Book review: A messy shipwreck
On Jun 8, 1967, during a Six Day War, unmarked jet planes and shoot boats pounded a USS Liberty, a notice boat in general waters off a seashore of Egypt. Some 34 American sailors were killed and 174 wounded. Within a day, Israel concurred a responsibility, though insisted a conflict had been an accident.
At a time, and in a indirect decades, allegations circulated that officials during a top levels in a governments of a United States and Israel had designed a operation to expel a censure on Egypt, providing a stratagem for a bombing of Cairo and a dismissal of Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser from power.
In Blood in a Water: How a US and Israel Conspired to Ambush a USS Liberty, Joan Mellen, an emerita highbrow of artistic essay and novel during Temple University (whose books embody Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in a Robber Baron Culture of Texas; The Great Game in Cuba: CIA and a Cuban Revolution; and A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and a Case That Should Have Changed History) provides nonetheless another full-throated publicity of swindling and cover-up.
Explanations of a conflict have, indeed, been unsuitable and unconvincing. Legitimate questions, therefore, can and should be raised. But Blood in a Water does not yield a arguable comment of what indeed happened. The book is feeble organized, numbingly boring and full of opinions masquerading as facts. Mellen has finished probably no archival research. She relies roughly wholly on a uncorroborated claims of survivors and antagonistic members of infantry and comprehension agencies in both countries.
Mellen does not explain since boss Lyndon Johnson chose a fake dwindle stratagem as a best choice to disintegrate Nasser. Or since he wanted a United States to enter a Six Day War and use arch weapons, given threats by a Soviet Union to urge Egypt. Mellen insists, though evidence, that to safeguard that no one on a USS Liberty remained alive to attest that Israel, not Egypt, pounded them, Johnson removed planes sent to rescue a ship. She maintains as good that 4 planes with arch warheads and 4 armed with required weapons were 7 mins from Cairo when Johnson removed them (presumably, since he knew by afterwards that a conflict could not be pinned on Egypt).
Mellen declares that Johnson was a fight rapist who certified a conflict on a USS Maddox in a Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as a approach to get authorisation from a US Congress for an escalation of infantry in Vietnam, and used a same tactic, “turned opposite American innocents” on a USS Liberty. That secretary of invulnerability Robert McNamara, “the flay of Vietnam,” she writes, “should not have hesitated to scapegoat a Liberty sailors should warn no one.” W.W. Rostow, special confidant to a president, she alleges, unsuccessful to accept a confidence clearway as a Kennedy nominee since he was “deemed a traitor.” The faithfulness of CIA counterintelligence arch James Angleton “was demonstrably not to a United States though to Israel.” Assistant secretary of invulnerability Cyrus Vance “took assign of a cover in a United States.”
Relying on a files of (deceased) CIA item and archivist Richard Thompson, including a prejudiced discourse from an “unknown Israeli writer,” Mellen concludes that Mossad arch Meir Amit systematic Moshe Dayan to “sink a USS Liberty with all hands.” Israel’s rejection that a Six Day War was a land grab, she adds, “was rendered preposterous, as a settlements in what had been Palestinian domain began during once.”
The support in Blood in a Water is, during best, sloppy. Mellen relies heavily on sources that came to her third hand, and opinions delivered 40 years after a attack. She believes anyone who endorses a swindling – and no one else. William McGonagle, Captain of a Liberty, she writes, was an “insecure male and a control freak.” Mellen claims McGonagle knew in allege about a fake dwindle scheme, perceived a graduation and a new authority as a prerogative for participating in a cover-up, though doesn’t explain since he was peaceful to put his possess life during risk. Four months before he died, Mellen asserts, in an all-too-typical use of tales told by passed men, McGonagle (who was severely bleeding on Jun 8) resolved a conflict was deliberate.
Mellen believes that a Six Day War typifies decisions done in a shadows, that give inaugurated officials trustworthy deniability. She writes with a wish that when “hard truths” are revealed, adults in democracies will be some-more expected to direct probity and firmness in their nations’ domestic and unfamiliar policies.
These excellent goals, however, are not expected to be modernized by books with pre-cooked theses in hunt of corroborating evidence. Blood in a Water, alas, is ideologically driven artistic writing, not history. Prometheus Books should be admonished for edition it.
Glenn C. Altschuler is a Thomas and Dorothy Litwin highbrow of American Studies during Cornell University.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for only $5 and ascent your knowledge with an ads-free website and disdainful content. Click here