Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders . New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 360 pp. $27.95.
2016; The MIT Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jcws_r_00691
ISSN1531-3298
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoJohn 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 institutions, transnational exchanges, and global forces, Betting on the Africans offers a valuable reminder that individuals and interpersonal relationships help to shape key moments of international importance. Kennedy's sincere belief in the potential of African states and his carefully crafted image of the same were important in cultivating diplomatic relationships and mass foreign popularity, even if his actual policies toward Africa did not shift as far from his predecessor as Muehlenbeck may contend.For it is in the complex relationship between rhetoric, diplomatic theater, and hard policies that Betting on the Africans leaves room for debate. Muehlenbeck admits that Kennedy's emphasis on personal diplomacy was “largely symbolic,” but he nonetheless asserts: “For Africans, JFK's words spoke louder than his actions” (pp. 56, 225). This notion gives short shrift to African leaders who were also savvy politicians and diplomats. Among others, Nyerere and the stateless African nationalists Tanganyika hosted were deeply frustrated with Kennedy over his approach to minority rule and were heading toward greater confrontation before his death, although most spoke highly of the president in public, particularly after the assassination. That Muehlenbeck accepts at face value such postmortem tributes—some given directly to Kennedy oral historians—as well as newspaper coverage of official visits fails to account for the fact that African leaders could themselves engage in symbolic diplomatic language that masked more complicated views of the president and U.S. policy.Muehlenbeck also simplifies complex continental politics by hewing too closely to a traditional and largely bilateral form of diplomatic history. The book collectively addresses all of Africa, but most chapters concentrate on U.S. views of relations with single countries. Although the bibliography is extensive, it does not include any French or Portuguese sources. This is surprising because Francophone countries appear prominently in four chapters, and the United Nations (UN) vote against Lisbon on Angola represented the pivotal moment for Kennedy's anti-colonial reputation as president. Including either published French Foreign Ministry records or publications such as Daniel da Silva Costa Marcos's Salazer e de Gaulle would have revealed that France's cooperation with reactionary African actors, notably Portugal and South Africa, constrained and countered some of Kennedy's more ambitious efforts. De Gaulle's refusal to join Washington in isolating Portugal began a reluctant U.S. acceptance of Lusophone colonialism that would see Kennedy backtrack in subsequent UN votes and limit contact with stateless nationalists in ways reminiscent of Eisenhower. The lack of such context illustrates the book's sometimes problematic emphasis on top-down politics in Washington, and it calls into question how case studies were selected. The book marginalizes not just the litmus test of Portuguese Africa but Nigeria, the populous darling of Michael Latham's and Larry Grubb's modernization theories that has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Such omissions minimize the ways that changing inter-African realities explain the waxing and waning of U.S. bilateral relationships as much as any affection for Kennedy or lack thereof.Betting on the Africans is a valuable contribution to Kennedy-era foreign policy on the continent even if it is not the definitive word. The book highlights several areas that deserve further research. Most importantly, Muehlenbeck provides a detailed and readable exploration of the way Kennedy crafted an image of U.S. engagement with the continent alongside which all future administrations would be judged.
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