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.
