1. KENNEDY AND AFRICA
Kennedy arrived in office, however, with a record on Africa unique among American politicians. His broad interest in colonial problems had gone back a long way—to childhood tales of Ireland’s long struggle for independence and, in the contemporary world, at least to the trip he had taken as an inquisitive young Congressman to Indochina in 1951. In the mid-fifties he had begun to see in Algeria the same pattern of colonial decay he had already inspected in Southeast Asia; and he feared that French intransigence would have the same outcome of uniting the nationalists with the communists. In addition, he had just come on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and no doubt wanted to move into foreign affairs in a way that would at once be arresting and useful and demonstrate a basic liberalism.
He therefore thought a good deal in the spring of 1957 about a speech on the Algerian struggle for self-determination. In preparing the speech, he was in discreet touch with William J. Porter, director of the State Department’s Office of North African Affairs, an intelligent Foreign Service officer who feared that Washington’s uncritical commitment to the French was jeopardizing the whole future of the west in Africa. Kennedy also evidently talked to the Algerians seeking a hearing for the national liberation movement at the United Nations. (This was more audacious than it sounds: as late as 1960 Secretary of State Herter bleakly declined to meet with representatives of the FLN.) He consulted American experts on North Africa and did considerable reading himself.
Rising in the Senate in July 1957, he pointed out that the French government was repeating its errors of the past—above all, in its refusal to accept the reality of nationalism; and he bluntly criticized the American policy of full support to France in the struggle against the Algerian rebels. “No amount of mutual politeness, wishful thinking, nostalgia, or regret,” he told the Senate, “should blind either France or the United States to the fact that, if France and the West at large are to have a continuing influence in North Africa . . . the essential first step is the independence of Algeria.” The Atlantic nations, he said, must understand that “this is no longer a French problem alone,” and the United States must use its influence to work for a solution based on a recognition of “the independent personality of Algeria.”
It is hard now to recall the furor his remarks caused. The Algerian speech brought Kennedy more mail, both from the United States and abroad, than any other address he made in the Senate. It produced great irritation not just in official circles in Paris and Washington but throughout the foreign policy establishment in the United States—the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Times, the Department of State. Kennedy had criticized an ally; he had imperiled the unity of NATO. Even Democrats drew back. Dean Acheson attacked him scornfully. Adlai Stevenson thought he had gone too far. For the next year or two, respectable people cited Kennedy’s Algerian speech as evidence of his irresponsibility in foreign affairs.
But there were other reactions. I was in Paris that July, and, as I wrote him, my main impression was of “the great gap between what people thought privately and were willing to say publicly about Algeria. . . . I found no one (including people in the Quai d’Orsai) ready to defend the present policy.” French critics of the official policy were pleased to have their hands strengthened by this evidence of international concern. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber ran the full text in L’Express with Kennedy’s photograph on the cover. In Europe the speech identified him for the first time as a fresh and independent voice of American foreign policy. And Africans, of course, were deeply excited. In 1961, when Ambassador Philip Kaiser presented his credentials to Ould Daddah, the President of Mauritania, his host spoke of the thrill with which he had read the speech as a student in Paris. This was the reaction among political leaders across the continent.
Soon Kennedy became chairman of the African Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In this capacity he warned his colleagues about the new energies bursting forth in the dark continent. “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will,” he said in 1959, “Africa is going through a revolution. . . . The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.” He advocated sympathy with the independence movement, programs of economic and educational assistance and, as the goal of American policy, “a strong Africa.”
In 1960, for the first time in American history, Africa figured prominently in a presidential election. Kennedy charged repeatedly (there are 479 references to Africa in the index of his 1960 campaign speeches) that “we have lost ground in Africa because we have neglected and ignored the needs and aspirations of the African people,” while Nixon, in a rather tepid response, criticized Kennedy for not having called any meetings of the African subcommittee that year. In the summer, when students in Kenya who had scholarships in American universities could not meet their travel fares and the Eisenhower administration declined to do anything about them, Kennedy arranged through the Kennedy Foundation to bring them over on a well-publicized airlift. He also sent Averell Harriman on a fact-finding mission to West and Central Africa.
Once elected, Kennedy moved forward swiftly to lay the groundwork for a new African policy. His first State Department appointment was G. Mennen Williams as Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. He described this as “a position of responsibility second to none in the new administration,” and, while this pleasant exaggeration was no doubt intended in part to assuage Williams’s disappointment over not being in the cabinet, it also expressed a new sense of urgency about Africa—and was so received by African leaders. Williams, of course, was well known as a progressive governor of Michigan and battler for civil rights; and his designation expressed Kennedy’s desire to take African policy out of conventional channels and give it fresh energy and purpose.
Williams had a clear and strong vision of the American role as the friend of African independence and development. But he turned out, despite his political background, not to be too proficient in the intramural warfare of the Department of State; and he was too much the old-fashioned New Deal liberal for his relations with the President to be entirely comfortable. Yet in a way Kennedy admired Williams’s very earnestness; and Williams always felt that he had Kennedy’s backing. Though they traveled by different roads—Williams, by explicit moral idealism; Kennedy, who hated to declare his idealism, by expressions of practical concern for the American interest—they generally arrived at the same conclusion. When problems made their painful climb through bureaucratic conflicts to the White House, Kennedy ordinarily decided them Williams’s way.
Kennedy, indeed, felt rather protective about Williams. When the Assistant Secretary on his first African trip was quoted at Nairobi as saying that Africa was for the Africans, a comment which caused a brief uproar in London, Kennedy was resolved not to give ground to Williams’s critics. Asked about the statement at a press conference, he replied briefly, “I don’t know who else Africa should be for.” The Nairobi incident amused him, and he used to kid Williams about it. That March at the Gridiron Dinner, Kennedy remarked that he had just received a cable from Williams asking whether he could stay in Africa a few more weeks. “I felt I had better send this reply,” the President told the Gridiron audience: “‘No, Soapy. Africa is for the Africans.’”
African policy received another infusion from the outside when Williams acquired a singularly able and imaginative Deputy Assistant Secretary in Wayne Fredericks, whose work at the Ford Foundation had been preceded by long business experience in Africa. Then in March the President seized the opportunity afforded by the Angola resolution in the UN to dramatize the new American attitude toward African colonial questions. And on African Freedom Day in April he told a reception of African ambassadors of his ‘‘profound attachment to the great effort which the people of Africa are making in working toward political freedom.”
In selecting his own ambassadors f
or the new African nations, he made a special effort to find men who embodied the spirit of the New Frontier. He used to say that Africa was the exciting place for a diplomat to be; London and Paris hardly mattered any more—everything could be done by telephone from Washington—but in Africa a man was on his own. After Robert Kennedy and Chester Bowles had blocked the dying administration’s attempt to equip the new African states with Foreign Service officers on the verge of retirement, the President sent to Africa in the next years a group of younger Foreign Service officers, like his old friend Edmund Gullion (to the Congo), leavened by journalists like William Attwood and Edward Korry of Look (to Guinea and Ethiopia), scholars like John Badeau (to Egypt) and liberal Democrats with government experience in Truman days like Philip Kaiser, John Ferguson and James Loeb (to Senegal and Mauritania, Morrocco and Guinea). Kennedy’s concern with Africa necessarily remained marginal, except when, as in the Congo, problems erupted into crisis. But his curiosity was unremitting. He cared very much, for example, about the performance of his African ambassadors and rarely failed to see them when they came home on consultation. “He was really interested in what they thought,” as Ralph Dungan once remarked, “and he always wanted to check their judgment against his.”
The President’s interest was not widely shared in the United States, except by African specialists and, to an increasing degree, by Negro leaders. No one in Congress, for example, showed the concern for Africa that Kennedy himself had shown as Senator. Though Albert Gore of Tennessee kept the Senate Subcommittee on Africa alive for a time, it lapsed into inactivity after his resignation from the chairmanship early in 1963. As one consequence, Kennedy was not able to increase American assistance to Africa as he would have liked. But, as the magazine West Africa later put it, the Africans “considered that Mr. Kennedy’s political attitudes were even more important than his efforts to aid their economies.” And in communicating these political attitudes Kennedy used a weapon more powerful than the most generous aid programs. That weapon was his own personal contacts with African leaders.
2. PRESIDENTIAL DIPLOMACY
Under Eisenhower presidential meetings with foreign leaders had not ordinarily been for the transaction of business; this was left to the Secretary of State and the pros. They were rather for the purpose of generating goodwill—what came to be called “high-level massage.” The briefing books the State Department sent to the White House in the early Kennedy days reflected this theory. They were vacuous documents, devoid of the hard facts on which the new President lived. Kennedy tossed them aside; and it took a little while before McGeorge Bundy could persuade State to start giving the President the operational detail. At times it almost seemed to us as if the Department were resolved to prevent the President from discussing anything of importance.
The purely ceremonial aspects of official visits bored Kennedy. With the help of Angier Biddle Duke, his skillful Chief of Protocol, he cut down on the number of full-dress state visits and devised a new category of less formal meetings. The essence for him was, not the warm handclasp and the smiling photograph, but private communication and candor. He wanted to find out how foreign leaders saw their problems, to get them to understand something of his own problems and to establish personal relations which could be continued by correspondence. We had the impression that he was sometimes impatient with his European guests, who could be long-winded and self-important. But he went to endless lengths to be friendly to visitors from Latin America, Asia and Africa. Nowhere did his efforts have more striking success than with the Africans. Beginning with Nkrumah of Ghana in March 1961, African leaders flowed through the White House in what appeared an unending stream: eleven in 1961, ten in 1962 and in 1963, when the supply was nearing the point of exhaustion, seven.
They would arrive at the White House, proud, tense and unsure, not knowing what to expect from the head of the most powerful state in the world. Kennedy, with instinctive charm and consideration, put them instantly at ease. For one thing he conveyed an intimate understanding of the force of African nationalism. This was not just put on for Africans. I heard him once explain to President Kekkonen of Finland, “The strongest force in the world is the desire for national independence. . . . That is why I am eager that the United States back nationalist movements, even though it embroils us with our friends in Europe. Mali and Guinea show the power of nationalism to overcome an initial commitment to communism.” He talked to Africans as an American and not as a partner of the European colonial powers; and, at the same time, his insight into the African mood enabled him to see African problems, not as outsiders saw them, but as Africans saw them themselves.
He spoke simply and directly, as one world leader talking in confidence to another. He set forth American policy without apology, even when he knew it might disturb or displease his visitor. He made clear his understanding of their determination to stay out of the cold war and made it just as clear that the United States was going to meet its own commitments in the world. At the same time, he treated his visitors as members of the fraternity of working politicians and did not hesitate to discuss the limitations placed on his own action by the Congress or the balance of payments or public opinion: thus “I hope you’ll come along with us on Chinese representation; this can’t go on forever, but we have to hold the line for another year.” Sometimes his candor made the people from State squirm a little; but he knew what he was doing, and his confidence was never betrayed.
He inquired into his visitors’ problems with disarming frankness: “Well, now that you’ve got your independence, aren’t you finding that your troubles are just beginning?” He realized that their internal pressures sometimes forced them to do things—of an anti-American sort, for example—which they might rather not do. Indeed, he was the first American President for whom the whole world was, in a sense, domestic politics. He understood the problems of Sékou Touré and Sukarno as Franklin Roosevelt understood the problems of Robert La Follette or Frank Hague.
His knowledge startled his visitors by its sweep and detail. He would mention personalities and issues, cite facts and statistics and comment on past or present in a way which led some of his guests to say afterward that the American President knew more about their countries than they did themselves. When Borg Olivier, the Prime Minister-designate of Malta, came to the White House, Kennedy inadvertently embarrassed him by questions about the Knights of St. John and the great siege of Malta which displayed more knowledge than the Maltese leader seemed to have of the history of his own island. His humor lightened awkward moments. When Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, a Roman Catholic, waited while the Marine Band with a roll of drums announced his entry into the reception rooms of the White House, Kennedy leaned toward him and said, “Well, Mr. President, how does it feel to go into luncheon with another religious minority politician who made the grade?” There were never reprimands or homilies: his respect for the dignity of his visitors was complete. He did not ask them to do things they could not do nor promise them things he could not deliver. He gave the impression that he was looking for areas where he and they could work together; where disagreement was unavoidable, then let each side understand the reasons and respect the differences.
He invited their opinions and, whatever the crises on his desk, heard them out with undivided attention. The African leaders responded with astonishingly free and open accounts of their uncertainties and hopes. One after another, they left his presence with admiration for his “sensibility,” pride in what they now felt to be a special relationship, a conviction that Kennedy’s America, even if it could not do everything at once, was basically with them, and, most of all, a fascination with Kennedy himself. “With Kennedy there were sparks,” said Samuel Ibe, a young Nigerian diplomat. “You would meet him and, ‘shoo, shoo,’ sparks and electricity would be shooting all over.” Hastings Banda, back in Nyasaland, delivered a great eulogy of the American President at a party rally. The Prime Minister of Sudan, cherishing a hunting rifle the President had
given him, constantly expressed the wish that Kennedy would go out on safari with him. Sékou Touré, who had been for a moment the great Soviet hope in Africa, repeatedly invited him to Guinea. Kennedy’s personal friends soon encircled the continent.
The President’s impact was reinforced by the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy’s interest in Africa began when he headed the American delegation to the independence celebration of the Ivory Coast in August 1961. He seized the occasion to have frank talks with Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the president of the new republic. Houphouët-Boigny urged him not to give up on Sékou Touré, though he doubted whether it was worthwhile spending much energy in an effort to reclaim Nkrumah in Ghana. He also recommended that President Kennedy consult closely with the African leaders on their economic and political problems. Back in Washington, Robert Kennedy became a ready and effective ally for those advancing the claims of African policy. When Houphouët-Boigny visited Washington in 1962 and received a bored reception at the State Department, the Attorney General arranged a special meeting with the President in which the misunderstandings were speedily cleared up. He even talked to nationalist leaders, like Eduardo Mondlane, the political representative of the insurrection movement in Mozambique, when it would have been thought improper for the White House or the State Department to show official interest. Nor did the family concern stop there. Unable to accept Sékou Touré’s invitations himself, the President sent Sargent Shriver to Guinea for a couple of visits. No doubt this warm response by the Kennedy dan had a particular appeal for a culture so largely founded on kinship.
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