How Family Letters Helped James Scott Write THE ATTACK ON THE LIBERTY

A guest post by author James Scott.

My recently completed book, The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship, proved to be an interesting marriage of investigative reporting and family history. The Liberty was a spy ship sent into the Middle East in 1967 to monitor what we now know as the Six-Day War. On the fourth day of the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Israelis strafed and torpedoed the Liberty as it steamed in international waters, killing 34 men and injuring 171 others in what is still a highly controversial affair.

I have a personal connection to the story: My father was an engineering officer on the Liberty. He was awarded the Silver Star for his efforts to prevent the ship from sinking, an impressive accomplishment for a young man who happened to celebrate his 24th birthday the day of the attack.

The book’s research involved gathering records from some two-dozen archives and libraries scattered across the United States and Israel. I conducted hundreds of interviews and filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Navy, State Department, CIA and NSA. I even filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy to pry loose some records. Still, the most valuable historical finds came, not from any government agency, but from my family.

My grandmother unfortunately passed away about the time I began researching this project. In the process of cleaning out her house in Charlotte, my father discovered the letters he wrote to his parents in the days before and after the attack, all neatly stored in the attic of the Cornell Avenue home where he grew up. Bundled along with his letters were dozens of others my grandparents wrote to him during his days in the Navy.

Many of the letters were unrelated to the book I was writing, but each offered a glimpse into my family’s history. My grandmother was an avid letter writer, a communication that is fading in our world of e-mail, phone texts and Twitter. She wrote of visits with her mother, who lived to be 97. She described one of my uncle’s weddings and gave the details of my grandfather’s new boss. She often wrote of mundane events, like the flooded basement in a rainstorm (she described it as looking like the “Queen Mary’s indoor swimming pool”) and what dinner she planned to cook for my grandfather. She even mailed a newspaper clipping about Charlotte constructing a $25 million skyscraper—the tallest in the Southeast at the time—and something that seems so small town these days, given that Charlotte, now one of the nation’s largest banking centers, is crowded with high rises, a professional football stadium and basketball coliseum.

The most powerful correspondence—and which I used extensively in the book—centered on the days following the Liberty attack. In her letters, my grandmother described the agony of a parent, in a world before the advent of 24-hour cable news coverage and the Internet, held hostage to the brief snippets of information transmitted over the family’s black and white television and the two radios, each tuned to different stations. She described how her fear of losing her middle son paralyzed her. In a fit of desperation she went into my father’s bedroom and rubbed her hands over one of his uniforms he had left behind on a previous visit home, hoping she might get some psychic sense of whether he had survived. Then there was the letter capturing her relief when she learned my father was one of the lucky ones: “I just don’t know how to start this letter but to say your safety is the greatest gift we have ever had,” she wrote. Across the envelope, she scrawled a command to the Postal Service: “Speed it!”

Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to interview my grandfather or grandmother in the course of my research, since by then both had passed away. But the letters, brittle and yellow after weathering years in my grandparents’ attic, proved to be a window into that critical moment of my family’s history. I was able to share their agony at not knowing the fate of my father as well as the joy upon learning that he had survived.

These letters, which unfortunately so many families unknowingly toss out when loved ones die, became an invaluable research tool in reconstructing this important story. But for me, it went beyond the scope of this one story. In the course of reading these letters—I have now pored over them all countless times—I found that I had a much greater appreciation, not only of what my family went through in the aftermath of the Liberty attack, but of the day-to-day life in Charlotte in the 1960s—the small town rhythm, the family gossip and even the awe and amazement over a new skyscraper.

James Scott