Any discussion about the USA should have a defined starting point if it is to be compact and intelligible to a broad audience. And this is the reason why I have decided to start this discussion with the inauguration of John .F. Kennedy as the 35th President of the USA in January 1961, only three months after Nigeria attained the status of a sovereign nation. Many more African countries were to become independent in the next five years and it was the stated policy of the Kennedy administration to capture the hearts and minds of the people of Africa even if it was only to pull them away from the orbit of influence of the Soviet Union. This was at a time when the Cold War which was going to split the world into two was just gathering steam. It was a time when the US government started to woo bright young Nigerians with offers of scholarships to the best universities in the US.
At the time at which Kennedy was moving into the White House, he was looking forward with justifiable confidence to providing purposeful leadership to his country. On the day of his inauguration, no American soldier, sailor or air man was in any danger of death or injury from enemy action in any part of the world. The Korean War had been halted by an armistice seven years earlier and the killing fields of Vietnam were still half a decade into the future. Although United States forces were stationed abroad, primarily in Korea, Japan and Germany, they were there to maintain the peace which had been won at the end of the Second World War; a war in which the new president had participated and come away from with honourable scars of battle. It was also the war which had cost the life of his brother, the one who had been groomed to enter the White House and would have done so but for his tragic demise.
At home, the American economy, by far the strongest in the world was booming like it had never done before. Whilst her competitors were still involved in repairing the damage done to their industrial infrastructure by the Second World War, it was full steam ahead for American manufacturers. The USA was the industrial capital of the world with home produced goods penetrating and dominating markets right round the world. In the sphere of diplomacy, the Americans simply ruled the globe so much so that it was clear to all Americans that in the words of the New Deal president, the thrice elected Delano Roosevelt, they had nothing to fear but fear itself. This was so even though the ruinously expensive arms race which was going to wreak havoc on the USA and lead to the disintegration of the Soviet Union was already underway. The signs were becoming clear that the Cold War was already underway and what Kennedy’s predecessor in office, Ike Eisenhower had described as the Military/Industrial complex had grown well past the hatching stage.
Domestically, the country was in all appearances at peace with herself even though the John Crow laws which enforced the lowly status of African-Americans or Negroes as they were called were still fully operational in all the states below the Mason-Dixon line where Blacks could not be found on the streets after dark. In those days and indeed until very recently, the battle flag of the rebel Confederacy flew side by side with the Stars and Stripes as if the civil war had not yet come to an end. As indeed it had not, as far as the white Southerners were concerned. But, quite importantly, there was no denying the existence of African-Americans in all spheres of life.
The Blacks were everywhere but nowhere were they more conspicuous than in the field of sports. They ruled the tracks in athletics and were the kings in the boxing ring. In the then recently concluded Rome Olympics, Americans, most of them black, brought home a load of medals, most of them gold. It was in Rome where the world had the opportunity for the first time to see the young dashing and dazzling winner of the light-heavyweight gold, the incomparable Cassius Clay who as Muhammad Ali was to put a new and exciting face on world boxing.
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There is no doubt that in those closing days of 1960, presidency of the USA, more than now, was the most glittering political prize of all and it was fitting that it had been won by the young, articulate and wickedly handsome John Kennedy. He was not only all these but he was extremely wealthy and scion of the Kennedy clan, the widely acclaimed first family of American politics. The balance of forces in American politics at the time could not have been closer as the winning margin between Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, the reigning two term Vice President was in the region of a mere hundred thousand votes. In that circumstance, the new president had no choice but be bipartisan and most decisions arrived at by consensus.
John Kennedy, the first Irish-Catholic POTUS had everything including the goodwill of people all round the world going for him especially because his country was loved all around the world. When he stood up tall at his inauguration to admonish his compatriots to ‘ask what you can do for your country, not what your country can do for you’, the world rose as one to cheer him to the echo. It was a brave new world where opportunities were opening up as they had never done in the history of the world. Even in Africa, the winds of change which had first been felt by Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister of the time was sweeping away established colonial powers as self-rule became fashionable. Optimism broke out like a rash of boils everywhere and the failure of the new Kennedy administration was not even remotely worthy of contemplation.
Looking back now, it can be said that the Presidency of J.F. Kennedy started off in the best of times but also in the worst of times as serious difficulties lay just around the corner. On the first of January 1959, a young heavily bearded revolutionary dressed in military fatigues henceforth to be known around the world as Fidel Castro, led a rag tag but victorious army into Havannah, the capital of Cuba, a tiny island country not many miles off the coast of Florida. He had come to bring an end to the government of Fulgencio Batista, the latest dictator to torment the good people of Cuba. His rule was at and for the pleasure of his masters in Washington but he was not a very effective dictator and so the US government did not shed any tears over his passing but instead quickly recognised the new government with a view to continue with business as usual. Unfortunately, the Castro government was not cut from the same cloth as other Latin American leaders who were cravenly beholden to the US government. He not only repudiated the traditional American hegemony in Latin America but also announced his determination to tread an independent path leading to socialism. Not since the Monroe doctrine had been presented to the American Congress in 1823 had any such challenge to American authority in the region been mounted by any Latin American government. In predictable response, the American government threw a codon sanitire around Cuba and imposed a trade embargo on the island which more than sixty years later is still being enforced. The USA remains determined that no other country in that region was going to be allowed to show any signs of an independent foreign policy. Not satisfied with the measures that had been devised to keep Cuba in her humble place, the Kennedy government in the way of all big powers ill-advisedly supported a CIA inspired invasion of Cuba by a group of fanatical anti-Castro Cuban exiles hell bent on overthrowing the left leaning Castro. The quite unexpected result of this misadventure in the aptly named Bay of Pigs was that the exiles were swept away with contemptuous ease by alert Cuban forces that were fiercely loyal to the Castro regime. More than sixty years on, the Castro regime remains in power in Cuba and is still treading the path of socialism. It is ironic that Kennedy who in his lifetime approved all manner of plots to assassinate Castro was himself cut down in his prime all of fifty-nine years ago whereas Castro, his putative victim continued to live life to the full and remained a relevant figure in world affairs until in the end, he died of old age.
The cloud, smaller than a human hand which Cuba represented at the beginning of Kennedy’s administration has since then, spread relentlessly to cover the skies over the USA, all but blocking out the light in many directions. Kennedy occupied the White House for less than three years before he was wantonly sacrificed on the streets of Dallas, Texas but, within that time, the signs of a bright future were far from good. By then, the first set of Americans were already in Vietnam, ostensibly as advisers to a beleaguered South Vietnamese government before that government was thrown out of Saigon by the Communist led forces of North Vietnam. But this was not before more than fifty thousand American soldiers had been sent back home in body bags and many thousands more were wrecked physically, mentally and psychologically. It is clear that the American nation as a whole was badly traumatised by the Vietnam experience and for many years afterwards, the country was very circumspect about taking direct military risks overseas. Even now, it is still apparent that America has not fully recovered from the Vietnam experience and never did recover the soul which was blithely tossed away in the paddy fields of Vietnam fifty and more years ago.