Roland Popp, the scholar who sent me the Nixon memo where RMN inveighed against "domestic political considerations" when it came to Mideast policy, has sent me two other letters in a related vein, ones he picked up at the LBJ Library. I can’t link them; there are copyright issues. But let me quote and summarize.
The first letter was written by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson to John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, in February 1957 after the Suez crisis. LBJ was then the Democratic leader in the Senate. The letter is a stern admonition to Dulles that he should not pressure Israel to withdraw from Gaza and lands in the Sinai near the Gulf of Aqaba, lands it had occupied in the ’56 war, which it had initiated, along with England and France.
"I feel I should tell you, most frankly, how disturbed I have been by recent stories in the press, which stories have appeared under the bylines of most reputable correspondents, that serious consideration is being given in the General Assembly of the United Nations to imposing economic sanctions against the State of Israel." These sanctions would be "unwise" and unfair. One has to look at the "root causes" of the trouble in the Middle East, Johnson said, and one of these causes is that when Israel withdraws from these lands it will have no guarantee of security from Egyptian attacks. "[T]he merits, the justice, and the morality in this situation are clear," Johnson wrote.
The second letter is the stunner. It was penned a week later, from New York, by the president of the American Jewish Committee. "I realize that your letter to the Secretary of State on February 11, is off the record and not subject to any public treatment," said Irving Engel. But the Senator had passed on a copy to Engel, in confidence, through a Jewish lawyer. Engel went on:
With this letter you have, to my feeling, truly lived up to the meaning of the Ecclesiastes’ word: "There is a time to keep silent, a time to speak." You have, Senator, spoken the frank and creative words of a statesman, a guardian of the moral principles of America, and a defender of the true interests of this country. On behalf of the American Jewish Committee… I wish to give you thanks for a momentous act of wisdom and courage.
I’m not historian enough to judge the Suez question. Israel did
withdraw from those territories, and Egypt’s subsequent militarization of the border
led (probably along with Israel’s getting the bomb from France) to the ’67 war. But it never ends. Today the rationale is offered, as it was 50 years
ago, that Israel cannot withdraw from the West Bank because it would be
vulnerable to attack if it did so.
What the two letters offer is an echo of what Abba Eban said in an essay I mentioned the other day: the crucial importance to Israel of American Jewish "pressure and influence" on U.S. policymakers back in the 50s and 60s. Why was the Jewish community so important to a senator from Texas? Johnson had been put forward as a presidential candidate in ’56, he would run again in ’60. Johnson was a political animal; and his blunt letter to Dulles seems a transparent effort to cultivate support from Jews. He kept the letter private while making sure it got to big Jews in New York. It is important to remember that Dulles was widely despised in the Jewish community; he had backed Hitler through the early 30s. A "bastard," I remember hearing in my childhood.
A cursory search of Johnson biographies suggests that no one has written about this episode. As Engel said, there’s a time to be silent and a time to speak. Isn’t it time to speak of this neverending element in our politics?
