Sukarno was 100 yards away when a grenade exploded near his stalled car and blamed the Dutch. The Dutch blamed U.S. diplomat Jones for shouting an Indonesian’s rebels’ word.

On a barnstorming tour of the boondocks aimed at whipping up enthusiasm for his threatened invasion of Nether lands New Guinea, Indonesia’s President Sukarno took along a star-studded cast: ten admiring foreign ambassadors, including the U.S.’s Howard Palfrey Jones, Soviet Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, a brigade of local beauties. As an…