The Pierre Hotel incident

The Pierre

Recently Tom Friedman upset people by writing that the Congress is “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Hopefully, Friedman’s piece signals the decadence of the lobby. And the golden age? Here is pro-Israel historian Melvin Urofsky’s version of a famous back-room incident in the 1960 Kennedy campaign, recounted in his 1978 book celebrating the Israel lobby, We Are One! American Jewry and Israel, in which Kennedy was interviewed by the nascent lobby in New York. 

Some things never change. Or haven’t in 50 years anyway. The Pierre Hotel incident, per Urofsky, resulted in important shifts in American policy.

This back-room scene anticipates Obama’s struggles with Jewish backers this year, and the crucial difference between Obama’s rhetoric and action on settlements– words I will boldface below in the Kennedy context. The Israeli colonization of the West Bank is a lot like the Israeli denial of the Palestinian right of return in the 1950s and 1960s. International law was and is clear. American presidents were all for the right of return. They did nothing about it besides lip service.

When Kennedy ran for reelection to the Senate in 1958, he discovered that a number of Jewish voters in Massachusetts blamed him for cuts in a particular AID grant to Israel. He went to John McCormack, who later succeeded Sam Rayburn as speaker of the House and had excellent relations with Massachusetts Jewish leaders, for help. [McCormack explained the legislative palavering to leaders, saying Kennedy was actually trying to save funding for Israel] While the Jewish leaders present may not yet have trusted Kennedy, they did respect McCormack and took his word for what had happened. As a result, much of the anti-Kennedy sentiment in the community lessened…

Probably the key incident in the Kennedy wooing took place shortly after the Democratic convention [in 1960]. Meyer Feldman, an influential Washington lawyer and adviser to Kennedy, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, and philanthropist and businessman Abraham Feinberg gathered about thirty of the nation’s top Jewish leaders at Feinberg’s apartment in the Hotel Pierre in New York to meet the Democratic candidate. Kennedy had agreed ahead of time that there would be no limits on the type of questions asked, and after an initial fifteen-minute presentation the candidate fielded a wide range of questions which were, in Feinberg’s words, “hard, even brutal,” and dealt with his father’s alleged anti-Semitism and Kennedy’s own stand on key issues. After over an hour of this, the thirty skeptical men who had entered the apartment changed their minds about the Massachusetts senator. Although there was to have been no fund-raising, after Kennedy left, the group spontaneously put together a loan fund of $500,000 to be made available to the Kennedy campaign…

[As president, Kennedy] recognized that in such areas as refugee repatriation, Arab-Israel negotiations, and plans to divert Jordan River waters for large-scale agriculture and power projects, all of which had become extremely sensitive matters thanks to Eisenhower and Dulles, no government in Israel could survive which conceded as much as some of the State and Defense departments analysts demanded. What Kennedy did, much of it through Feldman, was to signal Israel on how to distinguish between rhetoric and action….

[A]lthough the American government publicly called on Israel to settle the refugee problem and joined in the United Nations censure of Israel after the 1962 retaliatory raids on Syria, the Administration also increased foreign aid, quietly buried a number of potentially dangerous anti-Israel proposals, and entered for the first time into a long-term military-assistance program.

You can read Abba Eban’s version of the Pierre Hotel incident here.

Also, as you consider the Nullification of American Policy that occurred under Kennedy– surely in some measure as a result of campaign contributions– you will understand why the brave AP reporter Matt Lee at the State Department is so angry. No one is going to pull the wool over his eyes. He sees the nullification of policy going on before his eyes. He calls State on it. And they give him more Rhetoric, not Action. Matt Lee’s impatience stands for millions of Americans, including many, many progressive Jews.