One of the more curious episodes in the history of American foreign relations was the competition for the unofficial title of Mr. Africa between two future presidents: Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
Though their concerns were domestic, Kennedy and Nixon were the first American politicians of national rank to prioritize Africa. Domestically, the two men competed for Black support. Republican Nixon especially needed those votes in industrial states that had trended Democratic.
He had the political winds to his back. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, led by Nixon’s fellow California Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren, invigorated a pro-civil rights image for the GOP, reinforced by President Dwight Eisenhower’s forceful response to the Little Rock integration crisis in 1957. Indeed, Nixon could take justifiable pride in his civil rights record.
Honorary member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for his service in Congress, he was the first prominent member of the Eisenhower administration to endorse publicly the Brown decision. He also backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, he worked with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to include a strong civil rights plank in the Republican platform.
Still, Nixon needed to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, as well as win Black support. Seeing Africa as the answer to both, he became the GOP’s go-to Africanist, representing the United States at the widely publicized independence ceremonies of Ghana in 1957. There, Nixon unexpectedly met the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., fresh off his leadership of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.
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Meanwhile, Kennedy calculated similarly. The precarious New Deal coalition of pro-civil rights Northerners and a segregationist Southern base suggested a formula that might achieve just enough to win: avoid civil rights and talk about Africa. The balancing act was realpolitik for Democrats.
In 1952, despite Adlai Stevenson’s winning 79 percent of Black votes nationally, Eisenhower swept the North and carried several Southern states. Stevenson’s numbers fell to 61 percent in 1956, and Rev. King and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) announced their votes for Eisenhower.
Kennedy would spell out his approach to Africa on July 2, 1957, in his first major foreign policy address, later known as the Algeria speech. “The most powerful single force in the world today is … man’s eternal desire to be free and independent,” he said.
Though both Nixon and Kennedy asserted that the Cold War would be fought and won in the so-called Third World, Kennedy defined winning differently. He asserted that nationalism was more strategically important than communism and insisted that America back the nationalists, even against Washington’s European allies.
Ordinary Americans were also starting to notice the continent. A 1950 remake of King Solomon’s Mines struck gold at the box office. John Ford’s “Mogambo” (1953) with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, and John Huston’s “The African Queen” (1951) with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, were magnificently filmed on location.
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If such icons as Gable and Bogart could reinvent themselves in the heart of Africa, maybe the Dark Continent beheld a new frontier after all. Richard Nixon’s Africanist bona fides rested primarily on his March 1957 trip to Accra as Washington’s representative at Ghana’s independence celebrations.
His widely publicized trip report recommended that a new Bureau of African Affairs be established at State, embassies be set up in every country and substantial economic development assistance extended. Regardless, Nixon eyed Kennedy warily. As the latter hammered the vice president’s failure in his report to mention Algeria, he provoked doubts about Nixon’s judgment and ability to overcome Cold War-driven policy deference to France.
Attention soon shifted to another rebellious French colony. In September 1958, Guinea rejected French President Charles de Gaulle’s plan to grant its African colonies independence but remain tied to France economically. Furious, de Gaulle directed departing French officials to leave nothing of value behind, a punitive action that poisoned the Franco-Guinean relationship for decades to come.
Sékou Touré thus took over a country economically shattered by de Gaulle’s wrath. While the Soviet Union jumped at the opportunity to befriend Guinea, Washington waffled, struggling to balance support for African independence with its alliance with France. Touré begged Eisenhower for more, insisting that neutrality was his objective.
As evidence of his sincerity, he offered to visit the United States, which Washington accepted. The state visit, which occurred from Oct. 25 through Nov. 9, 1959, was the baptismal program of the new Bureau of African Affairs, which, with Nixon pushing hard, had opened its doors on Sept. 8. It also marked Touré’s first official travel beyond Africa as head of state; thus, its success meant as much to the new bureau as to the leader of the new country.
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Ambassador to Guinea John Morrow recommended extended orientation travel around the United States. Touré himself wanted to see the South. Atlanta, Touré’s preferred choice, was dropped because of fear of a racially motivated slight by the governor of Georgia.
Consequently, Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina, Morrow’s home state, came to the rescue. Touré received an honorary degree from Morrow’s recent employer, North Carolina College, then lunched with the president of crosstown (and segregated) Duke University. After a stop in Chicago, Touré flew to Nixon’s Southern California, but curiously without Nixon.
Instead, Kennedy seized the moment to helicopter dramatically into Disneyland to meet the Guinean. For the Guineans, Kennedy’s performance was the high point; Touré would follow the presidential campaigns of the next two years closely.
In stark contrast to Kennedy, Eisenhower’s perceived ambivalence and sluggishness left the Africans cold. The nonverbal message communicated to Africans at the presidential level was that Africa still did not much matter. A sluggish image afflicted the final two years of the Eisenhower administration.
The president himself suffered two heart attacks that sapped his energy and contributed to the image of an out-of-touch old man. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ fatal illness during the second term deprived foreign policy of its prime advocate. Nowhere was this truer than in its approaches to Africa. deferred to the Europeans. Although Kennedy took over the new subcommittee on Africa in 1959, he ended up chairing only one session as he focused on his presidential campaign.
Nixon’s repeated criticism that Kennedy was an absentee chair was on point, although the implication that the senator postured on Africa for only political purposes missed the mark. Regardless, Africans heard little of the criticism. Africa continued to make headlines. Under pressure from the United Nations, the Belgians fast-forwarded Congolese independence to July 1960.
Things went wrong from the beginning, however, and the pall of the Congo hung over the presidential campaign. Kennedy constantly invoked Africa on the hustings, delivering 13 formal speeches on the topic and referring to it 479 times. Kennedy’s choice of Harris Wofford as speechwriter confirmed the close link on his own staff between domestic civil rights and Africa.
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Civil Rights Commission and in 1959 edited its first report to Congress. Not long before their respective nominations in the summer of 1960, Nixon and Kennedy confronted each other again over Africa. Kenyan trade union leader Tom Mboya approached a small group of private Americans about organizing a program for several hundred compatriots to study in American universities to prepare a cadre of qualified personnel to lead their country into independence.
Celebrities Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier donated their time and names to the project. Robinson lobbied Nixon personally, and Nixon, in turn, pressed State to produce assistance. Rather than go through Nixon, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Joseph Charles Satterthwaite wrote Robinson directly on July 11 to reject a State role, claiming that he had heard nothing from the Department of Defense to follow up on Nixon’s ideas.
Frustrated with Nixon, several influential activists approached Wofford, Kennedy presidential campaign press spokesman Pierre Salinger and Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver (who ran the family’s Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation). Succeeding in getting an invitation to meet the candidate, on July 26, 1960, Mboya flew to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
There is no better measure of the weight of Africa on the 1960 campaign than the televised debates. “In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the question was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free,” Kennedy intoned. “In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery.
Kennedy did not return to Africa until the fourth and final debate, when he echoed the language of his Algeria speech: “Africa is now the emerging area of the world. It contains 25 percent of all the members of the [United Nations] General Assembly. We didn’t even have a Bureau of African Affairs until 1957 [sic, 1958]. In the Africa south of the Sahara, which is the major new section, we have less students from all of Africa in that area studying under government auspices today than from the country of Thailand.
Six African countries are members of the United Nations, he said, but there wasn’t a single American diplomatic representative in any of them. Mr. Kennedy won the unofficial title of Mr. Africa, which helped to fuel his narrow electoral victory. Africa thus served successfully as an indirect and noncontroversial means to reach Black voters while skirting the explosive language of civil rights.
It was just enough to win key industrial states without losing the Deep South, a masterful political juggling act. He staffed the Africa Bureau early on with strong, politically attuned leadership, starting with Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams as assistant secretary. He chose highly visible ambassadors to Africa, including his prep school classmate, magazine editor and fluent French speaker William Attwood to Guinea.
He launched the Peace Corps and put brother-in-law Shriver in charge. Yet Kennedy’s presidential record in Africa would prove mixed, at best. Days after his inauguration, he faced a crisis in the former Belgian Congo and charges of CIA involvement in the assassination of the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.
His support for Mondlane prompted threats by Portuguese dictator and NATO ally Antonio Salazar to terminate the Azores base agreement. Kennedy then backed off from Mondlane, a message that pushed Africans to look elsewhere for support. Finally, Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 abruptly ended what remained of his Africa outreach.
Successor Lyndon B. To be sure, Kennedy’s vision resonated among those Americans most interested in the continent of Africa, but it would take another generation to build sufficient grassroots political force to influence policy.
During his congressional and senatorial years, John Kennedy emerged as a strong believer in a US policy of support for these new nations. As an early supporter of independence and self-determination, he opposed continued French rule in Indochina and Algeria. Yet he was not really a liberal in foreign affairs in the sense in which that term was then applied. He was rather a hardheaded judge of what he thought was in the US national interest.
He saw independence as an inevitable process and believed it was in the US interest to side with gradual change. This anticolonial stance gained him the acquaintance and sympathy of future African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure and brought him into the public eye for the first time.
Kennedy's policies in Africa make for interesting study, as they reveal a gradual shift in the President's mind as to the role the United States should play in the third world, particularly regarding the newly independent nations of Africa.
During his presidential years Kennedy gradually moved away from his position of generally supporting the new nations. This shift started with a hard but less-known lesson than that of the Bay of Pigs - the assassination of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
The role of the US government in the Lumumba assassination is carefully examined, as is its policy in supporting the UN military contingent in the country and its stance toward the short-lived ''breakaway'' state of Katanga. This was a confused period. Kennedy felt strongly that US credibility on the issue of support for decolonization was at stake.
To create a stable government in the newly independent Congo he had to forge a coalition among groups which had serious and sometimes nearly irreconcilable disagreements. When this could not be done he was forced to support the more conservative, right-wing elements. And he had to do it without seeming to resist change in the eyes of the third world or putting undue strain on the NATO alliance, since several of its members , such as Belgium and Britain, did not share Kennedy's views on independence for the Congo.
In Angola, Kennedy's policy was different. Instead of trying to reinforce a moderate center coalition (which did not exist), he sought to pressure both sides in order to achieve an orderly transition toward independence and avert a colonial war and possible Soviet intervention.
At first he believed that the US could have it both ways: that the country could rely on an unweakened NATO (then riven by Portuguese opposition to Angolan independence) to preserve its national security interests while continuing to be perceived by the third world as a supporter of independence for those still under colonial rule.
Over the course of time he found that he had to choose between the two. He chose Portugal and a strong NATO. Kennedy's African policy, as the author notes, shows him to have been a cautious leader, committing himself only little by little when events seemed to be beyond his ability to influence them.
It also shows him as a man who knew what he wanted but was rarely sure how he could do it and who always left himself a way out if disaster struck. The author describes him as a ''decision maker ruled by a sense of his limitations but, as a diplomat, ready to take full advantage of his presidential powers.''
These traits served him better in the Congo than in Vietnam, where he followed a course of steadily increasing US troop commitments without ever deciding how far he would ultimately go in committing himself.
On July 2, 1957, Sen. John F. Kennedy gave an hour and fifteen minute speech to the Senate entitled “Imperialism: the Enemy of Freedom,” in which he called for a dramatic change in American foreign policy to support anti-colonialism in Africa and Asia even at the cost of damaging ties with key NATO allies like France, Portugal, and Belgium.
It was Kennedy’s first big foreign policy speech, and it was critical of the policies of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who had supported France’s war to keep Algeria from independence. In 1957, half a million American-equipped French soldiers were bogged down in a violent campaign to repress 9 million Algerians seeking independence.
Paris argued that Algeria was not a colony but an integral part of the French homeland. It had insisted that Algeria be recognized as France itself when it joined NATO, asserting that Article 5 applied to both France and Algeria. No other European ally asserted such a deal with any other colonial possession.
In the 1950s, Eisenhower’s foreign policy was dominated by his hard-line Cold Warrior Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had a black-and-white view of the world. You were either an ally like France or a communist enemy. There was no place for neutrality or the Third World. Kennedy rightly argued that this approach ignored the most powerful force in Africa and Asia: nationalism.
The era of great European empires was rapidly coming to an end, Kennedy argued, and Washington needed to embrace the change and help the cause of independence. Algeria was the premier symbol of the anti-colonial struggle, and America was on the wrong side. Jack’s youngest brother Teddy had visited Algeria in June 1956, and his report of the trip had an important influence on JFK’s thinking about French North Africa.
In the speech, Kennedy dismissed France’s legal argument that Algeria was a part of the French homeland like Normandy or Alsace, noting that, except for some French settlers, Algerians could not vote in French elections. The French government was outraged, as was the Eisenhower administration and most Republicans.
Of course Eisenhower and Dulles did not change policies. Instead, France came to grips with reality under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, who accepted Algerian independence in 1962 despite several assassination attempts on his life and coup plots by fanatical generals. When JFK became president in 1961, he backed de Gaulle completely.
Cleva’s book puts Kennedy’s speech in its historical and strategic perspective. In 1957, the United States had seven air bases in France and NATO was headquartered in Paris. But French and American policy was unsustainable; the French empire could not prevent Algerian independence indefinitely.
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