Final_Judgment

[64] Final Judgment 125
victim of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute to be killed on U.S. soil." 173
(However, as we shall see in Chapter 18, there is—as in the assassination of
John F. Kennedy—a lot more about the murder of his younger brother than
really meets the eye.)
Nonetheless, as Alfred Lilienthal, the veteran critic of U.S. Middle East
policy, has written, "There is little question that Kennedy intended to move
decisively in his second term. The assassination of President Kennedy in
Dallas on November 22, 1963, shattered the possibility that his second term
might see Washington start to free itself from the grave burdens of U.S.
partisanship on the Arab-Israeli conflict and of continuous politicking for
domestic votes." 174
MOVING FAST
Arab hopes for peace had been shattered and a new American president
in Washington was—in the meantime—busy ingratiating himself with
Israel's representatives in the American capital.
“You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one,” the
new president told one Israeli official. 175 Although Johnson’s quote has
been oft repeated, it is not quite certain just who that official was. The
quote, indeed, may have been apocryphal—another legend in the Lyndon
Johnson legacy.
However, most sources believe that Johnson's comment was probably
made to Ephraim Evron, the number two man in Israel's embassy in
Washington. It was Evron who ultimately became a very close friend of
Lyndon Johnson.
At the time of the Kennedy assassination—interestingly enough—Evron
was in Washington in charge of Israeli intelligence operations, working
closely with James Jesus Angleton, Israel's man at the CIA. Thus, it seems
likely, that whatever Angleton knew about JFK's assassination, Evron likely
knew—and vice versa. And perhaps, we might speculate, Johnson also thus
knew as well. (In Chapter 8 and in Chapter 16 we will consider Angleton's
peculiar part in the JFK assassination conspiracy in full detail.)
According to Johnson aide Harry McPherson, "I think [Evron] felt what
I've always felt, that some place in Lyndon Johnson's blood there are a great
many Jewish corpuscles." 176
The aforementioned McPherson, speaking on tape for the LBJ Library
Oral History Project, interestingly described himself as the Johnson White
House's "staff anti-Semite," 177 McPherson explained that this meant that
he had to maintain "a continuing relationship with B'nai B'rith, the Anti-
Defamation League, to some extent the Zionist organization, and others
who want various things," 178 presumably a difficult task. As a
consequence, McPherson was especially tuned in to Johnson's relationship
with Israel and its lobby in Washington.