At Canaan's Edge (87 page)

Harry McPherson gamely continued westward from South Vietnam across India into Tel Aviv airport before dawn on Monday, June 5. An Israeli general in escort told him after breakfast to ignore air raid sirens and radio warnings of Egyptian bombardment massed from Sinai, which was McPherson's first hint that preemptive Israeli strikes had just destroyed nearly all Nasser's war planes on the ground. From the United Nations in New York, Middle East envoy Ralph Bunche woke the Secretary-General at home: “War has broken out!” The Moscow–Washington hotline jangled alive at 7:47
A.M
.—in McNamara's office because the equipment was not yet rigged to the White House. By afternoon, incoming Jordanian artillery opened a second front to a crippling counterattack from the air, and Israeli soldiers swiftly captured all of Jerusalem for the first time in 1,900 years. At 2:30
P.M
. on Wednesday, according to war historian Michael Oren, the chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces climbed the Temple Mount inside the walled Old City and emotionally proposed to blow up both Muslim structures built there in the long Jewish exile: Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Generals Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin overruled him, but to secure military possession in the ongoing battle they ignored instructions to surrender holy sites to the control of civilian clergy from the three Abrahamic religions. World powers and the belligerents needed three more chaotic days to implement a cease-fire, during which time Israel drove Syria from the Golan Heights on a third front. McPherson returned home Sunday from immersion in two successive wars—one endless, one lightning—amazed by solidarity in Israel. “The spirit of the army, indeed of all the people, has to be experienced to be believed,” he told President Johnson.

T
HE
S
IX
D
AY
W
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spawned lasting shock in world politics. Egyptian citizens heard bulletins of glorious success toward liquidating “the Zionist entity” only hours before bloody remnants of their army retreated pell-mell across the Nile, leaving 15,000 dead and five thousand prisoner. Ho Chi Minh, who once gratified patriarch David Ben-Gurion with the offer of sanctuary in Hanoi for an Israeli government-in-waiting—back when the Vietnamese independence movement of 1946 was briefly more established than Jewish guerrillas trying to create Israel—proved no more accurate than Radio Cairo with his first-day proclamation that Israelis were “doomed to ignominious defeat” as “agents of the United States and British imperialists.” The ideological force of Pan-Arab nationalism all but evaporated. For the Soviet Union, which had switched its support abruptly from Israel to the Arab nations in 1954, the disaster wasted massive military aid and deflated claims of invincible Communist sponsorship.

Miracle reprieve shifted Jewish identity. “The whole world fell in love with us,” said Orthodox theologian David Hartman. “To be Israeli was really sexy.” Jews prayed again at the Western Wall of Herod's Temple as biblical places reentered everyday life. Rabbi Heschel rushed to Jerusalem among pilgrims. “There is great astonishment in the souls,” he wrote. “It is as if the prophets had risen from their graves.” In New York, at a nationwide celebration only two days after the war, the traditional prayer of thanksgiving for another day of life dissolved into waves of nearly universal weeping that Arthur Hertzberg said swept up assimilated Jews previously “remote to the synagogue” and indifferent to Israel. Outdoors in Washington, manning one of the emergency tables that collected an astonishing $100 million, Office of Economic Opportunity official Hyman Bookbinder was struck by a modest woman who donated her savings of $1,700. Bookbinder, a secular Jew born to Polish Bundists during World War I, soon quit government to work for the American Jewish Committee and would join his first synagogue after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

A warrior's exultation hardened the awakening of Jewish spirit. “We grew so fast into a visible central power that the seeds of arrogance as well came in,” observed David Hartman. First news of Israel's deliverance prompted a vulgar outburst from Abe Fortas in his Supreme Court chambers: “I'm going to decorate my office with Arab foreskins.” The implications of the war were so fantastic as to be hushed in numb realization that tiny Israel not only thrashed the surrounding Arab hosts single-handed, against restraining counsel from Washington, but also administered a sting to her aloof benefactor. For three hours on Day Four, Israeli war planes strafed and torpedoed the plainly marked U.S.S.
Liberty
spy ship in international waters off the coast of Egypt, killing thirty-four American sailors, wounding 170. Official statements of regret would leave the origin and anatomy of the attack shrouded in secrecy, as if both sides needed to muffle the repercussions. Writer Jonathan Kaufman later analyzed a new strain of “muscular Judaism” that sprouted beside cultured moralism built through many centuries of Diaspora, when scattered communities had relied on Jewish teaching to promote tolerance and social justice in host countries. Immediately after the Six Day War, the American gadfly I. F. Stone charged that the intoxicating rebirth of mighty Samson actually reduced Israel into the clench of her enemies. “Both Israelis and Arabs in other words feel that only force can assure justice,” he wrote. “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human, and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”

In America, the Six Day War crystallized two historic transformations of Jewish political culture—both stoked for a century in the cauldron of ideological ferment that had arrived with destitute immigrant families. Much of the evolving debate applied arcane Marxist vocabulary to competitive polemics over which factions invented, rescued, or betrayed the best comprehensive plan to uplift oppressed people everywhere. Countless theories adapted to the onslaught of the Depression and Holocaust into the Cold War, but few experts or ideologues had expected a significant mass movement to rise from the black South. While Jewish activists participated heavily in the strange inner workings of church-based nonviolent politics, leading writers held back in guarded approval. A seminal essay of estrangement appeared just before Birmingham in 1963, when
Commentary
editor Norman Podhoretz wrote that although he had grown up paying lip service to civil rights, “I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.” Dismissing integration and democracy as false hopes for “the Negro problem in this country,” Podhoretz saw no solution until “skin color does in
fact
disappear,” and confessed a desperate fantasy: “it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” In early 1967, the
New York Times Magazine
published debate from the premise of a broad divergence in nature. To a screed from James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White,” Robert Gordis of the Jewish Theological Seminary replied, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat.” The Six Day War accelerated an ideology of progress projected through rather than against the established power of the United States, allied with Israel as the strong model democracy of the Middle East. Black power served as a foil of squandered potential. Sudden prosperity in arms made ideas more martial, as did fading concern with minorities and the poor, but the pioneer intellectuals still aspired to a visionary outlook. In
Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea,
Irving Kristol traced idealistic political philosophy from his Trotskyite youth to the commanding center of 1980s Washington, with no mention at all of the nonviolent civil rights era.

A parallel line of influential Jewish thought followed the extraordinary arc of Max Shactman, the Polish-born party leader who on a starry-eyed 1925 delegation to Moscow had hailed the Communist International as “a brilliant red light in the darkness of capitalistic gloom.” From firsthand knowledge, Shactman broke first with Stalin, then with Leon Trotsky for underestimating Stalin's monstrous perversion of workers' opportunity, then also with Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste among many “second-rate” anti-Soviet rivals, and finally with the idea of an independent socialist presence in American politics. In 1965, as the spellbinding luminary of backroom New York dialectics, Shactman stunned the regulars in “our socialist loft on 14th Street” with an offhand comment that American stooges running South Vietnam “may be no worse than the thugs in Hanoi.” Bayard Rustin, among many protégés then building a “Shactmanite base” within the American labor movement, chafed under demands from new union employers to support the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam policy. In 1967,
Dissent
magazine founder Irving Howe made notes on Rustin's misery under group pressure not only to compromise his lifelong pacifist stance but speak favorably of the American war cause. Rustin pleaded for leeway to salvage his ties within the civil rights movement, where very young leaders like Courtland Cox and Stokely Carmichael, who had idolized Rustin for years, blamed him for the betrayal that spurred their revolt against nonviolence. Unlike Rustin, socialist leader Michael Harrington split with Shactman over Vietnam, and he coined the word “neoconservative” for Shactman's coalition thrust. As the term gained currency in the intellectual beehive of Manhattan, it suggested strong military purpose with a utopian residue focused on Israel. The powerful neoconservative school in American politics would grow from a merger of labor-wing Shactmanites into the larger movement associated with Irving Kristol.

Instantly, by contrast, the outbreak of the Middle East war threw the Vietnam peace movement into a political crossfire. Martin Luther King, back from Geneva, smarted from criticism that he had abandoned nonviolence by lending his name with Reinhold Niebuhr and other religious leaders to a prewar
New York Times
ad that sounded alarm over the hostile Arab encirclement. As he hopscotched between Cleveland and Chicago, King complained that “the
Times
played it up as a total endorsement of Israel.” On Day Two, Stanley Levison told King that people were too emotional to see that war “settles nothing” beyond survival. On Day Five, J. Edgar Hoover rushed to the White House a report suggesting that King's subversive advisers would risk Israel to undercut President Johnson in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Rabbi Heschel endured mounting criticism on the same point. Israeli emissaries warned that his Vietnam protest threatened vital American protection, and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary further ostracized Heschel in their zeal for both wars. Movement leaders compressed decades of agonizing reappraisal into the short week of battle. Andrew Young told King he feared Israel would not compromise on its conquest of Jerusalem. Levison and Harry Wachtel said the great powers should impose a comprehensive peace—but would not do so. By June 11, one day after the cease-fire, King complained to advisers that he had interpreted his nonviolence to support Israel's right to exist, “and now Israel faces the danger of being smug and unyielding.”

Doubts about consistency so plagued the antiwar clergy that several times they gathered secretly at the Union Theological Seminary office of John Bennett, chief organizer of the prewar ad in the
Times.
Could they oppose one war and praise the other in good faith, and exactly how should they draw the distinction? Rabbi Heschel, who was pouring forth a book of joyful meditation on Israel, fared badly with his first efforts to justify the Israeli war by character as well as circumstance, stating almost giddily that the Jewish soldiers were reluctant and hardly meant to hurt anyone. Harry Wachtel would recall that Heschel was “roughly handled” for such effusions by colleagues who normally deferred to him. Heschel and the priest Daniel Berrigan fell into temperamental strain. King mostly listened. Rabbi Balfour Brickner said the CALCAV group should pursue settlements for Vietnam
and
the Middle East, arguing that immediate peace advocacy was the surest way to keep legitimate self-defense from becoming a loophole for violence. Most participants thought the combination would make two difficult tasks impossible. Heschel, from his delicate experience as a Jewish contact inside the Vatican Council, said a religious peace campaign for Israel would provoke anti-Semitism. John Bennett sent Al Lowenstein and others a running tally of the contrasts between the two wars, but pragmatism recommended separate treatment. Heschel preserved his ecumenical wonder in his new book—“All men are created equal, yet no two faces are alike”—which would include a stern rebuke from the Talmud: “When the Egyptians who had enslaved the children of Israel were sinking in the Red Sea, the angels were jubilant and wanted to sing a song of praise and triumph. But God, the Father of all men, said to the angels, ‘My creatures are drowning—and you sing!'”

King regretted the immobilizing effect of Middle East passions on Vietnam protest. “It has given Johnson the little respite he wanted from Vietnam,” he told Levison. To King, Vietnam was the ongoing war for which Americans must assume civic responsibility, and he had no way of knowing about doubts within the government. On June 13, Harry McPherson gave President Johnson his raw impressions of Vietnam, stressing the blatant corruption among the South Vietnamese and the candor of American soldiers. He quoted a lieutenant general: “Before I came out here a year and a half ago, I thought we were at zero. I was wrong. We were at minus fifty.
Now
we are at zero.” McPherson's report strained to understand the baffling ferocity of the enemy without demonizing the Vietnamese. If he were a young peasant in the hamlets he saw, McPherson bluntly conjectured, and were offered the chance of “striking back at my Frenchified oppressors and their American allies, and of rising to a position of leadership in the VC, I would join up.” Yet he cast his lot loyally in battle. “Every aspect of our national life and our role in the world is involved in Vietnam,” McPherson assured Johnson. “I feel that I am only another of those many men who have a part of their souls at stake there.”