From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (116 page)

Translating an appreciation for Third World nationalism into policies for specific countries and regions, on the other hand, posed numerous practical difficulties and forced awkward compromises. South Asia was a case in point. JFK respected Prime Minister Nehru. He feared that to "lose" leading neutrals like India might cause the balance of power to "swing against us."
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Early in his administration, he authorized a "tilt" toward India in hopes that it could be accomplished without jeopardizing relations with Pakistan. As with Eisenhower, the ploy failed. The
administration exaggerated Chinese aims in South Asia, overestimated its threat to India and Pakistan, and underestimated the intractability of regional hatreds. The president could not establish a close relationship with the aloof and imperious Nehru. A Chinese military incursion into a remote border region of India in October 1962 forced India and the United States into an uneasy embrace, but infusions of U.S. military aid in addition to the massive economic assistance already provided purchased precious little influence in New Delhi. Military aid from the United States to India provoked outrage in Pakistan; Washington's efforts to appease its ally with additional weapons further destabilized an already volatile region. Attempts to ease Indo-Pakistani tensions through mediation got nowhere. In a blatant display of realpolitik, Pakistan drifted toward China. "History can be idiotic," ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith confided to his diary. "A staunch American ally against communism is negotiating with the Chinese Communists to the discontent of an erstwhile neutral."
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At the time of Kennedy's death, his South Asian policy was in disarray.

Not surprisingly, the Middle East provided more difficult challenges and brought even more serious consequences. Kennedy sympathized with Arab nationalism. He respected and liked Dulles's nemesis, Nasser, and, as with Nehru, sought to seduce him through personal communication, development aid, and large quantities of desperately needed wheat. He hoped to convert the restless Egyptian to peaceful ways, ease Arab-Israeli tensions, and thereby minimize Soviet influence in a critical region. JFK's good intentions ran afoul of Nasser's regional ambitions, competing U.S. interests in the conservative Arab oil states, the power of the Israel lobby, and, of course, the Cold War. The president learned as others before him that, especially in the Middle East, it was impossible to have it both ways, much less all three.

A civil war in the obscure Red Sea kingdom of Yemen frustrated Kennedy's diplomacy. Angered by Syria's 1961 abandonment of the United Arab Republic, Nasser sent tanks, planes, and seventy thousand troops to support leftist rebels who had overthrown the Yemen monarchy. Fearful of Egyptian influence in a neighboring state, Saudi Arabia and Jordan backed conservative Arab counterrevolutionaries in what became a scaled-down, Middle East version of the Spanish Civil War. The United States initially recognized the Nasser-backed government, but the British expressed concern about their interests in nearby Aden. When Egypt threatened Saudi Arabia, U.S. oilmen dispatched dire warnings to Washington.
Israel protested these new signs of Nasser's aggressiveness. After the Syrian and Iraqi governments were toppled in early 1963 by pro-Nasser forces and the Soviets sent modern tanks and bombers to Egypt, JFK backtracked. Carefully avoiding a complete break with Nasser, he threatened to cut off aid to Egypt, openly supported Jordan by dispatching the Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean, and ordered naval and air forces to Saudi Arabia. Nasser's intervention in Yemen undermined Kennedy's approach to Egypt, strengthened U.S. ties with the conservative Arab states, and opened the way for closer American-Israeli relations.
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Ironically, given the president's early efforts at evenhandedness, the modern U.S. alliance with Israel originated on his watch. The move toward Nasser provoked a powerful backlash from the Israel lobby and its congressional backers and a diplomatic blitz from Tel Aviv to secure from Washington state-of-the-art weapons and a security commitment. The State Department predictably opposed Israeli requests, and JFK was wary. But McNamara's Pentagon was a more powerful player in Kennedy's Washington than Rusk's State Department, and warnings that increased Soviet aid and West Germany's sale of missiles to Nasser had upset the Middle East arms balance brought the president around. In August 1962, he agreed to sell Israel Hawk surface-to-air missiles, a sharp departure from past U.S. policy that had banned sales of major weapons systems and a generally unrecognized landmark in the Israel–United States special relationship.
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Increasingly alarmed by the prospect of nuclear proliferation to Third World countries, JFK attached high priority to preventing Israel from converting to weapons production its nuclear project at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Shortly before his death, in response to rising tensions in the Middle East and in return for vague—and as it turned out duplicitous—Israeli assurances regarding Dimona, he promised to assist Israel militarily should it be the victim of aggression, a giant step toward the alliance he and his predecessors had resisted. Instead of accommodating Arab nationalism and taking a more balanced approach in the region, JFK established the basis for the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.
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Kennedy made Africa a centerpiece of his anti-colonialism and gave that continent for the first time a high profile in U.S. foreign policy. He promoted African independence in numerous speeches. To get around the racism deeply entrenched in the U.S. government and the State
Department's traditional European bias in dealing with Africa, he named former Michigan governor and civil rights activist G. Mennen Williams assistant secretary of state for African affairs and appointed ambassadors who knew the continent and sympathized with its people. He invited African leaders to the White House. Aware that segregation in the District of Columbia and surrounding states made Washington a hardship post for African diplomats, he pushed for desegregation along Route 40, a major east-west artery. His evolving stand in favor of civil rights for African Americans was influenced at least partly by a desire to show Third World leaders that U.S. freedom was color-blind.
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He focused special attention on Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, one of the most prominent African leaders, agreeing to fund a huge dam on the Volta River. Unlike Dulles with Nasser, he followed through on his commitment even after Nkrumah made anti-American speeches and sought aid from Moscow, although he did extract pledges that there would be no expropriation of U.S. property.
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As with the Middle East, JFK's support for African nationalism had sharply defined limits. On the most complex, volatile, and ultimately tragic of African issues, the Congo, he pursued a notably cautious approach. Brutally exploited by Belgium for nearly a century, the Congo was given independence in 1960 without preparation and in the expectation that the former colonists would retain dominant influence. Taking office just as the strife-torn Congo assumed crisis proportions, Kennedy declined to support nationalist leader Lumumba, the eloquent and charismatic former postal worker and beer salesman whom many Americans considered pro-Communist. He did not call for Lumumba's release when he was imprisoned by rivals or praise him after his brutal assassination. The president did oppose the secession of mineral-rich Katanga Province and its leader Moise Tshombe, who was backed by Europeans and southern American segregationists, an act of some political courage. But he left responsibility for holding the Congo together to the United Nations and refused to commit U.S. troops to the peacekeeping mission. He did welcome the ultimate UN victory. To the disgruntlement of some southern congressmen, he denied Tshombe a visa to the United States.
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Similar limits applied elsewhere in Africa. The administration spoke in favor of independence for the Portugese colony of Angola and provided
limited aid to pro-Western factions among the rebels. Portugal also secured U.S. military aid through NATO, however, and its use of American-provided napalm to suppress the rebellion provoked worldwide outrage. When the U.S. stand in favor of Angolan independence threatened renewal of the lease for its critical Azores air base, a badly divided administration backed off.
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Similarly, while the United States verbally criticized South Africa's apartheid policies, it refused to support economic sanctions or an arms embargo. South Africa remained a major source of strategic minerals. Its gold helped stabilize the global economy. Its ports were important on the east-west passage, and the United States had just constructed a vital missile-tracking station near Pretoria. United States officials also feared destabilizing South Africa because the African National Congress (ANC) was allegedly controlled by Communists. The CIA appears to have played a role in helping the South African government locate and arrest ANC leader Nelson Mandela. When faced with what the State Department called "an embarrassing choice between security requirements and basic political principle," the United States opted for the former.
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Kennedy devoted more attention to Latin America than any other postwar president. He deliberately set out to recapture the spirit of FDR's Good Neighbor policy. He also concluded after the rise of Castro that Latin America was "the most dangerous area of the world" and that to safeguard its own security the United States must address the poverty and oppression that seemed a fertile breeding ground for Communism.
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As president, he visited Latin America three times, drawing a million people in a triumphal 1962 appearance in Mexico City. He entertained hemispheric chiefs of state and diplomats, unlike so many of his predecessors dealing with them as equals and enjoying their company. He understood that the United States had committed wrongs in the hemisphere in the past, and he identified with the Latin American people. Because of his empathy, his style and charisma, and the tragic circumstances of his death, he is still revered in the hemisphere.
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Even before the Bay of Pigs, JFK demonstrated his commitment to Latin America. On March 13, 1961, with great fanfare, he announced the Alliance for Progress, the Marshall Plan–like aid program hemispheric leaders had been seeking since the 1940s, a "vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose," he proclaimed, "to satisfy
the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools."
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In August, the administration pledged $1 billion for the first year and $20 billion for the next decade. Political democracy and fundamental reforms were to accompany economic development. The Alliance excited great hope in the hemisphere and at home. Like the Peace Corps, it seemed to epitomize the idealism of New Frontier foreign policy.

In fact, the administration's actions often belied its idealistic rhetoric and undercut its goals. JFK's overriding concern, at times an obsession, was to prevent another Cuba in the hemisphere. To achieve that aim, he interfered in Latin American politics on a scale unmatched since Wilson. United States officials would have liked to get rid of Jean Claude "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Haiti's reprehensible dictator, but they could not identify an acceptable alternative and acquiesced in his rule. The clever Duvalier even manipulated Washington into a generous aid package in return for Haiti's crucial vote to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. The administration welcomed the assassination of the despicable Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in May 1961. But it viewed his eventual successor, the popularly elected Juan Bosch, as a fuzzy-headed intellectual, even what one diplomat called a "deep cover communist."
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"There are three possibilities in descending order of preference," JFK opined, "a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim for the first, but we can't really renounce the second until we are sure we can avoid the third."
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The United States thus stood by in September 1963 while Bosch was overthrown by the Dominican military.

The administration also undermined popularly elected leftist governments that did not follow its line on Cuba. Argentina and Brazil, the two largest hemispheric countries, struggled to pursue independent foreign policies, maintaining diplomatic relations and small trade with the Soviet Union while defying U.S. sanctions against Cuba. Even though Argentina's Arturo Frondizi enthusiastically backed the Alliance for Progress and actively cultivated U.S. support, the administration looked the other way when he was overthrown by the military in March 1962. Kennedy viewed Brazil's leftist leader João Goulart as unreliable. The CIA spent $5 million in a destabilization effort that helped lead to a military coup in 1964.
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In Chile, it blatantly interfered in the electoral process, spending more than $2.5 million to replace the leftist Arturo
Alessandri with the more moderate and presumably more reliable Eduardo Frei. Frei was the type of Latin American leader the administration preferred. After his election in 1964, he achieved modest results under the Alliance for Progress. But the Kennedy covert operation also initiated a pattern of interference in Chilean politics that would have tragic results.

The most blatant and dubious intervention was in tiny British Guiana (now Guyana), which, remarkably, during the Kennedy years—and to its own misfortune—came to be viewed as crucial to U.S. security. On the verge of independence from Britain, this impoverished northern Latin American colony adjacent to Venezuela was headed by elected prime minister Cheddi Jagan, a U.S.-trained dentist and avowed Marxist. Jagan assured Kennedy privately in October 1961 that he would not permit a Soviet base in British Guiana. Unpersuaded, the administration with British complicity carried out in early 1962 a covert operation that included fomenting demonstrations, riots, and a general strike. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy pressured British prime minister Harold Macmillan to delay independence. The British reluctantly went along, instituting a new electoral process that would eliminate Jagan from office in 1964.
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On November 18, 1963, four days before his assassination, JFK outlined what was to have been a Kennedy Doctrine, affirming that "every source at our command" must be used to "prevent the establishment of another Cuba in the hemisphere." It was a statement, McGeorge Bundy later conceded, that was "blanketed almost immediately by his death."
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