3.1 KiB
| updated | aliases | category | tags | summary | born | died | location | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-08 |
|
Intelligence & Government |
|
Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson who was pressured by pro-Israel fundraiser Abraham Feinberg not to interfere with Israel's nuclear activities. | 1916-06-09 | 2009-07-06 | San Francisco, California, USA |
Robert S. McNamara served as the Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy and later under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was involved in discussions regarding Israel's nuclear program and the sale of advanced U.S. fighter aircraft to Israel. Abraham Feinberg directly intervened with McNamara, insisting that the United States should not interfere with Israel's nuclear activities. McNamara cryptically acknowledged the basic problem of Israel's existence as a question mark in history, which he understood as a reason for Israel's desire for a nuclear bomb.1
The USS Liberty attack
In an affidavit released in October 2003, Ward Boston states that the president of the Navy's 1967 Court of Inquiry into the attack on the USS Liberty Incident, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr., told him that McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the court to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.2 A. Jay Cristol quotes McNamara's July 1967 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "it was the conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom we have great confidence that the attack was not intentional. I read the record of investigation and I support that conclusion."3 The Chicago Tribune reported in 2007 that J. Q. Hart, a chief petty officer at a Navy relay station in Morocco, recalled hearing McNamara order Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis to recall the carrier aircraft sent toward the Liberty, and quoted Hart as recalling McNamara's words: "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors." McNamara, then 91, told the Tribune he had "absolutely no recollection of what I did that day."4
Footnotes
-
Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 8. ↩︎
-
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 the declaration dated January 8, 2004, https://archive.org/download/boston-declaration/BostonDeclaration.pdf. ↩︎
-
A. Jay Cristol, History News Network, June 12, 2007. Cristol quotes the testimony with ellipses and cites it as released by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1967. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/why-you-shouldnt-pay-attention-to-the-claims-that- ↩︎
-
"New revelations in attack on American spy ship," Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2007. Hart's and McNamara's statements are as the Tribune reported them. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/10/02/new-revelations-in-attack-on-american-spy-ship/ ↩︎