3. AFRICA VS. EUROPE
The problem of balancing the relative claims of our NATO allies and the new African states was always tricky. It especially affected our policy in the United Nations, confronting Adlai Stevenson, the State Department and the President with a series of delicate decisions. The vote on the Angola resolution in March 1961 had liberated the United States from its position of systematic deference to the old colonial powers. Nonetheless, each new issue had to be met on its merits. Some presented hard choices, and the presidential decision was not made easier by the tendency of both Europeanists and Africanists in the State Department to overstate the dreadful consequences which would follow from favoring the other.
Kennedy was thus considerably concerned in the early months of 1961 with his old problem of Algeria. He watched with sympathy de Gaulle’s careful and circuitous effort to bring his nation to the acceptance of Algerian independence. When the French generals in Algeria mutinied at the end of April and there seemed for a panicky moment the prospect of a paratroop attack on Paris, Kennedy promptly offered de Gaulle his assistance. The collapse of the revolt permitted de Gaulle to move forward; but in the next months, as France finally began talks with the Algerian nationalists, Tunisia took the opportunity to try to drive the French out of their military base at Bizerte. When the French responded by a large and bloody attack, the matter came before the United Nations. In August a special session of the General Assembly met to consider an Afro-Asian resolution calling for the withdrawal of French armed forces from Tunisian territory.
De Gaulle, of course, pronounced the debate no business of the UN and declined to let France take part. In New York Stevenson felt that we should vote for the Afro-Asian resolution. In Washington the Bureau of European Affairs recommended abstention. When I brought the matter to the President, he thought for a moment and then said, “Everyone forgets how shaky de Gaulle’s position is. . . . If the Tunisian affair goes really sour, it might just start a new military revolt. We don’t want the ultras to take over France. With all his faults, the General is the only hope for a solution in Algeria. Tell Adlai that our sympathy is with the anti-colonial nations; but their cause won’t be helped by the overthrow of de Gaulle, nor will our position in Berlin. Let’s sit this one out.”
We abstained without undue damage to our position in Africa. Kennedy then asked the State Department to prepare a letter to Habib Bourguiba, the wise president of Tunisia, in order to “reestablish with you a communication which seems to have been partially interrupted by the incidents of Bizerte.” When I brought it to him for clearance, he strengthened it by scribbling on the draft: “Standing as my country does close to a holocaust that could destroy the U.S. as well as Europe and much of the East, I have not found it possible to take a public position on this matter satisfactory to you. I regret this greatly, but I am hopeful that you will recognize our difficulties as well as those of your country in these days.” Our relations with Tunisia were soon repaired; in another year France was out of Bizerte, Franco-Tunisian relations were restored and Algeria was independent.
The Portuguese colonies were not so easy. Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea were all in conditions of incipient revolt, and the new African states were determined to help them gain their freedom. Our own capacity to act in this situation, however, was limited by our dependence, or alleged dependence, on the military and naval installations which Portugal made available to us in the Azores. In the summer of 1961, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared the Azores base essential to American security in case of trouble over Berlin. The problem led to continuous wrangling in Washington—the Bureau of European Affairs vs. the Bureau of African Affairs; the Mission to the UN vs. the Pentagon—with occasional interpolations by such kibitzers as J. K. Galbraith, who enraged the Europeanists by suggesting that they were trading off Africa for “a few acres of asphalt in the Atlantic,” and by Dean Acheson, who enraged the Africanists by recommending that the United States stop helping draft resolutions on Angola. The Azores lease was due to expire at the end of 1962, and this gave these discussions a certain frenetic quality that autumn until Dr. Salazar finally decided to extend American access to the facilities without formal renewal of the agreement.
This dilemma left us no choice but a moderating policy on Portuguese questions in the UN—never enough for the nationalists in Africa and always too much for the Pentagon and Dr. Salazar. We labored to tone down the Afro-Asian assaults on Portugal; that was why, as Stevenson tried to explain to Acheson, we took part in the drafting of resolutions. Thus in 1961 we succeeded in making “self-determination” the UN goal rather than “independence.” And we consistently opposed the use of sanctions against Portugal. At the same time, we used private suasion in Lisbon as well as public argument in the UN in a constant effort to induce Portugal to reform its colonial methods.
Portugal yielded only imperceptibly under these various ministrations, though it did agree in the summer of 1963 to talks with African leaders. In the meantime, the failure of the nationalist insurrections to make much progress against Portuguese rule led the African delegates to redouble their verbal onslaughts in the UN. The situation dragged on inconclusively through the Kennedy years, trailing an aura of general dissatisfaction on both sides. Nevertheless Kennedy’s effectiveness in making his African visitors understand the American dilemma over the Azores base limited the harm that restraint on the Portuguese colonies did to our general position in Africa.
Though without the Azores problem we would have unquestionably moved faster in our policy toward the Portuguese colonies, the middle course did express substantive conviction as well as tactical necessity. Kennedy always mistrusted UN resolutions which promised big things but could not be carried out. He used to quote a Chinese proverb: “There is a great deal of noise on the stairs, but nobody comes into the room.” He wanted, not hortatory rhetoric against colonialism, but realistic resolutions which could help lay the economic, educational and institutional foundations for self-government. Jonathan B. Bingham, who handled colonial questions at the UN in 1961 and 1962, set forth this position to the General Assembly in November 1961:
We would rather see the leaders and peoples of Africa conquer the realities of independence, with all the exertion that this requires, with all of the institution-building that this requires, than to be satisfied with the hollow and sterile image of independence without the reality. . . .
For a nation to have such freedom, two things are necessary. It must have in its own hands, instead of in alien hands, the right to decide. And—no less vital—it must have among its people, and among its leaders, the knowledge and experience which alone confer the ability to decide.
Similar language, of course, had long been used by the white man as a pretext to deny the Africans their independence. But again the spirit of Kennedy in his personal talks with African leaders rescued the language from its old context and made it the expression of thoughtful concern and friendly counsel.
4. NORTH AFRICA
Once countries had gained their independence, Kennedy believed that the sensible thing was to try to live with the new nations and their new leaders. Not domination or preachment but adjustment and rapprochement seemed to him the fruitful relationship. He saw this as a long-term investment and was ready in the meantime to put up with a certain amount of nonsense.
On July 3, 1962, five years and a day after Kennedy had given his speech in the United States Senate, Algeria became free; and in due course the President took pleasure in sending his confidential Foreign Service consultant of 1957, William J. Porter, to Algiers as ambassador. If independence had come when Kennedy and Porter first discussed the Algerian question, a free Algeria would have had a moderate national government, a functioning economy and a leaning toward the west. But the long war against France had radicalized the political leadership and ravaged the economic and administrative system. Ahmed Ben Bella, who quickly acquired ascendancy in the new Algeria, was a passio
nate nationalist and socialist presiding over a turbulent and divided land.
Still, even this wilder Algeria had not forgotten the American who had once championed its cause. The National Liberation Front had saluted Kennedy’s election in 1960; and in 1962, when Ben Bella made his first major trip outside Algeria, he went straight to Washington. After a cordial meeting with Kennedy, the Algerian leader left more ardent than ever in his enthusiasm. Ben Bella, Ambassador Porter has suggested, thought Kennedy a really good man and “ascribed to Kennedy everything he thought good in the United States; the fight against the big trusts, against the segregationists.” Whenever Porter returned to Washington for consultation, Ben Bella charged him with “fraternal greetings” for the President—a message which always entertained Kennedy.
Unfortunately Ben Bella’s almost fanatical admiration for the American President did not extend to American foreign policy. When the Algerian leader left Washington, he went on—to Kennedy’s surprise and annoyance—to visit Fidel Castro, toward whom he also evidently had fraternal feelings and with whom he promptly joined in a communiqué exhorting the United States to get out of Guantanamo. Kennedy, who had found Ben Bella sincere and congenial, was perplexed by what seemed either hopeless naïveté or calculated insult. In the next months, the Algerian government, in between Ben Bella’s fraternal greetings to the American President, applauded the Cubans and the Viet Cong and fulminated against American imperialism.
With his personal stake in the outcome of the Algerian revolution, Kennedy followed Algerian developments with special care. The President used to quiz Porter closely about Ben Bella, even asking him to describe the expressions on the Algerian leader’s face when he said the things reported in the dispatches. But Kennedy’s disappointment over Ben Bella’s erratic behavior did not divert him from his course. He felt that the anti-imperialist extravagance of Algeria was more the result of mood than of doctrine or discipline; that the present state of affairs was not necessarily permanent; that the United States should maintain a presence and help direct Ben Bella’s energies toward the welfare of his own people. When Algeria was threatened by mass starvation in the winter of 1962–63, Kennedy rushed in Food for Peace, which ended by feeding one of every three Algerians; indeed, Algerian emergency relief was the largest PL 480 program. In a variety of ways, despite the pinpricks, Kennedy played for the long term. His policy, as Porter once described it, was “to stay in close, keep working and wait for the breaks.”
He pursued this policy throughout North Africa. In Habib Bourguiba, who visited Washington in the spring of 1961, Kennedy had a good friend—a relation reinforced by the comradeship of Habib Bourguiba, Jr., as Tunisian ambassador to Washington, with the young men of the New Frontier. In the case of Libya, Kennedy entertained both the crown prince and the prime minister, though his limitless equability before African politicians did break down, probably for the only time, when the prime minister, his country brimming with oil, made insistent and repeated requests for American economic assistance throughout their meeting. And it was the President’s intention, when political conditions permitted, to invite President Nasser of Egypt to the United States.
The Nasser story is more a part of Middle Eastern than of African policy. I had little to do with the Middle East, except as it occasionally impinged on the UN; and I hope that Myer Feldman and Robert Komer, who watched this troubled region for the President, will someday provide their own accounts of one of Kennedy’s most interesting experiments in foreign policy. Very early in the administration Bundy and Rostow placed high in a list of problems for the New Frontier the question of whether better relations were possible with the most powerful leader of the Arab world. John Badeau, who had been president of the American University in Cairo and later of the Near East Foundation, went to Cairo as ambassador with general instructions to test out a course of selective cooperation. In August, when Nasser sent an unexpected and lengthy reply to a circular message Kennedy had sent to the Arab chiefs of state the previous spring, a correspondence sprang up between the two Presidents which went on intermittently through the Kennedy years and served as a substitute for a face-to-face encounter.
Middle Eastern policy was complicated not only by Nasser’s dreams of empire and by the decay of medieval oligarchies in states like Yemen and Saudi Arabia but also, of course, by the inordinate Arab hatred of Israel. Kennedy believed strongly in America’s moral commitment to Israeli security and took steps to strengthen Israel’s ability to resist aggression. But he wished to preserve an entrée to Nasser in order both to restrain Egyptian policy toward Israel and to try to work more closely with the modernizing forces in the Arab world. Thus when he recognized the anti-Nasser government in Syria in 1961 and sent Israel the Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in 1962, he took care to inform Nasser in advance what we were doing and why we were doing it—a courtesy which undoubtedly moderated Nasser’s response to what he might otherwise have seen as unfriendly acts.
Kennedy’s deeper hope, as with Sukarno and Ben Bella, was to persuade Nasser to concentrate on making progress at home rather than trouble abroad. As in Algeria, our main tool of economic assistance was Food for Peace. For a time the policy of selective cooperation had an encouraging effect. In June 1962, when Nasser wrote Kennedy expressing his appreciation for the PL 480 aid and for a stabilization loan, he agreed with the President that, though the United Arab Republic and the United States had their differences, they could still cooperate. This tacit acceptance of the American interest in a free Israel marked a considerable advance in mutual understanding.
Then the Imam of Yemen died in September 1962, and in the ensuing confusion Nasser backed a military revolution against the Imam’s successor. Saudi Arabia took Nasser’s intervention as a preliminary to an attack on itself and supported the royalists. Kennedy, fearful that the civil war in Yemen would lead to a larger war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia—a conflict which might involve the United States because of our interests in Saudi oil—decided to accept the revolutionary regime in the hope that it could stabilize the situation in Yemen and begin the job of modernizing that fifteenth-century country. At the same time, he tried to persuade Nasser to withdraw his troops and thereby reassure Saudi Arabia. The British, with their interest in Aden, feared the consolidation of Egyptian influence in Yemen and therefore opposed the revolutionary regime. The matter soon became incredibly entangled, and Kennedy, to Robert Komer’s dismay, used to call it, when it was going badly, “Komer’s war.” In any case, the Yemen affair dominated American relations with Egypt in 1963 and interrupted Kennedy’s effort to turn Egyptian energies inward.
5. BLACK AFRICA: SÉKOU TOURÉ AND NKRUMAH
The policy of staying in close, keeping at work and waiting for the breaks had its most notable success in Guinea. Under the influence of Sékou Touré, a left-wing trade union leader, Guinea alone among the former French colonies had voted in 1958 against de Gaulle’s idea of transforming the old French empire into a French community. In a fit of irritation, de Gaulle responded by ordering a total French evacuation. He even placed Guinea on an international blacklist, informing the Eisenhower administration, for example, that, if Washington helped this crowd of malcontents, France would be ready to withdraw from NATO. Washington in consequence did not bother to answer the letters subsequently arriving from Guinea requesting modest amounts of aid. In this situation sékou Touré, even if he were not a Marxist, had no choice but to turn east—and, of course, then considering himself a Marxist, he found this alternative highly agreeable. The Russians, delighted at the chance to establish themselves on the Atlantic coast of Africa, obliged with an extensive program of technical assistance. By 1960 Washington had consigned Guinea to the communist bloc, and such amateur experts on world communism as Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut pronounced Sékou Touré a communist operative beyond hope of redemption.
Kennedy took another view. The fascination with the break-up of the French empire, which had already involved him in Ind
ochina and Algeria, as well as a desire to meet the man who had said no to de Gaulle, had led him in 1959 to seek out Touré when the Guinean leader visited the United States. Kennedy, who was then speaking in California, hired a helicopter and conferred with Touré at, of all places, Disneyland. During the 1960 campaign he repeatedly criticized the Eisenhower administration for its delay of eight months in sending an ambassador to Guinea, pointing out that the Russian Ambassador was there on Independence Day with offers of trade and aid—“and today Guinea has moved toward the communist bloc because of our neglect.”
There seemed little question that such a movement had taken place. Touré even refused to receive Eisenhower’s retiring ambassador for a farewell call; in the torrent of oratory following Lumumba’s death, he tried to suggest that Kennedy was somehow responsible for this crime against the African people; in April he accepted the Lenin Peace Prize; and after the Bay of Pigs he affirmed to Castro on behalf of the people of Guinea “our complete solidarity and our total support for the cause of your revolution, which symbolizes the struggle for liberty of all dominated peoples.” Despite all this, Kennedy felt that Sékou Touré remained a nationalist at heart; and, before William Attwood departed as his ambassador to Conakry, the President asked him to verify this as best he could.
Attwood found the American position less hopeless than it seemed from Washington. The Russian aid program, it turned out, was a great mess. The materials were poor, the technicians officious and incompetent, the diplomats insistent and patronizing. Returning to Washington in May, Attwood reported a slow disillusionment and recommended a small American aid program to show Sekou Touré that the United States was willing to go along with genuine non-alignment. Outside the Bureau of African Affairs, the bureaucracy regarded this with disdain as another gust of New Frontier naïveté. Then Robert Kennedy came back from the Ivory Coast and vigorously backed Attwood. The President said, “Bill, tell the AID people I’m for it if they can find the money.”
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