Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Johnson

A few months ago, the Associated Press reported that newly released
tapes from US president Lyndon Johnson’s White House office showed
LBJ’s “personal and often emotional connection to Israel.” The news
agency pointed out that during the Johnson presidency (1963-1969),
“the United States became Israel’s chief diplomatic ally and primary
arms supplier.”

But the news report does little to reveal the full historical extent
of Johnson’s actions on behalf of the Jewish people and the State of
Israel.
Most students of the Arab-Israeli conflict can identify Johnson as
the president during the 1967 war. But few know about LBJ’s actions
to rescue hundreds of endangered Jews during the Holocaust – actions
that could have thrown him out of Congress and into jail. Indeed, the
title of “Righteous Gentile” is certainly appropriate in the case of
the Texan, whose centennial year is being commemorated this year.

Appropriately enough, the annual Jerusalem Conference announced this
week that it will honor Johnson.

Historians have revealed that Johnson, while serving as a young
congressman in 1938 and 1939, arranged for visas to be supplied to
Jews in Warsaw, and oversaw the apparently illegal immigration of
hundreds of Jews through the port of Galveston, Texas.

A key resource for uncovering LBJ’s pro-Jewish activity is the
unpublished 1989 doctoral thesis by University of Texas student Louis
Gomolak, “Prologue: LBJ’s Foreign Affairs Background, 1908-1948.”
Johnson’s activities were confirmed by other historians in interviews
with his wife, family members and political associates.

Research into Johnson’s personal history indicates that he inherited
his concern for the Jewish people from his family. His aunt Jessie
Johnson Hatcher, a major influence on LBJ, was a member of the Zionist
Organization of America. According to Gomolak, Aunt Jessie had
nurtured LBJ’s commitment to befriending Jews for 50 years. As young
boy, Lyndon watched his politically active grandfather “Big Sam” and
father “Little Sam” seek clemency for Leo Frank, the Jewish victim of
a blood libel in Atlanta.
Frank was lynched by a mob in 1915, and the Ku Klux Klan in Texas
threatened to kill the Johnsons. The Johnsons later told friends that
Lyndon’s family hid in their cellar while his father and uncles stood
guard with shotguns on their porch in case of KKK attacks. Johnson’s
speech writer later stated, “Johnson often cited Leo Frank’s lynching
as the source of his opposition to both anti-Semitism and
isolationism.”

Already in 1934 – four years before Chamberlain’s Munich sellout to
Hitler – Johnson was keenly alert to the dangers of Nazism and
presented a book of essays, ‘Nazism: An Assault on Civilization’, to
the 21-year-old woman he was courting, Claudia Taylor – later known as
“Lady Bird” Johnson. It was an incredible engagement present.

FIVE DAYS after taking office in 1937, LBJ broke with the
“Dixiecrats” and supported an immigration bill that would naturalize
illegal aliens, mostly Jews from Lithuania and Poland . In 1938,
Johnson was told of a young Austrian Jewish musician who was about to
be deported from the United States. With an element of subterfuge,
LBJ sent him to the US Consulate in Havana to obtain a residency
permit. Erich Leinsdorf, the world famous musician and conductor,
credited LBJ for saving his live.

That same year, LBJ warned Jewish friend, Jim Novy, that European
Jews faced annihilation. “Get as many Jewish people as possible out of
Germany and Poland,” were Johnson’s instructions. Somehow, Johnson
provided him with a pile of signed immigration papers that were used
to get 42 Jews out of Warsaw.

But that wasn’t enough. According to historian James M. Smallwood,
Congressman Johnson used legal and sometimes illegal methods to
smuggle “hundreds of Jews into Texas, using Galveston as the entry
port.
Enough money could buy false passports and fake visas in Cuba, Mexico
and other Latin American countries. Johnson smuggled boatloads and
planeloads of Jews into Texas. He hid them in the Texas National
Youth Administration. Johnson saved at least four or five hundred
Jews, possibly more.

During World War II Johnson joined Novy at a small Austin gathering
to sell $65,000 in war bonds. According to Gomolak, Novy and Johnson
then raised a very “substantial sum for arms for Jewish underground
fighters in Palestine.” One source cited by the historian reports
that “Novy and Johnson had been secretly shipping heavy crates labeled
‘Texas Grapefruit’ – but containing arms – to Jewish underground
‘freedom fighters’ in Palestine.”

ON JUNE 4, 1945, Johnson visited Dachau. According to Smallwood,
Lady Bird later recalled that when her husband returned home, “he was
still shaken, stunned, terrorized, and bursting with an overpowering
revulsion and incredulous horror at what he had seen.”

A decade later while serving in the Senate, Johnson blocked the
Eisenhower administration’s attempts to apply sanctions against Israel
following the 1956 Sinai Campaign. ”The indefatigable Johnson had
never ceased pressure on the administration,” wrote I.L. “Si” Kenen,
the head of AIPAC at the time.

As Senate majority leader, Johnson consistently blocked the
anti-Israel initiatives of his fellow Democrat, William Fulbright, the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Among Johnson’s
closest advisers during this period were several strong pro-Israel
advocates, including Benjamin Cohen (who 30 years earlier was the
liaison between Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and Chaim
Weizmann) and Abe Fortas, the legendary Washington “insider.”

Johnson’s concern for the Jewish people continued through his
presidency. Soon after taking office in the aftermath of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Johnson told an Israeli diplomat,
“You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.”

Just one month after succeeding Kennedy, LBJ attended the December
1963 dedication of the Agudas Achim Synagogue in Austin . Novy opened
the ceremony by saying to Johnson, “We can’t thank him enough for all
those Jews he got out of Germany during the days of Hitler.”

Lady Bird would later describe the day, according to Gomolak: “Person
after person plucked at my sleeve and said, ‘I wouldn’t be here today
if it wasn’t for him. He helped me get out.’” Lady Bird elaborated,
“Jews had been woven into the warp and woof of all [Lyndon's] years.”

THE PRELUDE to the 1967 war was a terrifying period for Israel, with
the US State Department led by the historically unfriendly Dean Rusk
urging an evenhanded policy despite Arab threats and acts of
aggression. Johnson held no such illusions. After the war he placed
the blame firmly on Egypt : “If a single act of folly was more
responsible for this explosion than any other, it was the arbitrary
and dangerous announced decision by Egypt that the Strait of Tiran
would be closed [to Israeli ships and Israeli-bound cargo].”

Kennedy was the first president to approve the sale of defensive US
weapons to Israel , specifically Hawk anti-aircraft missiles. But
Johnson approved tanks and fighter jets, all vital after the 1967 war
when France imposed a freeze on sales to Israel . Yehuda Avner
recently described on these pages prime minister Levi Eshkol’s
successful appeal for these weapons on a visit to the LBJ ranch.

Israel won the 1967 war, and Johnson worked to make sure it also won
the peace. “I sure as hell want to be careful and not run out on
little Israel,” Johnson said in a March 1968 conversation with his
ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg, according to White
House tapes recently released.

Soon after the 1967 war, Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asked Johnson
at the Glassboro Summit why the US supported Israel when there were 80
million Arabs and only three million Israelis. ”Because it is
right” responded the straight-shooting Texan.

The crafting of UN Resolution 242 in November 1967 was done under
Johnson’s scrutiny. The call for “secure and recognized boundaries”
was critical. The American and British drafters of the resolution
opposed Israel returning all the territories captured in the war. In
September 1968, Johnson explained, “We are not the ones to say where
other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the
greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the
situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure
and there must be recognized borders. Some such lines must be agreed
to by the neighbors involved.”

Goldberg later noted, “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem
and this omission was deliberate.” This historic diplomacy was
conducted under Johnson’s stewardship, as Goldberg related in oral
history to the Johnson Library. “I must say for Johnson,” Goldberg
stated, “he gave me great personal support.”

Robert David Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College,
recently wrote in The New York Sun, Johnson’s policies stemmed more
from personal concerns – his friendship with leading Zionists, his
belief that America had a moral obligation to bolster Israeli security
and his conception of Israel as a frontier land much like his home
state of Texas. His personal concerns led him to intervene when he
felt that the State or Defense departments had insufficiently
appreciated Israel’s diplomatic or military needs.

President Johnson firmly pointed American policy in a pro-Israel
direction. In an historical context, the American emergency airlift
to Israel in 1973, the constant diplomatic support, the economic and
military assistance and the strategic bonds between the two countries
can all be credited to the seeds planted by LBJ.