The Middle East has long been a hotbed for violence and conflict. During the 1950s and 1960s American leaders turned their attention to Asia and largely left the Middle East alone. In the 1970s, that came back to haunt them.
In the winter of 1974 and the spring of 1975, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been working its way through Southern Lebanon. By the summer of 1975, the southern half of Lebanon was a firm base for the PLO. This worried Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose own position in Israel was tenuous and could easily slip if the PLO began a new wave of operations. Rabin chose to take preemptive actions and attack targets in Gaza and the West Bank that Israel intelligence said were either held by the PLO or were supportive of the PLO. These attacks, mostly conducted by either missile attacks or commando raids, only burned the fire in the PLO’s eyes even brighter. Large scale violence broke out on the Lebanese-Israeli border in August of 1975. The Lebanese Government, which was no fan of the existence of Israel, saw the violence as Israeli aggression and declared war, launching an invasion of Israel. Lebanese ally and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat also declared war on Israel, forcing a two-pronged assault. Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr announced his government’s support for the PLO and began to offer strategic assistance in the war against Israel.
The Middle Eastern Situation, as the press called the conflict in its early stages, immediately embroiled the House of Commons. AIP leader George Wallace used PMQs to attack Prime Minister Ford for failing to stand up and defend Israel, which led Opposition Leader Roman Gribbs to attack Wallace, in turn, for war mongering. Ford and his cabinet spent many hours huddling behind closed doors to develop an answer to the Middle Eastern Situation, with Nationalist Defense Minister John Tower advocating the use of the newly-developed Strategic Defense Initiative missile system to destroy Lebanese, Egyptian, and Iraqi strategic command locations but leave the bulk of the fighting up to the Israelis. This put Tower at odds with most of his party, which support a large, active military campaign.
Ford was initially supportive of Tower’s limited approach but came under fire from his Coalition partners for advocating such a moderate response. Nationalist leader John Connally told Ford “These Arabs are backed by the Soviets. If we show weakness and Israel falls, we will have lost the whole damn thing to the Commies.” Connally and his more aggressive allies called for the deployment of nearly 50,000 American troops to Israel to defend Jerusalem and American interests in Israel, effectively working as a backup plan for Prime Minister Rabin. Torn, Ford went to his trusted adviser, Henry Kissinger, for counsel. Kissinger told Ford it was a catch-22 and he would lose either way; if he took Tower’s minimalist approach he would upset the Nationalists and may lose his parliamentary majority, if he took Connally’s aggressive deployment he would upset the people and may lose at the General Election.
On August 27, 1975, Ford announced he would be instructing the senior commanders of the Armed Forces to pursue “an aggressive plan of action, to defend our friends in Israel and protect the only true democracy of the Middle East”. When the plan, codified as the Israeli Defense Plan Act of 1975, was introduced into the Commons, Defense Minister Tower announced his resignation from the post, saying “I cannot, in good faith, work with our military commanders to implement a plan I believe is fundamentally flawed”. Even with Tower’s opposition, the bill passed on August 29, with 395
aye to 255
nay and the American Armed forces began operations the following day.
The first week of September, OPEC held an emergency meeting and voted to ban the sale of oil by any OPEC nation to the United States or the United Kingdom in response to their support for Israel. By September 15, the price of the barrel of oil in the US rose to $17 and price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump jumped to 59 cents. Ford’s approval ratings slumped to 41% as he attempted to reshuffle his cabinet (He ultimately decided to allow Connally to appoint the new Defense Minister in order to keep the Coalition strong), from a high of 59% immediately after the Assembly Referendum. While nowhere near as unpopular as Mike Mansfield was at the end of his term, Ford would need some work to in order to go down in history as the first successful American Prime Minister.
First Ford Government, August 1975
Prime Minister: The Rt. Hon. Gerald R. Ford, Jr. (C)
- Leader of the Center Party
Deputy Prime Minister: The Rt. Hon. John B. Connally, Jr. (Nat.)
- Leader of the National Party
Minister of Foreign Affairs: The Rt. Hon. Charles H. Percy (C)
Minister of Finance: The Rt. Hon. George H. Mahon (Nat.)
Minister of Defense: The Rt. Hon. Ronald W. Reagan (Nat.)
Minister of Justice: The Rt. Hon. William B. Saxbe (C)
Minister of Interior Affairs: The Rt. Hon. John Ben Shepperd (Nat.)
Minister of Trade, Industry, and Business: The Rt. Hon. George L. Murphy (Nat.)
Minister of Labor and Employment: The Rt. Hon. Edward W. Brooke, III (C)
Minister of Health and Social Affairs: The Rt. Hon. Margaret Chase Smith (C)
Minister of Education: The Rt. Hon. Elliot L. Richardson (Nat.)
Minister of Agriculture and the Environment: The Rt. Hon. Ralph Nader (C)
Minister of Transportation: The Rt. Hon. William E. Brock, III (C)
Minister of Infrastructure and Housing: The Rt. Hon. John V. Lindsay (C)
Minister of Veterans Affairs: The Rt. Hon. Maxwell D. Taylor (Nat.)
Minister of Native Affairs: The Rt. Hon. Theodore F. Stevens, Sr. (Nat.)
Minister of Sports, Media, and Culture: The Rt. Hon. John L. Harmer (Nat.)
Minister without Portfolio: The Rt. Hon. Otis R. Bowen (Nat.)