Click here to register!

Friends of the Congo will engage in a discussion and exchange with Stephen R. Weissman, author of From the Congo to Capitol Hill: A Coming-of-Age Memoir. He also wrote the much venerated American Foreign Policy in the Congo, 1960-1964.

This book is a revealing account of two episodes in America's Cold War-era foreign relations. A young American professor is caught up in a racially fraught crisis at an American White missionary-led university in the Congo and is publicly fired. Several years later, he becomes a key staff aide for a congressional committee battling to distance the U.S. government from the Congo dictator's human rights and corruption abuses. His interconnected experiences in these two fascinating places provide first hand insights into some of today's burning issues: the dynamics of racial conflict, the paranoia and narcissism of authoritarian regimes and the hidden dysfunctions of the U.S. Congress (including corrupting relationships with narrow-based domestic and foreign lobbyists), State Department (truth-shading and short-term thinking) and pundit press.