Two weeks later, on March 31, the US House of Representatives passed the European Recovery Program—the Marshall Plan—with a roll call of 329 to 74 (sixty-one of the seventy-four voting against were Republicans), authorizing $6.205 billion in foreign aid to countries that would use it to rebuild their infrastructures and resist Soviet infiltration. Again, the Kremlin reacted. On the same day the House passed the Marshall Plan, General Clay in Berlin cabled his boss, General Omar Bradley, the US Army’s chief of staff in Washington, informing him of a Soviet announcement that all US military and civilian trains moving from the American sector of Germany into the city of Berlin would have to submit to inspections by Soviet military.
“It is undoubtedly the first of a series of restrictive measures designed to drive us from Berlin . . . ,” Clay wrote. “It is my intent to instruct our guards to open fire if Soviet soldiers attempt to enter our trains.”
Two days later, the Central Intelligence Agency issued a top secret intelligence report called “Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948.” “The possibility must be recognized that the USSR might resort to direct military action in 1948,” it concluded, “particularly if the Kremlin should interpret some US move, or series of moves, as indicating an intention to attack the USSR or its satellites.”
The Northern Hemisphere had divided into two opposing forces, and there seemed no turning back. Every presidential candidate was forced to consider the possibility of the election unfolding in a time of war.
As the Berlin standoff spread fear across the United States, violence was spreading across Palestine. On January 5, a truckload of bombs disguised as crates of oranges ripped apart an Arab office building in Jaffa, killing fourteen and wounding nearly a hundred others. A Jewish organization called the Stern Gang took credit. Six days later, gun battles broke out in sand dunes and orange groves along the coastal plain of Gaza, claiming twenty lives. On January 18, Arabs ambushed a group of Jews on a highway, killing roughly three dozen young men and women.
The United Kingdom was scheduled to withdraw from Palestine at midnight on May 14, but the British occupying forces had already lost control.
One morning in a February staff meeting in the Oval Office, Clark Clifford brought up Palestine. “People were blaming the United States for not acting,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers recalled Clifford saying in this meeting. “[Truman] said that there was nothing further he could do. He had done everything possible except to mobilize troops.”
On March 6, 1948, Truman received an intelligence memo on the “Proposed Program on the Palestine Problem.” “Unless immediate action is taken to preserve peace in Palestine,” it began, “chaos and war will follow Great Britain’s withdrawal on May 15th. Such a situation will seriously damage United States prestige and United States interests. It will surely be exploited by the Russians.”
Truman still supported the United Nations proposal to partition Palestine into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs—but the United Nations had made no progress. The Jews refused to embrace the plan. The Arabs refused to embrace the plan. And in the United States, the Palestine problem was highly politicized. Thomas Dewey was a popular governor in New York State, home of the city with the largest Jewish population in America by far. The Jews had been warm to Truman, but they would surely defect if they did not get what they wanted—Truman’s promise to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine. All Truman had to do to be reminded of this fact was to reach into his Oval Office desk drawer and pull out the Clifford-Rowe memo, which pointed out that no candidate since 1876 had won the presidential election without capturing New York’s electoral votes, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916. “Unless the Palestine matter is boldly and favorably handled [by Truman],” the Clifford-Rowe memo read, “there is bound to be some defection on their [the Jews’] part to Dewey.”
Truman was hoping that somehow, the Palestine problem would solve itself, but as he waited, the whole affair blew up in his face. On Friday, March 19, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, informed the UN General Assembly that the United States was abandoning its support of the partition of Palestine into two states, in support of a UN “trusteeship” of the region. Austin’s statement to the UN was in opposition to Truman’s own position. Just the day before, Truman had met with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and had all but promised him that the United States would support a Jewish homeland. Now Austin was informing the UN that this was no longer the case.
When the story broke, Truman was stunned and worried. He wrote on his desk calendar, “The State Dept pulled the rug from under me today . . . 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 low in my life.”
He called Clark Clifford at seven thirty the next morning: “Can you come right down? There’s a story in the papers on Palestine and I don’t understand what has happened.”
When Clifford arrived, he found his boss “as disturbed as I have ever seen him.” The backlash among Jewish organizations and politicians from states with Jewish constituents was furious, and the appearance of absolute ineptness was impossible to escape. As the New York Times political writer Arthur
