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JFK: Ordeal in Africa

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There is a tragically small subset of scholarship that focuses on American Foreign Relations with Africa, but Richard Mahoney's JFK: Ordeal in Africa surely ranks among the best of the bunch. Though somewhat dated and unfortunately out of print, Mahoney presents an incredibly insightful and well-written account of Kennedy's engagement with Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the major flash points of Ghana, the Portuguese colonies(primarily Angola), and the Congo. Through access to classified documents, interviews with participants, and a firm handle on the secondary literature that existed at the time, Ordeal in Africa effectively depicts the American strategy that often walked a fine line between anti-colonial idealism and practical Cold War strategy. The results were often problematic and occasionally contradictory, but by 1963 American policy seemed headed in the direction of a more liberal strategy that could benefit African nationalists.

Yet if the book focuses primarily on relations between the African continent and the United States, it is also worthwhile to note that it stands as one of the earliest and perhaps best overviews of Kennedy's general understanding of decolonization. Following Kennedy's interest in the topic from his days as the junior senator from Massachusetts, through the campaign, and into the White House, Mahoney demonstrates that Kennedy used the matter to bolster his liberal credentials while simultaneously grasping the strategic value of early support for the new nations of the developing world. Within the administration, the tensions between liberal ideology espoused by some of his policy advisers and the hard realities of the Cold War conflict tempted Kennedy to dilute his support for Third World independence, but he finally settled on a policy that sought to create a space for the peaceful development of new states by preventing the spread of the international conflict to the African continent.

Though release of new documents and taped conversations over the past two decades have revealed much information about American involvement in Africa (and more continues to be declassified each year), Mahoney's readable overview of the topic remains one of the most detailed and accessible.