On 22 November, the world will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy, one of the most trusted American presidents in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt. He had visited Egypt and the Holy Land in 1939 and years later as a United States senator he supported the independence of Algeria, a position that reflected his leadership qualities and explains one of the reasons why he was so admired in the Third World. Both president Kennedy and president Gamal Abdel-Nasser shared certain similarities that made communication between them easier and led to a common understanding on the major Arab issues at the time. The two were in their 40s, and both were visionary leaders to whom values and principles could not be delinked from politics and relations among the nations of the world. The two had great charisma and their respective countries and the world, too, considered them true spokesmen for their generations and capable of leading the world towards peace and justice for all peoples and countries. The genius of president Kennedy resided in the fact that he understood the legitimate aspirations of the developing countries for freedom from imperialism and for dignity. And this is the reason why president Nasser trusted him and maintained regular correspondence with him. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the great confidant of Nasser, said that the two and their respective governments exchanged 91 letters and messages from January 1961 till 22 November 1963, the sad day the world lost president Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Notwithstanding these similarities, there were deep differences between the two. One belonged to the Boston aristocracy and the East Coast Establishment and the other came from more humble origins. One went to Harvard and the other graduated from the Military Academy in Cairo. One climbed the political ladder in one of the great democracies of the day and the other came to power through a revolution that changed the face and the direction of Egypt. Despite these big differences, the two leaders shared things that many other politicians who rise to power lack: namely, leadership, charisma and inspiration. Being young, the two were not spoiled by petty politics. The two wanted to remake the world in a time that the nations of the world aspired to change it for the benefit of all. The two wanted to establish a new world order dissimilar from the pre-war era. Their main challenge was how to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict and the refugee problem in the framework of their values, principles and interests. In this respect, I think, president Kennedy had been at a disadvantage compared to president Nasser. President Nasser had fought the Israelis in the 1948 War, the year the Arabs have called the year of the Nakba when the Palestinians were uprooted from their historic homeland by Jewish gangs and the alliance between world Zionism and the imperialist powers back then. In fact, in one of his early letters to president Kennedy, Nasser referred to the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 and commented that it was a promise made by someone who had no power to make it (meaning the British) to ones who where not entitled to it (meaning the Jews). President Kennedy dealt with the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis from a Washington perspective and American rivalry with the former Soviet Union. The United States was combating the spread of Communism and saw Nasser's Egypt, wrongly of course, as an ally of Moscow. The Israelis under David Ben-Gurion played on this theme as well as the memory of the Holocaust, which was still vivid in the minds of those who ruled in the West in the 1960s. The scars of World War II were still widely felt and the West had a feeling of guilt towards the Jews. The Israelis played this card to the full and Ben-Gurion likened president Nasser to Adolf Hitler. He used to tell Western leaders that, if Nasser would have the chance, he would deal with the Israelis in a way worse than Nazi Germany. He repeated such lies to justify his requests for Western armaments. His theory was that Israel needed a deterrence power to dissuade Nasser from invading Israel and throwing it into the sea. Kennett Love, the New York Times reporter who wrote a book entitled Suez: The Twice Fought War, told us in a journalism course at the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s, that he had researched the speeches, interviews and statements by president Nasser and had never come up with the slightest reference to the idea of throwing the Jewish state into the sea. But this was the perfidy of the Israelis — that Western media and public opinion in the West believed that Nasser's Egypt was bent on annihilating the Israelis. When president Nasser travelled to New York City in September 1960 to attend the General Assembly of the United Nations (this was his first and last visit to the United States) he met president Dwight Eisenhower on 26 September and had to assure the US president that he had no intentions whatsoever of attacking Israel. He was not aware, to my knowledge, that the French and the Israelis had signed a secret agreement on 3 October 1957 whereby the former would help the latter build a nuclear reactor capable of producing from 10 to 15 kilogrammes of plutonium per year at Dimona. That was under the Fourth Republic in France. But with the establishment of the Fifth Republic under General Charles De Gaulle, he ordered all cooperation on this project to be scaled down. On 13 May 1960, the French foreign minister, Couve De Murville, called in the Israeli ambassador in Paris to notify him that nuclear cooperation between the two countries would come to an end. Furthermore, he asked the Israeli government to make public its nuclear programme and to accept international inspections for its nuclear facilities. In the meantime, the Israelis continued cooperating with the Americans in the nuclear field in the framework of an American programme that was known as the “Atoms for Peace Programme”. A French historian, Henri Laurens, wrote that the Israelis used this programme as cover for producing atomic weapons. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had been gravely preoccupied by Israeli intentions in this respect. Prior to his inauguration on 19 January 1961, president-elect Kennedy had met Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA, on 17 November 1960 to hear a briefing on its activities. And as recounted in a book by Hassanein Heikal, entitled The Secret Negotiations between the Arabs and the Israelis, Dulles brought up the question of the Dimona reactor in Israel, and how the French wanted to provide the Israelis with the “ultimate weapon” of nuclear deterrence. He went on to warn against a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. He further added that, according to their information, Egypt also had its nuclear programme. Interestingly enough, but not surprisingly, the president-elect enquired about the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Dulles estimated that neither the Arabs nor the Israelis were ready for peace yet. And he said something that would prove true seven years later: that the Israel had not decided where its boundaries would be traced. In May 1961, president Kennedy sent letters to president Nasser and Ben-Gurion to discuss peace prospects in the Middle East. According to Heikal, the true purpose of the idea was to deal with the nuclear issue and prevent a nuclear arms race in the region. President Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in New York on 30 May 1961 and the latter brought up the question of the Dimona reactor and explained how Israel would badly need water in the future and it was trying to harness nuclear energy to secure its water needs by the construction of desalination plants. He said that he did not believe that Moscow would provide Egypt with a nuclear reactor, but the Egyptians themselves would be able to acquire nuclear capabilities on their own in the span of 10 years. In the same meeting, the former Israeli prime minister talked about their arms needs in order to deter Nasser from attacking and destroying Israel. He explained how the gap in the military balance with Egypt was narrowing. The Israelis were complaining at the time of the superiority of Egypt in terms of bombers, which could encourage the Egyptians of thinking of staging a first strike against Israel, and that was the reason they asked the Kennedy administration to provide them with Hawk missiles. It is worth remembering that the United States until then refused to enter the arms market in the Middle East in order to keep a certain neutrality in the conflict between the Arab countries and Israel. But things started to change with the Kennedy administration, and the agreement in principle to give the Israeli army the Hawk missiles destabilised the tenuous military balance between Egypt and Israel in the 1960s, and paved the way a few years later for an expanding military relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv that completely destabilised the Middle East. The alibi was always to guarantee the security of the Jewish state. Thus, the Kennedy years carried with them prospects for peace in the Middle East that were deliberately undermined by the Israeli government. Ironically, the administration worked at cross-purposes. For while president Kennedy and his National Security Council worked for peace, the CIA took a different course under James Angleton, head of its operations division, who was negotiating with the Israeli intelligence services to provide Israel with an additional nuclear reactor. It was the same CIA that gave the go ahead for Israel to attack Egypt in June 1967. One of the big obstacles that confronted the Kennedy administration in dealing with Nasser's Egypt was the Arab Cold War that was raging between the Arab republican regimes and Arab monarchies. The war in Yemen that pulled in Egypt and Saudi Arabia complicated American diplomacy in the Arab world. The Saudis were the allies of the Americans and Big Oil in the United States feared that the Egyptian army would try to control Saudi oil fields. In a meeting with president Nasser, a Kennedy envoy conveyed the fears in Riyadh of the Egyptian army advancing from Yemen to occupy those fields. To which president Nasser answered that he was happy to hear that the Egyptian army had the capacity of moving into Saudi Arabia and marching towards oil fields thousand of miles away in the eastern part of the Kingdom. Something that this army was not capable of doing. That was the regional situation in the Middle East and the Arab world during the promising Kennedy administration: an Arab Cold War, an Israel racing to acquire nuclear weapons and preparing for war, not only, to bring about the downfall of president Nasser, but also to expand its frontiers by invading Arab territories. The assassination of president Kennedy was a great shock for Egyptians and the rest of the Arab world. During his tenure, peace between the Arabs and the Israelis was not impossible but he only governed for less than three years. Had he lived and been re-elected for a second term, running from 1965 to 1969, Israel would not have waged its aggression against Egypt and Syria and events in the Middle East could have taken a completely different course. His assassination brought an end to innocence in American positions and diplomacy in the Middle East. With Lyndon Johnson at the White House, American diplomacy aligned itself with Israel, and its objectives have aimed ever since to enable Israel to impose its hegemony on the destinies of the Middle East. Seven years after the assassination in Dallas, president Nasser passed away and the face of the Middle East changed completely. So in the span of less than seven years, the disappearance of two great leaders that were united in a certain idealism towards politics and how relations between nations should be conducted left a vacuum that no other leader, either in Washington or in Cairo has filled so far. Maybe because the age of great statesmen is gone forever. Let me conclude this article with a quote from a book president Kennedy authored with the title, Profiles in Courage, the true stories of some American senators and congressmen who stood by their principles and values against all odds. I quote: “The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of the final moment, but it is no less magnificent. A man does what he must, in spite of dangers, obstacles and personal consequences, and that is the basis of all human morality.” May the souls of president Kennedy and president Nasser rest in heavenly peace.
The writer is former assistant to the foreign minister.
