Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders by Philip Muehlenbeck (review)

John F. Kennedy’s engagement with the developing world has been a major topic of scholarly debate in international history circles, driven recently by investigations into regions that existed at the margins of earlier work dominated by Cuba and Vietnam. Philip Muehlenbeck adds a worthwhile addition to Camelot’s diplomatic corpus with Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders. He depicts Kennedy’s approach to the continent as especially enlightened, minimizing reactionary Cold War policies in favor of a new emphasis on development, engagement, and cooperation. Concentrating on the president’s personal diplomacy with a plethora of African heads of state, Muehlenbeck asserts that charisma and intelligence became Kennedy’s most effective weapons in the battle for the hearts and minds of a continent.

Kennedy entered the White House having devoted greater attention to the problems of nationalism and economic growth in the developing world than would any twentieth-century U.S. president. Muehlenbeck consciously eschews a Cold War focus, but he agrees with scholars like Robert Rakove that Kennedy’s interest in Africa, Asia, and Latin America was part genuine support for decolonization and part shrewd grand strategy. The president and many of his closest advisers believed siding with nationalists was the only way the Western alliance could avoid losing Africa as European powers reluctantly retreated. The Kennedy administration’s strategy was fourfold: oppose European colonialism, accept non-alignment, strengthen and expand economic development programs, and establish positive personal relationships with African leaders. Muehlenbeck focuses on the final element as best illustrating the break with predecessor Dwight Eisenhower’s lack of interest in the continent, arguing that Kennedy effectively changed “US foreign policy toward Africa in both rhetoric and substance” (p. xiii).

Muehlenbeck divides the book into two parts. The first focuses on Kennedy’s personal diplomacy, largely bilateral in nature but situated in a way that teases out larger regional issues. Among the “who’s who” of 1960s African leaders featured are Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika (modern Tanzania), Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and the conservative nationalists Félix Houphouët-Boigny and William Tubman, respective presidents of the Ivory Coast and Liberia. Although the Kennedy charm did not always succeed in aligning African and U.S. interests or in addressing major concerns such as the problem of minority rule, the interpersonal diplomacy did prove important in a few key areas, which Muehlenbeck explores thematically in the second section of the book. He offers a compelling exploration of the increasingly strained relationship between the White House and French President Charles de Gaulle over African independence, which deserves greater attention in the historiography of France’s eventual split with its North Atlantic allies. Kennedy also unnerved the paranoid Afrikaner government in Pretoria, and his eventual commitment to civil rights won him acclaim within African states. In perhaps the most original chapter, Muehlenbeck examines civil and military aviation, demonstrating how African denials of overflight and landing rights blocked Soviet plans to resupply Cuba by air during the October 1962 missile crisis. Despite feeling episodic at times, the chapters collectively illustrate how Kennedy’s personal touch contributed to constructive African engagement with the Western alliance.

Muehlenbeck provides an example of traditional diplomatic history at its best in the less common setting of postcolonial Africa. Multiarchival and multinational, the research takes advantage of such underutilized resources as the National Archives of South Africa and the Library of Congress’s Frontline Diplomacy oral history collection. Muehlenbeck weaves these sources into a monograph written with style and wit. His attention to detail celebrates how the pomp and circumstance of official visits and correspondence—which so many historians pass over as mere affectation— lay the groundwork for effective diplomacy, if only by setting the tone of ongoing conversations. Within a field increasingly dominated by discussions of...