JFK: Ordeal in Africa PDF
Preview JFK: Ordeal in Africa
J F K: ORDEAL IN AFRICA J F K ORDEAL IN AFRICA Richard D. Mahoney New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1983 Copyright © 1983, Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congre« Cataloging in Publication Data Mahoney, Richard D. JFK: Ordeal in Africa Includes index. 1. Africa—Foreign relations—United States. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Africa. 3. Africa—Foreign relations—1960- 4. United States—Foreign relations—1961-1963. 3. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963. I. Title. DT38.7.M33 1983 327.7306 82-24685 ISBN 0-19-503341-8 Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I Printed in the United States of America To my mother and father The conjectural element of foreign policy—the need to gear actions to an assessment that can* not be proved true when it is made—is never more crucial than in a revolutionary period. Then the old order is obviously disintegrating while the shape of its replacement is highly uncertain. Everything depends, therefore, on some conception of the future. Henry A. Kissinger Acknowledgments This history is based primarily on declassified documents from the Kennedy White House (the National Security Files and the President’s Office Files) which are housed in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Dor chester, Massachusetts. It is also drawn from the Adlai E. Stevenson Papers at Princeton University, the Chester Bowles Papers at Yale Uni versity, the G. Mennen Williams Papers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and from the collection of transcribed telephone con versations between the President and senior officials in his administration that is not yet in the public domain. To the archivists who work in the security vault at the Kennedy library (where I spent more than a year), I wish to pay special tribute. They processed what must have seemed an unending stream of declassification requests with unfailing humor and competence. I am certain that the library’s namesake would be pleased with the way his documentary heritage is being handled. Megan F. Desnoyers, Suzanne K. Forbes, and senior archivist William W. Moss were particularly helpful all the way along. Interviews comprise the other major source of this history. Two hundred and twenty-three principals—from former British prime min isters to Belgian mercenaries—shared their recollections with the author. The unknown scholar has little to offer the public men and women whose assistance he seeks. There is no assurance that the hours they take to answer his questions will ever be reflected in a favorable, or even recognized, historical verdict. That is why my sense of debt is especially great and my inability to mention all of these individuals particularly regrettable. Responsibility for this book is surely mine, but the story itself is truly theirs. My sincere thanks to: Rajeshwar Dayal, George Ivan Smith, Thomas A. Cassilly, Jr., Martin F. Herz, Lewis Hoffacker, Frank C. Cariucci, G. McMurtrie Godley, Robert Rothschild, Frédéric Vandewalle, J. Wayne Fredericks, Samuel E. Belk III, Carl Kaysen, Ralph A. Dungan, Lord Home, Lord Harlech, Sir Robert Jackson, the late Sir Geoffrey de Freitas, Erica Powell, Michael Dei-Anang, Alberto Franco Nogueira, Pierre Salinger, Harris L. Wofford, Jr., Gerald J. Bender, and Karen B. Maloney. A note on oral histories is in order. To diminish the factual slippage inherent in such exchanges, interviewing was done with the aid of White House, State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and embassy docu viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ments from the period. To avoid the journalistic practice now employed by some scholars of citing or quoting from unnamed sources, I have identified the pertinent individuals in the endnotes. In cases where the respondents specifically requested anonymity, a numbered index of confidential sources is cited in the text. This index will be deposited along with the rest of my research files at the Kennedy library. It will be available for use by other scholars after a suitable period of time. The reader should know that this history has built on the definitive scholarship of Catherine Hoskyns and Stephen R. Weissman on the Congo, Dennis Austin and W. Scott Thompson on Ghana, and John Marcum on Angola. A special word of gratitude is due George W. Ball, who gave the author access to his valuable papers and to W. Averell Harriman, who was not only kind in answering all of my questions and in reading an early draft of the manuscript, but also in arranging other interviews on my behalf. A grant from the Shell Foundation financed my first year of research and travel. The School of Advanced International Studies financed a second year, thanks to the intercession of Riordan J.A. Roett. My personal thanks to: Maurice W. Kelley for instilling an interest in the academic profession in the first place; Robert E. Osgood for guiding me in scholarly ways during the doctoral process; Witney Schneidman and Gerard Rice for their intellectual companionship; the James C. O’Neill family for kindly providing shelter in a time of need; David B. Kay and James D. Thayer for sparing the reader many a banal thought and ungrammatical phrase as a result of their painstaking work on the manu script in its early stages; and John W. Warner, who brought the full force of his editorial gifts to bear on this narrative during its final year. Susan Rabiner, my editor at Oxford University Press, was quick to spot some merit in the original manuscript and was firm in encouraging me to improve upon it. I also wish to thank Joaquin M. Duarte, Jr., who did everything he could to lighten my professional load during the final year of rewriting, and Jacques Lowe, who generously allowed the use of his dramatic photograph for the cover of this book. My father, William P. Mahoney, Jr., attentively read each of the manuscript’s five drafts with a generous spirit. His example sustains me. My mother, Alice D. Mahoney, was always sympathetic of my labors and was warmly appreciative of the final result. Without the devoted work of my aunt, Peggy M. Spaw, who spent hundreds of hours over the past two years helping me to recast the narrative and to rethink my judgments, this book would not have been written. Phoenix, Arizona R.D.M. August 18,1983 A NOTE TO THE READER The account which follows features the Congo, Ghana, and Portuguese Angola. While there were other African countries that were also important to the United States during this period, I have selected these three countries because they received proportionally more of the President's attention. To fellow students of American foreign policy, I offer an admission of bias from the outset: diplomacy is politics. Walter Lippmann described the political art as one involving Ma complex of material circumstances, of historic deposit, of human passion. . . By reason of its human makeup, diplomacy would seem to elude the strict confines of conceptual frame works or quantitative models. The experience of the Kennedy administration in Africa at least attests to the truth of Lord Salisbury’s observation that victories in diplomacy are won by “a series of microscopic advantages: a judicious suggestion here, an opportune civility there, a wise concession at one point and a far sighted persistence at another. . . .” National interests, rather than men, may be the crucial ingredients in foreign policy, but it is the men who make the difference in protecting or undoing those interests abroad. As John Kenneth Galbraith remarked to President Kennedy, foreign policy reflects the “fundamental instincts of those who make it.” This history revolves around the men in power at the time—their "thoughts, fears, and hopes,” as Kennedy once put it, in dealing with new and puzzling problems. In assessing the central character of that cast, Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general Belisarius may suggest a comparison: ,“His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own.”
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