Read an Excerpt
Support Any Friend
Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance
By WARREN BASS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2003 Warren Bass
All right reserved. ISBN: 0195165802
Chapter One
Kennedy's Inheritance
America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-1960
In November 1953, Eddie Jacobson, a Jewish Kansas City haberdasher who had the good fortune to pick as his business partner a scrappy young man named Harry S. Truman, was asked to introduce his old friend to an audience at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Before an eager crowd at the intellectual home of America's largest Jewish denomination, nestled in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, Jacobson tried to give the former president an introduction that rose to the occasion. "This is the man," Jacobson declared, "who helped create the state of Israel."
"What do you mean, 'helped create'?" asked Truman. With some feeling, he gave his own view of his role: "I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus."
Truman was a self-taught history buff, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he could identify with the ancient Persian monarch who liberated the Jews from their exilic bondage in Babylon. It is also not surprising that he chose in hindsight to romanticize the cutting of a Gordian policy knot. Still, Truman's assessment of his own importance has sometimes come to overshadow the reality of his administration's muddled approach to the Palestine question-and of the muddled and highly contingent American relationship with the young state of Israel. In fact, it had never been as simple as Truman liked to make it sound in retrospect.
America's Middle East policies throughout both world wars and the early Cold War were produced by a complex intersection of interests and actors. Throughout, sympathizers with Zionism had to grapple with opponents convinced that U.S. friendship with a Jewish state would hurt America's posture in the region. Moreover, U.S. Middle East policy was buffeted by wider trends in world politics: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Nazism in Germany and communism in Russia, the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust, the rise of nationalism and the fall of the great European empires, the indispensability of oil to Western economies, and the superpower jousting of the Cold War. The instinctive modern assumption of deep and abiding friendship between the United States and Israel rings tinny when one looks back at the presidencies that shaped America's encounter with the Middle East. Those White Houses found Middle East policy-making agonizing, and the policies they produced came not from neat ideological certainties but from painstaking attempts to balance U.S. interests and values.
Not least in importance was the administration of John F. Kennedy, who received a complicated inheritance in the Middle East. Woodrow Wilson bequeathed to Kennedy a liberal emphasis on the importance of nationalism; Franklin Roosevelt dissembled and underscored the importance of Saudi oil; Harry Truman demonstrated the difficulty of integrating support for Israel into U.S. Cold War strategy; and Dwight Eisenhower left a region with American influence on the wane and nationalism on the rise. To understand Kennedy's Middle East policies, we must understand what he inherited.
THE HOLY LAND AND THE PRIEST
Woodrow Wilson set the stage for America's policies toward the Arab-Israeli conflict-largely by expressing a value-driven American sympathy for nationalism, including the Jewish desire for self-rule. Temperamentally, it is hard to imagine two men farther apart than the gregarious Truman and the priggish Wilson. Still, they did have at least one thing in common: neither thought much of his State Department. Wilson trusted his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, no farther than the president-no Olympic athlete-could throw him. He relied instead on a series of advisers, including his all-purpose fixer, confidant, and occasional alter ego, the omnipresent Colonel Edward House. Wilson relied, too, on several distinguished American Jews who had managed to become establishment fixtures, including Henry Morgenthau-later named ambassador to the Ottoman Empire-and the man Wilson appointed as a Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis was then America's most influential Zionist. To be sure, this was not saying much in absolute terms-the American Zionist movement was, in the century's first decade, something to be sneezed at-but Brandeis's quiet clout was considerable. While Wilson's Princeton milieu was shot through with the anti-Semitism of its day, it seems not to have rubbed off; the president respected Brandeis, who wound up undertaking an array of missions that today would be bizarre tasks for a sitting member of the highest court in the land.
In 1917, the Zionist movement's center of intellectual gravity was located in London, home of Chaim Weizmann, the urbane, dapper chemist turned nationalist who would 31 years later become the ceremonial head of the new Jewish state. Weizmann, with the help of the sympathetic British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, was trying to succeed where even Theodor Herzl had failed: winning the support of a great imperial power for the Zionist enterprise. With the Allies at war with the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Palestine and much of the rest of the Middle East might soon fall into the hands of the British, who might in turn offer a home for Jewish nationalism. By the spring of 1917, with the world still mired in the muck of the Great War's trenches and Britain increasingly eager to enlist the support of world Jewry in hopes of breaking the stalemate, Weizmann was tantalizingly close to winning British patronage-expressed in the form of the famous Balfour Declaration, in which Britain expressed support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. So one of Weizmann's colleagues, James de Rothschild, asked Brandeis a favor: would he sound Wilson out about the idea of a postwar Holy Land that would be both Jewish and under the protection of Great Britain?
Wilson's response was in some doubt. Wilson saw himself as the tribune of a new politics. The Great War's key causes were, as Wilson saw it, essentially European: the Metternich-style system of shifting alliances and balances of power, the jingoistic legacy of warmongering in general and German belligerence in particular, and the disease of imperialism. Instead of the ruinous old statecraft, Wilson proposed disarmament, a system of collective security rooted in the League of Nations, and self-determination for small peoples. That made Rothschild's proposal something less than a perfect Wilsonian fit. On the one hand, the idea of a Jewish national home jibed neatly with the president's push for self-determination. On the other, Jewish self-rule under the aegis of Britain would come in imperialist wrapping. But on May 4, Brandeis lunched at the White House with Wilson and found the president willing to live with that tension-and accept a British protectorate for the Jews in Palestine?
Both Lansing and House objected. The secretary of state pointed out that America was not yet at war with Palestine's Ottoman masters. Moreover, Lansing wrote, "many Christian sects and individuals would undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ." Lansing also feared that Wilson's zeal for self-determination would put the United States on a slippery slope and put "ideas into the minds of certain races." In December 1918, Lansing asked, "Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on [Wilson's promise of self-determination]? How can it be harmonized with Zionism, to which the president is practically committed? The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite."
Ultimately, however, Wilson's disdain for Lansing kept the State Department out of the loop. Yet House-who often was the loop-also urged Wilson to hold off. The colonel fretted that London was plotting some sort of imperialist con game to use Washington to help it snatch up the choice bits of the Turks' collapsing empire. Nonetheless, Wilson's attraction to Zionism overrode his suspicion of Britain. The president "was fascinated with the idea that a democratic Zionism might replace Ottoman despotism and create a haven for oppressed Jews in Palestine." For one thing, the notion appealed to Wilson's messianic side, which was never terribly repressed. For another, there was a political upside. If he opposed the Balfour Declaration, Wilson risked getting outflanked on both the left and the right: Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor backed Zionism for fear that the alternative was a massive influx of Jewish immigrants, which could flood the U.S. labor market and depress wages; and both the Republicans and Theodore Roosevelt were also tilting toward Zionism. Moreover, some key satellites in Wilson's orbit-above all Brandeis, but also Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of New York and Brandeis's protégé, Felix Frankfurter-were also wooing him. Finally, Wilson proved willing to tolerate a continued great-power role in the Middle East, paving the way for the League of Nations Mandates that would place Palestine in British custody and let Britain and France divvy up much of the Middle East.
Ultimately, Wilson overruled Lansing and House and told Britain that he would back the Balfour Declaration. In America's earliest encounter with Zionism, the decision-making circle was actually a dot. The U.S. decision to bless the Balfour Declaration was made by the president alone. As Peter Grose has argued, Wilson's Zionism was casual and unreflective, rather than the result of a carefully weighed assessment. He followed his idealistic predilections, his chums, and his views of political prudence. "To think," Wilson mused, "that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people."
THE JUGGLER
Another American son of the manse played an even more important and complex role during the second part of U.S.-Zionist relations' early act. Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Wilson's elitism with beaming cheer and a sure common touch. "Above all," as Isaiah Berlin has noted, "he was absolutely fearless." Roosevelt was blessed with an invincible certainty that everything-the shipwreck of capitalism, the rise of fascism and communism, and quite simply the largest and most savage war ever-would turn out all right. When he told the American people that they were entitled to freedom from fear, he was merely inviting them to share in his natural state of mind.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously reckoned that FDR had a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament; as it happened, America's longest-serving president proved far wilier than his foes. Indeed, if the yardstick for intelligence is F. Scott Fitzgerald's proverbial ability to retain opposing ideas simultaneously and still function, Roosevelt's second-rate intellect starts to look more like genius. Nowhere was that clearer than on Palestine, where the man whom the historian Warren Kimball calls "the sly squire of Hyde Park" strewed in his wake the flotsam and jetsam of contradictory promises, commitments, and impressions. FDR stands as a lasting reminder that American sympathy for Zionism came with strings attached-that Wilsonian idealism was not nearly enough in a world of cruel choices and unyielding interests. "You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does," said Roosevelt on May 15, 1942. "I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore, I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war." So he was; so it did.
If Wilson's response to the Palestine problem was a casual Zionism, FDR's was by turns fanciful, hard-headed, duplicitous, and pragmatic. The common link was that neither man saw Zionism as a front-burner issue. With a shudder at FDR's easygoing improvisation, one key White House aide, David Niles-who would later become one of Zionism's most strategically placed proponents during the Truman administration-noted that there were "serious doubts" in his mind "that Israel would have come into being if Roosevelt had lived."
A staggering 92 percent of U.S. Jews voted to give FDR a fourth term in 1942. In turn, the president made them one of the building blocks of the New Deal coalition. Like Wilson, FDR seems to have been largely unaffected by the anti-Semitism of his class. (The young Eleanor, however, was not above the odd anti-Semitic jibe; and for all his anticolonialism, Roosevelt's correspondence and chats on Middle East affairs betray a less liberal attitude toward Arabs and Muslims, whom he lumped in with the large parts of the planet he assumed to be lamentably backward.) He was annoyed that his domestic reforms were sometimes sneeringly called the "Jew Deal," and many of his best aides were Jewish. As for Palestine itself, FDR's interest was somewhat limited, although he was fascinated with the Holy Land's geography. (En route to the Tehran summit in 1943, he ordered his pilot to swoop over Palestine as he picked out sites below. "We've seen it all, from Beersheva to Dan!" he enthused. "You know this country as though you were raised here," an adviser commented. "So I do!" Roosevelt replied.) The president, however, was not much of a Zionist. After 1941, his ideology, such as it was, did not extend much farther than doing whatever it took to win the war.
Roosevelt was lobbied more intensively on Palestine than his predecessors. The American Zionist movement grew dramatically after the Great War, even as Zionism's geopolitical position began eroding. As Nazism rose and as Britain's Balfour enthusiasm cooled, frosted, and then froze over, America's Zionists became increasingly worried. The largest mainstream Zionist groups were Hadassah (for women) and Brandeis's Zionist Organization of America (for men). Their combined membership rose steadily, in some grim symmetry with the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1935, Hadassah and the ZOA had a total of 50,000 members; in 1939, they had 110,000; in 1945, 280,000; and by the time Israel was born in 1948, fully half a million. For the most part, however, the movement was not a mass one, preferring to leave its lobbying to Roosevelt intimates-particularly Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was a veteran New York Democratic activist and Roosevelt sycophant. More hard-line Zionists preferred Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, a fiery orator with close ties to Ohio's Republican Senator Robert A. Taft and scant inclination to shield the administration from his rhetorical wrath.
The Zionists at first sought to win Roosevelt over by using shtadlanim, or emissaries, to intercede discreetly on the movement's behalf, in much the same way Brandeis so effectively nudged Wilson along. It did not go well. In February 1940, FDR met for the first time with Weizmann. "What about the Arabs?" Roosevelt inquired. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"
Needless to say, it could not.
Continues...
Excerpted from Support Any Friend by WARREN BASS Copyright © 2003 by Warren Bass
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
