The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  McGonagle’s strength began to return by the weekend. Other than meeting with Martin, the skipper had passed much of Friday recovering alone in his stateroom. After spending the entire night after the attack on the bridge, he welcomed the chance to sleep, shower, and dress in a fresh uniform. The ship’s doctor removed shrapnel from his right leg Saturday and his officers watched his voracious appetite return over meals in the wardroom. By Sunday night, the skipper felt strong enough to host the guests from the Davis for a wardroom screening of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 film Cleopatra. Privately, McGonagle’s thoughts centered on his crew and the families of the men killed. The traditionally reserved skipper revealed his anguish in a telegram to his wife. “My Dearest Jean. Am well but brokenhearted,” he wrote. “They gave their lives and blood to save their ship. Their valiant efforts were not in vain. Please convey my heartfelt condolences to dependents and help in any way possible.” He signed it: “Love Bill, USS Liberty.”

  The Navy planned a special mail pickup to boost morale. Many of the officers and crew dashed off letters home during breaks, capturing initial thoughts and recollections of the attack. Few were as prolific as Lucas. Between standing watch and having x-rays taken of his injuries, the young officer wrote four letters to his wife and his parents in just twenty-four hours. Like many on the Liberty, Lucas longed for home. “Honey, I love you so much. I would give anything to be with you right now,” he wrote. “I’ve had a good cry in the presence of the Admiral and several times when the Captain and I have been talking alone. The Captain has cried several times too. I need to have a good cry with you—tears of joy that I’m okay and won’t ever have to go through anything like this again. It was pure hell.”

  Other sailors voiced the disbelief many felt about Israel’s explanation that the attack had been a tragic accident. Sitting at the rectangular table in the wardroom where thirty-six hours earlier he had held down Seaman Gary Blanchard during surgery, Scott detailed his views in a five-page letter to his parents. “I don’t see how they made a mistake,” the officer wrote. “It was too well planned & coordinated. They knew exactly where to hit us and they did.” He signed the letter: “Alive & unscathed, Ensign John.” Seaman Apprentice Dale Larkins echoed Scott in a letter to his parents in Nebraska. “Close to thirty-five boys died,” he wrote. “That’s one hell of a mistake isn’t it?”

  Families of the sailors soon learned who died as chaplains visited homes. The names of the dead and injured appeared that weekend in the Norfolk newspaper and in the papers of towns and cities nationwide. Ruth Scott, the ensign’s mother, captured the agony many felt in a letter to her son on the envelope of which she scrawled: “Speed it!” “I just don’t know how to start this letter but to say your safety is the greatest gift we have ever had,” she wrote. “You have not been out of our minds a minute since we heard the horrible news about your ship, and we are still with you in spirit wherever you are now.”

  The fleet tug Papago soon became a fixture in the Liberty’s wake, at times sailing as close as a thousand yards behind the injured ship. The 205-foot-long tug often towed target rafts for fleet bombing practice, coming so close to the explosions that scalding shrapnel rained down on deck. Other times, the tug and its crew of about eighty-five helped tow wrecked or grounded ships. The Liberty could sail under its own power, but the gaping torpedo hole concerned the Navy. The majority of the damage was below the waterline and in the ship’s most sensitive spot, the NSA’s top-secret hub. Seawater flowed freely through flooded compartments as the Liberty steamed west, washing classified papers and bodies into the Mediterranean. Soviet trawlers lurked on the horizon, eager to salvage anything. After an unsuccessful attempt by divers to string four cargo nets over the hole, the Papago’s crew trolled for papers with an eighteen-foot boat hook and crab nets. On the journey to Malta, the tug ultimately fished out eight pounds of classified materials, which the skipper promptly locked in his safe. The tug backed over any papers that could not be recovered, grinding them up in the ship’s propeller. The skipper ordered several sailors to stand watch on the bow at all times, scanning the sea with binoculars. At night, the Papago’s searchlights illuminated the Liberty’s wake, making visibility even better than during the day.

  At 9:41 Sunday morning, Papago sailors spotted the first body floating in the sea. The men alerted the bridge and the tug slowed to idle. Navy diver Ensign John Highfill slipped into his wet suit, climbed overboard, and stroked out to the body on the sea’s surface. Far out in the Mediterranean, the water was warm and clear. Highfill noted that the body floated facedown. When he approached within ten feet, he paused, unsure of what the body might look like. The sailor had been in the water for three days, first trapped in the Liberty’s flooded compartments and now floating freely in the sea. Highfill held his breath and ducked beneath the surface to look. The scene stunned him. A piece of shrapnel had hit the sailor in the back of the head. The exit wound had caused his face to explode. Peering through his mask, Highfill saw what looked like the man’s brains and skin hanging down in the water. It reminded him of jellyfish tentacles. He eyed the rest of the sailor’s body and noted the man’s left arm was missing, leaving only a piece of jagged bone. Highfill had no other options: he reached out and grabbed the bone. The diver turned and paddled back, towing the sailor by his bone. When he reached the Papago, deck crews lowered a metal litter. Highfill floated the body onto it and at 9:55 A.M., the body left the water. That afternoon at 1:36 P.M., the Papago pulled alongside the Liberty and transferred the remains.

  Papago searchers spotted a second body at 6:39 P.M. that evening floating down the starboard side of the tug. Many of the sailors had just settled into the tug’s mess deck to watch Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin in the 1965 western comedy Cat Ballou. When the bridge again called man overboard, sailors slipped into life jackets and headed topside. Petty Officer 3rd Class Kit Rushing watched from the upper deck as Highfill swam out and retrieved his second body of the day. The crew lowered a litter into the water and then hoisted the body up at 6:53 P.M. The body thudded onto the deck. The dark skin led Rushing to conclude the dead sailor was black. Only when a Papago corpsman bent over and unfastened the man’s dungarees did the young radioman realize he was wrong. He stared down at the man’s bright white stomach. Oil coated the parts of the body not covered by his uniform. In the water, the challenge magnified. “You couldn’t grab anything except the hair or the collar and swim with them,” Highfill recalled years later. “Everything was just greasy.” The corpsman on deck yelled the dead sailor’s name to the bridge, where a signalman flashed the information to the Liberty. Sailors retrieved a body bag and zipped the remains inside. Crews hauled the body to the ship’s refrigerator, where vegetables had been cleared to make room. Searchers spotted the third and final body at 4:44 P.M. the next day. Eighteen minutes later, divers retrieved the body, this one unidentifiable.

  CHAPTER 11

  What LBJ didn’t know—and I don’t think we knew—was who had approved the attack and how far up it went in the Israeli government.

  —UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE NICHOLAS KATZENBACH

  President Johnson suffered through a long night Friday. After meeting with reporters from Newsweek and Time, the president dined alone at 10:37 P.M. and retired to the personal residence less than an hour later. Israel’s continued battle with Syria mandated that he spend most of the night on the phone. By 3:30 A.M., he had made five calls to the Situation Room, Pentagon, State Department, and America’s ambassador to the United Nations. The strain of the week’s pressure led him to summon his doctor at 4:05 A.M. over a muscular pain in his left shoulder. After a brief examination, the doctor determined Johnson was fine. Less than an hour later, the president picked up the phone again and dialed his national security adviser.

  Not until 6 A.M. did Johnson finally doze. His telephone continued to ring this morning, but the White House operator told callers that on doctor’s orders the president was not to be disturbed unless it was an eme
rgency. Two and a half hours later, the president rose, showered, and shaved. In what had become an almost daily routine that week, he descended to the basement Situation Room for another tense meeting with his advisers. More than a half dozen of them had gathered to review Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin’s latest hotline message about the war in the Middle East. Johnson digested the latest news while he ate his breakfast and figured out how to immediately pressure Israel to stop fighting.

  The Liberty in contrast sparked surprisingly little controversy for the president. In just forty-eight hours, the attack had dropped from the front pages of most national newspapers, replaced by headlines about the Middle East war, Vietnam, and debate over a record-breaking $70 billion defense spending bill. Each day as the Liberty’s casualty numbers climbed, news stories moved farther back in the pages. The dwindling coverage appeared to reflect reporters’ diminishing interest in the story that had once seemed so tantalizing, but had fizzled out following Israel’s confession that its forces had attacked in error. The barrage of press speculation that surrounded the spy ship the morning of the attack had waned to the point that no one even asked about the Liberty during the afternoon press briefing Friday at the White House.

  Many of the first editorials on the attack now appeared. Most newspapers unquestioningly accepted Israel’s claim, even though no investigation had been conducted or a more thorough explanation given. Editorial writers, unaware of the doubts that permeated the closed-door meetings in the White House and on Capitol Hill, had no reason to doubt Israel’s assertion. In its editorial, the New York Times described the attack as one of the “many mistakes that invariably occur in war.” “The Israelis, flushed with victory, apparently mistook the Liberty for an Egyptian ship—a major error in ship identification, since there are no ships under the Egyptian flag with the silhouette and the peculiar and distinctive radio and radar antennas that distinguish the Liberty and her sisters,” the paper wrote. “Nevertheless, it is clear that accident rather than design snuffed out the lives of some and caused injuries to others of the Liberty’s crew.”

  The Washington Post took a more tempered stance, arguing that the attack “must disturb and depress the whole country.” “Israel has made a prompt and complete apology, but this, of course, cannot restore the lives of the dead or make whole the wounded,” the paper wrote. “Americans will wish to have, and are entitled to have, a more complete explanation from Israel and from their own government.” Even the Virginian-Pilot, the daily newspaper serving the Liberty’s home port of Norfolk, failed to challenge the official story. War’s chaotic nature rendered such errors “inevitable.” “Its confusion, its haste, its inaccuracy have produced numerous examples in Vietnam: Americans shelling Americans and South Vietnamese, bombing raids on military targets killing and maiming helpless civilians,” observed the paper. “These same qualities were present in the Liberty incident.”

  Hints of disbelief did emerge, often from small newspapers outside the Beltway. Many puzzled over how Israel’s exceptional military could make such a blunder. The facts conflicted with common sense. The News and Courier in South Carolina described the attack as “shocking.” “It is hard to understand how an Israeli pilot could fail to identify the vessel as American,” the Charleston paper wrote. “The Egyptians don’t have any similarly configured ships, and all U.S. vessels fly the stars and stripes.” The Shreveport Times in Louisiana went further, describing Israel’s assertion that its forces attacked in error as “far fetched.” “It is not easy in clear daylight to mistake the red, white and blue and the stars of the American flag for the flag of some other nation,” the paper wrote. “Mere apology is not enough in a case of this kind. Israel should guarantee stiff punishment for those responsible for the attack.”

  Despite these overtures, the overall lack of criticism of Israel baffled some senior government leaders. The dogged press corps consistently challenged the administration on its Vietnam policy and ambitious social programs. In the case of the Liberty, the press aimed most of its critical questions at the American government. Israel in contrast enjoyed a reprieve. Reporters soon adopted the phrase “accidental attack,” a description that frustrated Pentagon officials, who felt it minimized the ferocity of the sustained assault that had killed or injured two out of every three men on board. “There was nothing accidental about it,” Phil Goulding later griped in his memoir. “It was conducted deliberately—by aircraft and by motor torpedo boat, by rocket and bomb and torpedo and gun fire. Whether it was a tragic mistake in identity is a separate question, but it was no accident.”

  The administration’s political reprieve on the Liberty ended Saturday just as the war in the Middle East concluded. The exhausted president prepared to spend a relaxing night with friends on his yacht on the Potomac. Israel had aggressively defended the actions of its air force and navy in the days after the attack on the Liberty. Within the first twenty-four hours, an Israeli military spokesman issued a statement declaring that the Liberty was unmarked. Israeli forces therefore had assumed the ship must be Egyptian. Now news reports on the wires—attributed to unnamed Pentagon sources—said some American military officials agreed that circumstances surrounding the attack made Israel’s claim of mistaken identity “plausible.”

  The White House dialed Robert McNamara soon after the story rattled off the news ticker. The unprovoked strike on the Liberty was an atrocity. The Pentagon still did not even have a concrete tally of how many sailors had been killed, a figure that climbed each day. Grieving families nationwide now struggled with the unexpected news of dead and missing loved ones. Many Liberty sailors faced catastrophic injuries and a lifetime of disability, impairment, and pain. The United States did not need to exacerbate that grief and suffering by indicating in any way that the deaths and injuries were acceptable or even faultless.

  Beyond the concerns of the families and the injured, the story also promised political problems for the administration. Only the night before, the president’s advisers had agreed to take a hard line with Israel to guarantee that the Jewish state paid reparations and punished the attackers. If comments from American officials appeared in news reports stating that Israel’s rationale for the attack was “plausible,” that would only weaken America’s bargaining position. Israel no doubt would use the comments to justify the attack and likely argue that it did not have an obligation to pay the families or the American government for the loss of life, for injuries, and for damage to the ship.

  After he hung up with the White House, the defense secretary picked up his hotline to Goulding. McNamara barked that the attack was neither plausible nor excusable. He refused to tolerate anyone in the Pentagon suggesting otherwise. McNamara ordered the Defense Department put out a statement immediately refuting the comments that now appeared on the wires. Goulding dictated a three-sentence statement that the Chicago Tribune would later declare came “close to setting foreign policy.” Within twenty minutes, Goulding’s superiors approved the statement and the Pentagon released it to the press.

  “We in the Department of Defense cannot accept an attack upon a clearly marked noncombatant United States naval ship in international waters as ‘plausible’ under any circumstances whatever,” the release read. “The suggestion that the United States flag was not visible and the implication that the identification markings were in any way inadequate are both unrealistic and inaccurate. The identification markings of U.S. naval vessels have proven satisfactory for international recognition for nearly 200 years.”

  Eugene Rostow summoned Israeli ambassador Avraham Harman for a meeting Saturday at the State Department’s headquarters. Two days had passed since the attack on the Liberty and many of the president’s senior advisers still fumed. The latest news reports buried on page 12 of the Washington Post this morning listed thirty-three killed, including nine confirmed dead and twenty-four missing, presumably sealed inside the Liberty’s flooded forward compartments. The news showed that the number of injured hovered at sevent
y-five with fifteen sailors seriously wounded. Those publicly released numbers were far less than the 171 who were actually injured.

  The Special Committee of the National Security Council had agreed during its meeting in the Cabinet Room the night before that the State Department would oversee the negotiations with Israel concerning the attack. The administration’s hard-line approach included demanding a better explanation for how the attack occurred, pushing for financial reparations for the killed and injured, and guaranteeing that Israel punish the attackers. Rostow’s job this morning was to hammer these points with the Israeli ambassador.

  The third-ranking officer in the State Department, Rostow possessed a gifted intellect. He had enrolled at Yale University in 1929 after scoring 100 percent on his entrance exam, a feat that led the New York Times to dub him the “perfect freshman.” Rostow graduated Phi Beta Kappa at age nineteen. He then studied economics at Cambridge and earned a law degree from Yale, where he edited the university’s prestigious law journal and later served as dean of the law school until joining the State Department in 1966.