The cool Zionist.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Book Review: SUPPORT ANY FRIEND: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance - Book Review

SUPPORT ANY FRIEND: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance by Warren Bass Oxford University Press, $30.00

IT IS THE GREAT MERIT OF Warren Bass's Support Any Friend to fix upon the Kennedy era asthe fulcrum for U.S.-Israeli relations and their impact on the wider Middle East. A fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Bass offers what is surely the definitive account of John F. Kennedy's Israel policy. To provide perspective on the decisions of the Kennedy administration, Bass has done a tremendous amount of legwork, consulting archives in the United States and Israel to produce a lively narrative of how different U.S. presidents have had different attitudes toward Israel. Some have had a romantic attachment to the idea of a Jewish homeland; others have kept a cool distance from it. Kennedy seems to have fallen into a third category of cool attachment.

As president, Woodrow Wilson was partial to the idea of a Jewish state because of his own messianic character. Louis Brandeis, America's first Jewish Supreme Court justice (appointed by Wilson in 1916), convinced him to accept a British protectorate in Palestine and to back the Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Wilson, Bass says, "followed his idealistic predilections, his chums, and his views of political prudence." On the other hand, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's record was more equivocal: He granted no entrance to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, while paying lip-service to the idea of a Jewish state.

Harry Truman recognized Israel in 1948--to the despair of the State Department and almost all his top advisers. The establishment types, who believed America's role was not to boost the aspirations of the fledgling Jewish state, but to cozy up to the oil-rich Arab states, thought that Truman had committed a horrible blunder. Truman disagreed. A lifetime of historical reading instilled in him the conviction that the Jews deserved a homeland. When speaking at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York years later, he said, "I am Cyrus," referring to the Persian King who liberated the Jews from exile in Babylon.

With Dwight Eisenhower, relations, such as they were, had a distinctly frosty edge. Eisenhower pulled the rug out from under Britain, France, and Israel in 1956, turning Suez into a crisis. A good case can be made that toppling Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power would have set the Middle...