The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Lyndon B. Johnson.md

updated	aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location
2026-10-08	Lyndon Johnson	Political Figure	KeyFigure Person WW2 Nazi Politician	Johnson's ties to Israel were strong, influenced by his close advisers like Abe Fortas and Edwin L.	1908-08-27	1973-01-22	Stonewall, Texas

Lyndon B. Johnson was the 36th President of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He was initially left in the dark on sensitive national security issues by President John F. Kennedy and his top aides, and reportedly went "berserk" upon being briefed in by the Central Intelligence Agency after Kennedy's assassination.¹

Johnson's ties to Israel were strong, influenced by his close advisers like Abe Fortas and Edwin L. Weisl, Sr., and his knowledge of Abraham Feinberg's fundraising skills. A deeper link stemmed from his visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau at the end of World War II, which left him profoundly shaken. His sensitivity to the plight of European Jews began even before the war, when as a young congressman, he helped German refugees gain asylum in America, circumventing red tape and preventing deportations.¹

Johnson's strong emotional ties to Israel and his belief that Soviet arms were altering the balance of power in the Middle East drove him to become the first American President to supply Israel with offensive weapons and the first publicly to commit America to its defense. In the early years of his presidency, he echoed Kennedy's policy by urging Israel to submit Dimona to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection, motivated by his belief that a nuclear Israel could lead to a nuclear Egypt, increased Soviet involvement, and potentially war.¹

Intelligence during the June 1967 crisis and war

On the morning of May 23, 1967, Johnson summoned Richard Helms from a congressional briefing and asked for an assessment of the Middle East situation. David S. Robarge, the CIA's chief historian, writes that Johnson declined to airlift special military supplies to Israel or to support it publicly, and quotes Johnson's later recollection of telling the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban on May 26: "All of our intelligence people are unanimous that if the UAR attacks, you will whip hell out of them."² On May 25 Walt Rostow sent Johnson an Israeli intelligence estimate with a CIA appraisal attached that, in Rostow's words, "throws a great deal of cold water on the Israeli estimate"; a handwritten "L" on the memorandum indicates that the President saw it.³

On June 5, 1967, Johnson told congressional leaders that he had been expecting Israel's move, which Robarge attributes to CIA analyses and a tip from Helms. Helms recalled that "in the midst of one meeting" during the war Johnson asked how accurate his intelligence was on the progress of the war, and that he answered it was accurate "just as long as the Israelis are winning."²

Notes of the National Security Council Special Committee meeting of June 9 record Clark Clifford saying that the attack on the USS Liberty Incident should be handled "as if Arabs or USSR had done it" and calling it "Inconceivable that it was accident"; the note-taker's marginal notation next to the remarks reads: "President subscribed 100%."⁴ On June 12 Johnson requested a special study on the strafing and torpedoing of the ship, covering pilot conversations and "everything we can get" from the NSA; Rostow sent a preliminary CIA report on June 13 as the "CIA's first cut at the problem," noting "They do not find evidence of U.S. identification before the attack."⁵ On June 26 Rostow sent Johnson the proposed public release of the Navy Court of Inquiry summary, noting that the Israelis had asked for 24 hours of lead time and that Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance was inclined to give 12; the 12-hour option is the one checked.⁶

The USS Liberty allegation

An affidavit by Ward Boston, senior legal counsel to the Navy's 1967 Court of Inquiry into the attack on the USS Liberty, released in October 2003, states that Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr. told him "that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."⁷ Kidd died in 1999.⁸ The Associated Press reported that the Johnson administration "did not formally challenge" Israel's explanation that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.⁹ The Chicago Tribune reported in 2007 that internal White House documents from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred "was not believed," and quoted a retired chief petty officer, J. Q. Hart, as recalling that McNamara told Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."¹⁰ A. Jay Cristol, the author of The Liberty Incident, rejects Boston's account as hearsay about a dead man.¹¹

Bobby Baker

Lyndon B. Johnson served as the 36th President of the United States. His rise to power emanated directly from his friends in Texas oil, including the Clint Murchison, Sr..¹²

As Senate Majority Leader, Johnson made Bobby Baker his secretary of the Senate Democrats in 1955, referring to Baker as "my strong right arm, the last man I see at night, the first I see in the morning." A major scandal brewed around Baker in the autumn of 1963, involving numerous questionable deals that were tightly interwoven with the Murchison family and organized crime figures.¹²

Footnotes

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1. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 9. ↩︎

2. Robarge, David S. "Getting it Right: CIA Analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (March 2005). https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/CIA-Analysis-1967-War.pdf Robarge quotes Helms's memoir and Johnson's The Vantage Point. ↩︎

3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 61, Memorandum from Rostow to President Johnson, May 25, 1967, with attached CIA appraisal. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d61 ↩︎

4. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 236, Notes of a Meeting of the Special Committee of the National Security Council, June 9, 1967 (Saunders's handwritten notes). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d236 ↩︎

5. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 284, Intelligence Memorandum, "The Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty," June 13, 1967, with source note on Helms's notes of the June 12 meeting and Rostow's covering memorandum of June 13. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d284 ↩︎

6. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 324, Memorandum from Rostow to President Johnson, June 26, 1967. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d324 ↩︎

7. Ward Boston Jr., affidavit as printed in the Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, October 11, 2004, pp. E1886-E1889, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2004-10-11/html/CREC-2004-10-11-pt1-PgE1886-3.htm; the same sentence is paragraph 16 of Boston's declaration dated January 8, 2004, https://archive.org/download/boston-declaration/BostonDeclaration.pdf. Sole source for the Kidd conversation. ↩︎

8. Ronald Fraser, "Captain Boston's Secret," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 2003 (Kidd's death year). https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2003/july/captain-bostons-secret ↩︎

9. Associated Press, Fox News, October 23, 2003. https://www.foxnews.com/story/ex-navy-official-1967-israeli-attack-on-u-s-ship-was-deliberate.amp ↩︎

10. "New revelations in attack on American spy ship," Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2007. The Tribune's text reads "the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed"; the Hart quotation is Hart's recollection as the Tribune reported it. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/10/02/new-revelations-in-attack-on-american-spy-ship/ ↩︎

11. A. Jay Cristol, History News Network, June 12, 2007. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/why-you-shouldnt-pay-attention-to-the-claims-that- ↩︎

12. Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎