Algerian diplomats won American influence by cultivating liberal elites and marrying locally

Evidence

Both were extensively-travelled cosmopolitans, popular and at home in salons across the world; good talkers (Yazid often to excess) with perfect command of English, a light-handed sense of humour and easy-going manners. Both had married attractive foreign wives; Chanderli first to a Frenchwoman, then to a beautiful Italian in New York; Yazid to an American, Olive, who helped open many doors to the Algerians in the United States. Both seemed the very antithesis of the hard-eyed revolutionaries and rude men of the maquis bickering among themselves in Tunis. Chanderli exuded a mixture of humanitarian intellectualism and personal well-being, reminding one of a Roy Jenkins (to whom, indeed, he bore some passing physical resemblance), and he achieved early success on the American scene by cultivating liberal “egg-heads” like J. K. Galbraith of Harvard. And through them he became friendly with an up-and-coming young Democrat Senator, John F. Kennedy. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 763

Categorization

• XREF: The Kennedy connection pays off later — the G.P.R.A.’s American network would influence Kennedy’s famous Algeria speech.