JFK and the CIA’s Mandela Effect

Former Time magazine editor Richard Stengel writes a detailed essay laying out the considerable evidence that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency tipped off the South African police about the location of Nelson Mandela in 1962, leading to Mandela’s arrest and 27 years in prison.

Stengel, who interviewed Mandela many times, noted that the South African president believed it was possible:

Mandela seemed to harbor no hard feelings about this—he was an outlaw, he was seeking to overthrow the South African government which was a reliable ally of the U.S.’s against the Soviet Union. He was a realist. From the 50s onward, he always had to factor the Cold War into his strategy. His freedom struggle was always fought in the shadow cast by the Cold War. He did complain to me that America and the West never supported him until he came out of prison, but he also understood that the U.S. saw everything through the lens of the Cold War.

If this is ever definitively confirmed, it will be seen as a significant moral failing on the part of the Kennedy administration — and embraced by quite a few successive American presidents — who concluded that a Cold War alliance with South Africa required turning a blind eye to the abominable crimes and abuses of the apartheid regime.

While Kennedy may not have ordered or have known about a CIA role in Mandela’s arrest, his administration did not want to go too far in protesting apartheid, and certainly made no objection to Mandela’s arrest. As historian Philip Muehlenbeck summarized, “Kennedy’s opposition to apartheid remained largely rhetorical as he rationalized that taking a tough line against the South African government would not convince it to change its racial policies but would only serve to militarize the conflict between the white minority and African majority. As a result, Kennedy refrained from taking stern action against Pretoria and did not send aid to the African National Congress as he had done for the Angolan nationalist movement.”

Robert F. Kennedy visited South Africa in 1966 and denounced apartheid, and when flying over the country “asked the pilot to tip the wing to Robben Island* and to Nelson Mandela, who was then imprisoned, as a respect for what he was doing,” according to his daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. In other words, her father was paying tribute to a man whom her uncle’s administration had helped imprison.

But JFK’s presidency and legacy were always more complicated than his hagiographers wanted to believe. Perhaps the most ill-timed tribute to Kennedy’s greatness came from Chris Matthews in his book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, which, when discussing Kennedy’s marriage, quoted Charlie Bartlett, the man who introduced John F. Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier, as concluding, “she knew what she was getting into when she married him. She was in love with Jack, and he had this terrible habit of going out with other girls.”

Matthews’s book was published in November 2011. Three months later, the American public got another detailed look at Kennedy’s “terrible habit” when Mimi Alford published Once Upon a Secret, chronicling her 18-month relationship with the president that started when she was a 19-year-old White House intern, and how she lost her virginity to him in the first lady’s bedroom. Unsurprisingly, many people didn’t see Kennedy as quite such an “elusive hero” after Alford’s revelations.

*Yes, this originally said “Robin Island,” as the transcription of the Kennedy Townsend remarks spelled it.