David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

Home > Nonfiction > David McCullough Library E-book Box Set > Page 494
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 494

by David McCullough


  “That was rough as a cob,” Truman said to Clifford, once everyone was gone. Truman told him not to feel badly. As a trial lawyer, Clifford said, he had lost cases before.

  “Let’s not agree that it’s lost yet,” Truman said.

  Would the United States recognize the new Palestine state, reporters asked the next day.

  He would cross that bridge when he came to it, Truman replied.

  But by then the bridge was already underfoot. Lovett had telephoned Clifford the evening before, less than an hour after the meeting broke up, to say he and Clifford must talk as soon as possible. Clifford had gone to Lovett’s home in Kalorama, where, over drinks, they agreed something had to be done, or there could be a serious breach between the President and the Secretary. Conceivably, Marshall might resign, which, as Clifford knew, would be the heaviest possible blow to Truman’s standing with the country and undoubtedly destroy whatever small chance he had of being reelected. “Marshall was the greatest asset he had,” Clifford would recall. “He couldn’t afford to lose him.” It was painfully ironic: Marshall, who insisted there be no political considerations, Marshall who was so “above politics,” had himself become the largest of political considerations.

  Lovett asked Clifford to think about it, but when Lovett called Clifford the next morning, Clifford told him there was nothing he could do. Lovett would have to persuade Marshall he was wrong.

  Truman’s reaction, when Clifford reported all this, was that Marshall, in Truman’s words, needed a little more time.

  That was on Thursday, the 13th.

  On Friday, May 14, the day the new Jewish state was to be declared at midnight in Jerusalem—6:00 P.M. Washington time—Clifford and Lovett met for lunch in the quiet of the F Street Club and worked out the wording of a statement to be released by the President. Lovett now urged only that there be no “indecent haste” in recognizing the new Jewish state, so that the American delegation at the United Nations could have ample warning. Clifford, however, could not promise that.

  Sometime that afternoon, Marshall called the President to say that while he could not support the position the President wished to take, he would not oppose it publicly.

  “That,” said Truman to Clifford, “is all we need.”

  Clifford put through a hurried call to Elihu Epstein, an official at the Jewish Agency in Washington, to tell him that recognition would occur that day, and to get the necessary papers ready and over to the White House at once. When Epstein asked what was needed, Clifford had to say he didn’t exactly know. “This is very unusual,” Clifford said, “a new country asking for recognition—it doesn’t happen every day.”

  Clifford called the State Department, then reported back to Epstein. When the papers finally arrived, the name of the new country had been left blank—to be filled in later—because it was still unknown.

  The new Jewish state—the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years—was declared on schedule at midnight in Jerusalem, 6:00 P.M. in Washington, Eleven minutes later at the White House, Charlie Ross announced de facto recognition by the United States of Israel, as it was to be called.

  The American delegation at the United Nations was flabbergasted. Some American delegates actually broke into laughter, thinking the announcement must be somebody’s idea of a joke. Ambassador Austin, the only one of the delegation who had been notified in advance and only at the last moment, was so upset he went home without telling any of the others.

  At the State Department, meantime, Marshall had dispatched his head of U.N. affairs, Dean Rusk, by plane to New York to keep the whole delegation from resigning.

  There was dancing in the streets in Brooklyn and the Bronx, a huge “salute-to-Israel” rally at the Polo Grounds. In synagogues across the country thanksgiving services were held. At 2210 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, headquarters of the Jewish Agency, a new flag was unfurled—pale blue and white, with a star of David in the center.

  In Kansas City, Eddie Jacobson packed his bags and left immediately by plane for New York to see Chaim Weizmann, who was to be the new President of Israel. Three days later, on May 17, Jacobson presented himself at the White House as Israel’s “temporary, unofficial ambassador.”

  It would be pointed out as time went on that the United States had granted only de facto recognition of the new Jewish state, whereas the Soviet Union followed with a more formal de jure recognition; that Truman in succeeding months, as Israel was under attack by Arab armies, refused to lift an American embargo on arms shipments to Israel; and that in the United Nations, through that summer and fall, the United States strongly supported a policy of mediation and compromise that the Israelis opposed. But such observations failed to diminish the larger symbolic force and importance of what Truman had done: it was the President of the United States of America who had granted the world’s first recognition of the new Jewish nation. And while experienced observers, including most of his own experts on foreign affairs, considered much of his performance a sorry spectacle of mismanagement—“a comic opera performance,” Time magazine said—there was immense approval in the country. An editorial in the Washington Star expressed well what most Americans felt:

  There is a great deal to be said against the past gyrations and topsy-turvy handling of American policy regarding Palestine. But that aspect of the situation is completely overshadowed at the moment…by the swift and dramatic decision of the United States to take the lead among all nations in recognizing the new Jewish State of Israel. It is a wise decision and a heartening one….

  As the popular radio commentator and world traveler Lowell Thomas said in his broadcast that evening, Americans in every part of the country would be turning to the Bible for some historical background for “this day of history.”

  Truman had no regrets. He had achieved what he intended and had, besides, established a point about who, after all, was in charge of American policy:

  The difficulty with many career officials in government [he would later write] is that they regard themselves as the men who really make policy and run the government. They look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy…. Some Presidents have handled this situation by setting up what amounted to a little State Department of their own. President Roosevelt did this and carried on direct communications with Churchill and Stalin. I did not feel that I wanted to follow this method, because the State Department is set up for the policy of handling foreign policy operations, and the State Department ought to take care of them. But I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not a second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making policy….

  He felt great satisfaction in what he had been able to do for the Jewish people, and was deeply moved by their expressions of gratitude, then and for years to come. When the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, called at the White House, he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.”

  “I thought he was overdoing things,” remembered David Niles, “but when I looked over at the President, tears were running down his cheeks.”

  Loy Henderson was removed from his job. Truman had him reassigned far from Washington and the concerns of American policy in the Middle East. He was made ambassador to India. Interestingly, Henderson would also remain a staunch admirer of Truman, considering him one of the great American presidents. “In my opinion,” Henderson later said, “the morale and effectiveness of the [State] Department were never higher than during the period that Truman was President…. The morale of the department is usually higher when the President is a man who is not afraid to make difficult decisions and who is prepared to accept the responsibilities that flow from such decisions.”

  General Marshall continued in his duties as before. When some of Marshall’
s friends urged him to resign, Marshall allegedly replied that one did not resign because a President who had the constitutional right to make a decision made one. However, Marshall would not speak to Clark Clifford ever again.

  Asked long afterward what he had thought to say to Marshall, to get him to agree at the last moment to American recognition of Israel, Robert Lovett said: “I told him that it was the President’s choice.”

  III

  The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called “Scrabble,” of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before.

  The economy was booming. Profits were up. Farmers were prospering. American prosperity overall was greater than at any time in the nation’s history. The net working capital of American corporations hit a new high of nearly $64 billion. For the steel, oil, and automobile industries, it was a banner year. Unemployment was below 4 percent. Nearly everyone who wanted a job had one, and though inflation continued, people were earning more actual buying power than ever before, and all this following the record year past, 1947, which, reported Fortune magazine, had been “the greatest productive record in the peacetime history of this or any other nation.”

  In London, the same summer of the 1948 national political conventions, American athletes—Bob Mathias, Harrison Dillard, Melvin Patton—swept the field in the first Olympic Games since 1936 in Berlin, winning thirty-eight medals.

  It was a time of extraordinary technical and scientific achievement. A 200-inch telescope, the world’s largest, was unveiled at Mount Palomar, California. Test pilot Chuck Yeager, flying a revolutionary rocket-plane, the Bell X-l, broke the sound barrier. The transistor was developed, a new antibiotic, Aureomycin, and cortisone to treat rheumatoid arthritis. A new kind of fuel, liquid hydrogen, promised, its inventor claimed, to “send men to the moon.”

  For evening entertainment the country was tuning in to such radio favorites as “Duffy’s Tavern” and the Jack Benny Show. Radio dominated, for news and entertainment. But approximately one family out of every eight now owned a “television machine,” as Truman called it, and 1948 would be remembered as the premier year for the “Camel Newsreel Theater,” with John Cameron Swayze, the first nightly television news program. Also, for the first time ever, there would be television broadcasts of the political conventions, these to be held in the same city, Philadelphia, in order to make such coverage easier.

  It was the year, too, of Christina’s World, a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill—a world bearing no relation to that of green gum and supersonic flight—that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American.

  The music being sung and danced to in 1948 included such hit songs as “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” “It’s a Most Unusual Day,” and a new rendition by Pee Wee Hunt of the old Kansas City favorite, “Twelfth Street Rag.” Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate was on Broadway, and several of the new motion pictures were some of the finest ever made—The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Among the best-selling books were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Eisenhower’s account of the war, Crusade in Europe, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, an Indiana University professor whose statistical revelations concerning male promiscuity in postwar American life caused a sensation.

  In January, Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered while walking through a garden in New Delhi. In March, Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose father founded Czechoslovakia as a free democracy, either jumped or was pushed to his death from a third-floor window in Prague, news that stirred grief and anger as almost nothing else had done since the end of the war. (“But let the world not misunderstand what he said, with that leap,” wrote Dorothy Thompson. “He said: He who collaborates with Communism chooses slavery, treason, dishonor—or suicide.”) In June would come a crisis in Berlin.

  In July, one of Truman’s favorite Americans, General John J. Pershing, died at age 87, and his body lay in state under the Capitol dome. Truman rode to the Capitol without police escort to pay his respects, as he said, “in my role as a Field Artillery Captain in World War I.”

  As time would tell, the politics of 1948 would also introduce a number of new words and expressions into common American usage—“whistle-stop,” “Dixiecrat,” and “red herring.”

  According to “scientific” polls given much attention in the press, 94 percent of the American people believed in God. According also to the polls, Harry Truman stood no chance of remaining President. “Obviously the Republican star is approaching its zenith,” reported Life, the country’s most popular magazine. Indeed, for all the change and tumult of the times, among the few accepted certainties was that it would be a Republican year, a dull campaign, and a debacle for Truman and the Democrats worse even than 1946.

  Two experiences greatly influenced Truman’s outlook through what remained of that spring, and on into summer and fall, giving him both courage and seemingly irrepressible confidence no matter how bleak the forecasts—and they grew steadily bleaker—or how many people deserted him—and there were to be many.

  The first had happened eight years before. Nothing, no struggle, no road traveled, could ever again be so difficult or look so hopeless, he felt, as had his chances in the Senate primary of 1940, the summer he ran against Lloyd C. Stark. It was a segment of Truman’s past that many political commentators and forecasters might well have studied closely in 1948. Courage, the saying goes, is “having done it before,” and in 1948 Truman knew he had done it before—against the odds, without money, without newspaper support, without the blessing of Franklin Roosevelt or any serious speculation by those supposedly in the know that he might actually wind up the winner. The persistent talk of his coming defeat in November, the tone of smug certainty in so much that was written and said, all had a very familiar ring to him.

  Of greatest importance also was the more immediate experience of a much publicized “nonpolitical” tour made by rail cross-country in June, exactly as recommended in the Rowe Report. For while the two-week expedition was not without its blunders and embarrassments and seemed at times to have been a mistake, Truman found it exhilarating in a way nothing else could have been, and he returned to Washington looking and feeling as vigorous and sure of himself as at any time in his political life.

  But courage and confidence, however important, would have been hardly enough without such other imponderable attributes as genuine sympathy for human feelings, humor, common sense, physical vitality—truly exceptional physical vitality for a man in his middle sixties—pride, determination, and a fundamental, unshakable Jacksonian faith in democracy, which to his mind mattered above all. Harry Truman trusted the American people. It would be said often, it sounded corny, and it was true. He loved the politician’s work of “getting out among the people,” loved seeing the country, loved the crowds. When local politicians came aboard the train to shake his hand, at one stop after another on this and later trips, and Truman took time for each of them, he was never just going through the motions, he genuinely liked such people, enjoyed seeing them.

  As President he felt more than ever a need to see and make contact with what he called the everyday American. And he always felt better for it. On a recent evening in Washington, on one of his walks, he had decided to take a look at the mechanism that raised and lowered the middle span of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. Descending some iron steps, he came upon the bridge tender, eating his evening supper out of a tin bucket. Showing no surprise that the President of the United States had climbed down the catwalk and suddenly appeared before him, the man said, “You know, Mr. President, I was ju
st thinking about you.” It was a greeting Truman adored and never forgot.

  In the primary summer of 1940 in Missouri, he had worked his way through small-town crowds pumping hands and saying, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I am from Jackson County.” Now, across the West, the refrain, somewhat modified, was heard again: “I am coming put here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then make up your mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President.”

  His sixteen-car “Presidential Special” departed from Union Station the night of June 3, Truman traveling again in his special armor-plated car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and accompanied by about twenty of the White House staff, including Secret Service agents, and fifty-nine reporters and photographers, which made it a record press party.

  The excuse for this “nonpolitical” tour was an invitation to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley, but no one took the nonpolitical claim seriously, least of all Truman, who began with his first brief stop at noon the next day, June 4, at Crestline, Ohio. “On this nonpartisan, bipartisan trip that we are taking here,” he said to the obvious enjoyment of the crowd, “I understand there are a whole lot of Democrats present….”

  The principal reason for declaring it an official presidential trip was that the Democratic Committee had no money. The cost was thus charged to the President’s annual travel fund, to the outrage of leading Republicans and much of the press.

 

‹ Prev