ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates what was – on the New State's own terms – Salazar's greatest failure while in power: the inability to shield northern Angola, with its profitable coffee plantations and its widely scattered white population, from the outbreak of anti-colonial violence. This outbreak provoked a significant political crisis, with an open anti-Salazar heave led by his Minister of National Defence, General Júlio Botelho Moniz. Before help could be sent to Angola, and a new political course set for ‘Overseas Portugal,’ Salazar had to once again consolidate his personal power. That Botelho Moniz had well-known links to the US Embassy in Lisbon served to poison relations between Salazar and the newly installed Kennedy administration, which believed itself capable of resolving the problem created for the West by Portugal's refusal to decolonise.
