The United States and the European Economic Community: from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson

This essay examines the transition from the Kennedy to the Johnson Administrations, and focuses on the conceptual and real intersecting of US foreign policy and European construction in the Sixties. By analysing a relevant number of passages in published and unpublished American documents, the author formulates a series of interpretative hypotheses and concludes that the general revision of US policy towards Europe which took place in the late Sixties and early Seventies – inevitably marking both US global policies and American relations with its Western European allies engaged in the integration process – was by no means unpredictable or unexpected. On the contrary, it was the likely consequence of a general trend which had gradually found its footing during the Kennedy and Johnson years and which had been generated by the US-European ‘gaps’ in diplomatic behaviour, mutual perception, defence and security issues and in overall economic planning.