One of the fascinating shifts in US policy occurs between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Kennedy had opposed Israel getting nukes, Johnson was a wimp on the question. Kennedy had stood up for the return of refugees, Johnson didn’t push it. As historian Geoffrey Wawro said at Friday’s “National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel Special Relationship,” Kennedy was far more concerned than Johnson about the impact of US support for Israel on Arab opinion, and Johnson was far less friendly to Nasser than Kennedy.
“I’ve got three Cohens in my cabinet,” Johnson boasted after Kennedy’s death, Wawro related. “No president had done more for the Jews than he would.”
Robert Caro is of course the indefatigable biographer of Lyndon Johnson. The latest volume of his multi-volume pursuit is called The Passage of Power, and focuses on the transition from the Kennedy to the Johnson administrations. I picked it up in a friend’s house recently and saw that Israel was mentioned once or twice in the index.
Caro brings up Robert Kennedy’s visit to Israel and Palestine in 1948. Kennedy had just graduated from Harvard and filed four stories to the Boston Post. Caro:
But when he arrived in the Middle East and saw, with his own eyes, Jews fighting for their existence against overwhelming odds, and was told by a twenty-three-year-old Israeli woman (“I never saw anyone so tired,” he wrote his mother) about her four brothers fighting in the Haganah, the views he expressed in his articles for the Post were not the views of his father [a reputed anti-Semite]. “The Jews in Palestine have become an immensely proud and determined people… a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation,” he wrote. They have “an undying spirit” the Arabs could never have; as for the United States, its failure to come more strongly to Israel’s assistance should be a matter of shame. “We are certainly not the great little saints we imagine ourselves.” And there was another noteworthy aspect of the articles, written as they were by such a mediocre student: they showed, as Arthur Schlesinger writes, “a maturity, cogency and, from time to time, literary finish” quite “creditable for a football player of twenty-two.”
It wasn’t only his reaction to Jews that gave the hint, it was his reaction to the embattled to the oppressed— to anyone, it began to become apparent, who was the underdog…
Caro is of course writing about the Nakba, the period in which 750,000 Palestinians fled and/or were expelled from Palestine as part of Israel’s creation. You would have no idea about the Palestinian experience from his rendering.
Why do I think that Caro’s next book, on Johnson as president, is going to do a poor job of treating the Six Day War and the general question of US policy toward Israel?
“Maturity,” “Cogency” “Literary Finish” Does it occur to Caro that Daddy was paying for a ghostwriter? When you’re quoting Schlesinger on the awesomeness of a Kennedy you’re pretty much already abandoning all critical standards.
“The Jews in Palestine have become an immensely proud and determined people… a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation,” he wrote. They have “an undying spirit” the Arabs could never have”
That’s straight out of Exodus .
Thinking Jews like Arendt saw where Israel was headed.
All that violence couldn’t end well
And guess what ? It didn’t
I’ve read some of the things JFK wrote when he was in his early 20s. He was a more gifted writer as a neophyte than Caro, a celebrated writer in his own right, is after half a century of practice. And Caro’s not a bad writer. I’ve read a few of his books, but he doesn’t approach the intellectual gifts of Kennedy, especially as a writer, which must surely sting deeply to a vain man like Caro. Which could also explain the bitterness that is apparent whenever he writes about Kennedy.
Ａｎｄ ａｌｌ ｔｈａｔ ＷＷＩＩ ｓｕｒｐｌｕｓ ｗｅｎｔ ｗｈｅｒｅ？
Caro was/is merely a careerist, he knew who buttered his bread, we can’t expect him to be more brave than the Nakba deniers at Binart’s Open Zion, even now only a member of the tribe could edit MW or write ‘Goliath’.
Which is why some past Soviet citizens, consider the west even more totalitarian. MW and EI is our Samizat, but far less penetrating of mainstream culture.
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“Caro’s books have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, first under editor in chief Robert Gottlieb and then by Sonny Mehta, “who took over the Johnson project – enthusiastically – after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987.” ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Caro#Bibliography
“when Sonny Mehta, my boss [the president of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group within Random House], gave me the responsibility for running Schocken, we agreed that Schocken should focus on its traditional and core publishing strength, which is books that have some connection to the Jewish experience. ”
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/a-conversation-with-altie-karper-1.344010
Nakba denial and rape culture at Peter Beinart’s Open Zion
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/benjamin-doherty/nakba-denial-and-rape-culture-peter-beinarts-open-zion