F orty years ago this summer, a president who had lost the public’s trust–and that of many lawmakers on Capitol Hill–faced war in the Middle East. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a preemptive strike at Arab armies massed on its southern, western, and northern borders. Six days later, the fighting was over, with Israel having pushed back the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians and taken the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. For Arabs and Israelis, the Six-Day War is the seminal event that defined not just that summer, but the region’s prospects ever since.
<p>The Six-Day War caught the United States by surprise. &quot;Rarely in the annals of American foreign policy had an international crisis caught an entire administration so completely off-guard,&quot; writes Michael Oren in his definitive history of the conflict. Details of how the American foreign policy establishment dealt with the quickly unfolding run-up to the war–beginning with Egypt ordering UN troops out of the Sinai–have long been classified. But in March, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released the transcripts of the confidential executive sessions that it held during 1967. The documents cover a wide range of topics, from a rebellion in the Congo to trade negotiations. But it is the briefings by Secretary of State Dean Rusk before the Committee–whose membership included such liberal lions as Democrats William Fulbright (the committee chair), Albert Gore, Sr. (Tenn.), Claiborne Pell (R.I.), and Mike Mansfield (Mont.)–on that summer’s Mideast crisis that provide the greatest insight into how American foreign policy works under the weight of a foreign adventure gone horribly wrong. </p>