II

The issue was complicated, baffling, and charged with emotion, “explosive,” as Truman said, and in the heated climate of an election year, exceedingly sensitive. Its consequences in human terms—for the Jewish people, the Arab Palestinians, in its effect on Middle Eastern relations—could clearly be momentous and very far-reaching.

Truman felt pulled in several directions. Like the great majority of Americans, he wanted to do what was right for the hundreds of thousands of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered such unimaginable horrors. His sympathy for them was heartfelt and deep-seated. As senator, at the mass meeting in Chicago in 1943, he had said everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a haven for Jewish survivors of the Nazis. Often as senator, he had personally assured Zionist leaders he would fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As President, he was further impressed by the report of an emissary sent the summer of 1945 to investigate displaced person camps in Europe and talk to Jewish survivors. Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, had supplied Truman with an exceedingly moving document describing misery that, as Truman said, “could not be allowed to continue.” And it reinforced his own belief that Palestine was the answer. Palestine, reported Harrison, was “definitely and preeminently” the choice of the Jewish survivors in Europe. Only in Palestine would “they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work. No other single matter is, therefore, so important from the viewpoint of Jews in Germany and Austria and those elsewhere who have known the horrors of concentration camps as is the disposition of the Palestine question.”

The two ardent champions of the Jewish cause on the White House staff were Clark Clifford and David K. Niles, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. Niles, one of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years and himself a Jew, sensed in Truman a fundamental sympathy for the plight of the Jews that he had never felt with Roosevelt. Had Roosevelt lived, Niles later said, things might not have turned out as they did.

Niles was a short, dark, round-faced, nearsighted man with a receding hairline—as unremarkable in appearance as Clifford was striking—and an extremely shrewd, experienced political troubleshooter with longstanding contacts among Jewish leaders in every part of the country. To White House reporters, as to others on the White House staff, he seemed oddly secretive, even mysterious, spending long weekends in New York with theater people, or in Boston, his home town. It was a reputation Niles cultivated. His own “passion for anonymity” verged on being a mania. “I am a man of no importance,” he would insist quietly. In his tiny, cluttered office on the second floor of the old State Department Building next door, he spent most of his time on the telephone. Between them, Niles and Clifford would keep key Zionists informed of what was going on in Washington and within the White House at almost every step.

Both men were keenly attuned to the politics of the Palestine issue, though Clifford vehemently objected to any charges, then or later, that the November election was the real heart of the matter, that it was all “just politics” to get the Jewish vote.

Support for a Jewish homeland was, of course, extremely good politics in 1948, possibly crucial in such big states as Pennsylvania or Illinois, and especially in New York where there were 2.5 million Jews. More important even than Jewish votes to the destitute Democratic Party could be Jewish campaign contributions. Nor was there any doubt that the Republicans stood ready to do all they could for the Jewish cause and for the same reasons. But beyond the so-called “Jewish vote” there was the country at large, where popular support for a Jewish homeland was overwhelming. As would sometimes be forgotten, it was not just American Jews who were stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.

Politics and humanitarian concerns and foreign policy were all closely, irrevocably intertwined. Yet for Truman unquestionably, humanitarian concerns mattered foremost. His sympathies were naturally with the underdog, but he was influenced too by a lifelong love of ancient history, his own remarkable grasp of the whole complicated chronicle of the Fertile Crescent. For Truman, Palestine was never just a place on the map.

And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine [Clifford remembered], even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure…. I remember him talking once about the problems of displaced persons. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has someplace to go back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

To Truman, as he himself wrote, it was “a basic human problem.” When his Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, reminded him of the critical need for Saudi Arabian oil, in the event of war, Truman said he would handle the situation in the light of justice, not oil.

Any implication by Forrestal or officials from the State Department that he somehow failed to appreciate the complexities involved, Truman greatly resented. As President he could not possibly dismiss the strategic and economic importance to the United States and Europe of the rapidly developing Middle Eastern oil reserves. Like most Americans, he knew relatively little about the Arabs and their culture, but at the same time he had no wish to damage relations with the Arabs, whose hostility to the establishment of a Jewish state in their midst appeared implacable. American relations with the Arab states had been good until now and like Forrestal, the Chiefs of Staff, fearing an “oil-starved” war, put great stress on the importance of maintaining those relations. To the Arabs it seemed they were being made to pay for the crimes of Hitler.

Much blood had already been spilled in Palestine. Arab groups had attacked Jewish settlements. Jewish terrorists had attacked British troops. Zionist leaders had been jailed. In the summer of 1946, the Jewish terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people. And while Truman remained sympathetic to the claim of the Jews on Palestine and knew that more than 600,000 Jews were already there, he also knew the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Arabs. As he said many times, he had no wish to send American troops to guarantee the survival of the new Jewish state; and from the advice he was getting, that was exactly what would be required.

Also he found the mounting pressures on him by Jewish organizations extremely vexing. A good listener, he had been listening to their pleas and arguments since his earliest days in office, when Rabbi Stephen Wise first called on him, and he had become not just worn down by it all but increasingly suspicious, increasingly resentful of the politics of Palestine. In late 1947, the White House received more than 100,000 letters and telegrams concerning Palestine.

“Mr. President, it is up to you and the other leaders of the American people to set an example to the rest of the world…. Give your support to the Zionist Movement, just as the late President Roosevelt would have done,” he read in a letter from Brooklyn. A telegram from the Philadelphia Womens Division of the American Jewish Congress said:

OUR GOVERNMENT IS HONOR BOUND BY ITS PLEASURES AND PROMISES AND MUST KEEP FAITH WITH HUMANITY. WE MUST GIVE OUR LEADERSHIP AND STRENGTH FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE.

Truman became so exasperated by the flood of Jewish “propaganda,” he told Senator Claude Pepper, that he took a great stack of such mail and “struck a match to it”—a claim that may have expressed his true desire but that appears to have no basis in fact. (“I don’t remember that incident at all,” his secretary Rose Conway later told writer Robert Donovan.)

“What I am trying to do is make the whole world safe for the Jews. Therefore I don’t feel like going to war in Palestine,” Truman wrote in response to one Zionist group, in a letter he never sent. To Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he had made a delegate to the United Nations, he wrote: “The action of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

When a congressional delegation from New York came to see him about the issue, he sat at his desk irritably shuffling papers and said he wished more people would call on him about the country’s problems, and not their own.

“I am not a New Yorker,” he is supposed to have said at another meeting. “All these people are pleading a special interest. I am an American.” He abhorred special interests of any kind, but several individuals had begun to get under his skin.

Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”

To his sister Mary Jane he wrote, “I’m so tired and bedeviled I can’t be decent to people.”

When several American diplomats, who had been called home from the Middle East to advise him, finished presenting the Arab point of view, Truman’s comment was that he didn’t have a great many Arabs among his constituents.

Forrestal’s intense, repeated warnings of the importance of Arab oil, Forrestal’s bitter opposition to any American action that would favor the Zionist cause, had also begun to play on Truman’s nerves. And for his part, Forrestal found himself thinking less and less of a President who seemed so willing to cave in to cheap political expediency.

Truman had not, however, shut himself off from Zionist spokesmen, or, importantly, from contact with his old friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson. Like many American Jews, Jacobson was not a Zionist. But he looked to Zionist leaders to solve the problems of the Jewish refugees, and he had been trying to do his part, both for the refugees and for the cause of the Jewish homeland, by escorting small groups to the White House to explain the Zionist position. (Following one such visit in 1946, when he had accompanied Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of New York, and Charles Kaplan, the vice president of a shirt company, to see the President, Jacobson quipped to reporters, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.”)

Truman was as fond of Jacobson as ever. He knew him to be a devout Jew and a patriotic American and trusted him absolutely, and this was to give Jacobson a role of unusual importance as events unfolded. Until now, Jacobson had asked no favors of Truman or presumed ever to impose on his time. “And when the day came when Eddie Jacobson was persuaded to forego his natural reluctance to petition me and he came to talk to me about the plight of the Jews…I paid careful attention,” Truman later wrote. Indeed, said Truman, it was “a fact of history” that Jacobson’s contribution was of “decisive importance,” a point quite unknown at the time.

The call to make Palestine a Jewish homeland had begun in the late nineteenth century, and prominent among American champions of the cause had been Truman’s late friend Justice Louis Brandeis, who had helped win Woodrow Wilson’s approval of the Zionist dream. In 1917, during the Great War, the British had seized Palestine from the Turks; that same year, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, the British government formally endorsed the idea of a future Jewish home in Palestine, the ancient kingdom of Israel, a narrow streak on the map, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, comprising all of 10,000 square miles, about the size of Sicily or Vermont.

The war over, Britain was granted a special mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations, with the understanding that independence would soon follow. But the British mandate had continued. Only after another world war, only in 1947, had the Attlee government announced that it would withdraw from Palestine, as from Greece, and turn the whole thorny issue over to the United Nations.

So, in effect, Palestine and the destiny of Europe’s displaced Jews was another of those results of World War II—like the bomb and the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe—that had been left for Truman to face.

American policy, generally speaking, favored immediate independence for Palestine, which would then be divided, or “partitioned,” into two separate states, one Jewish, one Arab, joined in an economic union. The United States also supported the idea of large-scale Jewish immigration to the new homeland.

Jews everywhere favored partition. The Arab states were vehemently opposed. The British thought the plan unworkable, and though Winston Churchill, at the peak of his power, had championed a Jewish homeland—“I am a Zionist,” he had bellowed at a meeting in Cairo in 1944—the Attlee government opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. To the British, Harry Truman seemed “carelessly pro-Zionist.” When, in 1946, Truman had called for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin ascribed it to a crude desire for votes in New York and suggested Truman had no wish to see more Jews come to the United States, remarks that set Truman’s teeth on edge.

The more attention given to the issue, the more divisive it became, dividing Jews from Arabs, British from Americans, and more and more in Washington threatening to divide the White House from the State Department, where it was strongly felt the Arabs would never accept partition except under force, and might very well turn to the Soviets for help—a move that could bring the Soviets into the Middle East on the pretext of keeping the peace.

Like the British, senior officers at the State Department favored a United Nations trusteeship over Palestine until the contention between Arabs and Jews could somehow be resolved. George Kennan considered the Palestine situation insoluble for the time being. More outspoken was the head of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, Loy W. Henderson, a suave, knowledgeable career diplomat with a strong sense of duty who was convinced partition of Palestine had no chance of success. Henderson worried about the consequences to the Marshall Plan should Arab oil be cut off, Europe being dependent on the Arab states for 80 percent of its oil. The creation of a new Jewish state at this particular moment, he stressed to Marshall, could be disastrous to the long-range interests of the United States.

Relations between the State Department and such members of Truman’s staff as Clifford and Niles grew extremely difficult. “Some White House men still believe that a number of positions taken by career men on this matter were based on anti-Semitism, not diplomacy,” Jonathan Daniels was to write, naming no names. “And there are men in the State Department who believe that some of the presidential staff were clearly more concerned about Israel in terms of American politics than in terms of American security.” If Clifford was reluctant to stress the domestic political stakes involved, Niles was not. Henderson would remember Niles turning to him at one point and saying sharply, “Look here, Loy, the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected.”

According to Dean Rusk, who was then Marshall’s assistant secretary in charge of U.N. affairs, the real cause of difficulty was not any deviousness on the part of the State Department, but the “conflicting objectives” in the President’s own mind. “This wasn’t understood at the time. With Marshall and State working toward a long-range solution, the Zionists branded anyone not 1,000 percent behind the Zionist cause as having betrayed the president.”

Clifford remained certain the State Department, “to a man,” was doing everything possible to thwart the President’s intentions, and he told Truman so. Truman thought Clifford unduly concerned. “I know how Marshall feels and he knows how I feel,” Truman said, meaning if Marshall was with him, that was all he needed to know.

In Palestine, the whole time, violence and terrorism continued.

It was in late 1947, on Saturday, November 29, over the Thanksgiving weekend, that the United Nations, at the end of a dramatic two-and-a-half-hour session, voted for partition by a narrow margin, the United States taking a lead part behind the scenes to see the measure through. (“We went for it,” Clifford told Jonathan Daniels. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through.”) The Soviet Union, too, had joined the United States in support.

Eddie Jacobson recorded in telegraphic style his own chronicle of the unfolding drama:

Nov. 6th—Wash.—Pres. still going all out for Palestine.

Nov. 17th—Again to White House….

Wed., 26—Received call from White House—everything O.K.

Nov. 27—Thanksgiving. Sent two page wire to Truman.

Friday, received call from his secretary [Matt Connelly] not to worry.

Nov. 29th—Mission accomplished.

Truman, Jacobson noted, had told him that “he [Truman] and he alone was responsible for swinging the votes of several delegations.”

Zionists, Jews everywhere, were elated. In the lobby outside the General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters at Flushing Meadows, in what had been the New York City Building at the 1939 World’s Fair, the Jewish delegation was swept up in the embrace of delegates and visitors from all but the Arab countries. In the hall itself, while members of the Arab delegations walked out, Zionists in the audience were rejoicing. “This is the day the Lord hath made!” a rabbi cried in the delegates’ lounge. “There were Jews in tears, and non-Jews moved by the nobility of the occasion. Nobody who ever lived that moment will ever lose its memory from his heart,” recalled Abba Eban, who was then a young liaison officer with the Jewish Agency, the official Zionist organization.

To the Zionist Organization of America, the vote was “a triumphant vindication” of the Zionist dream and “a victory for international equity.” Rabbi Silver called it a turning point in history, and expressed particular appreciation for the part played by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Here, said the New York Herald-Tribune, was “one of the few great acts of courageous collective statesmanship which our shattered postwar world has been able to achieve.” At a Zionist rally in New York to celebrate the occasion, twenty thousand people tried to jam into an auditorium on 34th Street, a crowd three times the seating capacity.

Britain announced that responsibility for Palestine would be turned over to the United Nations in less than six months, on May 14, 1948. The Arabs said partition meant war, and Truman was warned by the Chiefs of Staff that military intervention by the United States to protect a new Jewish state would require no less than 100,000 troops. (The British were about to withdraw 50,000 troops.) The Arabs, Forrestal told Clifford, would “push the Jews into the sea.”

The hard truth, as Forrestal reported to Truman, was that the deployable troops then available totaled less than 30,000, plus perhaps 23,000 Marines.

Nor was Palestine by any means the sole concern in early February 1948. In Czechoslovakia, a violent coup backed by the Red Army had imposed a pro-Communist government with bewildering speed. It was one of the traumatic events of the postwar era. A feeling of revulsion swept much of the world, as it had only ten years before when the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia. Italy and France appeared to be headed for the same fate.

Truman left for Key West for another greatly needed rest and change of scene which, after all, did little to improve his outlook. “Things look black,” he told Margaret in a letter from Key West on March 3. Russia had kept none of its agreements. “So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938/39 with Hitler.”

Two days later, on March 5, came a top-secret cable from General Lucius D. Clay in Berlin reporting a worrisome shift in Soviet attitudes in Berlin, “a new tenseness in every Soviet individual with whom we have official relations.” Until recently, Clay had felt another war was not likely for at least ten years. His sense now was that war could come any time and “with dramatic suddenness.”

If, as later suggested, the real purpose of Clay’s message was to impress Congress on the need to reinstate the draft, this was not understood at the time and its effect on Washington was stunning and entirely real. General Bradley said later that it “lifted me right out of my chair.” Secretary of the Army Royall checked with David Lilienthal to see how long it would take to move atomic bombs to the Mediterranean, closer to Russia. “The atmosphere of Washington today,” wrote Joseph and Stuart Alsop in their column, “is no longer postwar. It is a prewar atmosphere.”

“The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the U.N.,” Truman would write years later, bitter still over the memory. “Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that, and the other. I think I can say that I kept the faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews.”

Hundreds of thousands of postcards flooded the White House mail, nearly all from Jewish interest groups. Largely as a result of the efforts of the American Zionist Emergency Council, thirty-three state legislatures passed resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. Forty governors and more than half the Congress signed petitions to the President. David Niles grew so emotional at one meeting in Truman’s office that he threatened to quit unless Truman moved more emphatically in support of the Jewish cause. Ed Flynn came down from New York to tell the President that he must either “give in” on Palestine or expect New York’s opposition to his renomination in July.

Truman’s patience wore thin. He refused to make further comment on Palestine, refused to see any more Zionist spokesmen, even ruling out a visit from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the grand old man of world Zionist leaders, who, despite failing health, had sailed from London for the expressed purpose of seeing him. Weizmann, a renowned scientist, now seventy-four, had devoted a large part of his life to the dream of a Jewish homeland. Small, charming, and clever, he had been one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration. Also, he and Truman already knew and liked one another. At their first meeting, as Truman remembered, he had not known how to pronounce “Chaim.” “So I called him ‘Cham.’ He liked it. He was a wonderful man, one of the wisest people I think I ever met…a leader, one of the kind you read about.”

They had met secretly in the White House in November 1947, just before the U.N. vote on partition, and the effect on Truman was nearly as pronounced as it had been on the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, thirty years earlier. Spreading a map on Truman’s desk, Weizmann had fascinated the former Missouri farmer with the agricultural possibilities in the Negev Desert, the future control of which was still at issue. Truman pledged his support for the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. “You can bank on us,” Truman had said, and as Weizmann would write with wry understatement, “I was extremely happy to find that the President read the map quickly and clearly.”

But now Truman had closed the door to “the little doctor,” and this to Weizmann and his American Zionist allies was an especially distressing sign. Through Clifford and Niles, they already knew in detail what opposition they faced at the State Department.

A secret paper from George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff recommended no further support for partition. A report from the new Central Intelligence Agency concluded that partition would not work and urged reconsideration. More important to Truman were the views of George Marshall who, at a meeting of the National Security Council on February 12, had said the United States was “playing with fire while having nothing with which to put it out.”

Marshall saw America as gravely threatened by the Soviet Union, and as a soldier, he was acutely aware of the vital importance of Middle Eastern oil in the event of a war in Europe, which seemed more likely by the day. Marshall had besides a soldier’s distaste for politics. Writing about the Palestine question in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he had said candidly that “the political situation in this country doesn’t help matters.” At a press conference he was still more emphatic. As long as he was Secretary of State, there would be no “bending” to either political or military threats.

Clifford grew increasingly concerned. “On five occasions I told the President that our position on Israel was going sour,” Clifford recorded. “On each time the President replied, ‘No, Marshall knows how I feel.’”

At the State Department, thousands of letters were received demanding the dismissal of Loy Henderson for being “pro-Arab.”

Henderson was summoned to Truman’s office, to a meeting attended by Clifford and Niles, and asked to defend his position. Henderson felt Clifford and Niles were trying to humiliate him in front of the President. “I pointed out that the views which I had been expressing were those, not only of myself,” Henderson remembered, “but of all our legations and consular offices in the Middle East and of all members of the Department of State who had responsibilities for that area.” The cross-questioning by Clifford and Niles became more and more harsh, until finally Truman stood up and said, “Oh, hell, I’m leaving!”

From his bearing and facial expression [Henderson remembered] I was not at all convinced that even at that late date the President had made the final decision to go all out for the establishment of the Jewish state. Although I was not in a position, of course, to know what his real feelings were, I had the impression that he realized that the Congress, the press, the Democratic Party, and aroused American public opinion in general, would turn against him if he should withdraw his support of the Zionist cause. On the other hand, it seemed to me he was worried about what the long-term effect would be on the United States if he should continue to support policies advocated by the Zionists. He was almost desperately hoping, I thought, that the Department of State would tell him that the setting up in Palestine of Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the U.N. Commission would be in the interest of the United States. This, however, the Department of State thus far had not been able to do.

On arriving at New York from London, Chaim Weizmann had taken ill from the “strain” of events. Every effort to make contact with Truman had failed. Then, late the night of February 20, as Weizmann lay in his room at the Waldorf-Astoria, the president of the national B’nai B’rith, Frank Goldman, put through a call to Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, getting Jacobson out of bed to ask if he would be willing to help. No one, not even Ed Flynn, could budge the President, Goldman said.

In a hurried letter to Truman, Jacobson begged him to see Chaim Weizmann as soon as possible. But in response, in a letter from Key West dated February 27, Truman said there was nothing new that Weizmann could tell him. The situation, Truman added, was “not solvable as presently set up.”

Jacobson refused to accept defeat. No sooner had Truman returned to Washington than Jacobson arrived from Kansas City. On Saturday, March 13, without an appointment, he walked into the West Wing of the White House, where, outside Truman’s office, Matt Connelly warned him that under no circumstances was he to mention Palestine.

Entering Truman’s office, shaking hands with his old friend, Jacobson was pleased to see how well he looked. Florida had done him good, Jacobson said. For a while they chatted about their families and Jacobson’s business, a subject in which Truman, Jacobson said, “always had a brother’s interest.” They were alone, and with the West Wing largely unoccupied on Saturday, the hush of the room was greater than usual.

Jacobson brought up Palestine. Truman, suddenly tense and grim-faced, responded in hard, abrupt fashion, not at all like himself, Jacobson thought. “In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner, or in any way even approaching it,” Jacobson would remember. Truman later told Clark Clifford he was not angry at Jacobson so much as at the people who were using Jacobson to get to him.

He had no wish to talk about Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British, Truman said. He would leave that to the United Nations. He spoke bitterly of the abuse he had been subjected to, of how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jews had been to him. Jacobson thought suddenly and sadly that “my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be….”

Jacobson tried arguing back—“I am now surprised at myself that I had the nerve,” he later wrote—but Truman was unmoved. Jacobson felt crushed.

On a table to the right, against the wall, was one of the President’s prized possessions, a small bronze of Andrew Jackson on horseback, the model of the statue by Charles Keck that Truman had commissioned for the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City. Jacobson had noticed it on other visits, but now, pointing to it, he found himself making an impassioned speech:

Harry, all your life you have had a hero…. I too have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived…. I am talking about Chaim Weizmann. He is a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults and would be the last man to be party to them. It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out….

As Abba Eban later wrote, the comparison between Weizmann and Andrew Jackson was unimaginably far-fetched. And it worked.

Truman began drumming his fingers on the desk. He wheeled around in his chair and with his back to Jacobson sat looking out the window into the garden. For what to Jacobson seemed “like centuries,” neither of them said anything. Then, swinging about and looking Jacobson in the eye, Truman said what Jacobson later described as the most endearing words he had ever heard: “You win, you baldheaded son-of-a-bitch. I will see him.”

From the White House Jacobson walked directly across Lafayette Square and up 16th Street to the bar at the Statler where, as never before in his life, he downed two double bourbons.

On March 16, the morning papers were filled with rumors of war. Truman’s concern was extreme. The Marshall Plan was insufficient to check the Soviet menace. American military strength must also be reestablished and quickly. “It is the most serious situation we have faced since 1939,” he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. “I shall face it with everything I have.”

He must awaken the Congress and the country. “It was better to do that than be caught, as we were in the last war, without having warned the Congress and the people,” he told his staff.

On March 17, a fine, bright St. Patrick’s Day in Washington with the forsythia in bloom, he went before a joint session on the Hill to ask for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan, for universal military training still one more time, and for a “temporary reenactment” of the draft, to meet the rapid changes taking place in Europe that threatened national security. It was almost exactly a year since his speech from the same podium announcing the Truman Doctrine. And for the first time now, he identified the Soviet Union as the one nation blocking the way to peace. It was a forceful, historic statement:

Since the close of hostilities [World War II], the Soviet Union and its agents have destroyed independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

It is this ruthless course of action, and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations in Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today…. I believe that we have reached the point at which the position of the United States should be made unmistakably clear…. There are times in world history when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate.

The will to peace, he said, must be backed by the strength for peace. “We must be prepared to pay the price for peace, or assuredly we shall pay the price of war.”

But Congress was fundamentally unmoved.

To Arthur Krock of The New York Times, an acknowledged “hardliner,” Truman deserved great praise for his courage, as well as his disregard for political considerations, since calling for the draft in an election year seemed the poorest possible political strategy. Yet to many in the audience, talk of the “growing menace” of the Russians seemed a blatant election year ploy, and, as such, a poor one. “Frankly, candidly,” wrote Richard Strout in The New Republic, “we think Harry Truman is licked. We don’t think any ‘crisis atmosphere’ will elect him.”

A new Gallup Poll indicated that almost irrespective of what Truman might or might not do, he would lose in November to any of four possible Republican nominees: Dewey, Vandenberg, former Governor Harold E. Stassen of Minnesota, and General Douglas MacArthur.

“The simple fact is that Truman isn’t the type of strong man to whom folks turn in time of national danger,” concluded Strout. “The idea of Truman as a ‘man on horseback’ is just funny.”

Shortly after dark on the evening of Thursday, March 18, to avoid being seen by reporters, Chaim Weizmann was ushered quietly into the White House by way of the East Wing. Truman, who had not informed the State Department of what he was up to, insisted the meeting be kept secret. Eddie Jacobson, by now a familiar face to the White House press, had agreed to stay away.

According to later accounts by both Truman and Weizmann, the meeting went well. They talked for three quarters of an hour. Truman said he wanted to see justice done without bloodshed and assured Weizmann that the United States would support partition. “And when he left my office,” Truman would write, “I felt that he had received a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted.” Recalling the event years later, Truman would also remember Eddie Jacobson being present—but then, in a sense, he was.

The situation, however, had become more complicated than Weizmann knew, or than Truman himself seems to have understood, as would be revealed quite dramatically in less than twenty-four hours.

And Truman was partly, if unintentionally, to blame for what happened. He had not only neglected to tell Secretary Marshall, or anyone at the State Department, of Weizmann’s visit and what had transpired—possibly because Marshall was on the West Coast, or more likely because he refused to accept the possibility that he and Marshall might be working at cross-purposes—but he seems to have wholly misjudged the reaction of Jewish groups to the abrupt reversal of American policy that he himself had tacitly sanctioned several weeks before while in Key West and that his own ambassador to the U.N., former Senator Warren Austin, now presented, without warning, on Friday, March 19, the very day after Truman and Weizmann reached their “understanding.”

To give all sides in the Palestine controversy time to cool down, Austin announced before the General Assembly, the United States recommended abandoning the partition plan and called for a temporary U.N. “trusteeship” over Palestine.

It was a complete, seemingly inexplicable turnabout by the administration, and for Jews everywhere shattering, almost unbelievable news. The American Jewish Congress, in an emergency meeting, charged the State Department with conduct both un-American and “thoroughly dishonorable.” On Capitol Hill there were cries of “sellout.” No more shameful decision in international politics had ever been made, charged Congressman Emanuel Celler, Democrat from New York, while a Democratic senator who chose to remain anonymous predicted that the antagonism of Jews in those states where their number was greatest could produce a revolt at the polls in November every bit as damaging to Truman as the anti-Catholic movement had been to Al Smith in 1928.

The New York Times accused the administration of unprecedented ineptness and of caving in to base material concerns:

A land of milk and honey now flows with oil, and the homeland of three great religions is having its fate decided by expediency without a sign of the spiritual and ethical considerations which should be determining at least in that part of the world. Ancient Palestine was once described as “not the land of philosophers but the home of prophets.” It would take a prophet sitting on a rapidly spinning turntable to have foreseen the course which our Government has pursued during the last few months.

The White House was deluged with letters, telegrams, and petitions to the President filled with alarm and outrage over such “whimsical and cynical action,” such “vacillating” and “disastrous” policy. Nor were they all from Jews or Jewish organizations.

“This change can mean nothing but the complete annihilation of that wonderful home loving race of people who have demonstrated the wonders they can accomplish in that country which actually before God and man belongs to them,” wrote a municipal court judge from Council Bluffs, Iowa, named John P. Tinley. “They must not be betrayed. For God’s sake and the sake of humanity do something to correct this terrible blunder.” “Oh, how could you stoop so low!” declared Professor Samuel A. Sloan of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. “Was your action of Friday a ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ with England and the Arab interests? This revolting move must and should be the death of the United Nations…. Won’t you stop trying to be a statesman and act like a human being!”

For Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, March 19 was “Black Friday.” People enraged over the news kept calling him all day. How did he feel now that his friend Truman had turned out to be a traitor to the Jewish people? “There wasn’t one…who expressed faith and confidence in the word of the President of the United States,” remembered Jacobson, who felt so heartsick he had to take to his bed for the remainder of the weekend.

Not until Monday, when he was back at his store, did Jacobson hear from Chaim Weizmann, who called personally to tell him not to despair. Weizmann, who had more right than anyone to feel betrayed, was certain the President had meant what he said when they met. Jacobson must not forget, Weizmann stressed, that his friend Harry S. Truman was the single most powerful man in the world, and it was up to Jacobson to keep the White House door open.

Truman’s first news of what had happened at the United Nations came in the morning papers, Saturday, the 20th, the day after Austin’s speech. At 7:30 A.M. Truman was on the phone to Clifford at his home, telling him to get down to the White House immediately.

This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy [Truman wrote in a fury on his calendar]. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in my life.

There are people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat. They are succeeding in doing it…

Still unable to accept the idea that it might be Marshall who was opposing his position, or who misunderstood his position, he saw the State Department itself, “the striped pants boys,” as the perpetrators of his troubles.

“Truman was in his office as disturbed as I have ever seen him,” Clifford remembered. “ ‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘How could this have happened! I assured Chaim Weizmann…he must think I’m a shitass.’”

“The President’s statement that the action [at the U.N.] had come without his knowledge seemed incredible,” wrote Eben Ayers after an emergency staff meeting. “The political effect may be terrifically bad and it seemed impossible to believe that those responsible for the action could not have realized the reaction that would result.”

Calling a press conference in Los Angeles that evening, Secretary Marshall said he regarded trusteeship over Palestine as “the wisest course.” He himself had recommended it to the President, Marshall said, and the President had approved. The statement was brief, unadorned, accurate, and helped Truman not at all.

Marshall flew home the following day, Sunday the 21st, and on Monday the 22nd, at the White House he and Loy Henderson met with a calmer, more composed President, who now, in obvious deference to Marshall, said he had given approval to the idea of trusteeship as an intermediate step, and that it was only the “timing” of Austin’s speech that had upset him.

But as he came out of the meeting, Truman was heard to mutter, “This gets us nowhere.”

The fact was he had also specified earlier that nothing be done before the General Assembly that could be taken as a retreat from the partition plan. Further, he had insisted he be shown Austin’s speech in advance. “Send final draft of Austin’s remarks for my consideration,” he had directed on February 22, which clearly the State Department had not done. As Charlie Ross observed in his diary, “No pronouncement of the momentous nature of Austin’s should have been made without prior consultation with the P[resident] or someone on his staff.” But as Ross also observed, it would be unthinkable now for Truman to disavow what Austin had said.

Though Truman made none of these points to Marshall, he felt them acutely, as he felt still that it was those below Marshall who were determined to sabotage his policy, the “striped pants conspirators,” as he now referred to them in a letter to his sister.

At a press conference, speaking anything but plainly, he said trusteeship did not necessarily “prejudice the character of the final political settlement.” Was he then in favor still of partition at some future date? “That is what I am trying to say here as plainly as I can.”

He was straddling, obfuscating. He knew it, the reporters knew it, and he felt miserable. “It was one of the worst messes of my father’s career,” Margaret would attest, “and he could do nothing but suffer.”

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to submit her resignation as a delegate to the United Nations, while two of her sons, Franklin, Jr., and Elliott, joined a disparate but growing number of worried Democrats who wanted to draft General Eisenhower for the presidential nomination.

Truman refused to accept Mrs. Roosevelt’s resignation and paid no attention to her sons.

On April 9, writing to the President from New York, Chaim Weizmann, after thanking Truman for “the personal kindness which you have so often shown me” and for “the sympathetic interest which you have constantly devoted to the cause of our people,” stressed the gravity of the moment and Truman’s own historic role in it:

The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination. History and providence have placed this issue in your hands and I am confident that you will yet decide it in the spirit of moral law.

On Saturday afternoon, April 11, to avoid the few reporters hanging about the White House, Eddie Jacobson slipped in through the East Wing. Again Truman reaffirmed—and “very strongly,” according to Jacobson—what he had told Weizmann. Moreover, he now assured Jacobson he would recognize the new Jewish state. “And to this,” wrote Jacobson later, “he agreed with his whole heart.” Harry Truman had made up his mind.

As the likelihood of war breaking out in Palestine grew more ominous and the time before the British withdrawal grew shorter, tension at the White House increased measurably and the strain on the President himself did not go unnoticed. “The President,” wrote David Lilienthal after a meeting on April 21, “looked worn—as I haven’t seen him look since I have known him.”

There was never enough time. There was always more than one reasonable, prudent course of action to take. Nothing seemed simple.

At Griffith Stadium, throwing out the first ball at the start of the new baseball season—at a Senators-Yankees game—the ambidextrous President seemed hesitant even about which arm to use, then threw with his left.

News accounts described him as “whirling” about Washington. “Not once, but twice,” Truman had “tootled off” to the National Gallery to see a collection of paintings by the old masters discovered by the American Third Army in a salt mine in Germany. He attended the Gridiron dinner, another rite of spring, and the funeral of a veteran White House clerk, Maurice C. Latta, who had been employed since 1898. From a flag-festooned platform on Constitution Avenue, he reviewed an Army Day parade and later at the White House welcomed the very nervous, young Prince Regent of Belgium with a state dinner. At the nearby Loew’s Capitol Theater, accompanied by Bess and Margaret, he saw the premiere of Frank Capra’s new movie, State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, which gave him a lift as nothing had in a long while. “It is a scream,” he wrote to Mary Jane. “If you get a chance go see it. It gives the Republicans hell and, believe it or not, is favorable to your brother.”

The latest Gallup Poll reported his approval rating at only 36 percent. Republicans were overjoyed, Democrats and the liberal press increasingly downcast. “Must it be Truman?” asked The Nation. “Truman Should Quit,” said the front cover of The New Republic. “Harry Truman has none of the qualities demanded by the presidency.” He was “colorless,” “a little man” with a “known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” In The New York Times, Arthur Krock wrote grimly:

When he [Truman] vetoed what he called the “rich man’s” tax bill, which Congress had substituted for his own “poor man’s” bill, numerous Democrats in Congress jumped on the bandwagon to override the veto.

The Democratic Party is imperiling the President’s effectiveness as no major party in this country has done since the Republican radicals impeached Andrew Johnson…. A President whose defeat at the next poll is generally prophesied faces difficulties in performing his office that conceivably bring disaster…. At this writing, the President’s influence is weaker than any President’s has been in modern history.

Early in May, in advance of what was to be a crucial White House strategy conference on Palestine, Truman asked Clark Clifford to prepare the case for immediate recognition of the new Jewish state, which as yet had no name. He was to prepare himself, Truman told Clifford, as though presenting a case before the Supreme Court. “You will be addressing all of us present, of course,” Truman said, “but the person I really want you to convince is Marshall.”

Truman, as he told Clifford, was inclined to think that Marshall was opposed to such recognition. But this had nothing to do with Truman’s regard for the general. Nor was there the least question about Marshall’s own feelings. “I want you to know,” wrote Marshall in a personal birthday greeting to the President on May 8, “that I am keenly aware of the remarkable loyalty you have given me. In return, I can only promise you to do my best and assure you of my complete loyalty and trust in you.”

At a private birthday party for the President, Marshall had been still more emphatic, expressing his regard for the President in words no one present would forget. Indeed, it was one of the greatest tributes ever paid to Harry Truman. The party, at the nearby F Street Club, was given by Attorney General Tom Clark for some forty guests, including the President and Mrs. Truman, and marked one of the rare times that Marshall and his wife accepted an invitation to dine out in Washington. Clark and John Snyder each rose after dinner to offer toasts. Then, unexpectedly, Marshall stood up, pushed his chair out of the way, and leaning forward with his hands on the table began to speak, his expression very serious. Marshall, as everyone present was well aware, never complimented the people with whom he worked. It was not his way.

“The full stature of this man,” he said, his eyes on Truman, “will only be proven by history, but I want to say here and now that there has never been a decision made under this man’s administration, affecting policies beyond our shores, that has not been in the best interest of this country. It is not the courage of these decisions that will live, but the integrity of the man.”

Truman, his face flushed, rose slowly to respond but was unable to speak. The silence in the room was stunning. He stood with his arms half outstretched trying to compose himself. Finally he could only gesture to Marshall and say, “He won the war,” but he spoke with such simplicity and feeling that many guests were crying.

The meeting in the President’s office on the afternoon of May 12 began at four o’clock, just two days and two hours before the British mandate in Palestine was to expire.

Present were Marshall, Robert Lovett, and two of their State Department aides, Robert McClintock and Fraser Wilkins; Clifford, Niles, and Matt Connelly. Saying little, they took seats around Truman’s desk, Marshall and Lovett on the President’s left, with McClintock and Fraser just behind, Clifford sitting directly in front of the President, with Niles and Connelly to his left. Truman made a few preliminary remarks, in which he said nothing about recognition of Palestine, then turned to Marshall, who asked Lovett to present the case for trusteeship. Lovett spoke at some length, during which Marshall intervened briefly to report that during a recent conversation with Moshe Shertok of the Jewish Agency, he, Marshall, had warned that militarily the Jews were embarked on a very risky venture in Palestine, and should the tide turn against them, there was nothing to guarantee help from the United States.

Truman then called on Clifford, who for the first time mentioned recognition, proposing that the United States make the move quickly before the Soviet Union did. The United States should not even wait until the new Jewish state was declared but announce American recognition the very next day, May 13.

“As I talked,” remembered Clifford, “I noticed the thunder clouds gathering—Marshall’s face getting redder and redder.”

“This is just straight politics,” Marshall said. “I don’t even understand why Clifford is here. This is not a political meeting.”

“General,” Truman answered softly, “he is here because I asked him to be here.”

Clifford continued with his statement, speaking for perhaps fifteen minutes. He was calm, orderly, and unhurried, his rich voice, as always, beautifully modulated, one clear, perfectly structured sentence flowing smoothly, flawlessly after another. (“I had really prepared!” he would say, remembering the moment a lifetime later.) But Clifford was also twenty-six years younger than Marshall—and new to the experience of great power and large world decisions. Marshall’s prestige was a palpable presence in the room and made especially memorable, especially intimidating, by his anger. He sat glaring at Clifford the entire time. Possibly it was Clifford’s manner that upset Marshall, who was deeply worried about the world.

Recognition of the new Jewish state, Clifford said, would be wholly consistent with what had been the President’s policy from the beginning. It would be an act of humanity, “everything this country should represent.” The murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis had been the worst atrocity of all time. Every thoughtful human being must feel some responsibility for the survivors, who, unlike others in Europe, had no place to go. He explained the Balfour Declaration. He cited lines from Deuteronomy verifying the Jewish claim to a Palestine homeland.

Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.

There was no real alternative to the partition of Palestine, he said, or to recognition by the United States, since no postponement of the kind imagined by the State Department would ever be tolerated by the Jews. A separate Jewish state was inevitable. It would come to pass in a matter of days. “No matter what the State Department or anybody thinks, we are faced with the actual fact that there is to be a Jewish state.” To think otherwise was unrealistic.

Lovett spoke again. To recognize a Jewish state prematurely, before its boundaries were even known or government established, would be buying a pig-in-a-poke. He produced a file of intelligence reports indicating that numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine were Communists or Soviet agents. The entire matter should remain a U.N. problem, Lovett argued. The United Nations was struggling to determine the future government in Palestine, and this at the specific urging of the United States. Any premature, ill-advised recognition of the new state would be disastrous to American prestige in the United Nations and appear only as “a very transparent” bid for Jewish votes in November.

On this note, Marshall broke in, speaking gravely and with all the weight of his reputation, his anger just barely in control.

Clifford’s suggestions were wrong, Marshall said. Domestic political considerations must not determine foreign policy. At stake was “the great office of the President.” Indeed, said Marshall, looking directly at Truman, if the President were to follow Clifford’s advice, and if in the elections in November, he, Marshall, were to vote, he would vote against the President.

It was an extraordinary rebuke for Truman—“the sharpest rebuke ever for him,” Clifford felt certain—coming as it did from Marshall, “the great one of the age,” whose presence in his administration gave Truman such pride and feeling of confidence.

“That brought the meeting to a grinding halt. There was really a state of shock. The President, I think, was struck dumb by it,” Clifford would say, trying years later to evoke the feeling in the room. “There was this awful, total silence.”

Yet Truman showed no sign of emotion. His expression, serious from the start, changed not at all. He only raised his hand and said he was fully aware of the difficulties and dangers involved, as well as the political risks, which he himself would run. He was inclined to agree with General Marshall, but thought it best they all sleep on the matter.

Marshall and his retinue departed, Marshall refusing even to look at Clifford, who, seething within, began gathering up his papers. It was Marshall’s “righteous goddamn Baptist tone” that was so infuriating, he would later tell Jonathan Daniels—Marshall “didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” The President, Clifford could only conclude, had agreed with Marshall in order not to embarrass the general in front of the others.

“That was rough as a cob,” Truman said to Clifford, once everyone was gone. Truman told him not to feel badly. As a trial lawyer, Clifford said, he had lost cases before.

“Let’s not agree that it’s lost yet,” Truman said.

Would the United States recognize the new Palestine state, reporters asked the next day.

He would cross that bridge when he came to it, Truman replied.

But by then the bridge was already underfoot. Lovett had telephoned Clifford the evening before, less than an hour after the meeting broke up, to say he and Clifford must talk as soon as possible. Clifford had gone to Lovett’s home in Kalorama, where, over drinks, they agreed something had to be done, or there could be a serious breach between the President and the Secretary. Conceivably, Marshall might resign, which, as Clifford knew, would be the heaviest possible blow to Truman’s standing with the country and undoubtedly destroy whatever small chance he had of being reelected. “Marshall was the greatest asset he had,” Clifford would recall. “He couldn’t afford to lose him.” It was painfully ironic: Marshall, who insisted there be no political considerations, Marshall who was so “above politics,” had himself become the largest of political considerations.

Lovett asked Clifford to think about it, but when Lovett called Clifford the next morning, Clifford told him there was nothing he could do. Lovett would have to persuade Marshall he was wrong.

Truman’s reaction, when Clifford reported all this, was that Marshall, in Truman’s words, needed a little more time.

That was on Thursday, the 13th.

On Friday, May 14, the day the new Jewish state was to be declared at midnight in Jerusalem—6:00 P.M. Washington time—Clifford and Lovett met for lunch in the quiet of the F Street Club and worked out the wording of a statement to be released by the President. Lovett now urged only that there be no “indecent haste” in recognizing the new Jewish state, so that the American delegation at the United Nations could have ample warning. Clifford, however, could not promise that.

Sometime that afternoon, Marshall called the President to say that while he could not support the position the President wished to take, he would not oppose it publicly.

“That,” said Truman to Clifford, “is all we need.”

Clifford put through a hurried call to Elihu Epstein, an official at the Jewish Agency in Washington, to tell him that recognition would occur that day, and to get the necessary papers ready and over to the White House at once. When Epstein asked what was needed, Clifford had to say he didn’t exactly know. “This is very unusual,” Clifford said, “a new country asking for recognition—it doesn’t happen every day.”

Clifford called the State Department, then reported back to Epstein. When the papers finally arrived, the name of the new country had been left blank—to be filled in later—because it was still unknown.

The new Jewish state—the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years—was declared on schedule at midnight in Jerusalem, 6:00 P.M. in Washington, Eleven minutes later at the White House, Charlie Ross announced de facto recognition by the United States of Israel, as it was to be called.

The American delegation at the United Nations was flabbergasted. Some American delegates actually broke into laughter, thinking the announcement must be somebody’s idea of a joke. Ambassador Austin, the only one of the delegation who had been notified in advance and only at the last moment, was so upset he went home without telling any of the others.

At the State Department, meantime, Marshall had dispatched his head of U.N. affairs, Dean Rusk, by plane to New York to keep the whole delegation from resigning.

There was dancing in the streets in Brooklyn and the Bronx, a huge “salute-to-Israel” rally at the Polo Grounds. In synagogues across the country thanksgiving services were held. At 2210 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, headquarters of the Jewish Agency, a new flag was unfurled—pale blue and white, with a star of David in the center.

In Kansas City, Eddie Jacobson packed his bags and left immediately by plane for New York to see Chaim Weizmann, who was to be the new President of Israel. Three days later, on May 17, Jacobson presented himself at the White House as Israel’s “temporary, unofficial ambassador.”

It would be pointed out as time went on that the United States had granted only de facto recognition of the new Jewish state, whereas the Soviet Union followed with a more formal de jure recognition; that Truman in succeeding months, as Israel was under attack by Arab armies, refused to lift an American embargo on arms shipments to Israel; and that in the United Nations, through that summer and fall, the United States strongly supported a policy of mediation and compromise that the Israelis opposed. But such observations failed to diminish the larger symbolic force and importance of what Truman had done: it was the President of the United States of America who had granted the world’s first recognition of the new Jewish nation. And while experienced observers, including most of his own experts on foreign affairs, considered much of his performance a sorry spectacle of mismanagement—“a comic opera performance,” Time magazine said—there was immense approval in the country. An editorial in the Washington Star expressed well what most Americans felt:

There is a great deal to be said against the past gyrations and topsy-turvy handling of American policy regarding Palestine. But that aspect of the situation is completely overshadowed at the moment…by the swift and dramatic decision of the United States to take the lead among all nations in recognizing the new Jewish State of Israel. It is a wise decision and a heartening one….

As the popular radio commentator and world traveler Lowell Thomas said in his broadcast that evening, Americans in every part of the country would be turning to the Bible for some historical background for “this day of history.”

Truman had no regrets. He had achieved what he intended and had, besides, established a point about who, after all, was in charge of American policy:

The difficulty with many career officials in government [he would later write] is that they regard themselves as the men who really make policy and run the government. They look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy…. Some Presidents have handled this situation by setting up what amounted to a little State Department of their own. President Roosevelt did this and carried on direct communications with Churchill and Stalin. I did not feel that I wanted to follow this method, because the State Department is set up for the policy of handling foreign policy operations, and the State Department ought to take care of them. But I wanted to make it plain that the President of the United States, and not a second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making policy….

He felt great satisfaction in what he had been able to do for the Jewish people, and was deeply moved by their expressions of gratitude, then and for years to come. When the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, called at the White House, he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.”

“I thought he was overdoing things,” remembered David Niles, “but when I looked over at the President, tears were running down his cheeks.”

Loy Henderson was removed from his job. Truman had him reassigned far from Washington and the concerns of American policy in the Middle East. He was made ambassador to India. Interestingly, Henderson would also remain a staunch admirer of Truman, considering him one of the great American presidents. “In my opinion,” Henderson later said, “the morale and effectiveness of the [State] Department were never higher than during the period that Truman was President…. The morale of the department is usually higher when the President is a man who is not afraid to make difficult decisions and who is prepared to accept the responsibilities that flow from such decisions.”

General Marshall continued in his duties as before. When some of Marshall’s friends urged him to resign, Marshall allegedly replied that one did not resign because a President who had the constitutional right to make a decision made one. However, Marshall would not speak to Clark Clifford ever again.

Asked long afterward what he had thought to say to Marshall, to get him to agree at the last moment to American recognition of Israel, Robert Lovett said: “I told him that it was the President’s choice.”