by James Scott
Rostow ranked as one of the president’s most pro-Israel advisers. Born in Brooklyn to a socialist father, Rostow was proud of his Jewish heritage and even slipped Yiddish into casual conversations. His support of Israel was so pronounced during the Middle East crisis that one senior intelligence official would later say he acted as though he were a lawyer for Israel. In contrast to his colleagues, whose strong comments on the Liberty the night before offended him, Rostow refused to believe Israel knowingly targeted the spy ship. “I could never imagine any Israeli, no matter what his politics were, deliberately firing on the American flag,” Rostow later recalled. “I was convinced, and I am convinced, that it was a pure accident.”
Regardless of his personal views, Rostow soldiered on this muggy Saturday morning in his meeting with Ambassador Harman. He demanded Israel give the United States a “complete explanation” for the attack. The British-born ambassador produced a letter addressed to Dean Rusk, outlining Israel’s commitment to pay damages to the affected families and the American government. Harman’s message echoed Prime Minister Eshkol’s offer the day before to the American ambassador in Tel Aviv to “make retribution to the families of the victims.”
“The Government of Israel deeply regrets this tragic accident. The Ambassador of Israel has been instructed to inform the Honorable Secretary of State that the Government of Israel is prepared to make amends for the tragic loss of life and material damage,” Harman wrote in the one-page letter. “The Ambassador of Israel expresses once again in the name of the Government of Israel its deep condolences to the Government of the United States and its sympathy to all the bereaved families.”
Elsewhere in the State Department that afternoon, Rusk channeled his hostility over the attack into a stinging three-page letter to the ambassador. Aided by Katzenbach and Walt Rostow, Rusk left no doubt that he didn’t believe Israel’s assertion that its forces had attacked in error. A rough draft of the letter—complete with scratch-outs and handwritten edits—states that the attack “cannot simply be dismissed as an accident.”
The men toned down the final draft of the letter only slightly. Rather than call the attack deliberate, Rusk instead outlined the facts surrounding the assault and questioned how Israeli forces could have made such an incredible blunder. “At the time of the attack, the U.S.S. Liberty was flying the American flag and its identification was clearly indicated in large white letters and numerals on its hull. It was broad daylight and the weather conditions were excellent,” Rusk fumed. “Experience demonstrates that both the flag and the identification number of the vessel were readily visible from the air.”
The secretary of state pointed out that the United States knew Israeli planes had circled the Liberty several times prior to the attack in an apparent effort to identify the spy ship. Unbeknownst to Rusk this afternoon, State Department legal advisers would later determine that at least eight reconnaissance flights buzzed the spy ship, starting at dawn the day of the attack. Rusk wrote that the United States believed that Israel had identified the Liberty—or at least its nationality—prior to the attack. Under the circumstances, he described the assault as “quite literally incomprehensible.”
“As a minimum, the attack must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life,” Rusk wrote. “The silhouette and conduct of the U.S.S. Liberty readily distinguished it from any vessel that could have been considered hostile. The U.S.S. Liberty was peacefully engaged, posed no threat whatsoever to the torpedo boats, and obviously carried no armament affording it a combat capability. It could and should have been scrutinized visually at close range before torpedoes were fired.”
Rusk concluded his letter by informing the ambassador that he expected Israel to compensate America for the damages and guarantee that the Israeli military never again endanger American forces. But reparations and promises were not enough. To convince the American people, Israel needed to punish the attackers. “The Secretary of State wishes to make clear that the United States Government expects the Government of Israel also to take the disciplinary measures which international law requires in the event of wrongful conduct by the military personnel of a State.”
Later that afternoon, Eugene Rostow gave the secretary of state’s stern letter to Harman. Before reading the note, Harman told Rostow that Israel had decided to appoint a military inquiry to investigate the attack. The ambassador defended Israel’s position. He pointed out the Jewish state did not know in advance of the Liberty’s presence, noted that the ship sailed in a war zone, and reminded Rostow that Israel promptly apologized for the attack. Harman urged the United States to treat the attack as a “tragic mistake” for which the Israeli government had accepted “full responsibility.”
Rostow told the ambassador that he agreed that the attack was a tragic mistake, but in keeping with the State Department’s firm line, he “added that circumstances surrounding it very mysterious. Word used in our note was ‘incomprehensible.’” Rostow then echoed Rusk’s demand that Israel punish the attackers. The United States planned to treat Israel no differently from any other nation under the same circumstances. Harman reiterated his hope that the United States would treat the attack as a “tragic mistake.”
The stress of the week had exhausted Johnson, who decided to take the rest of the weekend off. At 5:12 P.M. Saturday he left the White House and headed to the Anacostia Naval Yard. There Johnson boarded the presidential yacht at 5:23 P.M. to spend the night on the Potomac River, leaving behind the Situation Room, ringing phones, and clattering teletypes. Nine minutes after the president’s arrival, the captain steered the 104-foot Sequoia away from the pier. Built in 1925, the wooden yacht served as the flagship of the secretary of the Navy, though Johnson commandeered it as his own. The president spent so much time on the Sequoia that he had ordered upgrades. He had the tiny doorknob in his stateroom replaced with a larger one and the shower floor lowered several inches to accommodate his six-foot-three-inch frame. Johnson ordered the removal of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s elevator in the main salon to make room for a bar. After an 8 P.M. dinner, the president and his friends reclined on the top deck to watch the short films Journey to the Pacific and Helicopter Rescue in Vietnam in the warm June evening, the Sequoia’s smokestack serving as the movie screen. The president wished his guests goodnight at 11 P.M. and retreated to his stateroom.
The president woke early Sunday morning. He enjoyed breakfast and then read the newspapers and reviewed classified papers sent out from the Situation Room. Even though he told guests he had a “fair night’s rest,” the president remained tired. The sudden war in the Middle East, coupled with the associated political pressures, had exacerbated the strains he already felt because of Vietnam. Nearly every day this week, he had either been up late or awoken early because of the swift moving war in the desert. Following breakfast, the president retired to his cabin for a nap. That afternoon following lunch, he again retreated to his cabin to rest. The president rallied in the afternoon and even led the singing of happy birthday for a staff member before the Sequoia tied up at the pier at 7:10 P.M. On his own until Lady Bird returned from a four-day trip to New England, the president enjoyed a quiet dinner at aide Jack Valenti’s home in northwest Washington, before returning to the White House at 10:39 P.M. and bed soon after. He faced another difficult week ahead that would include sorting out the mess in the Middle East.
The Special Committee of the National Security Council sat down at 6:30 P.M. Monday in the White House cabinet room to discuss the latest developments in the war. The president, busy meeting with the speaker of the Texas legislature, then with a union leader, slipped into the Cabinet Room an hour late, where he doodled cartoon faces on White House stationery. Since the committee’s meeting Friday evening, events had changed dramatically in the Middle East. The fighting had ended over the weekend and the full scope of Israel’s victory had begun to emerge. In only six days, Israel had trounced its Arab neighbors. For ever
y Israeli killed or injured, the Arabs suffered twenty-five casualties. Captured territories totaled forty-two thousand square miles, more than tripling the size of the Jewish state. Israel had seized the Golan Heights from Syria, reached the Suez Canal in Egypt, and captured the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The thirteen advisers gathered around the elongated table likely felt a sense of relief that the war had ended without drawing the United States and Soviet Union into the conflict. Concerns over the war’s messy aftermath soon replaced any feeling of reprieve. The United States now had to help hammer out a lasting peace plan, limit arms proliferation in the region, and determine the future of Israel’s captured territories.
The Liberty was the first topic of discussion during the two and a half hours the committee met. Many of the president’s advisers had voiced outrage at the previous meeting, calling the attack “incomprehensible” and urging the president to treat Israel no different than the Arabs or Soviets. The circumstances surrounding the attack—combined with the fact that the Liberty flew a flag and had freshly painted hull markings—ruled out friendly fire in the eyes of many. “People in office assumed that it was not just an accident,” recalled NSC staff member Harold Saunders. “Most of us knew that they were guilty of a deliberate attack,” added Lucius Battle. “There was nobody I think who did not believe that the Israelis knew it was an American ship that they were attacking,” remembered Nicholas Katzenbach.
The evening’s discussion centered on a letter Israeli ambassador Harman had given to the State Department earlier that day. Harman’s three-page letter served as a rebuttal to Rusk’s stinging note delivered Saturday. The ambassador was no longer conciliatory. Rusk’s letter had infuriated the Israeli diplomats. Ephraim Evron, the embassy’s second in command, had described it as “vicious” in an urgent telegram to Jerusalem. He complained that American officials had already determined—even before an investigation had taken place—that Israeli forces had positively identified the nationality of the Liberty prior to the assault. “The clear conclusion is that our forces had attacked deliberately,” Evron wrote to the Foreign Ministry. “This is contrary to the initial reactions of the Administration and the Pentagon, that had a lower tone and were directed towards calming down.”
Eugene Rostow had stoked the anger when he tipped off the ambassador over the weekend that the administration’s hard line on the Liberty “made things easier” with the Arabs. McGeorge Bundy in fact had even urged Johnson to capitalize on the attack to weaken accusations of American support for Israel. Bundy drafted talking points on the Middle East crisis for the president and placed the Liberty at the top of his list. He noted that his suggestion was “probably for more use in the Middle East than in the United States.” “The U.S. continues to take very seriously the careless and destructive attack on the USS Liberty,” Bundy wrote. “There is no excuse for repeated attacks on a plainly marked U.S. naval vessel and while in the President’s language the prompt Israeli acknowledgment and apology was ‘to their credit,’ these acknowledgments do not change the fact that this most unfortunate attack occurred.”
In his reply to Rusk, Harman now challenged the assertion that Israeli forces had identified the spy ship prior to the attack and rejected the insinuation that Israel deliberately tried to sink the Liberty. “The Government of Israel feels that the statement that ‘there is every reason to believe that the U.S.S. Liberty was identified, or at least her nationality determined, by Israeli aircraft approximately one hour before the attack’ is unfounded,” Harman wrote. “Nor can the Government of Israel accept the statement that ‘the attack must be condemned as an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.’” The ambassador went further, blaming the United States for failing to alert Israel of the Liberty’s presence. “The area was in fact being used by the United Arab Republic for purposes of hostilities against Israel,” he wrote. “It would be appreciated if the Government of Israel could be given timely information of the approach by United States vessels to shores where the Israel Defense Forces are in authority.”
Harman’s letter only fueled the hostility of the president’s advisers. Saunders, who recorded the meeting minutes on a legal pad that evening, captured the frustration. “Consensus: reaction sour. ‘Terrible note.’” The United States now faced a larger problem. The “strong and firm line” the committee had agreed to pursue with Israel had backfired. Harman’s letter clearly showed that the Jewish state would not be bullied. The challenge facing the men this evening was how to proceed. The advisers debated releasing Rusk’s letter to the press. Nearly three dozen sailors had been killed in the attack and many more injured. An American ship almost had been lost. Rusk’s letter would reveal to the public the disbelief senior officials felt over Israel’s explanation and show that America did not tolerate the killing of its sailors. The move also promised to deflate the swelling pro-Israel fervor that had gripped much of the nation, giving the administration a political reprieve from the stifling pressure. Saunders had suggested a similar strategy days earlier, before America even knew the full extent of the casualties. “With 10 men killed and 100 wounded, should we make public our protest?” he asked in a memo to McGeorge Bundy, the president’s special consultant. “If we don’t we’ll look like real Israeli patsies. Would protest help cool off the Jewish community?”
Releasing Rusk’s letter guaranteed other problems. American leaders already complained about the lack of leverage over the Jewish state. The United States had urged Israel not to launch the war, but it was now clear Israel had been the aggressor. The Jewish state also had claimed that it had no territorial ambitions. The United States had publicly affirmed its commitment to the “political independence and territorial integrity” of all Middle Eastern nations. The president had used those exact words in a speech broadcast on radio and television twenty days earlier. American leaders had grown alarmed that Israel now planned to keep at least some of the captured lands. Failure to relinquish the seized territories promised to further complicate American relations in the Arab world, given the close ties between the United States and Israel. The committee’s meeting minutes reflect the president’s concern. “How do we get out of this predicament?” he asked. McNamara agreed. “We’re in a heck of a jam on territorial integrity.” A public airing of Rusk’s letter about the Liberty promised only to anger the Israelis and further erode American leverage.
The Middle East war served as only one variable in a larger foreign policy equation. Despite the recent attention on the conflict, the president and his advisers remained focused on Vietnam. That war would prove the deciding factor in Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection in 1968. The news that clattered off the teletype remained grim. Two more American fighters had been shot down Sunday, bringing the total number of planes lost to 581. The unpopular war claimed an average of twenty-six American lives each day. Though thousands of miles separated Vietnam and the Middle East, the two were intrinsically linked in the arena of domestic politics. That connection had only strengthened in the past week. Many American Jews who played a prominent role in the antiwar movement had emerged as hawks on the Middle East conflict, urging the United States to protect Israel and even protesting outside the White House and State Department. The president needed only to check with the mail department for confirmation. The Middle East war produced the largest surge of letters, telegrams, and postcards of any single issue during Johnson’s presidency. The burden of the overwhelming mail was reflected in a memo to Rusk. “During the past ten days, we have analyzed upwards of 50,000 letters and other messages,” the memo stated. “The White House has an additional 120,000 letters, which will all be answered. I’m relieved to report that several other agencies are being asked to help with this job.”
Set against the backdrop of these foreign policy concerns and the president’s weakened domestic political standing, the Liberty’s importance faded. The unprovoked attack angered the president and many of his adv
isers, but the leaders took a pragmatic view. The Liberty’s death toll amounted only to roughly one day’s casualty count in Vietnam. The week of the attack saw 176 Americans killed in Vietnam and 928 injured, down from 214 killed the week before and 1,161 wounded. The United States wanted to make sure Israel compensated the families and punished the attackers, but the attack did not warrant a break with the Jewish state. The United States had to focus on peace in the Middle East and Vietnam. “There are lots of terrible things that happen in wars,” recalled Saunders. “Given the other stakes—as horrible as this was—this was not something that belonged on the geopolitical stage.” Even Rusk, who appeared particularly troubled by the attack, agreed. “However outrageous the attack on the Liberty was, there remains the policy question as to whether that episode should have been blown into a major confrontation between Israel and the United States,” he later wrote in a letter to one of the Liberty’s officers. “Those who carry the ultimate responsibility, however, know that there are times when one has to pick up the pieces and not let everything fall apart because of an occurrence of this sort.”
The “strong and firm line” softened. Saunders recorded the decision in the meeting minutes. “Consensus: Publishing exchange wouldn’t do any good.” The State Department would seek a better explanation for the attack, but otherwise the administration reversed course. Rather than openly confront Israel, the United States moved to protect it from possible public relations fallout, the same rationale that had prompted some senior officials to previously suggest sinking the Liberty at sea to prevent reporters from photographing it. The advisers agreed that Harman’s letter blaming the United States for the attack represented a domestic political liability for the president. If the United States were forced to release it to the press—or if it leaked—the callous letter would outrage the American public. Many American Jews, already angry over the neutrality blunder, would blame the administration for stirring up anti-Israel sentiment. The beleaguered president, anxious to retain Jewish support and refocus on Vietnam, couldn’t afford the domestic political controversy. “It was no help if you had a lot of people getting angry at the Israelis,” recalled Katzenbach. “If the Israelis screw up the relations, then the Jewish groups are going to bail out the Israelis. It ends up with you having a more difficult situation than you would have otherwise.”