| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance. By Warren Bass. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiv, 336 pp. $30.00,ISBN 0-19-516580-2.)
Of the hundreds of scholarly books about John F. Kennedy, Support Any Friend is the first to examine one of the best-kept secrets about his foreign policy—his innovative approach to the Middle East. Warren Bass, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has given us a meticulously researched and beautifully written account of JFK's bold but ultimately unsuccessful bid to co-opt Arab nationalism, befriend Israel, and prevent the Middle East from becoming a Cold War battleground.	1
Bass begins by offering a portrait of the president as a young man surprisingly well informed about the challenges confronting the United States in the Middle East during the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower eras. Once he entered the Oval Office, JFK launched a two-pronged initiative, employing personal diplomacy and economic aid to build bridges to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab world's leading nationalist, while simultaneously signaling Israel's David Ben-Gurion that America was eager for a "special relationship" (p. 183) with the Jewish state. Bass makes all this come alive through vivid sketches of Kennedy's national security team, from senior advisers such as Dean Rusk to State Department Middle East hands such as Phillips Talbot and White House operatives such as Myer Feldman, the New Frontier's chief contact with the nascent Israel lobby in Washington.	. . .

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