Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders

by Philip E. Muehlenbeck

As a presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy established a reputation across Africa as a sympathetic supporter of African nationalism, who if elected would realign Washington's priorities toward the continent. Once in office, Kennedy indeed made changing the image of America in Africa a top priority of his administration, believing that the Cold War could be won or lost depending upon whether Washington or Moscow won the hearts and minds of the Third World.

Africa was particularly important because a wave of independence saw nineteen newly independent African states admitted into the United Nations during 1960-61. By 1962, 31 of the UN's 110 member states were from the African continent, and both Washington and Moscow sought to add these countries to their respective voting bloc. Kennedy feared that neglect of the newly decolonized countries of the world would result in the rise of anti-Americanism and needed to be addressed irrespective of the Cold War. Philip Muehlenbeck demonstrates how Kennedy used all means at his disposal-economic, cultural, personal-to appeal to the leaders of the developing world, including Nkrumah, Senghor, Touré, Nyerere, and Ben Bella.

Drawing on archival sources from Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Muehlenbeck closely examines Kennedy's policies towards Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Egypt, Algeria, Tanganyika, and South Africa, which were to a large extent successful in winning the sympathies of its peoples, while at the same time alienating more traditional American allies. Betting on the Africans adds an important chapter to the historiography of John F. Kennedy's Cold War strategy as well as the history of decolonization.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction, History, Politics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2012

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joins Robert Rakove's Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, at the pinnacle of the recent scholarship on Africa, including North Africa, and presidential diplomacy during the Sixties. Like Rakove, Muehlenbeck praises Kennedy for his attempts, only partially successful to escape from the Cold War binary vision that rendered Eisenhower's and later LBJ's African politics disasters. Kennedy understood that it would be a mistake to confuse anti-colonial nationalism into communism or socialism. Walking the tightrope between the European-centered interests that dominated his State Department and the more nuanced understandings of key advisors like G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams, Kennedy sometimes, as in the case of Angola, cast his lot with the Africans (though LBJ didn't follow through, squandering the capital JFK had amassed). But often, as in the case of South Africa, he found himself unable to extricate himself from the larger geopolitics. It mattered immensely that JFK had been one of the most vocal pro-African Senators prior to his election and that he was comfortable with a campaign of "personal diplomacy" that saw him welcome Ghana's Nkrumah, Algeria's Ben Bella, Senegal's Senghor and Tanzania's Nyerere to the White House. Excellent scholarship.

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely useful book for anyone who desires to know a little bit about the origins of US foreign policy towards Africa in the context of decolonization. The monograph is mostly about Kennedy's "personal diplomacy" with various African leaders, but the text also treats some of the preceding US administrations' approaches to the continent, especially Eisenhower's. This book is an extremely top-down treatment of diplomacy, focusing almost solely on JFK, his advisors, and US ambassadors and their personal relationships with African leaders. Nevertheless, one does get some picture of how US diplomacy influenced developments 'on the ground' in Africa and how Africans viewed the United States from the 1960s onwards. Naturally, the inescapable, overarching context of the period in question is the Cold War contest between the USSR and the USA, but Muehlenbeck is careful to point out that the saga of US interaction with Africa actually transcended the Cold War. He makes the very compelling point that JFK actually had the prescience to see that Africa, and the so-called Third World, were rising at a geometric rate, and that the United States would have to begin to build bridges of goodwill with these parts of the world in order to safeguard its own security and prosperity in the future, especially after the Cold War ended.

[Julian Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting examination, showing that John F. Kennedy was perhaps the best president in US history with regards to Africa. After discussing the Eisenhower administration's comical lack of knowledge and interest in African affairs, it explores how President Kennedy-- former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Africa subcommittee-- had a great interest in Africa and cultivated his relationships with African leaders, believing that partnership with African nationalists was essential in countering Soviet influence in the continent. While the subject is interesting, the organization is rather simple (each chapter a relationship with a different African nation) and as a result, each case study appears distinct from the others. Another common pitfall of studies of personal diplomacy is present here-- there's a limit in how much you can prove the affinity between leaders based solely on their writings to one another, and the personal element sometimes can only be inferred, as if in sketches. Prose is workmanlike and unmemorable.

[Zeb Larson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's sort of retro to include a discussion of personal in diplomatic history these days, but Muehlenbeck manages to pull it off. What emerges is a portrait of Kennedy as a man who was really concerned with human rights, often against the advice of people closest to him. This book's only great weakness is its absence of African archival sources, which would inform our understanding of how people in Tanzania or Ghana understood Kennedy.