the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt one)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

There is a watchful sadness about him, a haunted quality, that began in boyhood and persisted until the end of his short life. Few photographs show him smiling. His childhood, in High Point, North Carolina, was broken in two by loss: for his first twelve years, Coltrane, an only child, lived in the bosom of an intact extended middle-class family in his maternal grandparents’ house in Griffin Park, the town’s best Black neighborhood. His grandfather, the Reverend W. W. Blair, was the presiding elder of St. Stephen A.M.E. Zion Church; his father, John R. (the younger John was John William), owned a dry-cleaning and tailor shop. It was a musical household, in a serious way. “My family liked church music, so there was no jazz in the house,” Coltrane remembered. John R. played violin well; he also had a clarinet and a ukulele, and tinkered a little on both. Coltrane’s mother, Alice, had a trained singing voice and played piano. Young John sang in his elementary school chorus and joined the Boy Scouts.

Then, within a few months in the winter of 1938-39, his family suffered a series of deaths—first a beloved aunt, then the Reverend Blair, and then, most devastatingly to John, his father. Suddenly he and his mother were not only bereaved but impoverished. Alice’s sister Bettie Lyerly and Bettie’s daughter Mary moved in with them, and Alice rented the bedrooms to boarders. Alice, Bettie, Mary, and John slept on cots in the dining room. He had always been quiet, with a subtle streak of mischief, but the rupture of his life turned him even further inward.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt fourteen)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The change in Stanleyville was mirrored by a change in Washington, as liberals in the Kennedy administration slowly found their footing. On March 31, the administration endorsed the reconvening of parliament and said that any new government had to include Gizenga. As part of this policy reset, Kennedy cleaned house. Clare Timberlake’s hysterical cables from Leopoldville, in particular, were increasingly out of step with official thinking in Washington. Ever the stick in the mud, the ambassador continued to rail against Gizenga, failing to grasp the administration’s hope that bringing him into the fold would neutralize, rather than exacerbate, the possible Communist threat he posed. The final straw was Timberlake’s decision, amid unrest in Leopoldville, to radio the commander of the five-ship U.S. naval flotilla off the Angolan coast and order him to head toward the Congo River, without asking permission from Washington. It was a stunningly presumptuous move, and Kennedy, himself a former naval officer, was irate. Timberlake had to go.

Conveniently, Kennedy was able to make the insubordinate ambassador into a sacrificial lamb in a deal with Dag Hammarskjöld: Kennedy would recall Timberlake, who had long been a thorn in the UN’s side, and in return Hammarskjöld would recall Rajeshwar Dayal, who in any case had struggled to perform his duties on account of strong animosity with Kasavubu and Mobutu. Timberlake was put out to pasture in Alabama, at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base—the first in a series of what he considered “pleasant but indifferent jobs with no use being made of what talent I possess.”

Other U.S. officials who had been involved in the Congo drama were on the way out, too. William Burden, the U.S. ambassador in Brussels who had gone so native that he considered Lumumba’s assassination “all to the good,” was removed from his post despite Belgian pleas to Washington that he stay on. At the CIA, Kennedy had decided to fire the top two officials—Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell—after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion dealt the president his first major foreign policy failure.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt thirteen)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

The day Lumumba’s children departed, an American celebrity arrived. Louis Armstrong was playing Africa on a goodwill tour sponsored by the State Department and Pepsi-Cola. At King Baudouin Stadium, ten thousand people—UN soldiers, foreign diplomats, and government officials but mostly everyday Congolese—paid twenty cents for admission. Carried into the venue on a red sedan chair, an honor usually reserved for chiefs, “the King of Jazz” was introduced by Ambassador Timberlake, who had memorized some lines of Lingala for the occasion. The crowd tapped along tentatively to the sounds of “Mack the Knife” and “When the Saints Go Marching In”; this music was new to most. “Give those cats time,” Armstrong remarked to a reporter. “They’ll learn.” Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, had no dinner plans that evening, so the Devlin family hosted a meal. Maureen, who had never heard of the jazz great, reluctantly emerged to say hello.

But the feel-good interlude did not change the fact that the Congo was coming apart. Western diplomats had assumed that Lumumba was the source of the country’s woes; sideline him, and calm would return. In fact, the chaos had only deepened. Leopoldville was the epicenter of the disorder. “Many murders, assaults, rapes, burglaries are taking place without any action by police,” Dayal told Hammarskjöld. It was not unusual in the city to see soldiers pinning families up against a wall and strip-searching them. Gangs of youths, allied with one politician or another, prowled the streets. Lumumba’s supporters beat and stabbed Albert Ndele, a member of Mobutu’s College of Commissioners, outside a hotel. An unknown assassin shot and killed a pro-Lumumba provincial minister visiting from Kasai while he was in a taxi; his body was tossed out the car’s window.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt twelve)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Hammarskjöld was a reader. (In that, if nothing else, he had something in common with Lumumba.) In the corridors of the UN building, even late at night with the Congo Club, the secretary-general routinely turned the conversation to the arts and letters, not always to the delight of his colleagues, who would much rather listen to him gossip about Jackie Kennedy than endure a lecture on contemporary poetry. For Hammarskjöld, however, the melding was essential, and he made it a priority. Before the Congo crisis, he had been able to set aside two or three hours a day for what he called “serious matters”—namely, literary translation.

As he explained to a French journalist, “I don’t believe that the taste for literature can be reduced to what Americans call a ‘hobby,’ that is to say, to entertainment and relaxation, to a pastime.” He elaborated: “It is an important complement and, for a diplomat, an indispensable one.” Poetry and diplomacy both required a keen sense of the mot juste. More practically, he needed something to pass the time during Security Council sessions while he waited for delegates’ remarks to be translated from languages he already knew.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt eleven)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

By the summer of 1960, President Eisenhower was sixty-nine 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.

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 the Year of Africa 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.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt ten)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

Clare Timberlake also ran into trouble with Lumumba’s guards. On August 18, the U.S. ambassador had an appointment to see the prime minister to complain about another incident in which Congolese troops had harassed and briefly detained six American airmen. Evidently unaware of the appointment, Lumumba’s guards escorted Timberlake across the street from the prime minister’s house and left him waiting on a curb. He returned in a huff to the U.S. embassy, where he had two calls from an apologetic aide inviting him back. When the meeting finally took place, Lumumba bent over backward to declare his admiration for the United States. He told Timberlake that it was obvious he was not a Communist, since he had first asked an American—Edgar Detwiler—to exploit the Congo’s riches. The United States, he said, would have the honor of receiving the first Congolese ambassador to any country. In a short radio broadcast later that day, Lumumba once again praised the friendship of the American people. “We know that the U.S. understands us,” he said.

Even as this charm offensive was under way, however, UN troops once again came under sudden attack. At Ndjili airport, fourteen Canadian signalmen bound for the interior of the Congo were readying for takeoff when a band of Congolese soldiers rushed the plane, raised their guns, and ordered everyone off. The Canadians were forced to lie down on the tarmac, arms splayed, as their blue berets were plucked off their heads. One Canadian was kicked repeatedly in the cheeks. Another was knocked unconscious by a rifle butt. The problem, it turned out, was that several of the Canadians wore paratrooper badges—wings, a maple leaf, and a parachute—and were therefore mistaken for Belgians. The incident underscored not only the problem of Congolese hostility toward the UN but also the uncertain allegiance of the African soldiers serving in the UN force. Ghanaian troops had stood idly by as the Canadians were manhandled, intervening belatedly and only at the urging of their British officers.

the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt nine)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

He had been thinking about it for weeks. He had threatened it in his ultimatum to the UN. He had perhaps discussed it in hushed tones in the Château Laurier in Ottawa and in the private office of an African ambassador in New York. It was a scheme born of desperation, rather than confidence, the last resort for a man nearing defeat, the only way he could take back Katanga and thus restore the country he was meant to rule. Lumumba was ready to make a choice that would alter the history of the Congo and of Africa: to formally request military aid from the Soviet Union.

The Americans had declined to send him direct assistance. The UN was refusing to help him in Katanga and was even putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Tshombe. Help from the Soviet Union seemed like the only way to retake the breakaway province.

So far, however, Moscow had extended only token support. Soviet leaders had denounced Western imperialism at the UN, in the pages of Pravda, and in their communications with the Congolese, each statement long on Western castigation but short on concrete promises. What tangible help the Soviets did provide—food aid, twenty doctors, planes for the airlift, among other things—was being channeled through the UN mission rather than directly to the government. Yet Moscow had hinted that it might be willing to do more. On August 1, the Kremlin released a statement warning that if the “aggression against the Congo” continued, it would “take resolute measures to rebuff the aggressors.” Four days later, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, sent Lumumba a letter promising his “friendly and unselfish aid” and assuring him that the Soviet Union would not stand by if the Congo remained under imperialist attack. In the meantime, he gifted Lumumba a twin-engine plane for his personal use.