Fulbright Prewar

With the arms sale in place and a disruption in U.S.-Jordanian relations avoided, Johnson turned his attention away from the Middle East. He didn’t record any phone calls in the run-up to the Six Day War, but he later described his approach in a conversation with Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright—in which he complained about Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin’s claim that the United States had incited Israeli aggression against the Arabs.

Prewar Approach

President Johnson and J. William Fulbright, 10.57pm

WH6706.01 PNO 8, 11909-11909

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President Johnson: I think his [Kosygin’s] information about America’s conduct in the Arab world is as fault and inaccurate as his intelligence is on Nasser’s capabilities.

J. William Fulbright: I think he must have known that. What I meant is he misrepresented it.

President Johnson: Oh, yes, but he didn’t know it. He wouldn’t buy their statement that our planes participated in bombing the Arab world. He wouldn’t take that one.

But he did buy this stuff that we were there inciting them [the Israelis]. And there’s no man in the world that did as much, and got condemned as much, by everybody from Eshkol on down, as I did . . .

Fulbright: Yeah.

President Johnson: For not inciting it! I told them, I said, “You will not need to go alone unless you do go alone. And we will take our time, and we will find some way to open the Straits [of Tiran]. But if you get out here, and cut loose, and act irresponsibly—why, you’ll develop a lot of sentiment in this country, anti-Semitism and every other damn thing, and we just think it would be highly irresponsible.”

And we got them to put it off. They held it off for a week. [They] told us they’d hold it off for another week.

But then when Nasser said he was going to wipe them out, and he moved this stuff up there; and Russia passed on the message that he [Israel] was going to attack Syria, why, they couldn’t hold it anymore, and they had to jump.