A Familiar Frontier: The Kennedy Administration in the Congo ...

confidence” that the “Cabinet includes advisers who, I believe, understand thefundamental problems of our continent.” 11The perspective that Kennedy’s Administration represented a repudiation ofEisenhower policies and a new dawn for U.S.-African relations is strongly reflected inthe historical scholarship. Catherine Hoskyns writes that “by January 1961 the situationhad changed…the new men whom Kennedy had appointed regarded the EisenhowerCongo policy as a failure and were advocating a change.” 12 Madeleine G. Kalb’s TheCongo Cables, a work to which this thesis nonetheless owes a debt of gratitude, dividesthe Congo Crisis into two distinct sections: “The Eisenhower Policy” and “The KennedyPolicy,” with the last chapter of the book entitled “Kennedy: An Unexpected Success.”Even critical accounts of Kennedy’s Africa policy, which acknowledge that it did notcome close to living up to the initial fervor of its beginnings, attribute the eventual returnof American disinterest to other factors: a hostile congress, the continued presence ofEurope-oriented officials in the State Department, or pressing Cold War commitments inother parts of the world. 13However, the conception of a dramatically different policy under Kennedy isunsupported by the events in the Congo in 1961. On virtually all major concerns, theUnited States adopted a substantially similar position under Kennedy in 1961 as it hadunder Eisenhower in 1960. Looking at the three sequential areas of Americanintervention, Stanleyville, Leopoldville and Elisabethville, a careful consideration ofevents and reactions in 1960 and 1961 will show that Kennedy’s actions almost always11 Telegram from Nkrumah to Kennedy, President’s Office Files, Box 114, Folder 1112 Catherine Hoskyns, The Congo since Independence, January 1960-December 1961 (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1965), 31313 Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Great Powers and Africa (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969), 291-2938