French Rival

Faced with the potential withdrawal of French military assistance during his clash with de Gaulle during the transfer of power, Houphouët-Boigny enquired about potential American assistance. Neither the Eisenhower nor, at first, the Kennedy administration wanted to challenge the French in their sphere of influence. But the spectre of US military assistance began to haunt Paris, and influenced it to make concessions during the negotiations for the cooperation agreements. After independence, US policymakers were increasingly less inclined to fully defer to French sensitivities, and decided to provide a modicum of military assistance to the Entente states. With the French seeing the Americans as rivals in Africa, Houphouët-Boigny exploited the prospect of a heavier US involvement in the Ivorian security sector to extract additional military assistance from Paris and, eventually, to retain a French military presence in Côte d’Ivoire despite France’s planned withdrawal in line with its force reductions in Africa.

Intervention und Transformation: Die Hochphase des Reformismus in der Iranpolitik der Kennedy-Administration, 1961-1962

ZusammenfassungDer Wahlsieg des demokratischen Präsidentschaftskandidaten John F. Kennedy über den bisherigen Vizepräsidenten Richard Nixon schien eine Zeitenwende in der Außenpolitik der USA im Allgemeinen und insbesondere in der Politik gegenüber den Staaten der im Entstehen befindlichen sogenannten Dritten Welt anzukündigen. Der junge Präsident gemeinsam mit der ihn umgebenden Gruppe dynamisch-aktivistischer Berater symbolisierte die Abkehr von der als uninspiriert und vorwiegend reaktiv empfundenen Außenpolitik Eisenhowers und insbesondere von deren lange Zeit gleichgültigen bis feindseligen Einstellung gegenüber den immer stärker in den Vordergrund drängenden nationalistischen Bewegungen an der Peripherie. Tatsächlich hatte sich Kennedy bereits als junger Senator mit seiner Kritik an der amerikanischen Unterstützung der französischen Kolonialherrschaft in Algerien einen Namen gemacht.

Black Feelings

In Black Feelings, Corrigan traces the surging optimism of the Kennedy administration through the Black Power era’s dynamic and powerful circulation of black pessimism to understand how black feelings were a terrain of political struggle for black meaning, representation, and agency as black activists navigated the physical violence and psychological strain of movement disappointment, particularly with liberals (both black and white). Black Feelings demonstrates how racial feelings emerged, ebbed, flowed, disappeared, and re-emerged as the Long Sixties unfolded and finally ended. Black Feelings investigates how politicians, activists, and artists articulated the relationship between feeling black and black feelings to chart the affective energies that animated and troubled liberalism’s tropes of progress, equality, exceptionalism, perfection, and colorblindness. Black Feelings pays special attention to hope, hopelessness, impatience, brotherhood, rage, shame, resentment, disgust, contempt, betrayal, and melancholy and metaphors like the “powederkeg” that helped propel the affective racial landscape in the Long Sixties. Consequently, Black Feelings maps how black intellectuals described, animated, located, solicited, and projected feelings that shaped their political affiliations and their rhetorical strategies in opposition to dominant constructions of white feelings.

JFK and de Gaulle

This book explores French president Charles de Gaulle’s frank, persistent, and discrete campaign to dissuade President Kennedy from expanding the American military/economic aid program in Vietnam from their first summit meeting between in May 1961 up until Kennedy green-lit a coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the late summer of 1963. There were many thorny issues that complicated the Franco-American relationship in the early 1960s—ranging from nuclear policy, British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), and conditions for negotiating with Moscow—but Vietnam was the one case where de Gaulle was unquestionably right and Kennedy terribly wrong in hindsight. Kennedy’s decision to ignore de Gaulle on this matter was far costlier than any other, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, turned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese into refugees, and dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe. Despite de Gaulle’s efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit, the Kennedy administration responded to his peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. In the end, the Kennedy administration assumed that it was uniquely qualified to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World, while the discredited imperialists in the Élysée in Paris had lost their right to formulate Western policy in Southeast Asia by virtue of a long string of humiliating military defeats in their former colonies.

Ignoring Nosey Charlie

This chapter surveys transformations in the international system from the summer of 1962 to Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. In Vietnam, the Diem regime’s bloody repression of Buddhists and student protesters in mid-1963 sparked American revulsion and widespread distaste for the Kennedy administration’s wayward client state. As the situation in South Vietnam grew increasingly tumultuous, American embassy telegraphs out of Saigon revealed a profound distrust of French motives. The administration fixated on the notion that Roger Lalouette, the French ambassador, was plotting with the president’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, to arrange a cease-fire with the Viet Cong and potentially secure a reunification deal with the North in exchange for the removal of American forces. Lalouette was indeed working with Nhu, but he was trying to hammer out a deal that would give the Kennedy administration a “peace with honor” and an opportunity to exit the country before the situation spiraled out of control. The Kennedy administration was unable to accept that French efforts to foster North-South dialogue were the logical byproduct of a long-standing regional peace policy, interpreting Lalouette’s actions instead as part of a sinister Gaullist conspiracy to drive Americans out of Southeast Asia.