CHAPTER 36

THE HOLY LAND

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW YEAR,WASHINGTONdecided that it needed a new team representing the United States in Saigon. Henry Cabot Lodge was popular with the generals—too popular, Dean Rusk and Johnson decided. He continued to insist that the National Liberation Front was nothing but a gang of terrorists who deserved to be shot rather than negotiated with. The pacification effort was still stagnant, and the United States needed an ambassador who would act as a disinterested power broker during the runup to the fall presidential elections. The White House and State Department settled on seventy-two-year-old career diplomat Ellsworth Bunker. A tall, dignified New Englander known for a combination of toughness and tact, Bunker had come to the president’s attention when he had presided over a political settlement that brought peace and security, if not democracy, to the Dominician Republic. Eugene Locke was to replace William Porter as deputy ambassador, and Bob Komer would head up the pacification effort. Being third in line was a disappointment for Komer, but he had developed a reputation for excessive happy talk, the administration’s Guildenstern, asNewsweek termed him, always willing to tell the president what he thought Johnson wanted to hear.¹Lodge and Porter stepped down officially the second week in April. General Westmoreland and his staff held a dinner for them, during which Westmoreland presented the two with 9 mm Browning pistols complete with shoulder holsters and a plaque reading “Honorary Field Marshal.”²

In March, LBJ traveled to Guam, the westernmost outpost of American power in the Pacific, to introduce his new team to Ky and Thieu and to say goodbye to the old. At the Guam conference, Johnson told Ky that everything depended on a free and fair election. Only with a transparent democracy and the emergence of authentic noncommunist political parties could South Vietnam be assured of continued support from the United States. Moreover, the Military Revolutionary Council must reconcile itself to participation in the political life of the nation by members of the NLF and Vietcong, at least as individuals if not as an organized communist party.³Johnson also talked privately with Bunker. “My recollections are that the president emphasized the fact that he wanted to see the training of the Vietnamese accelerated and speeded up to enable us to more quickly turn the war over to them,” Bunker later recalled of the conversation.⁴

Shortly before the Guam Conference convened, UN Secretary General U Thant attempted to jump-start negotiations by proposing an unconditional bombing halt, a cease-fire in South Vietnam, and internationally supervised elections.⁵But LBJ was through with peace feelers for the time being. “I proceed from one negotiation to the other constantly waiting for something that never comes and usually find myself in worse shape at the end of the proposal than I do at the beginning,” he complained to Dean Rusk. Why couldn’t U Thant, Bill Fulbright, Harold Wilson, and other would-be negotiators see that?⁶The army of peacemakers needed to be told,

“You bring us something and you’ll find a pleasant and favorable response, but you don’t take anything from us until you get something from them.” … Now we constantly do that, three years of it, and we’re on borrowed time now and just a few months before the judgment day … I’m terribly afraid of these negotiations at this stage because I don’t think they want them and I don’t think they’re ready for them and I don’t think they’re prepared to give a damned thing. And if they were prepared, I’d be more frightened than I am because I don’t think they’re prepared to give what we must have … We have a limited time to go ahead and get ourselves in condition [to hold free elections and pull out] and I don’t want anybody interfering with it … We get their [the American people’s] hopes up … and then they’re nailed again each time we strike out … I think that with this Constitution, if it comes through out there and if we can get an election in 90 days and have that work out well, I think that we’re going to be in a lot better condition than we are now.⁷

As the president and his party winged their way back home, Ho Chi Minh stole most of the Guam headlines by publishing the texts of his and Johnson’s top-secret exchange of the previous month. The press speculated that he wanted to reassure China and other societies engaged in or contemplating wars of national liberation that North Vietnam would never relent. Immediately, Bobby Kennedy called a press conference to denounce the administration for having increased the price the United States was asking for peace. Previously, said Bobby, LBJ had demanded only a deescalation of the war by Hanoi in return for a bombing halt; now, Kennedy maintained, Mr. Johnson had upped the ante by demanding “evidence that Hanoi has already ceased infiltration before we stop the bombing.”⁸Arthur Schlesinger had been hammering away at his impressionable young friend. “Americans will never in a hundred years be able to bring democracy to the countryside of South Vietnam,” he wrote Bobby. “It is, so far as we are concerned, an alien, mysterious and impenetrable culture … And it is not our sort of thing anyway. We wouldn’t be able to do it in Latin America, despite the common moral and cultural heritage; we can’t even do it in Mississippi and Alabama.”⁹

 

IN THE MIDST OF URBAN RIOTINGin the summer of 1966, Bobby had cosponsored Senate hearings to prove that LBJ was not doing enough to help the cities. Now the heir apparent had “declared his independence” from the administration on Vietnam. The first step had come in early February 1967 when, during a tour of Western Europe, Kennedy had met with two officials from the Quay d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry. The Frenchmen suggested that if the United States would stop the bombing of the North, negotiations and an agreement on mutual de-escalation would soon follow. Immediately afterward, a story appeared inNewsweek to the effect that Bobby had been in indirect touch with the North Vietnamese and the terms for negotiation had been agreed on.

Soon after his return, the president asked Kennedy to come to the White House to discuss his trip and the story inNewsweek. Rusk advised Johnson to have a “witness” present. Consequently, both Walt Rostow and Nick Katzenbach sat in during the hour-long discussion late on the afternoon of February 6.¹⁰From all accounts, it was a stormy interview. Bobby tried to downplay his discussion with the French. Johnson implied that RFK, an uninformed and unauthorized U.S. senator, was interfering with and threatening legitimate American efforts to work out a negotiated settlement of the war in Vietnam. He was particularly irate about the leak toNewsweek. It probably came from your State Department, Bobby remarked. “It isn’t my State Department; it’s your State Department,” LBJ retorted. Johnson insisted that Kennedy inform the press that he had had no contact with the North Vietnamese, and he sullenly complied.¹¹

Then, a month later, Bobby rose on the floor of the Senate to declare, “We are now at a critical turning point … between the rising prospects of peace and surely rising war, between the promise of negotiations and the perils of spreading conflict.” He outlined a beguilingly simple peace plan. First, the United States should halt the bombing and announce its readiness “to negotiate within the week.” Second, the negotiators would agree that neither side would “substantially increase” its war effort. Third, some “international presence” should gradually replace U.S. troops while the two sides worked out a settlement permitting all major political interests—including the communists—a voice in determining South Vietnam’s political destiny.¹²Kennedy was being disingenuous, and everyone with any inside knowledge knew it. Joe Alsop later told an interviewer, “You have to bear in mind about Bobby, and I don’t mind saying it and I know it’ll hurt Ethel if she reads these damn things, but Johnson continued President Kennedy’s policy, and Bobby … was, by implication, rather violently attacking his own brother’s policy.”¹³

Johnson was convinced that Kennedy’s demarche was intended primarily for the 1968 presidential election campaign, but publicly he took a soft line. “We have help and suggestions from members of the Senate,” he told a televised press conference. “I have no particular fault to find or criticism to make of others … I must grant to them the same sincerity that I reserve for myself.”¹⁴He also believed he could invoke Jack to defeat Bobby. LBJ had Rostow research his predecessor’s speeches. Citing JFK’s commitment to SEATO, his acceptance of the domino theory, and his repeated comparison of South Vietnam to Berlin, Rostow observed, “I don’t believe any objective person can read this record without knowing that President Kennedy would have seen this through whatever the cost.”¹⁵

With the approach of the 1968 presidential election, Johnson feared, the American people, war-weary, increasingly uncertain about the wisdom of expending American blood and treasure to protect a tiny piece of real estate halfway around the world, would be unable to resist RFK’s siren song. “As this process goes forward,” LBJ confided to Orville Freeman, “there would be a real danger of a settlement on very bad terms which would subsequently blow up and which would, of course, destroy the president and the country in the process.”¹⁶

The new confrontation with Bobby came in the midst of the publication of a another book on President Kennedy that further demonized LBJ and news reports that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone in killing the president. Just before Christmas 1966, Look published excerpts from William Manchester’s long-awaitedDeath of a President. It was an emotional, vivid account of the fateful trip to Dallas and the days that followed. It featured extensive interviews with all of the Kennedys and anybody remotely associated with them, but none with LBJ. In the text the narrator kills LBJ with kindness while allowing Ted Sorenson, Kenny O’Donnell, and others to engage in character assassination.¹⁷

At the same time, attacks on the Warren Commission as an LBJ-orchestrated cover-up moved from gossip column to courtroom. Beginning in late February, New Orlean’s flamboyant district attorney Jim Garrison bragged that he had cracked the murder mystery of the century, the assassination of JFK. At a preliminary hearing before a three-judge federal panel, two witnesses testified that at a mid-September party in 1963, they had heard Clay L. Shaw, fifty-four, a retired businessman, and David W. Ferrie, an unemployed charter pilot, conspire with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the president, including such details as the angulation of crossfire.¹⁸A week before the trial was to begin, Ferrie had apparently committed suicide. The judges ruled the witnesses credible enough to convene a grand jury. LBJ briefly considered reopening the investigation, but after talking with Joe Califano, Lee White, and John Roche, he decided that only Chief Justice Warren himself could do that.¹⁹

In late February, an off-Broadway neo-Shakespearean satire about the Kennedys and Johnson, entitledMacBird , opened. Written by a precocious Berkeley coed, the mock-heroic parody and satire opened with a Lyndonish MacBird introducing himself with a “Howdy folks,” and calling the Earl of Warren “Boy.” His “Smooth Society” came off fairly well but not his foreign policy, “Pox Americana.” The Stevensonian Egg of Head was made a Hamlet-like figure vacillating between action and acceptance. Most telling was the implication that Macbeth/Johnson was involved in the death of Duncan/Kennedy.²⁰

If LBJ took note ofMacBird , there is no record of it, but the Manchester book and its implications gnawed at Johnson. In mid-March he unburdened himself during an off-the-record talk with Drew Pearson. Chief Justice Warren was also present. “Bobby says he’s gong to have twelve books written about me and twelve books written about him before the next election,” LBJ griped. Every columnist in Washington from [Joseph] Kraft to Evans and Novak were writing for Bobby. How could O’Donnell and the others have such a vivid memory of what happened on the plane back from Washington? They were all drowning their sorrow. “This fellow Manchester wanted to talk to me, I told him I would answer written questions, which I did. But I could tell he was a screwball by the questions.”²¹

 

LBJHAD NO INTENTION OF ALLOWING Hanoi to escape the consequences of its refusal to begin talks. In early April, the White House authorized an expansion of the bombing in the North. American fighter-bombers and B-52s destroyed two power plants in Haiphong, plants that had previously been off-limits to U.S. aircraft. Then air force and navy jet fighter-bombers pounded industrial targets just miles from the heart of Hanoi.²²Meanwhile, on the ground, Westmoreland’s aggressive strategy was gobbling up more and more men. By the end of 1966, 431,000 American military personnel were involved in the war.

By late 1967, U.S. and allied forces had inflicted a quarter of a million casualties on their opponents. Unfortunately, two-hundred-thousand Vietnamese reached draft age each year, and in the spring of 1967 Westmoreland sent word that he still did not have enough men to do the job. The first week in March he confided to Earle Wheeler that the American mission had been grossly misrepresenting the level of enemy activity. From January 1966 to January 1967, Saigon had reported forty-five battalions and larger size enemy-initiated action. In reality, there had been 174 enemy actions. Instead of an average of four a month, there had been an average of eighteen. In January 1967 alone, the mission had reported one such engagement, when in reality there had been twenty-five. Wheeler was flabbergasted. “If these figures should reach the public domain,” he cabled back, “they would, literally, blow the lid off of Washington. Please do whatever is necessary to insure these figures are not repeated, not released to news media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge.”²³It could very well sabotage the military’s requests for more troops.

As the war escalated, the administration was reeling from repeated blows by the surging antiwar movement. As television displayed the horrors of Vietnam on a daily basis and deepening American involvement produced a dramatic expansion of the draft, the increasingly student-driven antiwar movement gained momentum. Opposition to the conflict in Southeast Asia took many forms. Students against the war burned their draft cards, fled to Canada, or even mutilated themselves as part of a dual effort to protest the conflict and avoid serving in Vietnam. By war’s end the draft resistance movement had produced 570,000 draft offenders and 563,000 less-than-honorable discharges from the military. Folk singer Joan Baez refused to pay that part of her income tax that went to support the war. Muhammad Ali filed for conscientious objector status, a move that produced some derision given his career as a professional pugilist. Three enlisted men, the Fort Hood Three, challenged the constitutionality of the conflict from their encampment in Texas and refused to fight in what they termed an “unjust, immoral, and illegal war.”²⁴But it was the mass demonstrations broadcast by the major networks that had the greatest impact on the public and White House. In the spring of 1967, five hundred thousand marchers of all ages converged on New York’s Central Park, some of them chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”²⁵

At the same time, the reservations concerning the war within the Johnson foreign policy team that first appeared in 1966 grew apace. Alain Enthoven, assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis, submitted a pessimistic report to McNamara on the probable course of the war. “The “dangerously clever” North Vietnamese strategy was working. The enemy was absorbing the losses inflicted by Westmoreland’s war of attrition and counting on American public opinion to grow frustrated and eventually withdraw its support for the war. Washington was in a race to build a viable nation in the South before the domestic consensus supporting the conflict evaporated, and it was losing.²⁶In part, Robert McNamara’s assistants were reflecting his thinking. Shortly after the Manila Conference he had confided to LBJ, “I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher—600,000 [troops] 700,000, whatever it takes. It will break the economy of that country and it will substitute U.S. soldiers for South Vietnamese and will distort the whole pattern of conduct in South Vietnam if we do.”²⁷He continued to voice his misgivings to the Kennedys and to Averell Harriman. The United States could not win the war militarily, he told the ambassador-at-large. After the presidential election, the United States ought to come down full force on Saigon to negotiate a settlement with the NLF. Others in the cabinet were beginning to have their doubts, too, especially Willard Wirtz and Stewart Udall, both of whom had been members of JFK’s cabinet.²⁸

In April 1967, the White House summoned Westmoreland to Washington to justify his course of action in Vietnam. He met first with Mendell Rivers, John Stennis, and other congressional hawks and assured them that the Johnson administration was not overruling him and the military command in Vietnam and was in fact providing the men and matériel he needed to win the war. The general then proceeded to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with LBJ and his advisers. He reported that the war was going well. With the troops he had, he could survive and probably wear the enemy out, but it would take five years.²⁹From the White House, the U.S. commander in Vietnam proceeded to the Hill to address a joint session of Congress. Resplendent in an immaculately pressed uniform, his chest adorned with six rows of ribbons, Westmoreland spoke with “calculated optimism” of the war in Southeast Asia. As he recounted the exploits of U.S. and allied forces he was interrupted four times by standing ovations. At the conclusion of his speech he turned to Vice President Humphrey and Speaker McCormack and saluted smartly, then wheeled and repeated the gesture to the assembled House and Senate. Once again his auditors rose as one, showering Westmoreland with wave after wave of applause.

Reluctantly, Johnson and McNamara agreed to give their field commander another fifty-five thousand troops.³⁰At the same time, they made it clear that that was it; there would not be another significant increase; everyone in the American mission should focus on Vietnamization—empowering the Vietnamese to build a viable society capable of defending itself. All those concerned with the war effort should “emphasize consistently that the sole US objective in Vietnam has been and is to permit the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future.” Wheeler cabled Sharp following a May policy review: “Suggest that you batten down for rough weather ahead.”³¹

 

BEGINNING IN1966 Allard Lowenstein, a former student activist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a past head of the National Student Association, and a leader of the reform wing of the Americans for Democratic Action, launched a campaign to persuade the ADA to support someone other than Lyndon Johnson for president in 1968. Though Lowenstein did not succeed, the National Board at its annual meeting in Washington in the spring of 1967 denounced the war in Vietnam. At the same time, a group of antiwar enthusiasts in New York opened the “Citizens for Kennedy-Fulbright” headquarters in preparation for the 1968 presidential election. In July the group organized some fifty former delegates to the Democratic National Convention who sent a public letter to the president urging him not to run in 1968. Because of deep divisions over foreign affairs, they declared, “millions of Democrats will be unable to support Democratic candidates in local, state or national elections.”³²From that time on, Lyndon Johnson viewed the ADA as nothing less than a “Kennedy-in-exile” government.

Meanwhile, a series of events in the Congo had persuaded Richard Russell, the powerful chairman of Armed Services, that the administration had to be confronted lest America become involved in one Vietnam after another. Throughout the Congo’s bloody struggle for independence from Belgium and the civil strife that followed, the United States had acted to shore up the pro-Western, anticommunist government of President Joseph Mobutu. In June President Johnson dispatched three C-130 cargo planes and 150 military personnel to the central African republic. The American presence was necessary, Mobutu claimed, to help him suppress a major rebellion against his government. On July 8, shortly before the planes departed, Rusk called Russell and Fulbright to inform them of the enterprise. He gave the impression that the purpose of the expedition was to rescue Americans about to be butchered in the jungle. The following day, however, Rusk called again and said that the planes would be used to move Mobutu’s troops “around the Congo to deal with revolutionary elements.”³³On July 10, Russell seized the floor in the Senate to sharply criticize the administration. The situation in the Congo, he said, was purely an internal conflict and one in which the United States should not become involved. Americans must not become bogged down in “local rebellions and local wars” where the nation had “no stake and where we have no legal or moral commitment to intervene.”³⁴He had protested privately to the administration, he said, but his objections had gone unheeded.

Fulbright moved quickly to take advantage of the opening. During a long lunch in the Senate dining room, the Arkansan broached the subject of a national commitments resolution to his old friend from Georgia and urged him to introduce a bill embodying it. The document that Carl Marcy and his staff produced was a masterpiece, the chairman observed, one that “seems to me to come pretty close to expressing what I would guess is a nearly universal Senate view.” It provided that a national commitment by the United States to a foreign power “necessarily and exclusively results from affirmative action taken by the executive and legislative branches of the United States Government through means of a treaty, convention, or other legislative instrumentality specifically intended to give effect to such a commitment.”³⁵Thus was planted the seed that would flower into the Hatfield-McGovern and Cooper-Church resolutions as well as the War Powers Act. The long, bitter struggle against the imperial presidency had begun.

 

ONJULY25 Lyndon Johnson convened what he expected to be a routine gathering of Senate committee chairs. The group included Henry Jackson of Washington, Allen Ellender, James Eastland, Mike Monroney, Warren Magnuson—all committed party-liners on the war—as well as Mansfield and Fulbright. The president thanked the group for their “experience, friendship and judgment,” and invited comments. “Mr. President,” Fulbright exclaimed, “what you really need to do is to stop the war. That will solve all your problems.” Johnson’s face reddened. He sensed a change in the attitude of his colleagues toward the conflict in Vietnam, Fulbright declared. Even such a hawk as Indiana Senator Frank Lausche had called for an end to the bombing of the North. Senator Russell was very upset about being lied to on the Congo situation. “Vietnam is ruining our domestic and our foreign policy. I will not support it any longer,” he said. By now Johnson’s steely gaze was fixed on the Arkansan. The group was absolutely still. “I expect that for the first time in 20 years I may vote against foreign assistance and may try to bottle the whole bill up in the Committee,” Fulbright warned. Johnson exploded. If Congress wanted to tell the rest of the world to go to hell, that was its prerogative. “Maybe you don’t want to help the children of India, but I can’t hold back.” He then dared the leaders to defeat foreign aid. Fulbright refused to be intimidated. “Vietnam is central to the whole problem,” he declared. It was unbalancing the budget and undermining the nation’s foreign policy. “Bill,” Johnson responded, “everybody doesn’t have a blind spot like you do. You say don’t bomb North Vietnam on just about everything. I don’t have the simple solution you have.” Turning to the group, the president said bitterly, “If you want me to get out of Vietnam, then you have the prerogative of taking out the resolution under which we are out there now. You can repeal it tomorrow. You can tell the troops to come home. You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn’t know what he is doing.”³⁶

“Lyndon Johnson is a complicated human being,” Walter Lippmann opined. “There are at least two spirits wrestling within him. One is that of the peace-maker and reformer and herald of a better world. The other is that of the primitive frontiersman who wants to be the biggest, the best, the first, a worshiper of what William James called the bitch-goddess, success.”³⁷Fool! LBJ thought. Could he and the others not see that the cause of domestic reform, especially the fate of the civil rights movement, was inextricably intertwined with the course of the war in Vietnam? If the administration failed to prevent a direct military confrontation with the communist superpowers on the one hand or secure an “honorable peace” in Vietnam on the other, there could only be reaction, not reform, on the home front.

By the spring of 1967, Lady Bird was pining for LBJ’s retirement. “Many months ago I set March 1968 in my own mind as the time when Lyndon can make a statement that he will not be a candidate for reelection,” she recorded in her diary. “I was following the pattern of President Truman … For the first time in my life I have felt lately that Lyndon would be a happy man retired. I feel that there is enough at the Ranch to hold him, keep him busy, and that he can pour himself into some sort of therapeutic work at the University of Texas—in the Johnson School of Public Service perhaps.” She was convinced that her husband would not survive a second term. Indeed, in February 1965, she had bought a black funeral dress in case Lyndon should die suddenly.³⁸In mid-May she talked with Abe Fortas about a 1968 retirement. The president must not, could not, make any such announcement until March 1968 at the earliest, he said. The consensus in behalf of the war and the Great Society would fall apart. Moreover, if things were not going better in the country than they were then, it would be his duty to run again.³⁹

In late summer, LBJ summoned George Christian to his bedroom for an early morning confab. Lady Bird was there. He had decided not to seek another term, Johnson told his press secretary, and asked him to research exactly how Harry Truman had gone about withdrawing his name from consideration in 1952. LBJ explained that every time he looked at Woodrow Wilson’s portrait in the White House, he became more determined to step down before he became physically or politically incapacitated, or both. “The feeling I had that morning was that he was living under a sword,” Christian said. “He knew his days were numbered and he didn’t have four more years in him.” As Christian left the room, the president said, “Nobody knows this but you, me, and Bird.”⁴⁰

 

INJUNE1967,in the midst of LBJ’s preoccupation with the war in Vietnam and eroding support for the Great Society, Israel staged a preemptive strike against Egyptian forces. The war later widened to include Jordan and Syria, thereby threatening to precipitate a military confrontation between Washington and Moscow. The roots of the Six Day War are well-known. Relations between pan-Arab nationalists, led by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Israel had grown increasingly tense in the years following the 1956 Suez crisis. In 1964 Nasser joined with other Arab leaders in sponsoring the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), whose objective was to destroy the state of Israel and secure the return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had been driven from their homes in 1948.

The Kennedy administration had announced that it would pursue an even-handed policy in the Middle East. During the 1960 presidential campaign, JFK, prompted by a desire to counteract his father’s reputation as an anti-Semite and by the knowledge that Jewish intellectuals were one of the mainstays of American liberalism, had courted and largely won over the Jewish vote in the United States. He had named two acknowledged Zionists, Abe Ribicoff and Arthur Goldberg, to his cabinet and set up a de facto Jewish affairs desk under special assistant Myer Feldman. In September 1962, acting on the advice of these friends of Israel, Kennedy had approved the sale of Hawk surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles to Tel Aviv. In so doing, he broke with the long established, though unwritten, American policy of no arms sales to the Middle East. His pro-Israeli advisers observed that the Soviets had not taken such a self-denying pledge and were supplying Egypt with tanks, planes, and artillery pieces. Besides, they said, the Hawks could be used for defensive purposes only. At the same time, in accord with the Schlesinger-Goodwin-Galbraith doctrine of building bridges to anticolonial third world leaders, Kennedy attempted to cultivate Nasser. He spoke frequently and sympathetically of Arab nationalism. He increased American aid to Egypt, especially shipments of food under PL-480. In part, the president was responding to pressure from the State and Defense Departments, always cognizant of the strategic importance of the Arab states because of their large populations and the massive oil deposits in the region.⁴¹This, then, was the situation when Lyndon Baines Johnson became thirty-sixth president of the United States.

For those Jews who knew of his past, Lyndon Johnson’s standing could not have been higher, but for the rank and file, who were aware only that he hailed from oil-rich Texas, the new president was an object of suspicion. In truth, LBJ counted Jews, along with other minorities, as one of his natural constituencies. From his days as National Youth Administration director, when he had facilitated Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany, to the 1956 Suez crisis, when he had vociferously opposed a movement within Dulles’s State Department to impose sanctions on Israel, LBJ had demonstrated his fealty to the Zionist cause. Orville Freeman quoted him on his ties with the American Jewish community: “He … said wryly that in all his political life when people had been against him, looking to Texas now, that always, the Mexicans, the Negroes, the Jews had been his friends and he didn’t forget it.”⁴²Harry McPherson recalled reading an article by a Jewish writer at the time on the typical non-Jewish Jew and the typical Jewish non-Jew. “And the classic non-Jewish Jew was a Texan, just generally, the Texan being loud and wearing his heart on his sleeve, and being full of complaints, and fun, and being a little bit too much at all points … And Johnson was kind of a non-Jewish Jew in that sense; he was outrageous and he talked too much and demanded too much and was never satisfied and was a lot of fun.”⁴³He could have added that Johnson was sentimental, ardently attached to family and clan, generous, gregarious—and neurotic. Shortly after being sworn in as president, Johnson had remarked to an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.”⁴⁴

Johnson’s close relationship with Abe Fortas and other Jewish New Dealers was well-known. He retained Myer Feldman until 1966 and embraced David Dubinsky and the heavily Jewish ILGWU. During the 1964 election Lyndon and Lady Bird struck up a friendship with Arthur and Mathilde Krim (Mathilde had served briefly with the Irgun, the Israeli counterterrorist organization, in her youth). Indeed, the Krims became such close friends that they purchased land and built a house near the ranch in order to be available to the president on his frequent Texas vacations.⁴⁵As far as the Arab states were concerned, Johnson felt a natural antipathy for Nasser as a disturber of the status quo. While Johnson was still in the Senate, George Reedy had convinced his boss that Nasser’s bread and butter was the poverty and ignorance of his own countrymen; the Egyptian leader would continue to blame the West for their lot while doing nothing substantively to improve it because he could continue to exploit their discontent to keep himself in power.⁴⁶

At the same time, Johnson was determined to hew to the line that separated Israeli and American interests. As a congressional expert and advocate of preparedness, he was well aware of the importance of Arab oil to the strategic well-being of the United States. He also understood clearly that the Soviet Union was poised to take advantage of any and every tension in Arab-American relations. Typically, Johnson was careful in his diplomacy toward the Middle East, very careful. While showering Israel with rhetorical assurances concerning America’s commitment to that state’s well-being and cultivating American Zionists, the president did everything in his power to strengthen conservative, status quo powers in the Arab world and, when possible, to placate Nasser. For example, in early 1964, ardently supported by various Zionist organizations in the United States, Israel began pressuring Washington to sell it a hundred tanks, pointing out that the Soviets were rapidly arming the Egyptians and Syrians. Abe Feinberg, chief fund-raiser in the United States for Israeli causes, Feldman, and even Robert Komer, then the resident NSC Arabist, argued for the sale, warning Johnson that if it were not forthcoming, the GOP might well wean the Jewish vote away from the Democrats. Johnson chose to wait. The sale would be the first transfer of weapons that could be used for both offense and defense and was sure to anger Arab nationalists and strengthen Nasser’s hand. He did not know how long he would be able to resist Tel Aviv and New York’s blandishments, but he intended to get something for the tanks if and when the sale was made.

The White House was extremely worried about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Israel had constructed a top-secret nuclear reactor at Dimona.⁴⁷During a visit by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to the ranch in 1964, LBJ had secured a commitment to allow American inspectors to check Dimona at regular intervals to verify that no weapons were being developed. Still Johnson hesitated. He told Eshkol that Israel should attempt to purchase the tanks it needed from West Germany, France, or Britain. If that were not possible, the United States would deliver. In the end, the Europeans could not match quality or price, and the American marker was called in.⁴⁸

As the Johnson presidency began, Israel found itself prospering amid insecurity. Its population had tripled to 2.9 million since the founding of the state, and the annual economic growth rate was among the highest in the world. Prejudice there was, against Sephardic (non-European) Jews, but Israel was an open, diverse, dynamic democracy. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with its élan and egalitarianism—saluting and marching were rare and authority continually questioned—was a formidable force, claiming twenty-five brigades, 175 jets, and nearly one thousand battle tanks. In terms of training, equipment, and spare parts, if not in numbers, the IDF was the most potent military force in the Middle East. At the same time, Israel was circumscribed by 639 miles of hostile borders manned by thirty Arab divisions. Egypt was in a position to strangle Israeli trade by blockading the Straits of Tiran. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, or Fatah, attacked and harassed from bases in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Finally, antipathy to Israel was the one unifying factor in the Arab world.⁴⁹

At a Pan-Arab Summit Conference held in Cairo in January 1964, the Arabs approved a plan to divert the Jordan River at its source in hopes of turning all of Israel into a desert. They also approved creation of a United Arab Command with a $345 million, ten-year budget. The UAC would become operational in 1967.⁵⁰Later that year, U.S.-Egyptian relations reached the breaking point. Rioters, egged on by Nasserian rhetoric, burned down the American Embassy library. Then Egyptian forces accidentally shot down a plane belonging to John Mecom, a prominent Texas oilman. When Lucius Battle, the U.S. ambassador, suggested to the Egyptian president that he moderate his tone, the latter replied, “The American Ambassador says that our behavior is not acceptable. Well, let us tell them that those who do not accept our behavior can go and drink from the sea … We will cut the tongues of anybody who talks badly about us. We are not going to accept gangsterism by cowboys.”⁵¹This from a man who led 29.5 million residents who earned an average of $140 a year, lived to the age of thirty-five, and were 50 percent illiterate. Johnson had no intention of rewarding pseudo-revolutionaries who exploited rather than served their people. By 1965 Washington was working to block Egypt’s efforts to refinance its massive international debt. American food aid—shipments from the United States accounted for 60 percent of all Egyptian bread—was suspended.⁵²

Increasingly, Washington, Cairo, and, to an extent, Tel Aviv saw Jordan and its youthful monarch, Hussein, as a key to the solution of the Middle East riddle. Short, dapper, soft-spoken, Hussein’s smiling demeanor and mild manner concealed a shrewd intelligence and inner tenacity. He had survived no fewer than thirteen coup and assassination plots since taking over the throne in 1953. Indeed, his father had been shot by a Palestinian extremist.⁵³Jordan, devoid of natural resources, had long depended on foreign aid, first from the British and then from the United States, to feed and employ its people and to provide for its defense. With the rise of Nasser and pan-Arab nationalism, however, Hussein had had to wean his nation from the West, turning to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates for the subsidies his state needed to survive. As far as the Arab-Israeli conflict was concerned, Hussein had to perform a dangerous balancing act to keep from being swallowed up by his powerful neighbors. Nasser’s agents continually fomented unrest among Jordan’s huge Palestinian population, while Israel issued threat after threat to annihilate Jordan if it did not put a stop to Fatah raids emanating from its territory into Israel.⁵⁴

At the Pan-Arab Summit in Cairo, Soviet arms dealers had been much in evidence. Egypt and Syria wanted to let Russia be the sole armorer for the UAC. Hussein, supported by the Saudis, resisted. It would be unwise for the Arab brotherhood to become dependent on one source of supply. In desperation, the king turned to the United States. If Washington wanted to keep Soviet arms and United Arab Republic trainers out of Jordan, it would have to cut an arms deal. With the tacit approval of Israel, the United States had been “subsidizing non-viable Jordan”: $56 million in FY 1964 and $46.5 million in FY 1965. But Johnson and his advisers knew that overt military aid would deeply offend the friends of Israel. Tel Aviv might eventually understand, but American Jewish organizations, always more strident than the Israelis themselves, would view an arms deal with a frontline Arab country as a betrayal. As Komer observed to Ed Weisl, “The real trouble is that Israel’s US friends are much less knowledgeable about the real state of affairs than the Israeli Government—and thus more emotional.”⁵⁵

Komer and the State Department favored extending Jordan some $55 million in arms aid, ground weapons only. “So long as we can keep Hussein out of Nasser’s camp,” Komer observed, “Israel cannot be effectively hemmed in.”⁵⁶To make the case with the Israelis, LBJ chose Komer and Averell Harriman, Komer because of his hard nose and Harriman, as George Ball put it, because the former governor had “a lot of vested capital with the New York Jewish community.”⁵⁷Prime Minister Eshkol and Foreign Minister Golda Meir finally consented, but only in return for a public commitment to sell more and better arms to Israel. As Komer confided to LBJ, “Israeli aims are rather different from our own. They’ve consistently felt nervous about US support in a crunch, so have long favored tying us to them publicly (security guarantees, arms aid), regardless of whether this would throw the Arabs into Soviet hands or cost us our position in the Arab world.”⁵⁸There would be no public commitments, but Washington agreed to help Israel acquire some advanced supersonic aircraft from other suppliers. As had been the case with the tanks, Western European sources did not work out, and the United States ended up selling Israel several squadrons of A4 fighter-bombers. At the same time, the Johnson administration went ahead with its arms package to Jordan.⁵⁹These arrangements satisfied Abe Feinberg and other American Zionists but, of course, infuriated Nasser. He had to stand idly by while the United States armed both the Israelis and his moderate/progressive enemies within the Arab bloc.

During 1966 LBJ’s natural sympathy for Jews in general and Israel in particular was partially eclipsed by his anger over growing antiwar sentiment in the American Jewish community. Led by columnist Walter Lippmann, political activist Allard Lowenstein, and New York Senator Jacob Javits, Jewish political activists and intellectuals questioned the assumptions that underlay American involvement in Vietnam and participated in various end-the-war and dump Johnson movements. LBJ was dumbfounded. How could a people so educated and intelligent not see the connection between Southeast Asia and the Middle East? In the summer of 1966, Israeli President Zalman Shazar called at the White House. Johnson used the occasion to protest. “If because of the critics of our Vietnam policy,” LBJ asked, “we did not fulfill our commitments to the sixteen million people in Vietnam, how could we be expected to fulfill our commitments to two million Israelis?”⁶⁰Johnson pointed out to newly named Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Hanoi had issued several statements in support of the PLO. At one point, Johnson became so frustrated he told Tel Aviv that if they did not get their American friends off his back over Vietnam they could forget about further aid. Eban and Eppie Evron, Israel’s minister in the United States, tried, calling on Fulbright and assuring him of their total support of the administration’s position on Vietnam. But in fact they were able to make little headway. In Israel, the labor-dominated left was adamantly opposed to the war in Vietnam. Lippmann and Lowenstein felt far more strongly about Southeast Asia than they did the Middle East.⁶¹

Throughout the Middle East crisis a principal dilemma for the United States was whether or not to support Arab unity. In its effort to prevent Soviet penetration of the region—Moscow was continually trying to exploit Arab nationalism and play the radicals off against the moderates—Washington seemed called on to keep Nasser, Hussein, and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia talking and cooperating. The Johnson administration chose unity both out of cold war considerations and because it believed moderating Arab radicalism was the only long-term solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. “We have succeeded in maintaining satisfactory working relationships on all sides of a series of local disputes that have threatened to drive us and the USSR into opposing camps,” NSC Middle East expert Hal Saunders observed to Rostow. “We have long believed that splitting the Middle East is a major Soviet objective. Our interests in the area are wide and varied enough that we judge it essential to avoid that kind of split. Carrying water on both shoulders sometimes seems immoral and is always difficult. But for a power like the U.S. with its far flung conflicting interests there seems no other choice.”⁶²

During an interview with Rabbi Philip Bernstein and I. L. Kenen of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 1966, Bob Komer observed that the “Arab-Israeli standoff is … one of the most stable crises in the world.”⁶³He could not have been more wrong. The February 1966 coup in Syria that brought an ardently socialist and militantly anti-Israeli Ba’thist regime to power had further roiled the troubled waters of the Middle East. Damascus and Moscow embraced rhetorically and militarily. In 1966 alone the Soviets poured over $400 million into Syria. Russian became the nation’s second language. From Syrian territory, Fatah guerrillas began raiding Israeli settlements on an almost weekly basis. Over the course of 1966 Israel recorded ninety-three border incidents—mine explosions, shootings, sabotage.⁶⁴From positions on the Golan Heights, Syrian artillerymen shelled Israeli settlements. At the same time, PLO fighters continued to operate with almost a free hand along the Jordanian-Israeli border. On November 10, an Israeli police vehicle struck a mine that had been planted by Fatah guerrillas along the Israeli border. Three soldiers died. Three days later, an Israeli force of four-hundred men, under the cover of jet fighters, crossed into Syria and surrounded the small Jordanian town of Samu, suspected of harboring the guerrillas. As the force began to demolish more than one-hundred houses, a Jordanian infantry brigade arrived, and an intended surgical strike became a pitched battle. When the smoke and dust had cleared, the Israeli commander and fifteen Jordanian soldiers had been killed.⁶⁵Then on April 7, 1967, the Israeli Air Force launched raids against the Syrian gunners on the Golan Heights. In the air battle that followed the Israeli fighters blasted the Syrian MIGs out of the air and buzzed Damascus for effect.

In mid-May 1967, Nasser began to give way to pressure from Syria and militant Arab nationalists in Egypt and elsewhere to redeem himself and all of Islam by standing up to Israel. Citing Eshkol’s public pronouncements proclaiming his intention to wipe out Fatah camps in Syria, Damascus was deluging Cairo with dire warnings of an impending Israeli invasion. On May 16, he ordered the UN peacekeeping force out of the Sinai. Secretary General U Thant complied immediately without a murmur. Then on May 22, as Egyptian troops occupied Sharm el Sheikh on the Strait of Tiran at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba, Nasser announced that he was closing the waterway to Israeli shipping. At the same time, he began to mass troops along Israel’s southwestern border.⁶⁶These moves put an already nervous Israel into an “apocalyptic” frame of mind, as Eppie Evron put it. Abe Feinberg and his companions besieged the White House with requests for meetings with LBJ. “The Egyptian build-up of armour and infantry in Sinai, to the extent so far of approximately four divisions including 600 tanks, is greater than ever before, and has no objective justification,” Eshkol cabled Johnson.⁶⁷He insisted that the United States live up to its “commitment” to Israel.⁶⁸

Meanwhile, Hussein told the American ambassador to Jordan that he was convinced that Israel had long planned to annex all or part of the West Bank to improve its security position. The current Egyptian buildup and Syrian posturing offered the Israelis the perfect justification for a preemptive attack. He wanted no part of a war with Israel, but if attacked, Jordan would have to defend itself. Would the United States live up to its commitment to ensure that his kingdom was not overrun?⁶⁹

From the last week in May through the end of June, Johnson and his advisers met several times a day on the mounting crisis in the Middle East. Where did American obligations lie? “We have no specific written commitment to Israel’s defense,” Harry McPherson wrote Hubert Humphrey. “But as the President said in Ellenville, New York on August 19: ‘What do you do when little Israel calls on you for assistance and help? I’ll tell you what you do. You do what is right—you stand up for freedom, whatever the price.’ ”⁷⁰But that was rhetoric. During the runup to war, LBJ made it clear to the Israelis that the United States did not have an “attack-on-you-is-an-attack-on-us agreement.” He could not and would not give such assurance without the express consent of Congress. In fact, of course, the president did not want and did not seek such approval. His advisers told him that Israel would prevail in any war with the Arabs—in five days if they attacked, in ten if they were attacked. “The judgment of the intelligence community is that Israeli ground forces can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold on any three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth. The key was the war in the air. If Israel’s air force were not damaged beyond repair in an Egyptian preemptive strike, the Israelis would prevail.”⁷¹But despite what the Arabs and Soviets would later say, the White House did not want war under any circumstances. U.S. emissaries rushed to assure the Egyptians that Israel was not preparing to attack Syria and the Israelis that Egypt was not readying a preemptive strike against them.

At 6:10 on May 23, 1967, LBJ went on a national radio and television hookup to address the rising tension in the Middle East. He expressed concern about the warlike activities being conducted by the states of the region against each other, and he regretted the hasty withdrawal of UN troops from the Sinai. Blockade of Israel through closing the Straits of Tiran was unacceptable. The United States would uphold the right of free, innocent passage of this and other international waterways, he declared, and was “firmly committed to the support of the political independence and territorial integrity of all the nations of the area.”⁷²

On May 25, Abba Eban arrived in Washington for talks with the president and his advisers. The historic split between the State and Defense Departments on the one hand and the friends of Israel on the other came into sharp relief. McNamara and Rusk insisted that if Israel chose to attack first, it should expect no help from the United States. Abe Fortas and Clark Clifford argued that the administration must give Eban something to take home. At the very least, the president must assure the foreign minister that America would use force if necessary to open the straits. At one point, Dean Acheson, looking directly at Clifford, observed that it would better for all concerned if Israel had never been created. Clifford, as he knew, had played a crucial role during the Truman administration in helping bring the Jewish nation into being. No assurances, Johnson ultimately said, but he would consider a plan to put together an armed flotilla comprising ships from the major maritime powers to force entry through the straits. The key, LBJ observed, was whether the UK had enough interest to “stand up with us like men.”⁷³

Meanwhile, the task at hand was to keep the Israelis from launching a preemptive strike. The atmosphere was tense as Johnson and Eban, with their advisers in tow, convened at the White House. Israeli intelligence was wrong, the president began. The Egyptians and Syrians had no intention of attacking; the mobilization was purely defensive in nature. Eban listened intently. Even if there were an attack, Johnson said, the IDF would “beat the hell out of them.” The United States was not going to give public guarantees for Israel’s security, and Israel must not, LBJ emphasized, make itself responsible for initiating hostilities. Slowly, solemnly he said, “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.” Eban sat in silence for a moment. He had to take something back to the cabinet, he finally said, as it attempted to deal with the “apocalyptic atmosphere” in his country. The United States was firmly committed to the right of free passage through the Straits of Tiran for all nations, LBJ replied. “I would not be wrong,” Eban inquired, “if I told the Prime Minister that your disposition is to make every possible effort to assure that the Strait and the Gulf will remain open to free and innocent passage?” LBJ replied that he would not be wrong.⁷⁴A day later the Israeli cabinet met and voted to take no action for the time being in response to the Arab buildup.⁷⁵

The next seven days were a blur of diplomatic activity. American officials approached the British, French, and Canadians about putting together an armed maritime flotilla to force the issue in the Gulf of Aqaba. France flatly refused, Britain was supportive in principle, and the Canadians provisionally promised a couple of ships. After due deliberation, Johnson’s advisers told him that any attempt to force open the Straits of Tiran by military means would require congressional approval. In turn, congressional leaders informed the president that although both houses were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Israeli cause, they would not support unilateral action by the United States and urged Johnson to work through the UN.

Shortly after the Arabs began mobilizing, McNamara had the Sixth Fleet, stationed in the central Mediterranean, turn and steam slowly toward the eastern littoral, a move not lost on the Soviets. Soviet Premier Alexsey Kosygin wrote LBJ warning that the Israelis were preparing a first strike, urging him to restrain his “ally,” and implying that Russia would not stand idly by if the United States intervened in an Arab-Israeli war.⁷⁶Through an intermediary, Nasser attempted to explain his position to LBJ: “Now is the time when all Arab people are waiting to see an act of friendship on the part of the USA. His urgent request is that the U.S. undertake no direct military action in the form of landings, shifting of naval fleet, or otherwise.”⁷⁷At the end of May the U.S. ambassador to Egypt reported that “he [Nasser] would probably welcome, but not seek, military showdown with Israel.”⁷⁸Though no one on Johnson’s foreign policy team said it, a Jewish victory that deflated Nasser and the militants and left Israel with more defensible borders would not be unwelcome. On the 31st Rostow had drinks with Eppie Evron. “Am I wrong in assessing the President’s personal determination [to come to Israel’s aid if it were threatened with extinction] as I did?” Evron asked. “You have known President Johnson for a long time and have a right to make your own assessment,” the national security adviser replied. Rostow remembered his saying with tears in his eyes, “So much hinges on that man.”⁷⁹

 

LYNDONJOHNSONand his advisers did not want war in the Middle East. They had done everything in their power to prevent it. True, LBJ had shifted from a policy of no arms aid to potential combatants, to seeking a balance through arming both sides. But massive Russian arms shipments to the front-line states had made passivity impossible. On June 1, 1967, McNamara met for forty minutes with General Meir Amit. The Israeli later recounted their conversation. “I told him that I’m personally going to recommend that we take action, because there’s no way out, and please don’t react. He told me it was all right, the president knows that you are here and I have a direct line to the president.” McNamara asked only two questions: How long would the war last—“seven days”—and how many casualties would Israel sustain?⁸⁰

“Like a cocked pistol, like a bomb with a dozen detonators,” ran aNewsweek story on the Arab-Israeli confrontation, “the Middle East last week exuded the ugly aura of imminent slaughter. In the souks of Damascus, reluctant shop-keepers were put through air-raid drills. In the mosques of Cairo, priests [sic] exhorted their congregations to holy war. And in the sacred city of Jerusalem, long divided between Arab and Jew, Israeli children were asked to supply two sandbags each to fortify their schools.”⁸¹On June 5, 1967, the pistol went off. As the blistering summer sun rose over the Negev, wave after wave of Israeli Air Force fighters took off, flying straight out over the Mediterranean and then wheeling and coming in low from the northwest to attack Egyptian airfields and troop concentrations. At the same time, Israeli armored columns drove south into the sands of the Sinai to engage Nasser’s forces, by then some eighty thousand strong. To the east, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers rolled toward Jordan and joined battle with Hussein’s Arab Legion. On the third front in the north, Israeli artillery opened up a barrage on Syrian positions perched atop the heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

At 11A.M. the Egyptians announced they had shot down forty-four enemy planes, nearly 10 percent of Israel’s air force. Radio Amman and Radio Damascus told their listeners that the Zionists were on the run and would soon be defeated. By nightfall, however, the truth had become clear. The Israelis had caught Nasser’s air force completely by surprise, destroying some 410 aircraft, most of them on the ground. In the Sinai, Israeli tank columns had captured three key road junctions and trapped more than ten thousand Arab troops in an indefensible pocket along the Gaza Strip. On the border with Jordan, Israeli forces pushed the Arab Legion back against the banks of the river and occupied all of the Old City of Jerusalem.⁸²

As chance would have it, Harry McPherson, who had been acting as liaison with the American Jewish community after Myer Feldman left to join a Washington law firm, was in Israel the day the war started. He had flown in from Saigon via Hong Kong, where he had been on another fact-finding mission for the president. He arrived at three in the morning and was whisked away to the U.S. ambassador’s home for some sleep. At eight o’clock McPherson was awakened by air raid sirens and was informed that the war had started. After huddling with the ambassador, Wally Barbour, in the air raid shelter at the embassy, the president’s emissary met with Abba Eban and the Israeli chief of military intelligence General Aharon Yariv at army headquarters in Jerusalem. The Israelis indicated that the Egyptians had started the fighting and they had merely counterattacked—but they were vague: “Big artillery barrages … big movements down in the Sinai.” McPherson insisted that they be more specific; President Johnson would want to know whether he was going to be speaking in behalf of a country that was being attacked or had itself delivered the first blow. At that point, the air raid sirens went off again. Should not everyone head for the air raid shelter? Barbour asked. Yariv paused a long moment and then replied, “No, that won’t be necessary.” Suddenly it dawned on McPherson: all of the Arab airplanes had been destroyed on the ground by the Israelis’ first strike. Immediately, he and Barbour informed Washington that it would have to cope with a war started by the Israelis.⁸³

The first of LBJ’s advisers to learn of the onset of war was Walt Rostow. The Situation Room woke him at 2:50A.M. with news of fighting in the Sinai. He dressed, arrived at the White House at 3:25, conferred with Rusk, and then called the president at 4:35. By then, Robert McNamara had arrived at the Pentagon. Shortly after seven, one of his staff officers informed him that Prime Minister Kosygin was on the “hot line”—actually a teletype rather than a telephone—and wanted to speak to the president.⁸⁴Kosygin and Johnson hastened to reassure each other that they had done their best to restrain their respective clients in the Middle East, deplored the outbreak of hostilities, and promised to work together through the UN Security Council to secure a cease-fire as soon as possible. During their exchange, LBJ had addressed his counterpart as “Comrade Kosygin.” At 10:01A.M. Radio Cairo announced that it had information from King Hussein that American aircraft were participating in the attacks on Arab positions. Immediately LBJ got on the hot line again, denied the charge, and asked Kosygin to persuade Nasser to stop spreading lies lest every American legation in the Middle East be burned to the ground. It was already too late for that. In Arab cities with an American consulate, angry demonstrations besieged U.S. offices, breaking windows and setting fires. The frontline states broke relations with the United States and the United Kingdom, and Arab oil ministers announced that they were going to meet; oil shipments would be halted to any nation found guilty of aiding the Zionists.⁸⁵

Just before noon on the 5th, LBJ gathered with his foreign policy advisers: Dean Rusk; McGeorge Bundy, who had been called in to troubleshoot, Dean Acheson; and Clark Clifford, who was still serving as chair of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Bundy later recalled that the meeting was “mainly concerned with the awful shape we would be in if the Israelis were losing. We didn’t really know anything about the situation on the ground. When, in the course of that day, it became apparent that the Israeli Air Force had won, the entire atmosphere of the problem changed. It was in a way reassuring when it became clear that the fighting was the Israelis’ idea and that the idea was working. That was a lot better than if it had been the other way around.”⁸⁶At the meeting’s conclusion, LBJ asked Bundy to return to temporary duty and head the team dealing with the Middle East crisis. Rostow, like virtually everyone else, was absorbed with Vietnam. Bundy readily agreed.⁸⁷Throughout the crisis, LBJ, who could become hysterical over trivia, demonstrated the coolness and deliberation that his staff had come to expect in times of great peril or uncertainty. That morning, Paul Glynn, LBJ’s military valet, was on duty and later recorded, “Found President quiet—watching TV. Pres. gave no indications of it being anything but a normal day—showered, shaved and dressed and left for SitRU.”⁸⁸

By the second day of the war, the issue facing LBJ, Bundy, Rusk, and Rostow was whether to join the Soviets in pressing for an immediate cease-fire. Initially, the Israelis had assured Washington that they would not use the war to annex Arab territory. But the rapid and overwhelming success of their arms quickly changed their minds. The Israelis and their American supporters were convinced that in 1956 the Great Powers had forced them to disgorge lands they had conquered legitimately by force of arms, thus rendering the state indefensible. They were determined that this would not happen again.

State and Defense, understandably distraught over the prospect of a cutoff of Arab oil to the West, pressed Johnson to support an immediate cease-fire. Others, such as Walt Rostow, argued that the Israelis should be left alone for a while to expand and consolidate their gains. Only until Nasser and the militant nationalists were discredited and Israel acquired defensible borders would there be a chance for a permanent long-term settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With the “moderates” in charge, a comprehensive agreement, including recognition of Israel’s right to exist and justice for Palestinian refugees, just might be possible.⁸⁹Johnson was drawn to the latter position. He remembered his conversations with George Reedy following the Suez crisis to the effect that Nasser was dedicated to permanent revolution and there would be no peace in the Holy Land until he was removed, or at least discredited. He knew that a majority of Americans agreed with Rostow. As Orville Freeman put it, “I hope they don’t have to kill too many of them [soldiers of the frontline states], but I hope they destroy their military resources and complete[ly] discredit them and eradicate the power of Nasser and make it clear once and for all that Israel is around to stay for a long, long time.”⁹⁰Finally, the intelligence LBJ had available to him indicated that the Soviets would not intervene to save the Arabs. Privately, the men in the Kremlin were admitting gross “miscalculations” by both themselves and the Arabs. They had overestimated the military prowess of the Egyptians and underestimated the commitment and effectiveness of the Israelis. In the days that followed, Johnson had Arthur Goldberg cooperate with the Soviets, but Washington did nothing to restrain Israel when it maneuvered to delay Security Council action for as long as possible.⁹¹

The president had another reason for not moving strongly to bring the fighting to an immediate halt: the mounting anger among American friends of Israel at what they considered his unsympathetic stance toward their brethren in arms. On the morning of the 5th, the White House press officer had told assembled journalists, echoing Woodrow Wilson, that the United States intended to remain neutral in “thought, word, and deed.” The Jewish community reacted as if the administration had just announced its intention to bomb the Wailing Wall. Larry Levinson and Ben Wattenberg, White House staffer and speechwriter, respectively, alerted Johnson that there would be a mass rally in behalf of Israel in Lafayette Park on the 8th. They and Mathilde Krim urged the president to make a mollifying statement, lest the gathering turn into a Hate LBJ session.⁹²

The president, who believed that he had been bending over backward to help Israel, was infuriated. He called Levinson into Joe Califano’s office to rebuke him. He told him how disappointed he was in some of his Jewish friends, their lack of trust in him, their lack of gratitude. A little later, LBJ spotted Levinson in the hall outside the Oval Office. He shook his fist at him and yelled, “You Zionist dupe! You Zionist dupe! You and Wattenberg are Zionist dupes in the White House! Why can’t you see I’m doing all I can for Israel? That’s what you should be telling people when they ask for a message from the President for their rally.” Levinson later told Joe Califano that he felt “shaken to the marrow of my bones by the encounter.”⁹³

Having blown off steam, LBJ once again became the cautious diplomat. The Israelis had made it clear from the beginning that they did not expect the United States to come to their rescue. “[Israeli intelligence chief Moshe] Bitan told us on the first day that they didn’t want our troops or planes,” McPherson reported to Johnson, “they would do the job themselves; they just wanted us to keep the Russians off their backs, and they wanted ‘two or three days to finish the job.’ ”⁹⁴Moreover, although pro-Israeli sentiment was running strong in Congress, leaders from both houses made it clear to the president that they did not want him to take unilateral action. Everything should be done through the UN.⁹⁵Consequently, LBJ worked through Feinberg, the Krims, Ed Weisl, and other contacts in the Jewish community to spread the word that he remained as firm a friend of Israel as ever. “Neutrality does not imply indifference,” Rusk told a news conference.⁹⁶

At 8:10A.M. on June 8, the American intelligence ship,USS Liberty , operating some thirteen miles off the Egyptian coast, reported that it was under attack—from Israeli aircraft. The Mirages made six strafing runs against the vessel. Twenty minutes later, three torpedo boats closed at high speed, and after first circling theLiberty , two of them launched torpedoes. One passed astern, and the other struck the starboard side in the area occupied by the ship’s intelligence-gathering and communication equipment. The weather was clear, theLiberty was flying the Stars and Stripes, and its hull number was prominently displayed. The ship began listing, and the Israelis called off the attack, convinced, apparently, that the Liberty was sinking.⁹⁷As a result of the assault, the ship suffered more than two hundred casualties, with thirty-four dead or dying.

As soon as the incident was reported, the U.S. aircraft carriersAmerica andSaratoga scrambled jets with orders to defend theLiberty. “You are authorized to use force including destruction as necessary to control the situation,” the commander of the Sixth Fleet ordered. “Do not use more force than required; do not pursue any unit towards land for reprisal purposes.”⁹⁸By the time the U.S. aircraft arrived, the Israelis had already departed the scene. Forty-four minutes after the attack, Tel Aviv “discovered” that they had nearly destroyed an American war vessel in international waters. Ambassador Avraham Harman called at the White House to apologize, and Abba Eban wrote LBJ, “I am deeply mortified and grieved by the tragic accident involving the lives and safety of Americans in Middle Eastern waters.”⁹⁹

LBJ was angry, of course, but he realized that he would have to tread carefully. He had cabled Kosygin that he was sending the America and Saratoga to the area to investigate. The initial CIA report indicated that it had all been a mistake. The information that the Liberty was a U.S. vessel had never made its way up the tactical chain of command in Israel.¹⁰⁰But subsequent probes by Naval Intelligence and other sources rendered that scenario highly unlikely. As Clark Clifford, a long-time friend of Israel, told LBJ, “It is inconceivable that it was an accident.”¹⁰¹According to a later theory, a high-ranking Israeli official—Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s name was mentioned—had ordered the attack in the belief that theLiberty was spying on Israel and was about to spill the beans concerning a forthcoming surprise attack on Syria. Whatever the case, Johnson did not subsequently press the matter with the Israelis. Rusk delivered a harsh protest to Ambassador Harman, but then let the matter go.¹⁰²Among other things, LBJ believed, the attack on theLiberty would get Feinberg and the American friends of Israel off his back and give him some leverage with the Israelis as the terms of a peace settlement came to be worked out.

The Israeli decision to attack Syria drove the Soviet Union to the brink of war. Their chief proxy, Egypt, had been militarily annihilated. The USSR’s massive investment in the region seemed for naught. The Chinese were crowing, and respect for Soviet power was changing to contempt in many quarters of the globe. On news of the Israeli invasion, the Kremlin had broken diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Kosygin got on the hot line and warned of a “grave catastrophe” and announced that unless the Israelis halted their incursion into Syria immediately, the Soviet Union would take “necessary actions, including military.” LBJ immediately huddled with CIA Director Richard Helms, McNamara, Clifford, Bundy, Rostow, and Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson. The CIA chief later recalled that the meeting was one of the tensest he had ever attended. After due deliberation, LBJ ordered the Sixth Fleet to set sail for the eastern Mediterranean.¹⁰³At the same time, he cabled Kosygin that he would do his utmost to persuade the Israelis to stand down. Fortunately, early in the afternoon of June 10, Israel signed a truce agreement with Syria, and by June 11 all was still in the Holy Land.

In the days following the end of the Six Day War, Rostow continued to push LBJ to use the occasion to convince all parties that the time had come for a comprehensive settlement. The problem was, as Harry McPherson pointed out to the president, the Israelis and their American supporters were in no frame of mind to make concessions. They were drunk with victory and mesmerized by the vision of permanently secure borders impervious to future Arab and Soviet attacks. Tel Aviv began stalling on U.S. inspection of the atomic facility at Dimona and flatly refused to follow International Atomic Energy Agency nonproliferation guidelines. To ask Israeli intellectuals and religious leaders to give up the Old City now would be like talking to deaf men.¹⁰⁴Finally, it was highly unlikely that the Kremlin, despite its disgust with Nasser, would be willing to stop fishing in troubled waters. Both Nasser and Hussein had survived. In the wake of their devastating military defeat, both became temporarily more flexible, especially in dealing with the United States, but both continued to plead that their very existence depended on their ability to avoid direct negotiations with Israel, the only precondition Tel Aviv set for relinquishing the gains that it had achieved as a result of its blitzkrieg.¹⁰⁵

On June 19, LBJ delivered an innocuous speech outlining an entirely predictable plan for peace: freedom of innocent passage through all international waterways in the region; a settlement (unspecified) of the refugee problem; respect for the political independence and territorial integrity of all parties; an arms control agreement; and the right of all countries to physical security. Peace, Johnson emphasized, was up to the parties involved. The United States could not and would not pressure the Israelis to sacrifice if their neighbors were not even willing to talk with them. As he was well aware, American opinion continued to be decidedly pro-Israeli. “Harris told me last week that in all his years as a pollster, he had never seen a more sweeping … registration of overwhelming support for one side of a question,” McGeorge Bundy reported to LBJ.¹⁰⁶John Roche, who had prepared the president’s speech, told him after one draft, “It is still a bit much for my taste, but I confess that I look on the Israelis as Texans and Nasser as Santa Anna.”¹⁰⁷

That November, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 242, which was designed to bring about a negotiated settlement to the ongoing Middle East crisis. It called for a multilateral guarantee of Israel’s borders in exchange for a return of the territory seized in the Six Day War. In addition, Israel would enjoy free access to “regional waterways” (Nasser had ordered the Suez Canal blocked with sunken ships shortly after Israel attacked) in the area, while the Palestinians could look forward to “a just settlement of the refugee problem,” a provision that they interpreted to mean the conversion of what used to be called Palestine (Israel and parts of the current state of Jordan) into a multinational state including both Jews and Palestinians.

The United States supported Resolution 242 but was sympathetic to Israel’s fears concerning its security. Tel Aviv insisted that the Arab nations would have to extend formal recognition and give guarantees before the land seized in the Six Day War was returned. As the United States continued to replace Israeli military equipment and to subsidize the Israeli economy, an angry Nasser severed diplomatic ties with Washington. When Israel refused to evacuate the Sinai and return the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, Moscow broke relations with Tel Aviv. Washington and various third parties attempted mediation but with no success. Fedayeen border raids and terrorist attacks mounted in number, while Israel ruled the territories under its control with an iron hand. The region remained ripe for another explosion.

LBJ thought, all things considered, that the United States had handled the Middle East crisis rather well: there had not been a general war involving the Soviet Union and the United States; the conflict had been of brief duration; and Israel was more secure than it had been before the fighting started, rendering the possibility of another war more remote. Others did not agree. “U.S. Ignored Crisis Signs in Mideast,” ran a headline in theBaltimore Sun. “The result has been one of the worst failures of United States foreign policy since the miscalculations in the early days of the Vietnamese war.”¹⁰⁸