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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. xiv, 336 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-19-516580-2.)
Of the hundreds of scholarly books about John F. Kennedy, Support Any Friend is the first to examine one of the best-kept secrets about his foreign policy-his innovative approach to the Middle East. Warren Bass, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has given us a meticulously researched and beautifully written account of JFKs bold but ultimately unsuccessful bid to co-opt Arab nationalism, befriend Israel, and prevent the Middle East from becoming a Cold War battleground.
Bass begins by offering a portrait of the president as a young man surprisingly well informed about the challenges confronting the United States in the Middle East during the Roosevelt, Truman, and Elsenhower eras. Once he entered the Oval Office, JFK...