The New York Times
Support Any Friend marks a major contribution to the diplomatic history of a little understood period in American Middle East diplomacy. Bass captures the full flavor of the collision between abstract interests and flesh-and-blood personalities that makes international diplomacy so fascinating. This book will be riveting even for those who think they are not especially interested in the period or its problems. — Adam Garfinkle
The Washington Post
Reading this book at present has a slightly eerie "Groundhog Day" feeling. What goes around comes around, as the latest peace process echoes the events and issues of 40 and more years ago: Israel's security, the West Bank, the status of refugees. And yet if the questions are largely the same, the answers are quite different, a mark of how far the terms of the debate -- and America's position -- have changed. Today, a "right of return" is a Palestinian demand and a sticking point on which Israel can expect to be supported by the United States. — Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Publishers Weekly
A forested memorial in Israel, Yad Kennedy, includes the sculpted stump of a felled tree, a tribute to the president cut down in his youth. To Bass, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kennedy presidency, despite the professional Arabists in the State Department, shifted America's Middle East policy toward Israel, selling arms to the Jewish state, fudging inspections of its nuclear initiative and openly engaging in security cooperation. The intransigence of Arab states toward Israel had eroded the stern limits on arms sales to Israel set by the chilly Eisenhower-Dulles regime. Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser had gambled on an unprofitable merger with Syria and a hemorrhaging venture into Yemen to try to create, with Soviet Cold War assistance, a noose around Israel. It failed, and Kennedy's suspicion of Nasser's pro-Soviet position distanced the two men. The young president found that he had little to lose in cautiously supporting Israel, as the Soviet Union was openly cajoling some Arab nationalists into becoming clients who would prove useless while repelling others who feared for their thrones. Despite breaking foreign policy taboos, the Kennedy administration, Bass concedes, hardly addressed the intractable regional problems. Readers may nod over Bass's relentless detail, but he establishes his case that the Kennedy administration was "the true origin of America's alliance" with Israel, illuminating in the process some new and humanizing facets of Kennedy's management style and rehabilitating the savvy and subtle leadership skills of Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, successor to the combative David Ben-Gurion. B&w photos. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A Middle Eastern nation becomes a nuclear power and refuses to admit arms inspectors, an American president threatens intervention: news from today’s headlines, now more than 40 years old. Bass (Foreign Policy, Middle East Studies/Council on Foreign Relations) has several purposes here. First among them, he shows with admirable clarity just how keen a student and practitioner of foreign policy JFK truly was, and especially in contrast with his recent successors. As Bass writes, again with an eye to today’s news, "In the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the American electorate knew what it came to forget in the 1990s: that it could not afford ill-preparedness in its commander-in-chief." He goes on to examine the evolution of America’s relationship with Israel, which, he points out, has not always been friendly; when JFK took office, Israel was far closer to France, though David Ben-Gurion sought to establish closer ties with the larger power. "For Ben-Gurion," Bass writes, "America was an aspiration, France a consolation." Forging those closer ties while not alienating the Arab powers, foremost among them Nasser’s Egypt, and their Soviet benefactor proved to be a vexing exercise for Kennedy, especially when Israel ignored his demands that it open a secret nuclear reactor to international inspection. Still, as Bass demonstrates, JFK helped bring about a delicate balance of military strength in the region by providing Israel with defensive antiaircraft missiles as protection against Egypt’s mighty air force, though he refused to part with offensive weapons—a policy that Lyndon Johnson undid almost as soon as he took office, so that "the U.S.-Israel arms relationship was, by thelate 1960s, almost unrecognizable from the trickle it had been at the start of the Kennedy administration." Plus ça change. . . . A fine, well-constructed study.
