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Betting on the Africans is a study of John F. Kennedy's strategy for improving U.S.-African relations through the use of personal diplomacy to court African nationalist leaders and the ramifications that policy had for U.S. relations with its more traditional allies.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: JFK and the "Greatest Revolution in Human History"
- Abbreviations
- Part One
- 1: 'More Royalist than the Queen': Eisenhower/Dulles Policy toward Africa
- 2: JFK's Early Support of African Nationalism
- 3: Kennedy, Sékou Touré, and the Success of Personal Diplomacy
- 4: Kennedy, Kwame Nkrumah, and the Volta River Project Decision
- 5: Kennedy, Julius Nyerere, and Self-Determination in Southern Africa
- 6: Kennedy, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ben Bella, and North African Arab Nationalism
- 7: Kennedy, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, William Tubman, and Conservative African Nationalism
- Part Two
- 8: The Kennedy-de Gaulle Rivalry in Africa
- 9: The View from Pretoria
- 10: Cold War Civil Rights and Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalists
- 11: Contested Skies: US-USSR Competition for African Civil Aviation Markets and the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Conclusion: The Kennedy Legacy in Africa
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Philip E. Muehlenbeck is a Professor Lecturer in the Department of History at George Washington University.
Summary
Betting on the Africans is a study of John F. Kennedy's strategy for improving U.S.-African relations through the use of personal diplomacy to court African nationalist leaders and the ramifications that policy had for U.S. relations with its more traditional allies.
Additional text
Phil Muehlenbeck provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of Kennedy's high-profile outreach to African leaders. He challenges previous interpretations that placed the Cold War at the center of Kennedy's relations with that continent's new nations. Muehlenbeck emphasizes instead the ways in which U.S. policy toward Africa in the early 1960s responded to the imperatives of decolonization and nationalism. Kennedy's personal attention to individual African leaders, in Betting on the Africans, represents a farsighted exception to the more common pattern of American disinterest in the lands between the Mediterranean and the Cape of Good Hope. Important reading for all those interested in America's relationship with the world, in African history, and in the global history turning point of the early 1960s.
