse.”

But as a politician who had risen by virtue of his powers of
persuasion, Lumumba must have thought that in talking to President
Dwight Eisenhower, he might well win the trust of the world’s most
powerful leader — despite any misconceptions the president or his
administration might have about him. Lumumba brought with him to
America a carved ivory lamp and a wooden statue, gifts he planned to
present to Eisenhower at the White House. He had announced that he
wished to “thank him for the American people’s continued efforts
to bring about progress in Africa.”

Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, left, shakes hands with United
Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, after their conference at
the United Nations, N.Y., United States, on July 24, 1960. | AP

The trip would turn out to be the beginning of the end for Lumumba,
however. The officials he met with not only rebuffed his substantive
requests; they also claimed to find his style so off-putting that they
lost any confidence they had had in him.

Lumumba didn’t know it, but his very life was at stake. Just weeks
after welcoming him to Washington, the U.S. government would be trying
to kill him.

SHORTLY AFTER LANDING IN the United States, Lumumba’s delegation
was told that Eisenhower would be unable to welcome the prime
minister; Eisenhower had scheduled trips to Chicago, for the
Republican National Convention, and to Denver, to visit his dying
mother-in-law. State visits were usually organized months in advance
and the result of an official invitation, but Lumumba sprang his trip
on the United States. As a State Department cable put it, “His party
was pulled together at the last minute and came with no advance
preparation (and no money).”

Even though the president had not deliberately absented himself from
Washington, the U.S. government was pointedly declining to accord
Lumumba high honors. Before the visit, Secretary of State Christian
Herter decided that a meeting with him and Lumumba “with no social
functions offered should be the most we should do.” Belgium, still
smarting from the loss of its colony and fed up with Lumumba, was a
member of NATO, and for the sake of relations with an American ally,
U.S. officials found ample reason to keep Lumumba at arm’s length.

And so the U.S. government reduced its honors to the bare minimum
required by diplomatic protocol. When Lumumba stepped out of the
airplane at Washington National Airport, in brown loafers and a blue
suit with a pocket square, he was welcomed with a hastily sewn
Congolese flag, rush ordered for the occasion, and a Marine Corps band
with no Congolese anthem to play (since none yet existed). Lumumba
nonetheless judged the reception “a dignified welcome of the sort
granted a head of state,” as he later announced at a press
conference, noting the 19-gun salute given to him. Since this was an
official visit, Lumumba and his party stayed at Blair House, the
presidential guest quarters across the street from the White House. He
considered the lodgings “a magnificent house.”

Lumumba, left, of the Republic of the Congo and U.S. Secretary of
State Christian Herter stand under an umbrella in the rain during
ceremonies at the National Airport in Arlington, Va., July 27, 1960. |
John Rous/AP Photo

But even this bare-bones reception, designed in part to accommodate
Belgian colonial sensitivities, prompted immediate protest from
Brussels. “A cordial handshake for the Negro who is responsible for
an unknown number of rapes of Belgian women, Belgian nuns, wives of
American missionaries,” raged a columnist for the conservative
newspaper _Libre Belgique_, blaming Lumumba for his failure to bring
the chaotic post-independence mutiny under control. “Nineteen cannon
shots and military honors for a Negro prime minister of a so-called
state whose army, after deciding to rebel against its prime minister,
turned around and focused its fire on women of white skin.” With
evident disgust, the columnist conjured up the image of “smelly
Patrice” interloping at Blair House, a “savage swindler” in a
four-poster bed “wallowing in the sheets of the King of the
Belgians, Charles de Gaulle, and Khrushchev.” Noting that the
residence was managed by an elderly white woman, the author added,
“Let’s hope nothing happens to her.”

Before Lumumba had even laid his head down at Blair House, William
Burden — a Vanderbilt heir who had donated his way into becoming
Eisenhower’s ambassador to Belgium — called Herter from Brussels
to relay Belgian officials’ displeasure with the “catastrophic”
optics. Soon, Belgium’s foreign minister, Pierre Wigny, was also on
the phone complaining to Herter, hinting that this, along with U.S.
policies he deemed too favorable to Lumumba, would endanger Belgian
support for NATO. At a meeting of the military alliance in Paris, two
Belgian diplomats — one of them the secretary-general of NATO —
made the same threat. To Brussels, Lumumba’s treatment was evidently
a question of national honor, something worth risking relations with
the United States over.

In the past, the United States never had to choose between European
colonial powers and newly independent states. But over Belgium and the
Congo, that tension was now coming to a head. Herter was still trying
to keep both parties happy, apologizing to the Belgian ambassador
while pointing out that the United States hadn’t selected Lumumba as
prime minister of the Congo but “inherited him along with
independence.” The U.S. embassy in Brussels, however, took the side
of the touchy Belgians, urging Washington that “the balance of the
visit be played in the lowest possible key in order to hold the damage
to a minimum.”

Lumumba would rightly say that the episode demonstrated Belgian
pettiness, but he avoided blaming the United States. On the contrary:
At a press conference held in Blair House’s stuffy basement, he
called for American troops to intervene in the Congo and help hasten
the Belgian withdrawal. These didn’t seem like the words of a man in
Moscow’s pay.

With no White House visit on the agenda, Lumumba’s delegation filled
its schedule with sightseeing and shopping. At the Lincoln Memorial,
the Congolese learned about the Civil War, a secessionist conflict
Lumumba could not avoid comparing to his own, likening Jefferson Davis
to Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway province in Katanga.
“All those who want secession are bound to be beaten in the end,”
he declared. From there, he visited a Cadillac dealership near the
Capitol to look at official cars for his government. A reporter noted,
“He tested doors, poked seat cushions, asked prices — but in the
end, bought nothing.”

In this July 24, 1960 file photo, Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba waves
as he sits in car for the drive from Idlewild Airport, New York after
his arrival from Europe to speak to the United Nations Security
Council. | AP

Lumumba and his party also toured Mount Vernon, George Washington’s
riverside plantation. A guide emphasized the first American
president’s legacy as an anticolonial fighter.

“What was the attitude of the English towards him?” Lumumba asked
when they reached Washington’s bedroom.

“Oh, they treated him with respect.”

“Modern-day colonists are not so gallant,” Lumumba replied with a
smile.

PART OF LUMUMBA’S GOAL in visiting the United States was to recruit
skilled Americans who could fill the posts left vacant by Belgian
workers — people who could serve as engineers, lawyers, doctors,
dentists and nurses in the Congo. On the campus of Howard University,
the United States’ premier historically Black college, he met with a
small group of professors and students. Most of Howard’s 6,000
students were American, but 83 hailed from Africa, and Lumumba jumped
at the chance to chat with some of them in their native tongues. None
came from the Congo, but he pledged that would change soon and urged
Howard’s American students to cross the ocean to “work on the land
of their ancestors.”

At the Mayflower Hotel, just north of Blair House, he met with a
Methodist missionary couple who had known him from primary school and
encouraged them to send more teachers and medical workers to the
Congo. In the ballroom below, diplomats, journalists and various
friends of Africa mingled at a reception held in his honor. Lumumba
and his aides took the opportunity to redouble their recruitment
efforts.

Yvonne Reed, just 22 years old and fresh out of college, attended the
reception in the stead of her mother, who was active in the civil
rights movement. Like her mother, Reed had often felt the sting of
racism — Washington was still largely segregated at the time — and
although she felt out of place at the reception, she was eager to meet
the Congolese prime minister. By the time she arrived, the receiving
line had broken and Lumumba was enmeshed in a circle of reporters. But
she buttonholed one of his aides, who told her that the Congo was
looking for American talent. Might she come work there?

The next morning, Reed dressed herself in a suit and took a taxi to
Blair House. A man from the Soviet embassy pushed past her to ring the
bell but was told Lumumba was busy. Reed, however, was ushered into a
waiting room. Lumumba walked down the staircase.

“So you’re interested in going to the Congo?” he asked.

She was. No discussion ensued about what, exactly, this young,
inexperienced woman would do, but Lumumba instructed his aides to see
to it that her paperwork was taken care of. He would be leaving for
the Congo from New York in a matter of days. “That’s it,” he
said, with a decisiveness that impressed Reed. “I’ll see you on
the plane.”

It was a sign of just how bad the Belgian brain drain from the Congo
was that Lumumba was willing to accept all comers, no matter how short
their résumés. And as it turned out, Reed did not get on the plane
in New York, because her parents thought better of the idea. She ended
up going to the Congo much later — and, it must be said, is the
mother of the comedian Dave Chappelle. Reed would always look back
fondly on her fleeting encounter with Lumumba. “He was a strong
leader,” she said. “He knew what he was doing.”

AT BLAIR HOUSE, SOME OF Lumumba’s American interlocutors, already
primed to view Black leaders as rubes, nitpicked about his lack of
familiarity with Western manners. Between courses of lunch, a State
Department officer suppressed a smirk when the prime minister, upon
being delivered a finger bowl — for washing one’s hands — drank
out of it. State Department escorts found fault, too, in Lumumba’s
improvisational approach to scheduling. They were constantly trying to
hustle along the Congolese delegation, usually in vain. Lumumba stood
up an Indiana politician who had flown in from out of town to talk
about foreign aid. “You just don’t do that to a U.S. Senator when
you are asking for money,” an aide vented to _Time_.

One incident would become legendary in diplomatic circles. According
to the young State Department officer assigned to Lumumba in D.C., the
prime minister discreetly requested a “blonde” for the evening.
The officer, Thomas Cassilly, called a contact in the CIA, who
promptly arranged a hotel room and a suitable woman. Lumumba had
railed against philandering in his earlier writing — “the wife is
not like a shirt which one can change at will: marriage is ‘a life
contract’” — but expressed satisfaction with the choice that
night.

Coming on the heels of stories about Black men raping white women in
the Congo during the mutiny, Lumumba’s assignation, which became
known to the White House yet was never exploited, played especially
poorly within the Washington establishment (never mind that it gave a
free pass to serial adulterers such as Allen Dulles). Officials were
already giving Lumumba mixed reviews. One anonymous official
characterized him to a reporter this way: “Erratic, but a tough,
clever guy.” But there was one chance for Lumumba to speak directly
to the highest levels of the American government and make his own
impression. The centerpiece of Lumumba’s trip to the nation’s
capital was a meeting at the State Department. Washington had
heretofore known him only telescopically, judging him from a distance
through cables and news clippings. Now it could examine him up close.

THE MEETING BEGAN AT 3:00 P.M. in the secretary of State’s grand
fifth-floor office, the afternoon light piercing venetian blinds.
Herter presided, joined by three other State Department officials and
an interpreter. Lumumba, who brought three Congolese officials with
him, began with praise. “The people of the Congo, even in their most
remote villages, have faith in the United States,” he said. “We
know that the United States is anticolonial.” He went on to correct
Brussels’ version of events since June 30, explaining how Belgium
had emptied the treasury, intervened illegally across the country and
engineered the secession of Katanga. He knew the United States and
Belgium were allies, but couldn’t Washington talk some sense into
its transatlantic partner? In fact, he said, the United States might
serve as a good mediator, a role in which the U.N. seemed to be
failing. Lumumba also reiterated his request for U.S. aid. His
government was unable to make payroll. Could the United States lend it
money? What about equipment? He had twice been thwarted from flying
where he needed to go in the Congo. “Would it be possible for us,
through official channels, to obtain a plane, which could be used by
the head of state and me for the trips we have to make into the
interior of the country?”

Herter was sixty-five years old, a grandfather several times over. He
had begun his diplomatic career during World War I and spoke in the
soothing, mid-Atlantic accent one would expect of a Massachusetts
Republican and husband of a Pratt heiress. He had broad shoulders and
bushy eyebrows and, the day he met Lumumba, sported a polka-dot bow
tie. He was the very picture of American diplomacy.

Thus he had little problem deflecting Lumumba’s many requests.
Pressuring Belgium to withdraw its troops? That was a matter for the
U.N. now. Direct bilateral economic aid? All funds had to be channeled
through the U.N. A plane? Also a question for the U.N.

“I wonder if it would not be proper for me to present my respects to
the president,” Lumumba said.

“Unfortunately I do not know his schedule,” Herter replied.

When Lumumba asked whether he might be able to merely meet one of the
presidential candidates, Vice President Richard Nixon or Senator John
F. Kennedy, Herter again demurred.

Officials had steeled themselves for an erratic child, but over the
hour-and-a-half meeting, according to contemporaneous accounts,
Lumumba convinced them that he was fundamentally
reasonable. _Time_ reported that “Washington officials, who had
expected a ranting fanatic, found instead a poised, almost impassive,
man.” The_ Christian Science Monitor_ announced that Lumumba had
“made a favorable impression” — “favorable by contrast to the
advance stories out of the Congo that had pictured the youthful
Congolese Premier as wielder of threats and ultimatums, as the
Congo’s Castro, as an anti-West, pro-Soviet
revolutionary-turned-statesman.”

A career Foreign Service officer in attendance echoed this assessment,
finding “no evidence” that Lumumba was crazy, as critics had
suggested. Other officials registered his “brilliance” and
“articulateness.” Even Lumumba’s solicitation of a plane was
viewed somewhat sympathetically, with Herter passing on the request to
the U.N.

Years later, however, one official present would offer a very
different account of the meeting. Douglas Dillon, the number two at
the State Department, would tell Church Committee investigators in
1975 that he found Lumumba “psychotic” and “impossible to deal
with”:

“When he was in the State Department meeting, either with me or with
the Secretary in my presence, he spoke in a manner that seemed almost
messianic in quality. And he would never look you in the eye. He
looked up at the sky. And a tremendous flow of words came out. He
spoke in French, and he spoke it very fluently. And his words didn’t
ever have any relation to the particular things that we wanted to
discuss. And it was just like ships passing in the night. You had a
feeling that he was a person that was gripped by this fervor that I
can only characterize as messianic. And he was just not a rational
being.”

Whether Dillon’s assessment reflected the private consensus of July
1960 or was an ex post facto exaggeration, colored by knowledge of
what Lumumba became, one cannot know for sure. Regardless, despite a
few positive reports from the meeting, a consensus that he was
unfriendly toward the United States was hardening in Washington. In
August, the_ National Review_ deemed Lumumba “a cheap embezzler, a
schizoid agitator (half witch-doctor, half Marxist), an opportunist
ready to sell out to the highest bidder, ex-officio Big Chief Number
One of a gang of jungle primitives strutting about in the masks of
Cabinet Ministers.” Washington was starting to consider whether to
replace Lumumba with someone more suited to U.S. interests. “We
wondered whether there was any way of changing the scenery in the
Congo,” Dillon would say.

The subject came up at an interagency conference Dillon attended at
the Pentagon shortly after meeting Lumumba. Someone raised the
prospect of assassinating Lumumba, but a CIA representative shut down
the discussion, perhaps because the group was too large for such a
sensitive topic, or perhaps because the idea was deemed impractical.
Nonetheless, a new idea had been floated, a moral boundary probed.

BY AUGUST 1960, PRESIDENT EISENHOWER was 69 years old, nearing the
end of his second term, and running out of steam. He had survived Cold
War crises in Cuba, Korea, Hungary and the Suez, not to mention a
heart attack, a stroke and intestinal surgery. After the shootdown of
a U-2 spy plane over Russia in May scotched an East-West peace summit
in Paris, the president largely lost interest in the duties of his job
and played golf almost daily. “I wish someone would take me out and
shoot me in the head so I wouldn’t have to go through this stuff,”
he huffed one day in July, after a National Security Council meeting
brought him bad news from Cuba and the Congo.

President Dwight Eisenhower with foreign policy aides, Herter on July
19, 1960. | AP

Eisenhower was cranky to begin with. Dubbed “the terrible-tempered
Mr. Bang” by the press, he once launched a golf club at his doctor
so forcefully it nearly broke the man’s leg. But the disorder in the
Congo made him even more crotchety than usual. In Eisenhower’s view,
the “winds of change” in Africa were turning into a “destructive
hurricane.” His impression of decolonization was not favorable:
“The determination of the peoples for self-rule, their own flag, and
their own vote in the United Nations resembled a torrent overrunning
everything in its path.”

This distinct lack of enthusiasm for the African nationalist cause was
hardly surprising. Given his time leading the invasions of France and
Germany in World War II and his service as NATO’s top commander
afterward, it was only natural that Eisenhower looked at a
postcolonial crisis through a European lens. And just as he dragged
his feet on civil rights domestically, he thought the Black population
of Africa should move cautiously and under the tutelage of their white
former rulers. The raffish Lumumba particularly offended his sense of
decorum.

At 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 18, the president walked into the
Cabinet Room of the White House, a high-ceilinged chamber off the Oval
Office with a fireplace, a portrait of George Washington, and views of
the Rose Garden through arched windows. He sat down in the leather
chair designated for him, slightly taller than everyone else’s, and
called to order the weekly meeting of the National Security Council.
Joining him around the massive mahogany table were 20 other men,
including the director of the CIA and the secretaries of defense, the
treasury and commerce.

The agenda that day was Africa. Each participant was given a map of
the continent, and the bulk of the meeting was devoted to the Congo.
The undersecretary of state, Douglas Dillon, the only man in the room
who had met Lumumba, led the discussion. The deterioration in
Lumumba’s relations with the U.N. portended disaster. The U.N. was
the vehicle for U.S. policy in the Congo, and if the organization were
forced out of the country, the Soviets might swoop in. Dillon
considered that prospect “altogether too ghastly to contemplate.”
Maurice Stans, the director of the Bureau of the Budget, weighed in
next. By virtue of his big-game hunting habit and his Belgian-born
father, Stans was what passed for a Congo expert at the White House.
After declaring that independence had come to Africa 50 years too
soon, he argued that Lumumba’s true goal was to drive out the whites
and seize their property. Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA,
jumped in to allege that Lumumba was in the Soviets’ pay.

The notes from the meeting would barely conceal Eisenhower’s anger.
It was “simply inconceivable” that the U.N. would be forced out.
When Dillon meekly suggested that it would be hard to keep U.N. troops
in the Congo without the permission of the Congolese, Eisenhower shot
him down. What the world was contending with was “one man forcing us
out of the Congo” — “Lumumba supported by the Soviets.”

It was likely at this point in the discussion that the president made
a fateful utterance. Robert Johnson, the official note taker for the
meeting, noticed the president turn toward Dulles. Then, he recalled,
“President Eisenhower said something — I can no longer remember
his words — that came across to me as an order for the assassination
of Lumumba.” Fifteen seconds of stunned silence followed
Eisenhower’s remark, as the room digested the apparent directive. It
was just one sentence, and a somewhat euphemistically phrased one at
that, but Johnson would forever remember the shock he felt in that
moment.

When Johnson returned to his desk to type up his notes, he asked his
boss what to do with the comment and was told not to mention it. The
only written record of the order that appears to survive comes from
the notes of Gerard Smith, the State Department’s director of policy
planning. It is an admittedly inconclusive piece of evidence: In the
margins of his legal pad, he wrote “Lumumba” and, beside that, a
bold X.

The article is adapted from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of
the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid. | Penguin
Random House

Eisenhower’s words would become the subject of debate for decades to
come. Dillon would claim to remember no “clearcut order” at the
meeting but would admit that the “general feeling” of the U.S.
government at the time was that Lumumba had to be gotten rid of.
Eisenhower’s more ardent defenders would swear that the president
had never suggested that Lumumba be killed and that he could never
have even conceived of committing such a sin. His son, John
Eisenhower, attended the Aug. 18 National Security Council meeting in
his capacity as an aide. According to John, “If Ike had something as
nasty as this to plot, he wouldn’t do it in front of 21 people.”
John also claimed to recall one of his father’s aides once joking
about killing Lumumba. The president, he said, turned red and replied
with anger, “That is beyond the pale.” Three other people at the
August 18 meeting also averred that Eisenhower had never issued
anything that could be interpreted as an assassination order.

Subsequent events would belie these defenses. The CIA got to work on a
plot to poison Lumumba’s food or toothpaste, and the man who
delivered it to the station chief in Congo noted that the order had
come from the very top of the U.S. government. Whatever the exact
phrasing, Ike’s message that day came through clear enough: Will no
one rid me of this turbulent prime minister?

Eisenhower’s directive did not appear to weigh heavily on his
conscience. Having just become the first-ever U.S. president to order
the assassination of a foreign leader, he headed to the whites-only
Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland, to play 18 holes of golf with
his son and grandson.

_STUART A. REID is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs and the
author of The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold
War Assassination, from which this article is adapted._

_POLITICO is the global authority on the intersection of politics,
policy, and power. It is the most robust news operation and
information service in the world specializing in politics and policy,
which informs the most influential audience in the world with insight,
edge, and authority. Founded in 2007, POLITICO has grown to a team of
700 working across North America, more than half of whom are editorial
staff._

* Patrice Lumumba
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* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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* CIA
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* assassination
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* Cold War
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