Jim DiEugenio Wrote:Totally agree Dawn.

Its people like Jennings, and Maddow, and Rather, and Brokaw who have allowed the cover up to endure for so long. About both the assassination and who JFK was. In Brokaw's special for the 50th he had that clown Richard Reeves try to deny that JFK was withdrawing from Vietnam. BTW, Brokaw used the same consultant that Jennings did ten years earlier, Mr. Handy Man, Gus Russo. Need to cover up the JFK case? Give Gus a call. Or--Mr. Single Bullet Fact-- Dale Myers.

BTW, those are nice photos Tracy. This is what JFK was pushing for: the moderate secularists in the area would channel democracy and progress into the lower classes. Avoiding the extremes of monarchy and Islamic fundamentalism.

When Kennedy was murdered, Nasser went into a month long depression and demanded his funeral be shown on national TV four times. Sadat was the first person at the embassy to sign his condolences. Ben Bella of Algeria declared a week of mourning.

In 1964, mobs in Egypt and Indonesia assaulted US owned libraries. Three years later, after LBJ reversed so many of Kennedy's policies in the region in favor of Israel, Egypt broke relations with the USA.

Except for Carter, its been pretty much downhill there ever since.

Love to see Rachel interview, not Goldstein about Vietnam, but Robert Rakove of Stanford about Kennedy and the Middle East.

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:Kennedy was dead set against Israel getting the bomb and made this a very strong bargaining point with Ben Gurion in letters to him.

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:Its not Ken.

This is a reference to two things. First, RFK really did not like the Shah. And it was mutual. So Bobby commissioned a private study on what it would take to bring back Mossadegh.

The Shah really understood that RFK was serious. He responded with the White Revolution.

The problem was that the after JFK passed, the attitude by LBJ toward the Shah was much more softer due to Johnson's close relations with the Rockefellers, especially Nelson. Then of course, it got worse under Nixon due to the Kissinger/David Rockefeller compact.

The Shah, if I recall, did not attend RFK's funeral.

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:Its not Ken.

This is a reference to two things. First, RFK really did not like the Shah. And it was mutual. So Bobby commissioned a private study on what it would take to bring back Mossadegh.

The Shah really understood that RFK was serious. He responded with the White Revolution.

The problem was that the after JFK passed, the attitude by LBJ toward the Shah was much more softer due to Johnson's close relations with the Rockefellers, especially Nelson. Then of course, it got worse under Nixon due to the Kissinger/David Rockefeller compact.

The Shah, if I recall, did not attend RFK's funeral.

If JFK was pro Israel then why did Nasser order his funeral shown four times on national TV, and why was Sadat the first person at the embassy to sign in?

Kennedy was dead set against Israel getting the bomb and made this a very strong bargaining point with Ben Gurion in letters to him.

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:1.) Malcolm Blunt actually was the guy who somehow got those letters from JFK to Ben Gurion out of the archives. And he showed me that one plus another one he had.

2.) RK, I had heard about this before, the foiled assassination plot with those two names. But I could not verify it. Is it really true?

If so, then I agree with you. Its very incriminating.

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:1.) Malcolm Blunt actually was the guy who somehow got those letters from JFK to Ben Gurion out of the archives. And he showed me that one plus another one he had.

2.) RK, I had heard about this before, the foiled assassination plot with those two names. But I could not verify it. Is it really true?

If so, then I agree with you. Its very incriminating.

Ken:

The best book on JFK's Mideast policy I know of is Rakove's. What Kennedy was trying to do, as he was in almost every key area, was to counteract what he perceived as errors by Dulles and Eisenhower. In this instance, he perceived that Dulles had made a mistake in dumping Nasser and Aswan. He also thought that Dulles had multiplied that mistake by trying to use Saudi Arabia's monarchy as a counterweight to Nasser, for example in the Bagdhad Pact.

Kennedy actually liked Nasser. As Mac Bundy once said, Kennedy was actually fascinated by the Egyptian leader. And he told Bundy that repairing the relationship with Egypt and Nasser was going to be a high priority with his administration. (Please note, Nasser was a pan Arabist and a socialist.) To him and RFK, Nasser and Sadat should be favored over the monarchies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia because they held promise of modernizing, and channeling ideas about economic and social progress and democracy into a moderate and stable course. (See the photos Tracy posted above.) For Kennedy, the monarchies in Iran and Saudi Arabia were dangerous examples to ally oneself with because they held no promise of any future progress and they also made it possible for an explosion of Islamic fundamentalism to take hold.

In his first administration, what Kennedy wanted to do was to ally himself with the moderate elements in the Middle East, and do what he could to encourage them e.g. Nasser's importation of troops into the Yemen civil war. He also wanted to make it clear he did not like the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran. He did both.

In his second administration, he then wanted to discourage the militarization of the Arab/Israeli rivalry and then begin to address the whole Palestinian problem. In my reading of Rakove and others, this is the best précis I can make so far. But understand, everyone in this JFK field has been so obsessed with Vietnam and Cuba that I am a pioneer here. So I have little doubt that I am missing parts of it.

Concerning Johnson saying he was continuing JFK's policy of friendship with Israel, it has been my experience in studying Kennedy and Johnson that whenever I read or see LBJ say that he is "continuing his predecessor's foreign policy", the antennae in my temples immediately go up, and an alarm starts ringing in my head, accompanied by the blaring announcement: "line of BS ahead".