After his trip to Florida—and a brief stop in North Carolina—Truman headed back to the White House. With every day leading up to the election, it seemed, the superpowers were moving closer to war, and one could only wonder if this was by the Kremlin’s design.
At 11 a.m. on October 21, eleven days before Election Day, General Lucius Clay arrived in the Oval Office along with Secretary of Defense Forrestal and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall. Clay was in Washington for only twenty-four hours; the threat of war with the Soviets was so real, he needed to get back to Germany. He had crossed the Atlantic to speak to Truman.
The airlift was carrying five thousand tons of supplies into Berlin daily in good weather, and three thousand tons under poor conditions, Clay reported. Winter weather would soon put the pilots flying the supply missions at greater risk. No progress had been made with Soviet negotiations to end the blockade. Undersecretary of the Army William H. Draper Jr. was in the room during this meeting. He later described the hostile environment in which the airlift was being conducted: “At almost any point in Berlin, you could see three planes in the air, two on their way in and one or two on the way out . . . The Russians were buzzing the planes. They didn’t shoot any down, but they came right near us. It’s a wonder there weren’t any accidents, and so starting a war, because that would have probably done it.”
Following this meeting, Truman ordered the National Security Council to add sixty-six more C-54s to the supply operation, and to secure aviation fuel for “the extraordinary demands of the air lift as well as stockpile for emergency purposes.”
On this same day, news broke of violence on the Korean peninsula, raising concerns that the US military and the Soviets might come nose to nose, in yet another part of the world. A Communist uprising on the peninsula’s southern coast hinted at a possible bigger rebellion in the making. It was a story that had been developing slowly since the end of World War II. In the summer of 1945, Japanese forces had surrendered to the Soviets north of the 38th parallel and to the United States south of the 38th parallel. That latitudinal dividing line had since morphed into a national border between the Soviet-controlled north and the US-backed south.
For months, American intelligence sources had warned of increasing instability on the peninsula. In the south, the Republic of Korea had established a government in August 1948, headed by the US-backed president Syngman Rhee, who spoke English and had earned a PhD in the United States at Princeton University many years earlier. But in September, the Soviets established a rival government based in the city of Pyongyang in the north. According to recent reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Soviets had some forty-five thousand occupation troops in North Korea. The same week that violence broke out on the Korean peninsula, the CIA issued a top secret document concluding, “It must be assumed that the USSR will not be satisfied with its present hold on North Korea and will exert continuing efforts to establish eventual control over all Korea.”
Truman later recalled, “Rhee’s government would be in grave danger if the military units of North Korea were to start a full-scale attack.”
At the same time, the pressure on the Truman administration to figure out some solution to the Arab-Israeli war continued to tighten. The casualties were mounting in the Middle East, and included many civilians. The United Nations mediator in Palestine, Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, had come up with a two-state proposal, known as the Bernadotte Plan, which (among other things) called on the Israelis to allow Arabs to return to their homes in what was now Israeli territory. On September 17, while Truman was campaigning in Ohio, Bernadotte was assassinated—shot dead in broad daylight in Jerusalem by the Jewish extremist group the Stern Gang.
On October 17 a State Department official named John McDonald cabled Truman from Jerusalem. “Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster,” McDonald wrote. He concluded that, with approximately 400,000 refugees, the “approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.”
The Palestine situation was inextricably linked with the American election. On the day Israel was founded, Truman had extended de facto recognition to the new Jewish state. It was provisional recognition, while full legal and diplomatic recognition was expected to follow, once Israel had held democratic elections. Now Truman was under extreme pressure to grant de jure recognition, in order to court the Jewish vote in America, most notably in New York. But Israel had not yet held democratic elections, and critics within the State Department were horrified by the treatment of the Arab refugees. The United Nations, the US State Department, Harry Truman, the Jews, the Arabs—no entity could come forth with a plan that the others could agree upon. So any position Truman took had the potential for disastrous results.
The Democratic platform adopted in Philadelphia in July had promised “full recognition” of Israel, a rethinking of the arms embargo that prevented the United States from sending arms to Israel, and no modifications to the borders of Israel that were not “fully acceptable to the State of Israel.” Truman was under intense pressure from Jewish groups in the United States to come through on all these promises, but thus far he had been unable. The Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut,
