Support Any Friend: Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance.(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. 336 pp.

Warren Bass has written an excellent historical study of America's Middle East foreign policy. Scholarship in this area has recently grown not only in quantity, but also in the quality of research, which increasingly incorporates sources in regional languages. (1) Bass advances this trend through his use of the partially declassified records in the Israeli State Archives and the Ben-Gurion Archive. He combines these documents with research in the U.S. and Britain to test what he regards as the myths surrounding his topic: the abiding U.S.-Israeli "special relationship"; the influence of the Israel lobby; and John F. Kennedy's Camelot. Bass gives Kennedy high marks for managing U.S. foreign policy though some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War, when the stakes were too high and the options too limited to base decisions simply on political calculation. Though electoral politics were…