“All of this is causing complete lack of confidence in our foreign policy from one end of this country to the other end among all classes of our population,” Clifford wrote to Truman. “This lack of confidence is shared by Democrats, Republicans, young people and old people. There is a definite feeling that we have no foreign policy, that we do not know where we are going, that the President and the State Department are bewildered, that the United States, instead of furnishing leadership in world affairs, is drifting helplessly. I believe all of this can be changed.”
Truman and Clifford agreed: The time had come for the administration to make its move in support of the Jews. Both feared that if the United States did not do so, the Soviets would. And then there were the ethical considerations, the idea that so many millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis, that justice was on their side. The British Mandate was to end, and at that time the Jews were going to declare a new state in Palestine. Without Truman’s support, would the new nation have any chance of survival?
Earlier, Truman had ordered Clifford to prepare a case to argue the matter with Secretary of State George Marshall. The day had arrived. On May 12, Truman summoned his secretary of state to the White House. When Marshall arrived at 4 p.m. with the State Department’s second-in-command, Robert Lovett (who had very recently replaced Dean Acheson in this position), they found Clark Clifford sitting in the Oval Office with the president. Clifford was nervous. “Of all the meetings I ever had with Presidents,” he recalled, “this one remains the most vivid.” Marshall was thought by many to be “the greatest living American,” according to Clifford, and the young White House special counsel found himself “on a collision course over Mideast Policy” with the secretary of state.
Marshall was immediately suspect. When Clifford began his case in support of the Jews, he recalled, “I noticed thunderclouds gathering—Marshall’s face getting redder and redder.” When Clifford finished his argument, Marshall turned to Truman.
“Mr. President,” said Marshall, “I thought this meeting was called to consider an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter.”
Truman replied, “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be here.”
Marshall flatly accused Truman of making a decision that affected the future of the world based upon homespun politics. Lovett jumped in to agree.
“It is obviously designed to win the Jewish vote,” Lovett said. “But in my opinion, it would lose more votes than it would gain.”
As a former general, and even now as secretary of state, Marshall was committed to remaining above politics. He did not vote in elections, believing that doing so would compromise his independence. Now, he told Truman, “If in the election I was to vote, I would vote against you.”
“Everyone in the room was stunned,” Clifford recalled. “Marshall’s statement fell short of an explicit threat to resign, but it came very close.”
When it was clear no agreement could be reached, the meeting participants gathered up their papers and uncomfortably adjourned. As the deadline approached, Truman communicated his decision to General Marshall by messenger: The president would support the Jews in Palestine. Marshall had no choice. To oppose the president publicly would be to shatter the chain of command, and the general understood this fact. He responded that, while he did not agree with Truman’s decision, he would not oppose it publicly. “That,” Truman told Clifford, “is all we need.”
Right up until the moment the British Mandate expired, Truman kept his decision to support a Jewish homeland a secret. In his May 13 press conference, a reporter asked, “Mr. President, will the United States recognize the new Palestine state?”
“I will cross that bridge when I get to it.”
The mandate expired at midnight on May 14 in Palestine, which was 6 p.m. on May 14 Washington time. In Palestine, Jewish leaders declared the new nation of Israel and began to secure borders with a makeshift army. Eleven minutes later, Truman released a statement: “This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.”
Truman was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel. “The charge that domestic politics determined our policy on Palestine angered President Truman for the rest of his life,” Clifford later wrote in his memoirs. “The President’s policy rested on the realities of the situation in the region, on America’s moral, ethical, and humanitarian values, on the costs and risks inherent in any other course, and—of course—America’s national interests.”
Meanwhile, the move did make for good politics. The night Truman recognized the new state of Israel, in Washington, the Israeli flag debuted at the Jewish Agency building on Massachusetts Avenue for a crowd of jubilant Zionists. In Palestine, the first shots of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War were soon fired, and violence and death began to spread across the region. Truman made a speech the night Israel was born, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.
“I want to say to you that for the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House,” he announced. “And you’re looking at him!”
11
“I Will Not Accept the Political Support of Henry Wallace and His Communists”
ON FRIDAY, JULY 4, 1947—a date chosen for the obvious symbolism—Thomas Dewey left Albany by train with his wife and sons, headed west on a nine-state speaking tour. Dewey had yet to declare his candidacy, but the trip was clearly a test run for a
