Every once in a while, I receive a mysterious e-mail: "Remember
the USS Liberty!"
This letter is never signed, and I don't know if it is sent from friend or foe - but every time I feel a small, sharp shiver.
A few days ago a friend dropped by and asked me to do a ZGram on the USS Liberty incident. He left a couple of issues of the "Newsletter of the USS Liberty Veterans Association" with me, with certain sections marked, and with these words: "We've got to start building bridges to other folks with common interests . . . " He added: "This is not a political issue. This is a ***moral*** issue!"
On this day of the Anniversary of the Attack on the USS Liberty, I am picking two excerpts, which I offer to you without comment:
The first one comes from the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, June 21, 1991, written by one Howard Rosenburg:
"The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL) has questioned the motivation behind a June 8 White House ceremony honoring surviving crew members of the USS Liberty, a naval intelligence ship bombed by Israel aircraft during the 1967 Six Day War.
"Thirty-four American seamen died in the episode, which Israel insists was an accident. The United States officially accepted that explanation. (...)
"'ADL hopes that the reason for the White House reception was simply to honor the Liberty members, not to give a stamp of approval to those seeking to malign Israel,' the statement said.
In 1988 and '89, the Milwaukee Jewish Council and other organizations argued that the village of Grafton was defaming Israel by naming a new public library after the LIBERTY."
The second piece is reprinted from the Congressional Record of September 7, 1989. It was inserted by Rep. Andy Jacobs (D-Ind), and consists of an essay written by former Rep. Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) on the occasion of the dedication of said public library in Grafton, Wisconsin, named in honor of the USS LIBERTY naval ship attacked by the Israelis in 1967:
Jacobs: ". . . a strange controversy occurred in connection with the 20th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS LIBERTY.
"I believe that Mr. McCloskey's views and report are entitled to be examined by the membership - and I place the essay in the RECORD without the slightest animonsity toward Israel. Apparently somebody somewhere in Israel did a very bad thing in the case of the USS LIBERTY. People in our country have done bad things too. That does not mean that either country is essentially bad.
"But young American military men did die 20 years ago. And I think it is regrettable that our own Government had declined to participate in the memorial the little town in Wisconsin decided to make for these innocent victims."
Here is McCloskey's essay:
The USS LIBERTY, 1967 - 1989
A heartwarming event took place a few days ago in the village of Grafton, Wisconsin, population 10,000, 20 miles north of Milwaukee and surrounded by the rolling corn fields of southeastern Wisconsin.
It was an especially beautiful June day, bright and sunny, with a cooling breeze off Lake Michigan.
In a brief ceremony, the Town's leading citizens unveiled a simple memorial to 34 U.S. navy officers and men killed by Israeli torpedo, rocket and machine gun fire 22 years earlier, on June 8, 1967. The Israelis, on the verge of attacking Syria's Golan Heights, had unleashed a furious fighter-bomber and torpedo boat attack on the intelligence gathering ship, the USS LIBERTY, off the shores of Egypt's Sinai Desert.
The US flag had been flying in an 8 knot breeze during several earlier reconnaissance flights and every man on the LIBERTY believed that the attack was no accident. A US Secretary of State, Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff and the Director of the National Security Agency have agreed with them.
Strangely enough, the dedication of the memorial with the names of the 34 dead US servicemen was the first public recognition of their sacrifice in the 22 years since the attack. There had also been 171 wounded from the crew of 294. No US naval vessel since World War II had suffered a greater percentage (69%) in battle casualties.
The honor to the 34 dead Americans, however, did not come from their Commander in Chief, the US Navy, nor their Senators and Congressmen.
Twenty two years after the fact, all but one of the political and military leaders of the nation, successors to those (for) whom the 34 US sailors had died that hot afternoon on June 8, 1967, were too afraid to attend or even send a congratulatory message.
That the ceremony was held at all was a tribute to two sturdy Grafton civic leaders and their wives, former Navy veteran Jim Grant and his wife, Carol, and John and Mari Dickmann. Grant was president of the Town's Board of Trustees, Dickmann the head of his own small manufacturing company in Grafton. Together they had organized the memorial event against bitter editorial opposition from Wisconsin's largest newspaper and from the Milwaukee Jewish community.
The stone memorial bearing the names of the 34 dead, including one Jewish boy, was unveiled by one of two US Navy regulars who attended, a Lt. Commander, who had been a Seaman 1st Class aboard the LIBERTY during the 1967 Israeli attack.
A former Navy combat pilot, President Bush, had been invited to attend. He didn't, nor did his office send the customary congratulatory message.
The Secretaries of Defense and of the Navy had been invited. Neither responded.
The Commander of the nearby Great Lakes Naval Training Station had been invited. Neither he nor even a Navy band was allowed to attend. No Blue Angels flew overhead. The clear words from on high was that no Navy personnel should dignify this particular memorial ceremony.
One solitary Chief Petty Officer, a recruiting officer from a nearby town, showed up. He tersely commented that he would have come even if the whole damn Navy Officer Corps had ordered him not to.
The remarks from the small podium in the afternoon sunshine were brief. The LIBERTY'S chaplain gave a moving invocation. The ship's captain, Commander McGonagle, wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him for having saved his ship despite severe wounds, thanked the President of the Town's Board of Trustees for the honor done his crew; the Chairman of the Grafton Library Committee, Mrs. Carol Schneider, raiser of over $1 million to build the new town library, gave a few words of thanks; the local state assemblywoman and state senator made a few remarks as did the American Legion Commander, the head of the Chamber of Commerce and a former congressman.
Two Liberty crew members, one officer and one enlisted man, gave USS LIBERTY crew jackets to the two elderly Grafton industrialists, Ben and Ted Grob, brothers who had preserved their machine tool company through the Depression years and who had contributed to countless Grafton charitable causes, large and small, before donating $500,000 for the new library. When the Grob brothers were invited by the Library Committee to name the Library after themselves, the Grobs had asked instead to name it for the USS LIBERTY.
The Grobs had read about the 1967 LIBERTY incident in a book, "Assault on the Liberty", written by deck officer Jim Ennes. Ennes' book had made it clear that the attack was deliberate, not accidental, and that the Israeli attacks on the LIBERTY'S life rafts were clearly intended to leave no survivors.
It is not easy to find Ennes' book in bookstores today, despite the fact that it sold out five printings. The publishers no longer find it politic(ally correct?) to publish and sell this particular piece of American historical writing.
The ceremony, on the lawn of the new Grafton Library, at least had marvelous music. The Lakeshore Philharmonic Orchestra, 20 volunteers strong, ages 16 to 60, opened with "America the Beautiful," then accompanied a talented local soprano in "The Star Spangled Banner," and finally, when the names of the 34 dead young Americans were slowly read, gave a soft rendition of "My Country Tis of Thee." There were few dry eyes among the surviving LIBERTY crew members and several hundred Grafton citizens standing on the lawn and in the adjacent street.
An honor guard of aging American Legionaires, mostly veterans of World War II, fired three volleys from M-1 rifles, which some of them could barely lift to the firing position; the orchestra rendered a final taps.
There was a brief tour of the new library, still without books, for the townspeople and 40 odd LIBERTY survivors and their families, following with lemonade and brownies (which) were served to all hands in the basement.
Almost last to leave were a quiet couple and their two adult children, the family of Seaman Jerry Goss, all from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Mr. and Mrs. Goss had lingered awhile to quietly gaze at the simple memorial gravestone with their son's name on it.
The Milwaukee Journal, once a great crusading newspaper, for over a year had written scathing editorials and news articles condemning the Grafton citizens committee and town leaders who had agreed to name the library after the USS LIBERTY. The Journal thought the name was "controversial and might evoke anti-Semitic feelings."
The Journal's article the next day was somewhat muted, devoting only half its words to the "controversy" the newspaper itself had created by terming the name of a US Navy ship as a rallying point for anti-Semitic organizations. The Journal's article stressed the Police SWAT team protection provided the ceremony, mentioned the attack as a "strange historical footnote to the Six Day War," Israel's claim that the attack was an accident, and that Ben Grob had once given campaign contributions to a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and "other right wing causes." The article cited "some Jewish groups" who had said those who wished to memorialize the ship by naming the library were - at the very least - "insensitive."
To the crew of the LIBERTY, the real heroes present were the Grants and the Dickmanns who had weathered the personal attacks from the Journal and the greater Milwaukee Jewish community for the previous two years.
As Oliver Wendell Holmes, veteran of the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, wounded at Balls Bluff, once paraphrased: "The perils of civil strife can be greater than the battlefield."
As the two buses with the USS LIBERTY survivors and their families left the new library's parking lot, one man leaned out the window for a final salute to the American flag flying over the new monument and said, "Thank you, Grafton!"
What a nation had declined to do, a small town had done, with patriotism, warmth and class."
Thought for the Day:
"Israel can largely neutralize the ire it raises in Washington by appealing to and mobilizing American 'friends of Israel.'"
(Daniel Burton-Rose reviewing Israel Shahak's book "Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies," Z Magazine, Feb. 98)