The outbreak of what would become known as the Six Day War in June 1967 came as a surprise to many of us, so focused as we were at The Star on Vietnam at that time. It had long been a given that ever since the 1956 Middle East war in which President Eisenhower compelled the Israelis to withdraw from seized Egyptian territory, that U.N. peacekeepers were ensuring the borders and that there was little likelihood of an eruption of fighting across them. But for reasons that are still unclear to me today, Gamal Abel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, told Syrian leaders that Soviet intelligence was reporting to him that Israel was about to attack Syria. Israel denied this, and in fact there was no indication that this was true, but the rapid mobilization of Egyptian and Syrian forces led to a corresponding major mobilization by Israel in May 1967.
What led directly to the war was Nasser’s very public demand that peacekeepers had to leave the Sinai, and more importantly, from Israel’s point of view, from the Gulf of Aqaba, which was Israel’s waterway south to the Red Sea. Meanwhile, as tensions rose, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, whose speeches mesmerized Americans because of his speaking ability, arrived in Washington for talks on May 26 and conferred at the White House with Johnson, Rusk and McNamara. What then followed was a hectic effort by the United States and Britain to line up an international flotilla to go through the Gulf of Aqaba to demonstrate Israel’s right to passage through the waterway. But this plan failed to get Security Council backing, and on June 5, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt, eventually seizing all of the Sinai, and on Syria, capturing the Golan Heights. Jordan was then pressured by Egypt and Syria to join the war, and it swiftly lost control of the West Bank of the Jordan River and East Jerusalem. Since that war, only the Sinai has been returned–under the peace treaty signed in 1979 after the Camp David Accord of 1978 worked out by President Jimmy Carter with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
But the June war was also a signal moment in U.S.-Soviet relations. It was the first time the “hot line” had been used in a real situation. On June 5, McNamara relates in his memoir, a general on duty in the War Room at the Pentagon called him and said “Premier Kosygin is on the ‘hot line’ and wants to talk to the president. What should I tell him?” McNamara says he was furious that there was not a direct line to the White House but that was quickly fixed. Eventually Kosygin was put through to Johnson. In his memoirs, Johnson said it was more a message than a conversation. Kosygin expressed Soviet concern over the fighting and that the Russians intended to work for a ceasefire and that they hoped we would exert influence on Israel. By June 11. there was a ceasefire.
For Israel, this was a high water mark for its military prowess. It had virtually destroyed the Egyptian air force and had destroyed the Sinai army of Egypt and occupied the whole Sinai. In complete control of the air, the Israelis advanced within striking distance of Damascus, the Syrian capital.
The Star sent me to New York to cover the special session of the General Assembly that the Russians had called for. And I wanted to be on hand in case there was a U.S.-Soviet summit. There had not been a meeting of the two world powers since Kennedy and Khrushchcv met in Vienna in June 1961, seven years earlier.
Kosygin’s four-engine IL-18 turbo prop landed at JFK airport at 5:05 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, 1967. There was an unusually large number of journalists on hand on this very sunny spring day. He did not make any statement on arriving, and his motorcade sped toward Manhattan, but instead of driving directly to the Soviet U.N. Mission on East 67th street, the motorcade stopped on Third Avenue and 53d Street. Kosygin, and U.S. Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and U.N, Ambassador Nikolai Fedorenko and an interpreter, along with a swarm of security agents, got out of their cars and started walking briskly up the largely deserted Third Avenue this early on a Saturday morning. They were followed by a swarm of newsmen and photographers, including me. I wrote later in my article for The Star that Kosygin, who had been agitating at home for better facilities for the consumer, seemed fascinated by the coffee counters and seating at Clark’s Coffee House at 66th Street and Third Avenue and by the high rises along the street.
On Monday, Kosygin spoke to the special U.N. General Assembly session he had called, and lambasted Israel and the United States and demanded a return to the status quo ante, which everyone knew would not happen, Johnson also made a speech on the Middle East from the State Department calling for sharp limits on arms shipments to the Middle East and free passage through international waters.
There then ensued an unusual diplomatic minuet. Both sides wanted a summit meeting, but Johnson refused to come to New York and Kosygin would not go to Washington. Eventually the governor of New Jersey suggested Glassboro State College, a sort of middle ground between New York and Washington. It was accepted by both sides and the first meeting was held on June 23, in the house of the college president, which was called “Hollybush” and the talks were forever known as being held in the “Spirit of Hollybush.”
It was a most unusual “summit.” The usual array of TV cameras and correspondents from all countries had gotten to the Glassboro campus. My front page story for The Star on June 24 had an upbeat tone. “President Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin return to this college town tomorrow to follow up on their extraordinarily smooth initial get together yesterday,” Kosygin held a press conference at the United Nations in which he said that Johnson would be welcomed in Russia “only after the aggression is halted and a truly peaceful policy is followed.” He said that an improvement in relations could only be achieved by “an end to American aggression in Vietnam.” Curiously, in the background to these meetings, Rusk and Gromtko were meeting privately and agreed on the draft of a non-proliferation treaty, that would be signed eventually by Brezhnev and President Nixon in 1973. Johnson and Kosygin had worked out a plan for Johnson to visit Moscow in late 1968 but the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, in effect cancelled that summit meeting. It also led me to join The New York Times in September 1968.
But I am a bit ahead of myself here. Ambassador Goldberg succeeded, along with the British ambassador. Lord Caradon, in getting the Security Council to accept Resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from occupied lands in return for peace. This has been deliberately ambiguous, since it does not call for a total withdrawal.
