Betting on the Africans

President John F. Kennedy's personal diplomacy with African leaders is explored in depth in this sympathetic study. Though Kennedy's Africa policies and American aid programs have been extensively discussed in recent scholarship, Philip E. Muehlenbeck adds to our knowledge of the president's role in shaping policy and using his personal prestige to blunt communist influence in postindependence Africa. “Kennedy's interest in Africa,” we are reminded, “far surpassed that of any other American Cold War president” (p. 223). Unlike other accounts of U.S.-Africa relations, Muehlenbeck's monograph covers the entire continent. His case studies include some that will be familiar to specialists, such as Ghana, and others that are often treated as separate or special cases (such as South Africa and the Arab states of North Africa) or not at all (such as Senegal and present-day Tanzania). Muehlenbeck uses documents from the National Archives of South Africa that demonstrate the anxiety of the apartheid regime over jfk's support for African nationalism. He discusses the rivalry for influence in Africa between the United States and France. His extensive use of oral histories and interviews with American officials adds texture to our understanding of jfk's activist approach to Africa

Communism · Diplomacy · Foreign policy · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Prestige · Rivalry · Scholarship · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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