Today's episode begins a series of episodes on the recent history of Southeast Asia. We will start by looking at Indonesia from 1950 to 1967, when Sukarno was the country's first president.



In 1961, Indonesia's President Sukarno visited Washington, D.C., to meet with John F. Kennedy. Both presidents were notorious womanizers, but while Sukarno was proud of it, in Kennedy's case the girl-chasing was kept secret until several years after his death.



Under Sukarno, Indonesia helped get the Nonaligned Movement started, by hosting a conference of leaders from 29 neutral Asian and African countries, at Bandung on Java in 1955. Today we usually call the countries in the Nonaligned Movement the "Third World." This photo shows five leaders of the Nonaligned Movement. From left to right: India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia's Sukarno, Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito.

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