The Foreign Service Journal, September 2022

46 SEPTEMBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL K ennedy staffed the Africa Bureau early on with strong, politically attuned leadership [and] chose highly visible ambassadors to Africa. although the implication that the senator postured on Africa for only political purposes missed the mark. Regardless, Africans heard little of the criticism. On the contrary, in August 1960, the news that Africa Subcommittee Chairman Kennedy was send- ing former New York Governor and Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman on a fact-finding trip to Guinea and several other African countries only stoked their enthusiasm for the senator. Africa continued to make headlines. Under pressure from the United Nations, the Belgians fast-forwarded Congolese independence to July 1960. Things went wrong from the beginning, however, and the pall of the Congo hung over the presidential campaign. Kennedy constantly invoked Africa on the hustings, delivering 13 formal speeches on the topic and referring to it 479 times. Kennedy’s choice of Harris Wofford as speechwriter confirmed the close link on his own staff between domestic civil rights and Africa. Wofford had served as an attorney for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and in 1959 edited its first report to Congress. His selection made plain that the intended audience was Black Americans. The Mboya Initiative Not long before their respective nominations in the summer of 1960, Nixon and Kennedy confronted each other again over Africa. Kenyan trade union leader TomMboya approached a small group of private Americans about organizing a program for several hundred compatriots to study in American univer- sities to prepare a cadre of qualified personnel to lead their country into independence. Celebrities Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier donated their time and names to the project. The missing piece was transportation to the U.S. Robinson lobbied Nixon personally, and Nixon, in turn, pressed State to produce assistance. Rather than go through Nixon, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Joseph Charles Satterthwaite wrote Robinson directly on July 11 to reject a State role, claiming that he had heard nothing from the Department of Defense to follow up on Nixon’s ideas. More- over, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs objected to funding Mboya in any form; it wanted State to work with one of its officially designated organiza- tions for student programs, the Institute for International Educa- tion or the Africa-America Insti- tute (which operated at a much higher overhead and longer planning timelines and could not have approached anywhere near the 800 students Mboya finally sent to America). Frustrated with Nixon, several influential activists approached Wofford, Kennedy presidential campaign press spokesman Pierre Salinger and Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver (who ran the family’s Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation). Succeeding in getting an invitation to meet the candidate, on July 26, 1960, Mboya flew to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Wofford later wrote: “Seeing the easy rapport of these two young men, each heading for the top leadership of his nation, I had a sense that day of the far-reaching changes to come in the relation- ship between America and Africa.” Subsequently, Shriver told the Mboya supporters that the foundation would contribute $100,000 to the airlift and an addi- tional $100,000 to defray expenses of the students in the U.S. There was just one condition: no publicity, although word of his family’s role finally surfaced shortly. The Debates There is no better measure of the weight of Africa on the 1960 campaign than the televised debates. Kennedy opened with the Africa card, putting Nixon on the defensive in the foreign policy arena in which he was most comfortable, in the process turning to a GOP icon, Abraham Lincoln. “In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln said the ques- tion was whether this nation could exist half-slave or half-free,” Kennedy intoned. “In the election of 1960, and with the world around us, the question is whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free, whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking, or whether it will move in the direction of slavery. I want people in Latin America and Africa and Asia to start to look at America; to see how we’re doing things; to wonder what the president of the United States is doing; and not to look at Khrushchev or look at the Chinese Communists.” Kennedy did not return to Africa until the fourth and final