He is dead now, but his mad rhetoric still echoes in the mind for those who were there. Speech after speech, Sukarno's cadence set the rhythm for our work and our lives in that long summer of 1965. We battened down the Embassy hatches and waited, straining to fathom his purpose and predict his next move. One after another, faster and faster, the PKI's enemies were over-run; the domino theory was being tested before our eyes. "All of history," Emerson once wrote, "stands in the long shadow of one man." So too did Indonesia by September 30 of that year ... until the last domino refused to fall.
In retrospect, it is easy now to say that our initial interpretation of the "September 30 Movement"—the so-called PKI coup attempt of October 1, 1965—was correct. We knew from the start that it was not a coup in the classic sense. Our first reaction was that Sukarno was behind it all. We knew that he believed that he stood on the stage of history, that he wanted his Indonesian revolution to become "the greatest of all revolutions, even a summing-up of all revolutions," an act which he called "entry into the Socialist stage"—the juncture at which collaboration with the bourgeois nationalists is abruptly terminated, the latter are removed from the stage in disgrace, and the drama moves inexorably toward its finale: the full-fledged Communist state.
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