Truman

by David McCullough

  When a congressional delegation from New York came to see him about the issue, he sat at his desk irritably shuffling papers and said he wished more people would call on him about the country’s problems, and not their own.

  “I am not a New Yorker,” he is supposed to have said at another meeting. “All these people are pleading a special interest. I am an American.” He abhorred special interests of any kind, but several individuals had begun to get under his skin.

  Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”

  To his sister Mary Jane he wrote, “I’m so tired and bedeviled I can’t be decent to people.”

  When several American diplomats, who had been called home from the Middle East to advise him, finished presenting the Arab point of view, Truman’s comment was that he didn’t have a great many Arabs among his constituents.

  Forrestal’s intense, repeated warnings of the importance of Arab oil, Forrestal’s bitter opposition to any American action that would favor the Zionist cause, had also begun to play on Truman’s nerves. And for his part, Forrestal found himself thinking less and less of a President who seemed so willing to cave in to cheap political expediency.

  Truman had not, however, shut himself off from Zionist spokesmen, or, importantly, from contact with his old friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson. Like many American Jews, Jacobson was not a Zionist. But he looked to Zionist leaders to solve the problems of the Jewish refugees, and he had been trying to do his part, both for the refugees and for the cause of the Jewish homeland, by escorting small groups to the White House to explain the Zionist position. (Following one such visit in 1946, when he had accompanied Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of New York, and Charles Kaplan, the vice president of a shirt company, to see the President, Jacobson quipped to reporters, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.”)

  Truman was as fond of Jacobson as ever. He knew him to be a devout Jew and a patriotic American and trusted him absolutely, and this was to give Jacobson a role of unusual importance as events unfolded. Until now, Jacobson had asked no favors of Truman or presumed ever to impose on his time. “And when the day came when Eddie Jacobson was persuaded to forego his natural reluctance to petition me and he came to talk to me about the plight of the Jews…I paid careful attention,” Truman later wrote. Indeed, said Truman, it was “a fact of history” that Jacobson’s contribution was of “decisive importance,” a point quite unknown at the time.

  The call to make Palestine a Jewish homeland had begun in the late nineteenth century, and prominent among American champions of the cause had been Truman’s late friend Justice Louis Brandeis, who had helped win Woodrow Wilson’s approval of the Zionist dream. In 1917, during the Great War, the British had seized Palestine from the Turks; that same year, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, the British government formally endorsed the idea of a future Jewish home in Palestine, the ancient kingdom of Israel, a narrow streak on the map, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, comprising all of 10,000 square miles, about the size of Sicily or Vermont.

  The war over, Britain was granted a special mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, with the understanding that independence would soon follow. But the British mandate had continued. Only after another world war, only in 1947, had the Attlee government announced that it would withdraw from Palestine, as from Greece, and turn the whole thorny issue over to the United Nations.

  So, in effect, Palestine and the destiny of Europe’s displaced Jews was another of those results of World War II—like the bomb and the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe—that had been left for Truman to face.

  American policy, generally speaking, favored immediate independence for Palestine, which would then be divided, or “partitioned,” into two separate states, one Jewish, one Arab, joined in an economic union. The United States also supported the idea of large-scale Jewish immigration to the new homeland.

  Jews everywhere favored partition. The Arab states were vehemently opposed. The British thought the plan unworkable, and though Winston Churchill, at the peak of his power, had championed a Jewish homeland—“I am a Zionist,” he had bellowed at a meeting in Cairo in 1944—the Attlee government opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. To the British, Harry Truman seemed “carelessly pro-Zionist.” When, in 1946, Truman had called for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ascribed it to a crude desire for votes in New York and suggested Truman had no wish to see more Jews come to the United States, remarks that set Truman’s teeth on edge.

  The more attention given to the issue, the more divisive it became, dividing Jews from Arabs, British from Americans, and more and more in Washington threatening to divide the White House from the State Department, where it was strongly felt the Arabs would never accept partition except under force, and might very well turn to the Soviets for help—a move that could bring the Soviets into the Middle East on the pretext of keeping the peace.

  Like the British, senior officers at the State Department favored a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine until the contention between Arabs and Jews could somehow be resolved. George Kennan considered the Palestine situation insoluble for the time being. More outspoken was the head of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy W. Henderson, a suave, knowledgeable career diplomat with a strong sense of duty who was convinced partition of Palestine had no chance of success. Henderson worried about the consequences to the Marshall Plan should Arab oil be cut off, Europe being dependent on the Arab states for 80 percent of its oil. The creation of a new Jewish state at this particular moment, he stressed to Marshall, could be disastrous to the long-range interests of the United States.

  Relations between the State Department and such members of Truman’s staff as Clifford and Niles grew extremely difficult. “Some White House men still believe that a number of positions taken by career men on this matter were based on anti-Semitism, not diplomacy,” Jonathan Daniels was to write, naming no names. “And there are men in the State Department who believe that some of the presidential staff were clearly more concerned about Israel in terms of American politics than in terms of American security.” If Clifford was reluctant to stress the domestic political stakes involved, Niles was not. Henderson would remember Niles turning to him at one point and saying sharply, “Look here, Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected.”

  According to Dean Rusk, who was then Marshall’s assistant secretary in charge of U.N. affairs, the real cause of difficulty was not any deviousness on the part of the State Department, but the “conflicting objectives” in the President’s own mind. “This wasn’t understood at the time. With Marshall and State working toward a long-range solution, the Zionists branded anyone not 1,000 percent behind the Zionist cause as having betrayed the president.”

  Clifford remained certain the State Department, “to a man,” was doing everything possible to thwart the President’s intentions, and he told Truman so. Truman thought Clifford unduly concerned. “I know how Marshall feels and he knows how I feel,” Truman said, meaning if Marshall was with him, that was all he needed to know.

  In Palestine, the whole time, violence and terrorism continued.

  It was in late 1947, on Saturday, November 29, over the Thanksgiving weekend, that the United Nations, at the end of a dramatic
two-and-a-half-hour session, voted for partition by a narrow margin, the United States taking a lead part behind the scenes to see the measure through. (“We went for it,” Clifford told Jonathan Daniels. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through.”) The Soviet Union, too, had joined the United States in support.

  Eddie Jacobson recorded in telegraphic style his own chronicle of the unfolding drama:

  Nov. 6th—Wash.—Pres. still going all out for Palestine.

  Nov. 17th—Again to White House….

  Wed., 26—Received call from White House—everything O.K.

  Nov. 27—Thanksgiving. Sent two page wire to Truman.

  Friday, received call from his secretary [Matt Connelly] not to worry.

  Nov. 29th—Mission accomplished.

  Truman, Jacobson noted, had told him that “he [Truman] and he alone was responsible for swinging the votes of several delegations.”

  Zionists, Jews everywhere, were elated. In the lobby outside the General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters at Flushing Meadows, in what had been the New York City Building at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Jewish delegation was swept up in the embrace of delegates and visitors from all but the Arab countries. In the hall itself, while members of the Arab delegations walked out, Zionists in the audience were rejoicing. “This is the day the Lord hath made!” a rabbi cried in the delegates’ lounge. “There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from his heart,” recalled Abba Eban, who was then a young liaison officer with the Jewish Agency, the official Zionist organization.

  To the Zionist Organization of America, the vote was “a triumphant vindication” of the Zionist dream and “a victory for international equity.” Rabbi Silver called it a turning point in history, and expressed particular appreciation for the part played by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Here, said the New York Herald-Tribune, was “one of the few great acts of courageous collective statesmanship which our shattered postwar world has been able to achieve.” At a Zionist rally in New York to celebrate the occasion, twenty thousand people tried to jam into an auditorium on 34th Street, a crowd three times the seating capacity.

  Britain announced that responsibility for Palestine would be turned over to the United Nations in less than six months, on May 14, 1948. The Arabs said partition meant war, and Truman was warned by the Chiefs of Staff that military intervention by the United States to protect a new Jewish state would require no less than 100,000 troops. (The British were about to withdraw 50,000 troops.) The Arabs, Forrestal told Clifford, would “push the Jews into the sea.”

  The hard truth, as Forrestal reported to Truman, was that the deployable troops then available totaled less than 30,000, plus perhaps 23,000 Marines.

  Nor was Palestine by any means the sole concern in early February 1948. In Czechoslovakia, a violent coup backed by the Red Army had imposed a pro-Communist government with bewildering speed. It was one of the traumatic events of the postwar era. A feeling of revulsion swept much of the world, as it had only ten years before when the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia. Italy and France appeared to be headed for the same fate.

  Truman left for Key West for another greatly needed rest and change of scene which, after all, did little to improve his outlook. “Things look black,” he told Margaret in a letter from Key West on March 3. Russia had kept none of its agreements. “So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938/39 with Hitler.”

  Two days later, on March 5, came a top-secret cable from General Lucius D. Clay in Berlin reporting a worrisome shift in Soviet attitudes in Berlin, “a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations.” Until recently, Clay had felt another war was not likely for at least ten years. His sense now was that war could come any time and “with dramatic suddenness.”

  If, as later suggested, the real purpose of Clay’s message was to impress Congress on the need to reinstate the draft, this was not understood at the time and its effect on Washington was stunning and entirely real. General Bradley said later that it “lifted me right out of my chair.” Secretary of the Army Royall checked with David Lilienthal to see how long it would take to move atomic bombs to the Mediterranean, closer to Russia. “The atmosphere of Washington today,” wrote Joseph and Stuart Alsop in their column, “is no longer postwar. It is a prewar atmosphere.”

  “The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the U.N.,” Truman would write years later, bitter still over the memory. “Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that, and the other. I think I can say that I kept the faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews.”

  Hundreds of thousands of postcards flooded the White House mail, nearly all from Jewish interest groups. Largely as a result of the efforts of the American Zionist Emergency Council, thirty-three state legislatures passed resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. Forty governors and more than half the Congress signed petitions to the President. David Niles grew so emotional at one meeting in Truman’s office that he threatened to quit unless Truman moved more emphatically in support of the Jewish cause. Ed Flynn came down from New York to tell the President that he must either “give in” on Palestine or expect New York’s opposition to his renomination in July.

  Truman’s patience wore thin. He refused to make further comment on Palestine, refused to see any more Zionist spokesmen, even ruling out a visit from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the grand old man of world Zionist leaders, who, despite failing health, had sailed from London for the expressed purpose of seeing him. Weizmann, a renowned scientist, now seventy-four, had devoted a large part of his life to the dream of a Jewish homeland. Small, charming, and clever, he had been one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration. Also, he and Truman already knew and liked one another. At their first meeting, as Truman remembered, he had not known how to pronounce “Chaim.” “So I called him ‘Cham.’ He liked it. He was a wonderful man, one of the wisest people I think I ever met…a leader, one of the kind you read about.”

  They had met secretly in the White House in November 1947, just before the U.N. vote on partition, and the effect on Truman was nearly as pronounced as it had been on the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, thirty years earlier. Spreading a map on Truman’s desk, Weizmann had fascinated the former Missouri farmer with the agricultural possibilities in the Negev Desert, the future control of which was still at issue. Truman pledged his support for the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. “You can bank on us,” Truman had said, and as Weizmann would write with wry understatement, “I was extremely happy to find that the President read the map quickly and clearly.”

  But now Truman had closed the door to “the little doctor,” and this to Weizmann and his American Zionist allies was an especially distressing sign. Through Clifford and Niles, they already knew in detail what opposition they faced at the State Department.

  A secret paper from George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff recommended no further support for partition. A report from the new Central Intelligence Agency concluded that partition would not work and urged reconsideration. More important to Truman were the views of George Marshall who, at a meeting of the National Security Council on February 12, had said the United States was “playing with fire while having nothing with which to put it out.”

  Marshall saw America as gravely threatened by the Soviet Union, and as a soldier, he was acutely aware of the vital importance of Middle Eastern oil in the event of a war in Europe, which seemed more likely by the day. Marshall had besides a soldier’s distaste for politics. Writing about the Palestine question in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he had said candidly that “the political situation in this country doesn’t help matte
rs.” At a press conference he was still more emphatic. As long as he was Secretary of State, there would be no “bending” to either political or military threats.

  Clifford grew increasingly concerned. “On five occasions I told the President that our position on Israel was going sour,” Clifford recorded. “On each time the President replied, ‘No, Marshall knows how I feel.’”

  At the State Department, thousands of letters were received demanding the dismissal of Loy Henderson for being “pro-Arab.”

  Henderson was summoned to Truman’s office, to a meeting attended by Clifford and Niles, and asked to defend his position. Henderson felt Clifford and Niles were trying to humiliate him in front of the President. “I pointed out that the views which I had been expressing were those, not only of myself,” Henderson remembered, “but of all our legations and consular offices in the Middle East and of all members of the Department of State who had responsibilities for that area.” The cross-questioning by Clifford and Niles became more and more harsh, until finally Truman stood up and said, “Oh, hell, I’m leaving!”

  From his bearing and facial expression [Henderson remembered] I was not at all convinced that even at that late date the President had made the final decision to go all out for the establishment of the Jewish state. Although I was not in a position, of course, to know what his real feelings were, I had the impression that he realized that the Congress, the press, the Democratic Party, and aroused American public opinion in general, would turn against him if he should withdraw his support of the Zionist cause. On the other hand, it seemed to me he was worried about what the long-term effect would be on the United States if he should continue to support policies advocated by the Zionists. He was almost desperately hoping, I thought, that the Department of State would tell him that the setting up in Palestine of Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the U.N. Commission would be in the interest of the United States. This, however, the Department of State thus far had not been able to do.