What's different about Biden's support for Israel

Plus: Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is dead at 100 |

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By Made by History / Produced by Olivia B. Waxman America has always had a special relationship with Israel. But as Doug Rossinow explains in Made by History, President Biden has offered more fulsome and unqualified support for Israel during a war than his predecessors have. Traditionally, American presidents have calibrated their backing based on how an Israeli war will affect American geostrategic goals, as well as what impact support would have on their own standing with American voters. That held true for Democrats like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, and Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Biden, by contrast, seems to see support for Israel more as a moral imperative, and everything from his rhetoric to his trip to Israel was designed to offer unabashed backing. But this poses political risks. It remains to be seen what impact Biden’s stance will have, but it's clear that he’s changed the approach employed by his predecessors.

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1957: Senator John F. Kennedy HENRY KOERNER The Dec. 2, 1957, cover of TIME “His intellectual qualifications are such that his photographer wife Jacqueline remarks, in a symbolic manner of speaking: "If I were drawing him, I'd draw a tiny body and an enormous head." Kennedy is recognized as the Senate library's best customer, reads six to eight books a week, mostly on American history…Jack Kennedy is a member of the U.S. Senate—and there is good reason for the fact that in all U.S. history only one man, Warren G. Harding, has gone directly from the Senate to the White House. Explains Kennedy: ‘The Senate is just not the place to run from. No matter how you vote, somebody is made happy and somebody unhappy. If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically. If you vote for everybody—in favor of every appropriation but against every tax to pay for it—you might as well be dead politically, because you are useless.’” Read More » This week in 1963: President Lyndon B. Johnson BERNARD SAFRAN The Nov. 29, 1963, cover of TIME “The office of Vice President has often been deemed, especially by men who held it, a job fit only for a nonentity. It was called ‘the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived’ (John Adams, the first Vice President), ‘a fifth wheel to the coach’ (Theodore Roosevelt), ‘as useful as a cow's fifth teat’ (Harry Truman), and not worth a ‘pitcher of warm spit’ (John Nance Garner). But as Lyndon Johnson would readily agree, and as the U.S. may rest assured, he is far from being a nonentity. Perhaps still another Vice President best described his skills. ‘He is,’ Richard Nixon once said, ‘one of the ablest political craftsmen of our time.’ During Republican Dwight Eisenhower's two terms, Johnson was the Senate's Democratic floor leader, and between presidential election years he was generally recognized as the U.S.'s most powerful Democrat. By the time he accepted his party's vice-presidential nomination, he was probably the only Democrat in the country who could step down to the nation's second-highest office.” Read More » This week in 1988: The 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER The Nov. 28, 1988, cover of TIME “Out of the mouths of such sinister characters the assassination-conspiracy theorists of the 1980s have fashioned the latest in a long-running series of explanations of what may forever remain unexplainable: why Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, exactly 25 years ago this week. In an anniversary spate of books and TV specials, the trendy theory is that the Mafia arranged the President's murder and the silencing of Oswald by Dallas strip-joint owner Jack Ruby. This, of course, clashes with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone for his own twisted reasons and that Ruby impetuously killed the assassin to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a Dallas trial of her husband's slayer.” Read More »

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