SUPPORT ANY FRIEND: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.–Israel Alliance

A forested memorial in Israel, Yad Kennedy, includes the sculpted stump of a felled tree, a tribute to the president cut down in his youth. To Bass, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy presidency, despite the professional Arabists in the State Department, shifted America's Middle East policy toward Israel, selling arms to the Jewish state, fudging inspections of its nuclear initiative and openly engaging in security cooperation. The intransigence of Arab states toward Israel had eroded the stern limits on arms sales to Israel set by the chilly Eisenhower-Dulles regime. Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser had gambled on an unprofitable merger with Syria and a hemorrhaging venture into Yemen to try to create, with Soviet Cold War assistance, a noose around Israel. It failed, and Kennedy's suspicion of Nasser's pro-Soviet position distanced the two men. The young president found that he had little to lose in cautiously supporting Israel, as the Soviet Union was openly cajoling some Arab nationalists into becoming clients who would prove useless while repelling others who feared for their thrones. Despite breaking foreign policy taboos, the Kennedy administration, Bass concedes, hardly addressed the intractable regional problems. Readers may nod over Bass's relentless detail, but he establishes his case that the Kennedy administration was "the true origin of America's alliance" with Israel, illuminating in the process some new and humanizing facets of Kennedy's management style and rehabilitating the savvy and subtle leadership skills of Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, successor to the combative David Ben-Gurion. B&w photos. (June)