Isaac C. Kidd Jr.

Isaac Campbell Kidd Jr. (died 1999) was a United States Navy admiral who, as a rear admiral in June 1967, presided over the Navy Court of Inquiry into the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, and who retired in 1978 as commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and as the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic.¹ His counsel to the court, Ward Boston, stated in 2003 and 2004 that Kidd told him that Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert S. McNamara ordered the court to find that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.²

Career

The Washington Post obituary of July 2, 1999 records a Navy career of forty years, with combat operations in the Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean during World War II and service in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the loss of the submarine Thresher, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the Dominican Republic crisis.¹ The same obituary gives his retirement in 1978 as commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, and gives his death on June 27, 1999, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, at age 79, after five years of illness with cancer.¹ In June 1967 he was assigned as Assistant Chief of Staff, Logistics, for the Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Southern Europe.³

The Court of Inquiry, June 1967

John S. McCain Jr., Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, named Kidd president of the court by a letter of June 10, 1967, which directed the court to "inquire into all the pertinent facts and circumstances leading to and connected with the armed attack; damage resulting therefrom; and deaths of and injuries to naval personnel."⁴ The record of proceedings opens at 2314 on June 10, 1967, in London, with Captains Bernard J. Lauff and Bert M. Atkinson Jr. as members and Captain Ward Boston Jr. as counsel.⁴ Kidd, Boston and the court reporter boarded the ship at sea off Souda Bay, Crete, and the court met aboard at 0630 on June 12; the court sat at Malta from June 13 to 15 and closed in London at 1645 on June 16.
Ronald Fraser reports that Kidd delivered the report to McCain on June 18, 1967, and that McCain added review comments stating that "the attack was a mistake."⁵

A. Jay Cristol wrote that the report was carried to Washington by Kidd "in a brief case chained to this wrist."⁶ The Chicago Tribune reported in 2007 that McCain chose Kidd to preside and gave the court one week, and that Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, then a captain and staff legal officer in London and later the Navy's Judge Advocate General, said the report was taken from him when he began to question aspects of it. Staring described the inquiry to the Tribune as "a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."⁷

Statements attributed to Kidd

Boston's declaration of January 8, 2004 states that Kidd told him, after returning from Washington, that he had been ordered to sit down with two civilians from either the White House or the Defense Department and rewrite portions of the court's findings, and that he had been ordered to "put the lid" on everything to do with the attack.² The declaration states that Kidd was "adamant" in later private conversations that the attack was deliberate and planned, and that Kidd telephoned Boston after Cristol's 1990 call and said that "Cristol must be an Israeli agent."²

Boston gave other accounts of the same period. Arab News reported in July 2003 that Kidd returned to Washington and then telephoned Boston, saying "We have to be quiet" and "We can't talk to the media," and quoted Boston as saying that Johnson "had ordered us to put the lid on it."⁸ Fraser wrote in July 2003 that Boston said Kidd told him top officials were not interested in hearing the truth.⁵ In an interview with the Chicago Tribune published October 2, 2007, Boston said that Kidd flew to Washington with the record while Boston returned to Naples, and that two weeks later Kidd telephoned him from his office in Naples and said: "Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up."⁷

Arab News reported that Boston quoted Kidd as saying, "Those guys knew what they were doing when they killed innocent sunbathing kids. They tried to sink that ship."⁸ The same article quoted James Ennes, a Liberty survivor, as saying that Kidd never characterized the attack as an accident and told him many times: "You are on the right track, Jim. Just keep on probing."⁸

Cristol states that Kidd, in interviews in the early 1990s, said the attack was not intentional, and wrote in 2007 that Boston's account is hearsay about a dead man.⁶⁸ McNamara told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 1967, as quoted by Cristol, that the conclusion of "the investigatory body headed by an Admiral of the Navy" was that the attack was not intentional.⁶