344 The Presidential Years
of the American security services.^440 When news came about Kennedy’s assassi-
nation a month later, a Romanian delegation headed by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-
Dej was visiting Belgrade. Gheorghiu-Dej later related that he and Tito spent
the entire night discussing the possible consequences of the president’s violent
death and the future prospects of the United States.^441 Tito did not believe that
the blame should be put on an unstable Lee Harvey Oswald, but that Kennedy
was the victim of a military operation. In a discussion with the East German
ambassador, Eleonore Staimer, who was an old acquaintance from Moscow,
he affirmed that during his recent journey to the States what had happened to
the president could have easily happened to him, and that the true killer would
never be found, as he would be protected by influential people in the Pentagon.
“I was a soldier too,” he told Madame Staimer, “and therefore I know very well
that with a gun like that, which was found after the assassination attempt, it is
impossible to shoot three times back-to-back with such precision at a quickly
moving car.”^442
Believing that American foreign policy was harmful to world peace, in the
sixties Tito tried to block the “reactionary forces” and to create a broad “peace
front.” This would include the non-aligned countries, the majority of the social-
ist countries, the Third World national liberation movements, the progres-
sive forces in the capitalist arena, and even some Western states critical of
Washington’s policy, such as France. He was sure that such a front could oper-
ate with success in the United Nations, where the balance tipped against the
United States. The primary objective of this coalition would be to isolate the
US and China and to force them by persistent pressure to pursue a more mod-
erate policy.^443
In order to curtail Beijing’s influence on the leaders of the non-aligned coun-
tries, most of all Sukarno, who considered war a legitimate means in the strug-
gle against the rich, in mid-April 1965 Tito visited Algiers, where the Chinese
premier, Zhou Enlai, had been shortly before him. Westerners believed that the
marshal was trying to secure a role on the international scene beyond his capac-
ity for action, but nevertheless they were not hostile to his policy of peaceful
coexistence.^444 They were much less inclined toward his anti-imperialist opin-
ions, which he was not shy about sharing. In May 1964, the twentieth anniver-
sary of victory in the Second World War, he compared American policy in
Vietnam, Congo, and Cuba to that of Mussolini and Hitler before the war and
their “diabolical plan to enslave the whole world.” He particularly condemned
the carpet-bombing of North Vietnam (operation Rolling Thunder) which, in
his opinion, offended everyone, especially those who had similar experiences
during the Second World War.^445