CONGO: Where's the War?

Washington airport was dank as any Congo rain forest. The diplomatic greeters, led by Secretary of State Christian Herter, huddled under a long blue canopy on rollers, but rain trickled down the back of the Egyptian ambassador's neck and plonked off the Homburg of the ambassador from Guinea. From a MATS Convair stepped Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba, 35, wearing his customary blue suit and brown Italian loafers. He gazed at a blue, gold-starred Congo flag that had, all too obviously, been hand-sewn that morning, and a Marine Corps band struck up Stars and Stripes Forever—the commission assigned to write a Congolese national anthem has not yet come up with a tune.

It was the hastiest state visit the U.S. had ever laid on. But, explained a State Department official, "it isn't important that several members of the delegation had no visas, that several others had no international health certificates, that one lost his passport and that the military aide has only one uniform. Here's a man who is dealing cold turkey with the whole world—from kings to carpetbaggers—and with very little preparation."

Five-Minute Peace. Washington officials, who had expected a ranting fanatic, found instead a poised, almost impassive, man who could respond politely and correctly in slightly accented French to Herter's welcoming speech without recourse to notes or text, who faced a roomful of U.S. correspondents and fielded their sharpest questions with calm confidence, urbanely parried questions he did not choose to answer. Sometimes, he spoke with disarming candor. "I was sitting around my office with the country exploding around me," he explained. "It took me just five seconds to decide that the only place to go was the United Nations."

Earlier at the U.N. and again in Washington, Lumumba hammered away at a single theme: the U.N. must get the Belgian troops out of the entire Congo, including secession-minded Katanga province. "After the Belgian troops leave, peace will be restored in five minutes," he told a U.N. press conference. "If the Belgian troops left tomorrow, that would be fine. But if they left today, that would be even better." Lumumba backed away smoothly from his big development contract with U.S. Promoter Louis Edgar Detwiler: "Only an agreement in principle." (Privately he admitted the contract was "a terrible mistake.")

"Well Done." In Washington, Lumumba settled into Blair House and popped over for talks with Herter. A goateed picture of confidence, he came out to indulge in some calculated exaggeration: "Now I know that the U.S. does not approve, and will never approve, the efforts to divide our country." State Department officials, admitting that the performance was "very well done," felt obliged to issue the "clarification" that the U.S. was backing the U.N., not Lumumba.

But diplomats, who had once dismissed him as a demagogue or a nut, began to wonder if Lumumba had not known all along what he was doing. "He was sitting down there feeling pretty vulnerable," mused one. "So he mentions the Russians, and nothing could bring the house down faster. Everyone panics, and the U.N. really begins to move." The consensus: "Erratic, but a tough, clever guy."