Truman was appalled. “My God!” he said to White. “I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!”
The next day, the president wrote Attorney General Clark: “I had as callers yesterday some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” He was “alarmed at the increased racial feeling all over the country” and asked for a special federal commission to investigate lynchings and civil rights. Clark immediately launched an investigation into the Woodard case, and a new group called the President’s Committee on Civil Rights was soon formed. Its goal would be to challenge states with a history of lynching—such as South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—to enforce the rule of law. Truman told his assistant David Niles, who advised the president on social issues, “I am very much in earnest on this thing and I’d like very much to have you push it with everything you have.”
“The main difficulty with the South,” Truman wrote in a letter to a friend, “is that they are living eighty years behind the times . . . I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [local area] is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from a law enforcement standpoint. When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
Long before most other white Americans, Truman could see that the nation was at a crossroads with respect to its racial identity. He came from a state in which segregation was still the norm. He had grown up with these traditions, thinking of them as a normal part of daily life. Some of his closest friends and political allies were powerful Democrats who hailed from southern states, who were highly entrenched in southern traditions of white supremacy. One of them, Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, had confided in a friend while both he and Truman were aboard FDR’s funeral train in 1945: “Everything’s going to be all right—the new President knows how to handle the niggers.”
Maybank was in for a surprise.
Over the same summer that a wave of lynchings terrorized blacks across the American South, terrorism threatened what little stability was left in the Middle East. On the morning of July 22, 1946, a few minutes before noon, the phone rang at the switchboard of the palatial King David Hotel, which looked out over the Old City of Jerusalem. The switchboard operator picked up to hear a female voice, warning that the hotel should be evacuated, that there was a bomb inside.
The warning was ignored.
The hotel served as headquarters for the British military command in Palestine and the United Kingdom’s Criminal Investigation Commission, which had recently raided the headquarters of a militant Zionist organization called Irgun and seized a number of documents. Those documents were now inside the hotel, along with numerous British and Palestinian officials. Irgun was willing to use violence to push for a Jewish homeland. From the organization’s point of view, there were few if any other options. Recent violence against Jews in Poland had continued to fuel the rage of Zionists, who were critical of laws preventing Jews from leaving Europe and immigrating to Palestine.
At roughly noon, an explosion ripped the pink limestone face off the hotel. Nearby trees were lifted from the soil and hurled like toothpicks. Windows of buildings throughout the neighborhood shattered.
A scramble for survivors began. By 9:30 that night, the local Palestinian authorities reported forty-one dead, a number that would reach ninety-one within the next two days, and included numerous high-level British officials. Irgun—led by Menachem Begin (a future prime minister of Israel)—took responsibility. The bombing of the King David Hotel put the world on notice: There was going to be war in the Middle East between Jews and Palestinians.
In Washington eight days later, Truman gathered his cabinet to discuss the Palestine problem. The situation was “loaded with political dynamite,” one cabinet officer noted. Jews who had survived the Nazi Final Solution had been organizing an effort to establish a homeland in Palestine. American money was pouring into the effort, but opposition was fierce. Arab tribes had occupied these lands for fourteen hundred years. The region was governed by the British Mandate for Palestine, in which British officials ran the local governments and, in the process, gained access to cheap oil from the Arabs. The mandate reached back to the days after World War I, and part of the original British commitment to the region was the eventual establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. That homeland had yet to materialize. Now, more than two decades later, the Jews were intent on making it happen.
In the White House, Truman showed members of his cabinet a file four inches thick—letters that had been sent to the White House in support of the Jews in their quest for a homeland. He was surprised when members of his cabinet pushed back, ferociously. If the United States supported a Jewish homeland, argued Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, the Arabs would be incensed. America depended on Saudi Arabia for oil, and in fact for the first time in its history the United States was about to start importing more oil than it was pulling out of the ground in its own territory.
