The new military rulers circulated photos of the slain generals, claiming that Communists, particularly Communist women, had tortured and castrated them and gouged out their eyes. The United States helped circulate such charges. Later autopsies showed the claims to be complete fabrications. But by then the damage had been done.
Egged on by the new rulers, mobs began attacking PKI members and sympathizers in what the New York Times called “one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history.” Islamic extremists functioned as death squads, often parading victims’ heads around on spikes. The Times described one incident: “Nearly 100 Communists, or suspected Communists, were herded into the town’s botanical garden and mowed down with a machine gun… the head that had belonged to the school principal… was stuck on a pole and paraded among the former pupils.” U.S. diplomats later acknowledged providing thousands of names of Communists to the Indonesian army for elimination. The Brits and Aussies added more names. Embassy staffer Robert Martens admitted unrepentantly, “It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.” Ambassador Green confessed that the United States had much better intelligence as to PKI membership than did the Indonesian army, which relied on U.S. information. Howard Federspiel, the State Department’s Indonesia expert, stated, “No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it.” U.S. efforts to cultivate close relationships with the Indonesian military were paying off. Perhaps one-third of the Indonesian general staff and almost half of the officer corps had received some training from Americans. McNamara defended U.S. involvement during the ensuing Senate inquiry, assuring listeners that U.S. “aid was well justified,” paying handsome dividends.80
The following months saw the massacre of between a half million and a million Communists and other leftists, many by means of U.S. arms. Perhaps a million people were imprisoned, some for decades. McGeorge Bundy told Johnson that the events following October 1 were “a striking vindication of U.S. policy.”81
His base decimated, Sukarno was forced out in 1967, replaced by Suharto. American businessmen felt great relief. The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta telegrammed Washington in December 1965, “Pressure for removing foreigners from direct control of extractive raw material production has been building for years.” Without the uprising, “removal of foreign oil companies would have been certainty.”82 Among the foreigners looking for concessions in the aftermath of the slaughter was the right-wing oilman H. L. Hunt. Hunt proclaimed Indonesia the sole bright spot for the United States in the Cold War and called the ouster of Sukarno the “greatest victory for Freedom since the last decisive battle of World War II.” In late 1968, the National Intelligence Estimate for Indonesia reported:
An essential part of the Suharto government’s economic program… has been to welcome foreign capital back to Indonesia. Already about 25 American and European firms have recovered control of mines, estates, and other enterprises nationalized under Sukarno. In addition, liberal legislation has been enacted to attract new private foreign investment. Tax incentives are offered and the rights of managerial control, repatriation of profits, and compensation in the event of expropriation are, in large measure, guaranteed. The prospects for private foreign investment in extractive industries are fairly good… there is substantial foreign investment in relatively untapped resources of nickel, copper, bauxite, and timber. The most promising industry, from the standpoint of both foreign capital and Indonesian economic growth, is oil. Crude production, chiefly from the fields of Caltex 5 in Central Sumatra, now averages 600,000 barrels per day, and daily output will probably exceed one million barrels within the next three years.83
In 1968, the CIA acknowledged that “in terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”84 Ambassador Green told a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that nobody knew the actual death tolclass="underline" “We merely judge it by whole villages that have been depopulated.”85
Suharto and other military dictators remained in power for decades. Despite the country’s tremendous natural wealth, the average Indonesian stayed mired in poverty. As the New York Times, which had been effusive in its praise for Suharto over the years, reported in 1993, “the average Indonesian earns the equivalent only of $2 or $3 a day and thinks of regular electricity or indoor plumbing as unimaginable luxuries.”86 U.S. corporations, however, thrived in the post-1965 business-friendly climate that was shaped with the help of U.S. economic advisors and safeguarded by a brutal military that violently repressed the least signs of opposition.
Johnson, stubborn, vain, coarse, and narrow-sighted, sacrificed his dreams of being a great domestic reformer in order to pursue his anti-Communist obsessions in Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere around the globe. Looking back in 1970, he told historian Doris Kearns that he had faced an impossible choice and ended up sacrificing “the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world.” But, if he hadn’t done so, he explained, he would have been seen as a “coward” and the United States as an “appeaser.”87 Johnson claimed that he made the choice knowing full well what it meant for him and understanding clearly how previous wars had destroyed the hopes and dreams of prior generations:
Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society… they’d use it so say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor… but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too. It’s hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That’s why I am suspicious of the military. They’re always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms.