More than four decades have passed since the attack on the Liberty, but it remains a vivid part of the daily lives of many of the men who served. Some of the sailors still wrestle with disabilities, while others battle post-traumatic stress disorder that led some to alcoholism and others to divorce court. Many families seemed to unravel in the wake of the tragic and unexpected deaths. Bitterness is common. Sailors and family members I interviewed dealt with the repercussions of the attack differently. One of the officers critically injured in the attack used his settlement money to buy a sports car. Years later the son of one crewmember who was killed named his own daughter Liberty. When I called to interview one sailor, his wife had to prep me. Brain damage caused him to stutter, she warned me, and I would have to repeat questions and be patient.
My father, I realized, was one of the lucky ones. Though he rarely spoke of the Liberty when I was growing up, the attack left its mark on him, as evident by the scores of letters he wrote during that era, now brittle and yellowed after spending years in a trunk in my grandmother’s attic. The tone of his letters prior to the attack reflected the excitement of a young man eager to see the world. He described the wildlife he saw in Africa, the mechanics of his job on the ship, and the distant ports he visited. That youthful tone vanished in the letters he wrote after the attack. Soon after the Liberty returned to Virginia, he left for Vietnam, where he was later injured and medically retired from the Navy.
The Liberty attack had other effects, in part because the government’s effort to deemphasize the attack meant vital lessons went unheeded. Seven months later, communist North Korea seized the spy ship U.S.S. Pueblo in international waters, killing one crewmember and holding eighty-two others hostage for almost a year. The men were beaten and starved. The congressional committee that investigated the Pueblo described the loss to American prestige and intelligence as “incalculable.” In the more than 500 pages of published testimony on the Pueblo, the Liberty is barely mentioned. But a passing exchange between Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was then chief of naval operations, and Democratic Representative Otis Pike of New York proved revealing. Pike asked the question that should have been on the minds of everyone: What did the Liberty teach us?
Moorer seemed to fumble. He replied that the Navy had provided some extra guns to repel boarders, changed some communication procedures, and told people to remain sharp, all alleged improvements that failed to protect the crew of the Pueblo. Under questioning, Moorer admitted that the intelligence missions were riskier than the Navy initially believed. “If the lessons of the Liberty had been known to planners and commanders involved with the USS Pueblo, the sorry tragedy of that ship would never have happened as it did,” Commander Lloyd Bucher, the skipper of the Pueblo, later wrote. “The similarities are a terrible confusion in command and control, a lack of response to desperate calls for assistance during attack, and a cover-up for incompetency at the top.”
Whether the Liberty belonged on the geopolitical stage—as some of President Johnson’s advisers questioned—is debatable. Soon after the attack, the president ordered Nicholas Katzenbach to press Israel to pay reparations to the injured and the families of the men killed and make sure payments were generous. With those conditions met, the president was willing to drop the matter. When I interviewed Katzenbach for this book, I asked if he had ever demanded to know why Israel attacked. “No,” he said. “What good would it do? What would it tell you?” From a policy perspective, Katzenbach said, Israel’s motivation didn’t matter. “I don’t think it would do any good to know,” he said. “I don’t like to work at things that don’t do any good.”
Faced with incredible pressure in Vietnam and with his domestic approval numbers plummeting, Johnson likely felt he had found a compromise that would make sure families were generously compensated and not spark a confrontation with Israel’s supporters. But the American government owed the men who served on the Liberty an explanation. Johnson downplayed the attack for the wrong reasons: to protect his failed policies in Southeast Asia and his personal political ambitions. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield told a reporter hours after the attack that he doubted the Liberty incident would spark any lasting complications in U.S.-Israel relations. If Navy investigators had spent more than eight days probing the attack, if Congress had played a more public and aggressive oversight role, and if Israel had followed Ambassador Harman’s advice and prosecuted those responsible, the attack wouldn’t have harmed long-term U.S.-Israeli relations.
Some of President Johnson’s advisers later regretted the handling of the attack. “We failed to let it all come out publicly at the time,” said Lucius Battle, the assistant secretary of state for near eastern and south Asian affairs. “We really ignored it for all practical purposes, and we shouldn’t have.” George Ball, the former undersecretary of state prior to Katzenbach, wrote that the Liberty ultimately had a greater effect on policy in Israel than in the United States. “Israel’s leaders concluded that nothing they might do would offend the Americans to the point of reprisal,” Ball wrote. “If America’s leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.” Rear Admiral Thomas Brooks, a former director of naval intelligence, described the treatment of the Liberty’s crew as a “national disgrace.” “The Navy was ordered to hush this up, say nothing, allow the sailors to say nothing,” Brooks said. “The Navy rolled over and played dead.”
My father found an unlikely sense of closure when he traveled with me to Israel in the fall of 2007. Yiftah Spector, one of the Israeli pilots who had attacked the Liberty, declined my request for an interview but invited me to his home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv for coffee. Spector, who also participated in Israel’s attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, more recently had drawn criticism for signing a petition, along with other pilots, refusing to conduct airstrikes against militants hiding in densely populated Palestinian areas. I left my father behind and took a cab to Spector’s home that afternoon. I arrived to find the sixty-six-year-old brigadier general covered in sweat from building a playground for his grandchildren in his backyard. Over coffee in his kitchen he asked why I was interested in the Liberty. Four decades had passed, he said, and it was an old story. I told him my father was one of the officers.
Why had I not brought him along for coffee, Spector asked, remembering my earlier comment that my father had accompanied me to Israel. I told him that I thought that might be awkward. “Nonsense,” he said. “I must meet your father. Call him.” I phoned my father and relayed Spector’s request to see him. Within half an hour a taxi pulled alongside the curb in front of Spector’s home, and my father came face-to-face with one of the pilots who attacked his ship that sunny afternoon of June 8, 1967. The two men, both young and confident so many years earlier, were now gray and wrinkled. Spector stuck out his hand for my father to shake. “We came within 300 meters of one another,” he told my father. “I’m sorry.”
Those were the words my father and many of his shipmates had wanted to hear for decades, the words no one in the Navy, the White House, or Congress had ever been publicly willing to say. The Liberty and its crew had become pariahs, shunned for political reasons and the misguided view that it was more important to protect relations with an ally than to support and defend American service members. The unfortunate reality is that America could have done both. Spector had no way of knowing how my father might react when he invited him to his home, but he chose to do so anyway. Even though my father had long ago packed up his memories of the Liberty and moved on with his life, I know how much Spector’s apology meant to him. A burden had been lifted. My father reached out and took Spector’s hand and said: “Thank you.”