Nancy Mitchell. Jimmy Carter in Africa

Based on archival research from more than thirty archives in twelve countries, twenty-eight oral history interviews, a plethora of newspapers and U.S. network news broadcasts, and comprehensive secondary sources, Nancy Mitchell’s Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War is an extraordinarily well-researched book. This landmark work will make an indelible mark on the historiography of the Carter administration because it contests several of the commonly held narratives of Carter’s foreign policy. Mitchell challenges the “myths” that Carter campaigned for the presidency primarily on a human rights platform; that he was an indecisive leader torn between competing advice from his secretary of state and national security advisor; and that he was a naïve idealist who transformed into a Cold Warrior only in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Mitchell contradicts these common refrains by persuasively demonstrating that human rights was a relatively minor aspect of Carter’s campaign platform and speeches; that Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski agreed more often than not, and that Carter was a decisive leader who made his own decisions and was not easily influenced by advisors to change his mind; and that he was an ardent Cold Warrior decades before coming to Washington, D.C.

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