Harry Truman Page 45

  I understand all that and I am trying to meet it as best I can.

  Not all of the leaders of the American Jewish community attacked Dad’s policy. When the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s report was made public, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, probably the most prominent supporter of Palestine in public life, told Dave Niles, the White House specialist on minority groups, he had only one regret, “that Justice Brandeis did not live to see this report - he would have called it a miracle.” Frankfurter then launched into a tirade against those Jewish spokesmen who, he said, “preferred a Jewish state on paper rather than doing something real for human beings.”

  More than once, the Palestine question was put to Dad in terms of American politics. At a Cabinet luncheon on October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan almost made a speech, pointing out how many Jews were major contributors to the Democratic Party’s campaign fund and were expecting the United States to support the Zionists’ position on Palestine. My father observed that if they would only keep quiet, the situation might yet be rescued without war. He refused to go beyond the report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which had recommended partition.

  Many Zionists were vigorously protesting the boundaries allotted the Jewish state, which excluded the southern section of Palestine, the Negev. On November 19, Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, visited Dad and described, with the eye of the imaginative scientist he was, what Israel could do with the Negev, if it was given to them. His vivid description ignited the enthusiasm of the ex-senator who had toiled for years to create regional development and flood controls in the Missouri Valley, and Dad immediately telephoned our representative at the UN and told him to support the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. But the UN refused to agree.

  My father was blamed for this failure, and attacks on him by Jewish spokesmen, and would-be spokesmen, multiplied. On March 11, 1948, Dad was forced to open his press conference with one of the angriest statements he ever made: “I want to pay attention to a vicious statement that was made by a columnist in a New York gossip paper, in which he said I had made the statement to the editor of a New York paper here that the Jews in New York were disloyal. I had thought I wouldn’t have to add another liar’s star to that fellow’s crown, but I will have to do it. That is just a lie out of the whole cloth. That is as emphatic as I can put it.”

  By now, the British had announced they were withdrawing from Palestine on May 15, and they made it clear they did not care what happened after that. The Arabs and the Jews seemed to be preparing for war. We were bracing for war with Russia at the same time and this was absorbing most of Dad’s waking hours. Partition now seemed out of the question, if war was to be avoided. The State Department, which had never favored partition, advanced an alternate plan for a temporary UN trusteeship that would replace the British mandate and maintain a status quo. My father never formally committed himself to this plan. It was conceived by career officers in the State Department who were convinced our support of partition would cost us the friendship of the Arab states and the loss of their vast oil resources. Meanwhile, the Jews announced that the moment the British withdrew they intended to declare the creation of the State of Israel.

  At this point in the mounting tension, Eddie Jacobson, Dad’s old partner in his Kansas City men’s clothing store, called at the White House. He begged my father to issue a statement supporting the idea of this Jewish state. A great deal of myth and emotional exaggeration has been wrapped around this meeting. I have been told by very intelligent people, and have read in the memoirs of men whom I admire, such as Dean Acheson, that Eddie Jacobson was responsible for Dad’s entire stand on Israel. There is even a myth that Eddie saw Dad secretly innumerable times during his White House years, using his friendship to bring Dad over to a pro-Jewish point of view. The whole thing is absurd. Eddie Jacobson was one of hundreds of army friends my father made during World War I. After the clothing store folded, Dad saw comparatively little of him. I don’t believe they ever discussed politics, except in the most offhand fashion.

  Far from welcoming his White House visit on March 13, 1948, my father was intensely angered by it. He resented the attempt to use the emotions of friendship to influence the policy of the United States as vehemently as he resented other people who attempted to influence him through his mother, his sister, or other members of the family. He was angry, and he made it very clear to Jacobson he knew he had not made the trip spontaneously - he had been persuaded by Zionists who were determined to put every conceivable pressure on the President.

  At the same time, I want to make it clear that Eddie Jacobson was, first and foremost, a loyal American. He made it clear to Dad, as he wrote in a memoir of his meeting, which is on deposit in the Weizmann Archives in Rehovoth, Israel, that “I never wanted him to do anything for the oppressed Jewish people abroad if doing so would result in the slightest damage to the best interests of my country. On this subject, my friend and I could never have any disagreement.”

  Eddie was soon reduced to asking my father if he would agree to see Chaim Weizmann. Again Dad refused. But when Eddie compared Dad’s hero worship of Andrew Jackson to his feelings for Weizmann, Dad agreed to see him, privately. He did so, the day following his dramatic message to Congress explicitly condemning Russian aggression, and the two men talked for three-quarters of an hour. Once more, Dr. Weizmann begged Dad to support the inclusion of the Negev in any Jewish state. My father assured him this idea had his full support. He also made it clear the United States still backed the idea of partition and wished to see it achieved as soon as possible. In fact, he told Dr. Weizmann that Warren Austin, the head of our UN delegation, would make an important statement to this effect the following day.

  Warren Austin did make an important statement in the UN the following day. But it was not the statement Dad expected him to make, in support of partition. Instead, Ambassador Austin announced the United States was abandoning partition and now supported a UN trusteeship to replace the British mandate. Headlines and Zionists exploded across the country and the world. My father was called a traitor, a liar, and a lot of other unjustified names. Dr. Weizmann was one of the few Jewish spokesmen who remained silent. He knew Dad had been double-crossed.

  Bitterly, on his calendar for March 19, 1948, Dad wrote:

  The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. I didn’t expect that would happen. In Key West or enroute there from St. Croix I approved the speech and statement of policy by Senator Austin to U.N. meeting. This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so in my life.

  There are people on the third and fourth levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve succeeded in doing it. [Secretary of State] Marshall’s in California and [Under Secretary of State] Lovett’s in Florida.

  The following day he wrote: “I spend the day trying to right what has happened. No luck . . .”

  Lamely, my father tried to explain the trusteeship idea did not rule out American support of partition but merely postponed it. Mrs. Roosevelt tried to resign as a member of the American delegation and withdrew her letter only on Dad’s personal plea. It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career, and he could do nothing about it but suffer. To tell the truth about what had happened would have made him and the entire American government look ridiculous. Not even in his memoirs did he feel free to tell the whole story, although he hinted at it. Now I think it is time for it to be told. Perhaps the truth will give future Presidents the power to deal with such insubordination among the career officials in the government.

  In a letter to his sister on March 21, 1948, Dad went even further, describing the really shocking arrogance of the State Department career men.

  I had to appear before Congress on Wednesday and state the Russian case. I had been
thinking and working on it for six months or more. I had discussed it with all the members of the Cabinet and many others. As usual the State Department balked. They tried by every means at their command to upset my plans. I had thought when General Marshall went over there he’d set them right but he has had too much to do and the third & fourth levels over there are the same striped pants conspirators. Someday I hope I’ll get a chance to clean them out.

  Not only did they try to stop my Russian speech but they have completely balled up the Palestine situation. It was not necessary either. But it may work out anyway in spite of them.

  On May 14, Israel declared itself a state. Eleven minutes later, Charlie Ross issued a statement announcing a de facto recognition of Israel by the government of the United States. This was a decision made by Dad alone, in spite of the opposition of the State Department conspirators who for a time even had Secretary of State Marshall convinced recognition should be withheld.

  As the American Jewish Historical Quarterly pointed out in a long review of Dad’s policy published in December 1968, this de facto recognition of Israel was not an act taken to gain Jewish votes. It was an action taken with the conviction that recognition was in America’s national interest. Moreover, de facto recognition was simply the recognition of a reality. It was a minimum step, which Dad absolutely refused to go beyond until after the 1948 elections were over. When it was clear Israel’s government was permanent, de jure recognition was extended on January 31, 1949. The United States was, in fact, the only country in the United Nations, other than South Africa, to withhold this de jure recognition of Israel so long. In spite of the large political advantages to be gained from taking the opposite course, Dad simply refused to do so because he did not think it was right.

  In September 1948, when the United Nations released the report of Count Folke Bernadotte, the mediator who had been assassinated, General Marshall supported it in the United Nations Assembly, although it drastically reduced Israel’s size. Once more, Zionists screamed that America’s policy of “betrayal” was anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. Democratic National Chairman Howard McGrath pleaded desperately with Dad to issue a statement supporting Israel on Rosh Hashanah. It would, in the words of one adviser, make “rich material for the holiday sermons. Praise and thanksgiving would be echoed from every Jewish home and no Jewish leader could fail to sing the President’s praise.” My father turned him down. He was concerned about Israel’s treatment of their Arab citizens, and he felt that withholding this recognition was a way of guaranteeing their good behavior.

  Late in October, a New York delegation called on Dad and warned him unless he offered Israel de jure recognition, raised the arms embargo, and supported the widest possible boundaries for Israel, he would inevitably lose New York State. Dad looked them in the eye and said: “You have come to me as a pressure group. If you believe for one second that I will bargain my convictions for the votes you imply would be mine, you are pathetically mistaken. Good morning.”

  Other Zionists urged Eddie Jacobson to attempt another assault on my father. But Eddie, a wiser man by now, told them rather peremptorily that Chaim Weizmann and Dad remained close friends, and Dr. Weizmann had himself told Eddie there was “nothing to worry about concerning Israel.” Only after Thomas E. Dewey issued a strong, very biased statement accusing Dad of betraying United States pledges to Israel did Dad make a statement. In his Madison Square Garden speech of October 24, 1948, he simply reiterated his support for the Democratic platform plank which accepted the wider boundaries of the original partition resolution.

  The American Jewish Historical Quarterly, at the end of its sixty-seven-page analysis of Dad’s policy toward Israel, concluded: “President Truman’s policy and action between May and November 1948, do not suggest a course based on political expediency. They reflect more, as had all of Truman’s decisions on this matter, the tremendous uncertainty and complexity of the Palestinian affair, and his belief that foreign policy was no place for political maneuvers.”

  On the first anniversary of the passage of the United Nations Partition Resolution, Dad wrote to Chaim Weizmann, one of the few Jewish leaders who had never lost faith in him: “As I read your letter I was struck by the common experience you and I have recently shared. We have both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts to our supposedly forlorn lost causes. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right - and we were both proven to be right.”

  In spite of the extremists who harassed him on all sides and the intransigence of his own State Department, my father achieved a compromise in Palestine that blended justice and realism. We managed to retain Britain’s friendship, and we did not lose our access to Arab oil or, during Dad’s administration, the friendship of most of the Arab states. To his deep regret, he was never able to persuade either side to agree to the internationalization of Jerusalem, which was a key point in his policy. Nor could he persuade the Arabs to join Israel in accepting U.S. aid for an ambitious program of development for the entire Middle East.

  During the same harrowing early months of 1948, when he was trying to cope with both Palestine and Russia, Dad also prepared and submitted to Congress the most ambitious civil rights program ever proposed by an American President.

  Based on the report of a committee of fifteen distinguished Americans whom Dad had appointed, it called on state, city, and the federal governments to make a united effort to close “a serious gap between our ideals and some of our practices.” It was a gap, Dad said, that “must be closed.” He called for establishing a commission on civil rights, a joint congressional committee on civil rights, and a civil rights division in the Department of Justice. He asked for a Fair Employment Practice Commission and stronger protections of the right to vote and a federal anti-lynch law. Dad knew the Southern wing of the Democratic Party would rise in fury against him, as they did, almost immediately. But he did not waver for a moment. One reason was the answer he gave to a reporter who asked him for a background comment on the message. He obviously was hoping to involve Dad in a complex ideological discussion. “The Constitution, containing the Bill of Rights, was the only document considered in the writing of that message,” Dad said.

  An even deeper and more personal view of my father’s approach to civil rights is in a letter he wrote to his sister only a few weeks before his mother’s death: “I’ve got to make a speech to the Society for the Advancement of Colored People tomorrow and I wish I didn’t have to make it. Mrs. R. and Walter White, Wayne Morse, Senator from Oregon, & your brother are the speakers. . . . Mamma won’t like what I have to say because I wind up by quoting Old Abe. But I believe what I say and I am hopeful we may implement it.”

  Some people thought my father could be persuaded to change his mind on civil rights. Shortly before the 1948 nominating convention, a group of compromisers, who shall be nameless here, practically pledged the support of the Dixiecrats if Dad would only “soften” his views on civil rights. Dad replied:

  My forebears were Confederates. I come from a part of the country where Jim Crowism is as prevalent as it is in New York or Washington. Every factor and influence in my background - and in my wife’s for that matter - would foster the personal belief that you are right.

  But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.

  Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.

  My father’s beliefs on civil rights were radical in the best sense of that word. They went to the root, the source. From the same profound understanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights came Abraham Lincoln’s vision of America, which Dad quoted to the NAACP in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial: “If it shall please the Divine Being who determines the destinies of nations, we shall remain a united people, and we will, humbly seeking the Divine guidance, make their prolonged nationa
l existence a source of new benefits to themselves and their successors, and to all classes and conditions of mankind.”

  ON NOVEMBER 11, 1948, Dad wrote to his sister Mary from Key West, “I didn’t know I was so tired until I sat down.”

  This was the only time, as far as I know, that he admitted how much effort he had put into the 1948 campaign.

  November 11 was always a historic day for him. “I am on my way to the beach to take a swim,” he told Mary. “Just thirty years ago I was firing a final barrage at the Heinies at a little town called Hermaville northeast of Verdun. Some change of position I’d say.”

  Although Dad strictly forbade us to gloat in public - “Now we’ve got ‘em licked let’s be generous and make ‘em like it,” he cautioned Mary - he could not restrain a few private expressions of delight over his victory.

  “The White House sent me a big scrapbook of editorials from all the papers over the country - and my, how they’ve banqueted on crow.”

  Winston Churchill, still out of office, underscored the importance of Dad’s reelection in his letter of congratulations:

  My dear Harry,

  I sent you a cable of my hearty congratulations on your gallant fight and tremendous victory. I felt keenly the way you were treated by some of your party and in particular Wallace who seemed to us over here to be a greater danger than he proved. But all this has now become only the background of your personal triumph. Of course it is my business as a foreigner or half a foreigner to keep out of American politics, but I am sure I can now say what a relief it has been to me and most of us here to feel that the long continued comradeship between us and also with the Democratic Party in peace and war will not be interrupted. This is most necessary and gives the best chance of preserving peace.