The History of U.S. Support of Apartheid (in South Africa)

Amid Israel’s “unprecedented” destruction of Gaza, I spoke with Professor David F. Schmitz about the U.S. government’s support of apartheid in South Africa. I was curious about any parallels between that episode in American history and what we're seeing in Israel and Gaza today. Professor Schmitz did not disappoint. 

A specialist in 20th-century U.S. history and American foreign policy, Professor Schmitz is the Robert Allen Skotheim Chair of History at Whitman College. He’s the author of several books, including The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965-1989, and Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes more discussion of how an anti-apartheid coalition formed in Congress, Ronald Reagan’s curious reception of Desmond Dutu in 1984, and more:

The Reagan administration had a low bar for compliments

Ben: Today I'd like to trace the history of U.S. support of apartheid South Africa. 

To begin, can you talk about the initial U.S. stance toward white rule in South Africa following its establishment after World War II? 

DFS: President Harry Truman, and President Dwight Eisenhower after him, mainly felt that Africa was a European concern. But when it came to South Africa and the establishment of an apartheid regime, the U.S. saw it through a Cold War lens. American officials sought anticommunist partners in strategic economic and geopolitical locations, and South Africa fell into those categories. 

Of course, when apartheid was established, the United States was still home to Jim Crow. State-sanctioned segregation only began to change in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. So it wasn’t a break with what was going on within the U.S. to support a white minority apartheid regime in South Africa.

Ben: As you document, Nixon and his staffers held clearly racist views, too. Can you talk about their stance toward South Africa and some of the pushback from a staffer named Winston Lord? 

DFS: So, on the one hand, under Nixon, you saw a continuation of the stance that we've been talking about. Especially after Vietnam, when American credibility in the world was challenged, Nixon saw South Africa as a vital ally to maintain and support.

The Nixon administration adhered to an old theory, first developed in the 1920s and ‘30s in response to Fascist Italy and then to Nazi Germany — the notion that there were moderates and extremists within right-wing dictatorships, and if you just worked with the moderates, you could isolate the extremists. 

Winston Lord challenged all of that. He viewed the assumption that you could work with right-wing dictatorships as fundamentally flawed.

Ben: Some of his arguments against supporting apartheid seem like they came straight out of 2024. 

He said, “To move closer ... to the racist regimes of southern Africa will reverberate domestically and reinforce doubts about the commitment to racial justice in our own society. The niceties of a foreign policy that at once proclaims abhorrence of apartheid and conducts business as usual with its practitioners will be lost on those in this country who identify with the overseas oppressed. They will be lost on a younger generation which insists on matching rhetoric with action.”

DFS: Yes, but his criticism was dismissed in so many ways.

Ben: I guess it also raises a question: why weren't older generations insisting on matching rhetoric with action? As you age, do you get health points for there being a discrepancy?

DFS: Ha, I’m not sure.