Betting on the Africans
John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders
Philip E. Muehlenbeck
Reviews and Awards
"Unlike other accounts of U.S. /Africa relations, Muehlenbeck's monograph covers the entire continent. Muehlenbeck's portrait of a charismatic American president engaged with the details of African political and economic aspirations is a contribution to the study of U.S./Africa relations as well as the JFK era." - Larry Grubbs, Journal of American History
"Muehlenbeck's well-researched work offers a compelling challenge to the conventional wisdom of continuity in American Cold War foreign policy toward Africa. The book's deep examination of the courtship of African leaders by President John F. Kennedy provides a unique perspective on personal diplomacy, specifically, and U.S.-African relations, generally, during one of the more volatile periods of the Cold War. A thought-provoking opening to our ongoing analysis of Kennedy foreign policy." - George White, Jr., American Historical Review
"In this fine book, Muehlenbeck...makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on US policy toward Africa...A well-written, crisply argued book that scholars, students in applicable classes, and general readers with a serious interest in US foreign policy and African affairs will love. Highly recommended." - CHOICE
"Challenging the conventional wisdom that judges John F. Kennedy's Africa policies to be little different from those of other American presidents, Muehlenbeck argues convincingly that JFK's strategy of personal diplomacy won the friendship of radical nationalists that other American leaders deemed lost to the Soviet camp. Based on extensive archival research, Muehlenbeck's in-depth analysis of the courtship of African leaders offers a unique window into U.S.-African relations during the early Cold War years." - Elizabeth Schmidt, author of Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958
"Phil Muehlenbeck provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of Kennedy's high-profile outreach to African leaders. He challenges previous interpretations that placed the Cold War at the center of Kennedy's relations with that continent's new nations. Muehlenbeck emphasizes instead the ways in which U.S. policy toward Africa in the early 1960s responded to the imperatives of decolonization and nationalism. Kennedy's personal attention to individual African leaders, in Betting on the Africans, represents a farsighted exception to the more common pattern of American disinterest in the lands between the Mediterranean and the Cape of Good Hope. Important reading for all those interested in America's relationship with the world, in African history, and in the global history turning point of the early 1960s." - Thomas Borstelmann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
