These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military.
The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship. In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. More than 50 years later, the story still hasn’t sunk in, but following the master’s injunction, I intend on re-telling it until it finally does. I swelled with a little pride, since I’d written that chapter, after culling through hundreds of pages of redacted files and interviewing several survivors of the lethal attack. The story needs to be told and retold until the implications finally sink in!” If you can kill American sailors and still get rewarded with fighter jets, you can get away with any atrocity. Vidal thumbed through the collection and stopped at one of the chapters. “The next volume is entirely yours, Gore,” Alex offered. “Jeffrey and I thought you might enjoy reading our latest bit of heresy.” Vidal turned to the table of contents, grunted and said, “As someone who has been scurrilously tarred as an anti-semite myself, why wasn’t I asked to contribute?” Good question. “The senator is beginning to sound a lot like Lincoln…after the assassination.” (This is a joke that Vidal perfected over the election year, but I got the sense we may have been his first test audience.)īefore leaving Gore with the check, Cockburn reached into his leather saddlebag and extracted a copy of The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
“Consider John Kerry,” Vidal said, in top gear now. “How so?” inquired Cockburn, who’d deftly managed to produce 90 minutes of commentary on Bob Roberts without having seen the film. “As for Tim’s excellent film, it was, I fear, quickly eclipsed by a politics that has become too absurd to satirize.” “Frankly, I didn’t watch my own or yours, but I’m sure we were all quite brilliant,” Vidal replied. I reminded Vidal that all three of us had recently done “commentaries” for the DVD version of Tim Robbins’ film Bob Roberts.
“Well, Alexander,” Vidal smirked, “at least the Judas didn’t name a child after me.” Alex raised his eyebrows at the well-aimed counterpunch. By now, Hitchens had completed his transformation into one of the literati’s most obnoxious neocons. “So, Gore, are you having second thoughts about your Dauphin?” Cockburn was referring to Christopher Hitchens, naturally, who a few years earlier Vidal had anointed as his successor in the ranks of political polemicists. But it didn’t take long for Alex to get the great man jump-started. It had only been a few months since Howard Austen had died and he was clearly still missing his longtime partner and the life they shared at Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. In the spring of 2004, Alexander Cockburn and I met Gore Vidal for lunch in Los Angeles. The USS Liberty being escorted to Malta after an attack by Israeli air and naval forces that killed 34 members of her crew and wounded another 171.
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