16-06-2015, 07:25 PM
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".
Thanks again, this helps. As you may have imagined, I'm having a 'discussion' with someone in this regard, so I appreciate the 'ammo' ;-)
