CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Israel’s Uprovoked and Unanswered Attack on the USS Liberty

The listing USS Liberty, a day after it was attacked by Israeli gun and torpedo boats. Photo: US Navy.

In the fall of 2003, Alexander Cockburn and I were in Los Angeles for a long weekend shortly after our book, The Politics of Antisemitism, came out. Few bookstores would put it on their shelves, not even the now shuttered Midnight Special in Santa Monica, a venue where we’d both appeared several times to vibrant audiences.

We’d started our book tour with a talk in the Mission District of San Francisco, normally a safe space for the promotion of heretical opinions, where we were confronted by a group of four or five Zionist miscreants, who, in a scene out of a Marx Brothers movie, denounced us as “journalistic jihadis” and flung rotten vegetables at us, not very accurately. I recall a squishy eggplant being tossed so wildly that it splattered against a display for the Oprah Book Club. Who says there’s no Providence in this world?

A few weeks later, Bill and Kathy Christison and I were shot at as we drove back to Santa Fe following a talk outside Taos, the bullet creasing the roof of the Christisons’ car. Bill, the old CIA hand, didn’t flinch, as I cowered spinelessly in the backseat. These were tense times, with much of the country still sweating out the post-911 fever, angry, paranoid, impotent.

In LA, we had to rent our own venues, first a small art gallery in Venice and the next afternoon a coffee shop in Silver Lake. Both gigs were well-attended and went off without incident, prompting Alex to ask if I thought we might be “losing our Mojo.”

“We haven’t played Orange County, yet,” I said. “Maybe we can pick up a black cat bone and some John the Conqueror root to get our Mojo rising again before we hit Yorba Linda.”

The following evening, we met Gore Vidal at a venerable Italian eatery in old Hollywood, off Sunset Boulevard. The restaurant, Vidal explained, was just down the block from the Hacienda Arms (now called the Piazza del Sol), location of the House of Francis, the most exclusive brothel of Hollywood’s Golden Era. “Lee Francis [the madam of the establishment] put the den into iniquity,” Vidal joked. “But the real owner was MGM. The studio paid most of the bills, including to the LAPD. They say Jean Harlow was sent a new girl every week and Clark Gable had his choice each afternoon in his dressing room on set. I don’t know if Madame Francis ran boys. But she must’ve. Half of Hollywood was queer. The studios liked it that way. Homosexuals were easier to control. They could be outed to the tabloids any minute, which made for fewer contract disputes.”

Vidal seemed a little forlorn to me. It had only been a few months since Howard Austen had died and he was clearly still bereft at the loss of his longtime partner and the life they shared at Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. Still, Gore dominated the conversation. Over the next two hours or so, Vidal told so many salacious anecdotes they would have filled a year’s worth of our old political gossip column, Our Little Secrets. Even Cockburn, who could hold his table talk with almost anyone, could barely pierce through Gore’s caustic monologue and eventually just tried diverting him down hilarious new avenues of vitriol and denunciation aimed at celebrities, politicians and rival writers, including the neocon transformation of the man he once declared his “dauphin,” C. Hitchens.

For most of the evening, Vidal didn’t pay much attention to me, except to say, out of the blue, that I reminded him of the young John Irving. “Not the prose, which is atrocious, but your look. Your bearing.” I didn’t see much of a resemblance; Irving was a wrestler and looked like one. I was a baseball player as a teenager and didn’t look or play quite enough like one to make it, even in the low-minor leagues. But it sounded like a compliment, so I didn’t object. Who objects to Gore Vidal anyway?  “In Hollywood, everybody looks like someone else,” Vidal said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Even the someone else you’re meant to look like.”

I cautiously reminded Vidal that all three of us had recently recorded “commentaries” for the DVD version of Tim Robbins’ film Bob Roberts. “Frankly, I didn’t watch my own or yours, but I’m sure we were all quite brilliant,” Vidal replied. “As for Tim’s excellent film, it was, I fear, quickly eclipsed by a politics that has become too absurd to satirize.”

“How so?” inquired Cockburn, who’d deftly managed to produce 45 minutes of commentary on Bob Roberts without having seen the film.

“Consider John Kerry,” Vidal quipped, in top gear now. “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.)

As the waiter uncorked the third bottle of an Italian Barolo, Alex reached into his leather satchel and handed Vidal a copy of our book, a volume Cockburn asserted was “so incendiary that we had to start our own publishing company to get it printed.” This seemed to pique Gore’s interest enough to flip through the pages of our little volume of essays on how the term “antisemitism” has been perverted and used to stigmatize and silence critics of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

“And you didn’t invite me to contribute?” he asked. “After all, I was a flaming anti-Semite, according to that old she-goat Abe Foxman. Imagine the puerile cast of a mind which considers that a witticism!”

“The next volume is entirely yours, Gore,” Alex offered.

As he scanned the pages, Vidal stopped about halfway through and glanced at me.

“This is you? You’re this, Jeffrey St. Clair?”

The glare was penetrating and I froze, momentarily, a little worried that I might become the object of Vidal’s withering ire, triggered by some unknown transgression against the English language.

“Yes, that’s Jeffrey, Gore,” Alex interjected. “The John Irving look-alike.” I’m not sure Alex knew who the author of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire was (though he would have relished Setting Free the Bears), contemporary middlebrow American novelists not being at the top of his reading list.

Vidal held up our book and repeatedly jabbed an index finger at the chapter on the USS Liberty, which I had written.

“Well, Mr. St. Clair, I see you are one of the few, the very few, who have rediscovered the fate of the Liberty. I certainly hope you’ve done those men, those sailors, justice. Their country certainly didn’t. Just think of it, Israel is the only country that can attack an American naval vessel and get rewarded the next year with guns, missiles, fighter jets and money.”

A few minutes later, the waiter approached our table and said, “Mr. Vidal, your car is waiting.”

Gore rose from his seat somewhat unsteadily, squeezed my shoulder, nodded his head at Alex, grabbed his cane and hobbled out of the restaurant.

“Do you think he’ll review it now?” I asked.

“Review it? He probably won’t even remember it,” Alex snapped, scrutinizing the substantial bill we’d been left to settle.

There were no reviews forthcoming. From Gore Vidal or anyone else. Even so, The Politics of Antisemitism sold more than 10,000 copies, is still selling and, alas, will, it seems, never go out of date. Not bad for a small press with no press–only word of mouth and the CounterPunch website–behind it.

Five years later, I called Vidal to approve my edits of his introduction to A Bush and Botox World, the filmmaker and journalist Saul Landau’s book, which we were publishing that spring.

After I introduced myself, Vidal responded sharply: “You’re Mr. Liberty, right?”

I confessed I was the very same, feeling that “Mr. Liberty” was something of an improvement over being John Irving’s doppelgänger.

“Well, Jeffrey, you did fine. You did just fine. But don’t be fooled into thinking your account of this atrocity will make even the slightest difference. Mark my words. Ten or 15 years from now, we’ll be dragged deeper into the muck than we are now. We’ll be drowning in it. Faust made a better deal.”

Now, 59 years after Israel committed an unanswered act of war against the US, the US finds itself shackled to Israel in a war against Iran, a war that Trump can’t extricate himself from without the consent of Israel–a war that Israel has viciously expanded by crossing both the Litani River in Lebanon and the Yellow Line in Gaza, plunging the US deeper and deeper into the intractable muck.

Gore Vidal was right. He almost always........

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