Monday, Mar. 18, 1957
With Pat & Dick in Africa
Sweeping across African skies in his DC-6B, Richard Nixon got the word that protocol would demand top hat. cutaway and striped trousers at the next stop of his African good-will tour in Liberia. Thus, when the plane landed (with one ailing engine), the Vice President of the U.S., already sweltering in his formal attire, and his summer-clad wife debarked into sizzling sunshine, shook hands all around. After the greetings they stepped quickly to an air-conditioned Cadillac for the 50-mile trip to the capital of Monrovia. The new comfort did not last; the car's air conditioning broke down, and as he sped through clouds of heavy red dust, Nixon sweated behind rolled-up windows.
Liberia had laid out the red carpet. Nixon was appointed honorary paramount chief of all the Liberian tribes (permitting him, if he should ever decide to retire to Liberia, to marry as many wives as he can support). Handshaking and waving his way through crowded village and city streets, he got a handsome welcome from President William V. S. Tubman, who reflected his country's devotion to the U.S. with dinners, gifts (carved ivory box, solid gold watch chain) and words ("Our strongest, closest and most reliable friend"). On behalf of a friendly U.S.,
Nixon presented Liberia with two Coast Guard utility boats and a six months' instruction course for Liberian navymen--bringing that nation's naval strength up to three vessels: two Coast Guard utility boats, one presidential yacht.
It was fitting, Tubman told Nixon, that the Vice President should visit Africa's oldest independent country (1847) after calling on Africa's newest.
Help Offered. Only a few days before, the Vice President (in lightweight business suit) and his party attended the official birth of the new nation of Ghana (see FOREIGN NEWS). Nixon, only one of hundreds of officials representing 69 foreign nations and territories at the ceremonies in Accra, had a pleasant, champagne-sipping talk with Ghana's U.S.-schooled Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, told Nkrumah that the U.S. is prepared to offer help in the new country's development. He chatted with one of Britain's top emissaries, Lord Privy Seal Richard A. ("Rab") Butler, talked about the forthcoming Ike-Macmillan conference in Bermuda, complimented Britain on her long, mutually profitable role in Ghana. Next day he held an impromptu talk with an American he never had met, Montgomery, Ala.'s bus-boycott leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (TIME, Feb. 18), invited King to confer with him in Washington.
That afternoon, to savor the exotic culture of the back-country people, the Nixons drove 20 miles from Accra to the hill town of Aburi. The colorfully dressed tribesmen assigned Nixon a mahogany throne. Pat, dandling a native infant on her knee, sat beside him on a smaller throne, watching as the tribal drums thrummed and the natives danced their age-old rituals.
Me Republican, He Democrat. The Vice President, carefully briefed, made sure to hold up two fingers during the dance to signify his pleasure. Then the chief, Nana Osae Djan II, told him proudly: "Adlai Stevenson came to see me three years ago. I gave him same welcome I give you." Replied Bwana Nixon in his best junglese: "My party Republican, he Democrat." Allowed the chief airily: "Yes. I hear all about it. I see it in the cinema." Nixon gave him a ballpoint pen, which, as far as anybody knows, may very well be the kind of trinket that the urbane chief hands out on his trips into the hinter-hinterland.
Before leaving Ghana, Nixon gave Nkrumah the official U.S. gift to the country: a 2,000-volume technical library, full-size reproductions of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. As a personal gift from President Eisenhower, Nixon presented Nkrumah with a Steuben glass cup engraved with figures representing the four freedoms. By week's end Richard Nixon had racked up a first-rate total of points--and Africa had seen nothing yet. Ahead lay a 12 1/2-hour flight across the heart of the continent. There were points in the making in Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya and Tunisia.
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