"The Senator from Algeria": The Speech Algerians Never Forgot

In October 2022, Algerian officials unveiled a memorial plaque in the heart of Algiers. It reads: "John Fitzgerald Kennedy, May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963, President of the United States of America, Friend of the Algerian Revolution." Algeria's minister of the mujahideen, Laid Rebiga, inaugurated it, and the American ambassador, Elizabeth Aubin, was there with him. "60 years after President Kennedy welcomed President Ben Bella to the White House," she wrote that day, "I am privileged to celebrate the inauguration of a plaque in Kennedy's honour in the heart of Algiers."

The city already had a Place John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy, a shaded square in El Biar next to the town hall. Few foreign leaders are remembered like this in Algeria. The reason goes back to a summer afternoon in Washington, nearly seventy years ago.

Two days before the Fourth of July in 1957, Senator Kennedy rose in the Senate chamber. His opening words are kept today by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library: "Mr. President, the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent."

He had picked the date with care. The Senate and the nation, he said, were getting ready "to commemorate the 181st anniversary of man's noblest expression against political repression," the Declaration of Independence. The subject he picked to go with it was Algeria.

Kennedy reached for his own country's story to make the case. "Most political revolutions – including our own – have been buoyed by outside aid in men, weapons, and ideas," he said. The United States, "a product of political revolution, must redouble its efforts to earn the respect and friendship of nationalist leaders." Then he said something no senior American politician had said so plainly. If the West wanted any lasting place in North Africa, "then the essential first step is the independence of Algeria." He asked his government to work for it "in the U.N., in NATO, in the administration of our aid programs and in the exercise of our diplomacy – in shaping a course toward political independence for Algeria."

The speech was loudly criticized in Paris and in official Washington, and Kennedy stood by it. In the Jesuit magazine America, in an article dated October 5, 1957, he wrote that Algerian nationalism was "a political fact of life," and that a lasting settlement "could be achieved only by adopting a course which would, within the measurable future, lead to Algerian independence."

In Algeria the speech was received very differently. Linda Belabdelouahab-Fernini, a scholar at the University of M'Sila, studied it in 2023 in the Algerian journal Al-Masadir. She explains that it came to be called simply the "Algeria Speech." "The persecuted Algerians welcomed the speech since it was the first official defense and backing of their Revolution and War for Independence," she writes. "The FLN had the impression to have found an outstanding ally." When the plaque went up, the Algerian daily Echorouk recalled the nickname the speech had earned him: "the senator from Algeria."

Five years later Kennedy was in the White House, and Algeria was independent. On July 3, 1962, he issued a statement that the American Presidency Project still publishes in full. "This moment of national independence for the Algerian people is both a solemn occasion and one of great joy," it begins. He added a personal line: "As one who has been interested in the future of the Algerian people for many years, it is with special pride that I extend the good wishes of the American people to the people of Algeria."

The Algerians remembered too. When Prime Minister Ahmed Ben Bella came to the White House that October, a briefing paper told Kennedy that his guest "comes with great personal respect for you, dating from your 1957 Senate speech." On the South Lawn, in front of the cameras, Ben Bella thanked him for "a clear and courageous stand you have taken many years ago already in favor Algerian independence."

Thirteen months later, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was killed. Philip Birnbaum, a young American diplomat in Algiers that week, described the days that followed in an oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. "All that week, and maybe for two weeks after that," he said, "we'd walk down the main street in Algiers and people would come up to us who didn't speak French or English, and would tell us in Arabic about their remorse."

His colleague Walter Cutler remembered the same thing: "when Kennedy died there was a tremendous outpouring of sentiment. As you recall, Kennedy stood up in the Senate and spoke in favor of Algerian independence, and this had made a tremendous impression on the Algerians."

Algeria sent its foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, to Washington for the funeral. William Stoltzfus, the American diplomat who went with the Algerian representatives to the White House and to Arlington cemetery, later recalled having them to dinner at his home.

The Algerian government named a square in Algiers after the late president, and one of his brothers came to dedicate it. Robert Duncan, then at the American embassy, said that "the Algerians had always had a very warm feeling for President Kennedy," because he "had been a very strong, vocal supporter of independence for Algeria." Another embassy officer, Richard Undeland, called the dedication of John F. Kennedy Square "the high point" of his time in Algiers. "The Algerians organized a good bit of hoopla over the inauguration," he recalled.

The scholar from M'Sila is careful about what the speech did and did not do. Kennedy's stand, she writes, "was essential but not sufficient. To be independent, Algeria had to pay a heavy bill." Algerians won their freedom themselves, and paid for it. What Kennedy offered them in 1957 was a voice in the American Senate saying their cause was just.

Americans who visit Algiers can find his name in two places, on the square in El Biar and on the plaque unveiled in 2022, which calls him a friend of the Algerian Revolution.

Dr Mohammed Doumir