The last decade has been one of rapid innovation in the field of Cold War history, with a growing number of scholars searching for increasingly dynamic ways in which to globalize histories of the American‒Soviet conflict. Key to this emerging historiographical trend has been the repositioning of the global South and especially Africa in the conflict. Philip Muehlenbeck’s Betting on the Africans follows in these footsteps with an analysis of John F. Kennedy’s attempts to court, via what the author refers to as “personal diplomacy,” African heads of state in the early 1960s. Previous scholarship, Muehlenbeck argues, has tended to overemphasize the East‒West binary of the Cold War as a framing device for Kennedy-era African policy. The result has been a flattening of Africa’s role in shaping the American president’s worldview and his understanding of the Cold War itself. As Muehlenbeck argues, for Kennedy, the courting of African nationalists stood hand-in-hand with winning the Cold War as it sought to align American interests, support, and attention to areas of the world that the president viewed as the sites of greatest potential in the early 1960s. And, as Betting on the Africans’ two parts and eleven chapters illustrate, no region held more potential than Africa.
Kennedy’s shortened presidency and the vast scope of the author’s research agenda provided some structural challenges for Muehlenbeck’s book. To overcome these challenges, Muehlenbeck largely divides his work into a series of illuminating case studies, including analyses of Kennedy’s personal relationships with such prominent African heads of state as Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Ben Bella. In each of these case studies Muehlenbeck skillfully outlines the delicate balancing act displayed by Kennedy as he courted the sympathies of this collection of leaders as well as trying to rein in some of their more troublesome (from an American perspective) ambitions. Muehlenbeck then contrasts Kennedy’s relationships with these more radical leaders with those he formed with the continent’s more conservative nationalists in Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.
In the second part of the book Muehlenbeck shifts his attention away from Kennedy’s personal relationships with African leaders to an analysis of the tensions his African agenda elicited in the administration’s broader foreign and domestic policies. Here Muehlenbeck traces Kennedy’s acrimonious relationship with Charles de Gaulle and the U.S. government’s even more contentious relations with the South African apartheid state before turning to the American civil rights movement. By far the most innovative chapter of Betting on the Africans comes at the end as Muehlenbeck details the intersections between the Cuban missile crisis and the politics of African civil aviation. In this chapter Muehlenbeck outlines the frantic attempts by Kennedy and others to garner African support for a continentwide aeronautical blockade of Soviet aircraft. In doing so, Muehlenbeck presents the reader with a lively discussion of African and global anxieties over the meaning of nonalignment in a moment of Cold War crisis. More than in any other chapter, it is in this final chapter that the reader begins to feel the real stakes of Kennedy’s charm campaign for both the United States and Africa’s postcolonial leaders.
In all, Betting on the Africans offers an insightful collection of case studies outlining Kennedy’s tactical inserting of American Cold War ambitions into the language, and in some cases possibly even the goals, of African decolonization. The author’s ability to maintain a cohesive and persuasive narrative throughout the book despite its vast scope is particularly admirable. Yet the author’s treatment of Kennedy himself is at times problematic—and the discussion of Eisenhower is perhaps even more so. Throughout this book Muehlenbeck describes Eisenhower’s African policy as racist or even nonexistent. For instance, nearly every chapter in the book’s first part refers to an initial slight by Eisenhower or his officials that helped turn Africa’s radical nationalists against the United States. The book suggests, therefore, that Kennedy was burdened throughout his presidency with the task of restoring the image of the United States in Africa. Such a narrative reads very powerfully, but it is also problematic analytically. Specifically, it obscures the differing sets of local and global realities, possibilities, and constraints faced by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Africa’s postcolonial leaders during the two U.S. administrations, turning these realities into static representations of each president’s personal views of Africa and Africans. The larger question is that of the changing nature of the postwar international community over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s and possibly the two presidents’ roles in it, something only hinted at in what is nevertheless a novel and accessible exploration of American and African foreign policy.
