9
“Of all the meetings I ever had with Presidents,” Clark Clifford wrote in his memoirs, “this one remains the most vivid.”[1]
“That was as rough as a cob,” Truman said when it ended.[2]
They were talking about a meeting President Harry Truman convened on May 12, 1948, to reach a decision about the American response to the possibility that the Palestinian Jews would declare the establishment of a new state. Truman staffer Clark Clifford, at the beginning of a long and mostly distinguished career that would include time as an advisor to four presidents and as secretary of defense, responded to a request from the president with a presentation, in the words of the official record of the meeting, “to urge the President to give prompt recognition to the Jewish State after the termination of the [British] mandate on May 15. He said such a move should be taken quickly before the Soviet Union recognized the Jewish State. It would have distinct value in restoring the President’s position for support of the partition of Palestine.”
As Secretary of State George Marshall later recalled the White House meeting, he said that he
Remarked to the President that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that the suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by Mr. Clifford. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not in fact achieve this purpose. The great dignity of the office of the President would be seriously diminished. The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President.[3]
Clifford was incensed, recalling later that Marshall spoke “with barely contained rage and more than a hint of self righteousness.”[4] Marshall glared at Clifford and acerbically asked why a political advisor was present at a meeting convened to discuss important international questions. Clifford said that State had no policy except to “wait.”[5]
Truman abruptly ended the meeting “saying that he was fully aware of the difficulties and dangers in the situation, to say nothing of the political risks involved which he, himself, would run.”[6]
“I never saw the General so furious,” Truman said to Clifford after Marshall left with his aides. “Suppose we let the dust settle a little and see if we can get this thing turned round.”[7]
Two days later the Palestinian Jews adopted a Declaration of Independence for the new Jewish state. Eleven minutes after the declaration took effect, as armies from five Arab states attacked Israel, Truman made his move. After White House and State Department aides met, Marshall had reluctantly agreed that, while he could not support the president’s decision, he would not resign over it. With the fear of a devastating crisis in his embattled administration set aside, Truman shocked his own State Department and U.N. delegation (which had spent the whole day urging the United Nations General Assembly to postpone any final decisions about the conflict) by announcing his recognition of Israel as an independent state.[8]
That May 12 White House meeting has fascinated historians and pundits ever since. It has become ground zero for an ongoing debate about whether American interests are better served by working with Israel or by maintaining a distance from it. It’s also a central landmark in the debate about whether massive lobbying pressures by American Jews have shaped America’s Israel policy. Pro-Israel, pro-Zionist writers, including many American Jews wanting to celebrate the contributions American Jews made to Israeli independence, have developed a mythic history that puts the United States at the center of the story of Israeli independence, and attributes American policy to American Jewish activism. This vision of history is a story of heroes, mostly Jewish, and villains, mostly “Arabists” in the State Department. It is a satisfying story, and it even features a biblical moment of drama, when Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s old Jewish friend and business partner, persuaded the reluctant president to meet the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann one last, decisive time.[9] That final meeting did the job, the legend has it; from then on American support was assured. Like Queen Esther, who pleads in the Bible with her moody husband, Xerxes, for the life of the Jewish people, Jacobson, an ordinary small businessman from Middle America, persuaded a powerful gentile ruler to support the embattled Jews.
Truman was eager to promote this myth. At a dinner shortly after the end of Truman’s presidency, Eddie Jacobson introduced Truman as the man who helped bring Israel into existence. “What do you mean, helped?” was Truman’s response. “I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!” Cyrus was the Persian king who famously gave the exiled Jews permission to return to their homeland and begin the rebuilding of Jerusalem.[10]
Anti-Zionist writers and Planet Vulcan theorists tell a mirror image of this story. The wise State Department experts and patriotic officials like George Marshall did their best to hold Truman to the true path of American national interest, but the incessant pressure and overwhelming financial power of the American Jewish community succeeded in manipulating and bullying a weak president into making the wrong decision. This pattern, they say, has dominated American policymaking on the subject of Israel ever since; the Israel lobby has frustrated one president after another who tried to steer American policy back onto the right path.
These conventional stories, both the pro- and the anti-Israel versions, aren’t entirely wrong; myths rarely are. The stories, however, are incomplete, and neither the Zionist nor the anti-Zionist myths can withstand critical scrutiny. Both forms of the myth are America-centric, exaggerating the impact of actions taken by Americans and minimizing the impact of decisions taken elsewhere. They are Jewcentric, failing to put Zionist agitation in proper perspective along with other factors, political and strategic, of more importance to Truman’s decision making. They also miss the degree to which Truman’s Palestine policy was rooted in his own settled convictions about what should be done. Truman knew what course he wanted to steer, and though contrary winds might force him to make temporary adjustments, he always returned to his original vision. Neither the Zionists nor the anti-Zionists ever quite managed to capture the president; Truman stuck to his guns.
The myths and the misunderstandings that cluster around the American role in Israel’s march to independence don’t just affect our perceptions of the 1940s. They continue to affect the way policymakers, politicians, pundits, and the public think about U.S.-Israeli relations today. Both in the United States and in the wider world, many, perhaps most, observers continue to underestimate the complexity of U.S.-Israeli relations, to overestimate the influence of American Jews over American policy in the region, and to underestimate the dependence of American policy toward Israel on broader American debates over national strategy as a whole.
To understand the U.S.-Israel relationship clearly, it is necessary to get past both the pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist myths. It is true for example that Harry Truman met with Chaim Weizmann after Eddie Jacobson’s intervention (“All right you baldheaded son of a bitch…I’ll see him”), but the visit’s impact on policy was, at most, indirect.[11] The United States government, with Truman’s full knowledge and support, continued to urge the Palestinian Jews to defer independence right up to the end. Before the Israelis proclaimed their new state, they voted against a proposal from the Truman administration to postpone it.[12] The new state began with an act of defiance that it intended to repeat; Israel declared its independence as it rejected American advice.
The American debate was never between proponents and opponents of an independent Jewish state. George Marshall, who came close to resigning in frustration over Truman’s decision to recognize Israel, was, like Truman, sympathetic to the Jews. He wanted them to succeed, but based on military estimates he was receiving from the CIA, he, like most other military experts at the time, believed that the Jewish cause was doomed to defeat. (Using a cricket metaphor that roughly equates to hitting a home run, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery told friends that the Arabs would “knock the Jews for six” if war broke out.)[13] Both Marshall and his State Department colleagues feared that, faced with the prospect of another humanitarian catastrophe for the Jews so soon after World War II, the United States would be caught up in a Jewish-Arab war.
The real American policy debate was never about whether to favor the Arab or the Jewish causes in Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the political leader of the Palestinian Arabs, was widely dismissed as a politically incompetent Nazi collaborator and had no significant following in Washington. While there was real human sympathy for Palestinian Arabs on the part of some diplomats and policymakers, many of the State Department officials who opposed support for the Palestinian Jews were, if anything, more hostile to Arab aspirations than they were to American Zionists at the time. The State Department feared that if the Zionists launched a war to build their state, Arab opinion throughout the Middle East would be radicalized. Under those conditions, the client kings and puppet rulers through whom Great Britain controlled the region would fall from power, valuable oil concessions which benefited American as well as British firms could be endangered, and the new rulers would be tempted to align with the Soviet Union.
This was a pro-British and pro-business, not a pro-Arab approach; the State Department wanted the United States to support the British Empire against Arab (and Persian) nationalists in the Middle East. If anything, these were the most orientalist and anti-Arab officials of all, believing that the sleepy peoples of the Near East could be induced to slumber on under British rule if the disturbing noises from Palestine could somehow be suppressed. The American Zionist view, naive and wrongheaded as it proved to be, was actually more pro-Arab than the approach of the mandarins. Many American Zionists hoped that the example of Israeli independence and development would inspire the Arab world to build independent, democratic societies on the Israeli model and saw the weakening of British colonial influence in the Middle East as a good thing.
To clear away both the pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist myths that cluster so thickly around the critical events of these dramatic times, and to recover a picture of the events of these years which can help us understand the choices we face in the contemporary world, the place to start is with understanding the situation and the motives of the man at the center of American foreign policy in these decisive years: Harry Truman, one of the most effective foreign policy leaders in American history. Once we step away from the mythmakers, we can begin to see both the accomplishments and the limitations of this extraordinary ordinary man in something like their true form.
The Man from Missouri
The conventional narratives about Harry Truman and Israel are right about one thing: Truman’s decisions about Palestine policy were political. But so were his decisions about the U.N., about NATO, and about the Marshall Plan. They had to be. Truman was a strong man but a weak president. For most of his presidency his ranking in the polls was low, the opposition controlled Congress, and the most powerful figures in his own party distrusted him. Truman never had the freedom to ignore political pressures when making foreign policy choices.
The conventional narratives about Truman’s Palestine policy miss two important things: the first is that the political firestorms that regularly raged over American foreign policy during Truman’s years in office were much larger and more powerful than anything the Zionist lobby could generate. Even when it came to Palestine policy, the Zionists were only one of several lobbies in the arena; they were never the strongest force that he faced.
The second thing missed is the consistency of Truman’s foreign policy approach, to Palestine as well as to more important issues. Somewhat to the surprise of those who knew him only as an undistinguished machine politician from Missouri, in the White House Truman proved to be a man of conviction and consistency. In some ways this reflected both the narrowness of his education and the simplicity of his character. Truman saw a world of timeless truths and classic ideas. His study of history led him to respect and to emulate people who changed the world by the power of their convictions; his stubborn adherence to the truths he knew grounded his foreign policy even as it sometimes infuriated his aides.
At the time, Truman was widely considered a failed president. In early 1952 with the nation caught in the stalemated and deeply unpopular Korean War, Truman’s approval rating sank to 22 percent,[14] and he abandoned his quest for a second elected term. But over the years, as historians reflected more deeply about the terrible crises of his era, as some of his policies were vindicated by later experience, and as the passions of the day gradually subsided, historians have come to treat Truman with more respect. He is now considered one of the most successful American presidents, not in the front rank with Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, but holding his own in the second rank.[15] This is one of the reasons that later generations are sometimes baffled by Truman’s foreign policy record; it is hard for us to remember just how weak and incompetent Truman often appeared to his contemporaries, and that makes it difficult to reconstruct the political atmosphere in which he made his decisions.
In his day, political columnists and observers ranging from Walter Lippmann to I. F. Stone and including Arthur Krock and Drew Pearson saw Truman as a small, misguided man. Intellectuals like Harold Laski and Arthur Schlesinger viewed him with a mix of condescending pity and contempt. His political colleagues for the most part shared the view they expressed to John Chamberlain of Life magazine in November 1945: “ ‘Big’ senators of both parties, remembering that Harry Truman was a ‘little’ senator for practically all his period on the Hill, are now indulging the ancient habit of saying ‘I told you so.’ They don’t want to be quoted directly, for they insist that Harry is their pal. But they manifestly do not fear him, and they will support him only if he happens by chance to be going their way.”[16] Three years later, the perception of weakness had only grown. As Krock, the prominent New York Times columnist, wrote in 1948, “The President’s influence at this writing is weaker than any President’s has been in modern American history.”[17]
Not since the martyred Lincoln was followed by Andrew Johnson had a man of great stature been succeeded by such an undistinguished person. In many ways Truman was the oddest duck and the biggest misfit to hold the presidency since the end of Johnson’s unlamented tenure in 1869. And just as Johnson faced Reconstruction, a task only marginally less difficult than the Civil War, so Truman would face a task only marginally less difficult than fighting and winning World War II: a global reconstruction in the face of some of the gravest foreign policy problems that any statesman in world history had ever faced.
Politically, Truman had two great handicaps, and they were linked. In the first place, he wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt, and, in the second place, he was Franklin Roosevelt’s successor. He lacked the authority, the self-assurance, the contacts, and the experience that belonged to the most effective political operator who ever lived in the White House. The contrast between the patrician and polished Roosevelt and the scrappy, self-made Missourian who succeeded him could not have been greater. Truman had no college degree. His parents knew little about the wider world. Roosevelt had attended Groton and Harvard, taking extensive European tours in childhood and adolescence, meeting princes and potentates before he was old enough to drink. FDR followed his cousin Theodore’s footsteps into government, serving in Teddy’s old post as assistant secretary of the navy during World War I. FDR was first nominated for national office (the vice presidency) in 1920, and even as he struggled with polio, he remained in the thick of Democratic politics, ultimately serving as governor of New York, then the most populous and most important state in the union. His unprecedented twelve years in the White House gave him an unrivaled mastery of American politics, greater personal prestige than any American statesman since Thomas Jefferson, a uniquely deep knowledge of the way the American government worked, and an in-depth understanding of the nuances of American policy and politics that no other American president has ever acquired. FDR inspired fear and respect across the federal bureaucracy, and was revered by a generation of Americans for whom he was the towering figure who led the country through the greatest depression and the most dangerous war in its history. Truman was none of the above.
It is sometimes forgotten today, but Truman faced a degree of insubordination in both the military and the State Department that no subsequent president until Donald Trump would experience. There were several reasons the bureaucracies were so willing to defy their nominal master. One was personal: throughout Truman’s time in office, he simply did not have the respect of the professional military and diplomats. Truman lacked the charisma, the knowledge, the culture, the ease of manner, and the aristocratic self-confidence that had made Franklin Roosevelt the master of American politics for twelve extraordinary years. He was an uneducated common man in a world of privilege and technocracy, a goose among swans, a mule among thoroughbreds. He would face, and face down, generals still wreathed in the laurels of victory, adored by the nation they had preserved through a terrible war, venerated by their veterans, worshipped by newspapers. His diplomats were for the most part the product of the nation’s finest schools; some, like Averell Harriman, came from the nation’s richest families; all saw themselves as part of a meritocratic elite, a secular priesthood privy to the arcana of diplomacy and the mysteries of power. When the largely self-educated Truman, who had graduated from the utterly undistinguished Independence High School, argued strategy and history, he argued with people who had read Thucydides in Greek in their teens. His meager accomplishments in two terms in the Senate had failed to impress the leaders of Congress, the national press corps, and the hostesses of Georgetown.
A failure in business whose only success in life came, apparently, from the alacrity with which he responded to the orders of the corrupt Tom Pendergast machine in Missouri, Truman ascended to the presidency lacking the confidence of his party and the respect of his peers. Complicating Truman’s task were the circumstances of his nomination to the vice presidency at the 1944 Democratic convention. Henry Wallace, an icon of the party’s liberal wing, had been FDR’s choice in 1940, and Roosevelt would have been happy to keep Wallace on the ticket in 1944.[18] But party leaders from the conservative South and the pragmatic big city machines worried about Roosevelt’s visibly declining health, and about perceptions that the ultraliberal Wallace would hurt the ticket in what was shaping up to be a close presidential race, demanded that Roosevelt dump Wallace for someone less controversial. When Sidney Hillman, the resourceful leader of the CIO labor federation and the most powerful representative of the left wing of organized labor in Democratic politics at the time, signaled that he could accept Truman, the second-term Missouri senator’s path to the nomination was open.[19]
FDR made it possible for Truman to replace Wallace; he did not make it easy. Roosevelt wanted to keep the liberals happy even as he shunted Wallace aside. So in a performance that was underhanded even by his Machiavellian standards, FDR gave a weaselly worded statement that many delegates interpreted as an endorsement of Wallace (“I personally would vote for his nomination if I were a delegate to the convention”) while he privately signaled a preference for Truman.[20] In the confusion, the liberal delegates at the Chicago convention revolted and the VP nomination went to a floor vote. Wallace led Truman on the first ballot, and it took the persuasive powers of the party bosses to strong-arm enough delegates into selecting Truman.[21] For many Democratic liberals, Truman’s elevation to the vice presidency represented a revolt of the conservatives and the party machines against the idealism and liberal leadership that Roosevelt stood for. When Roosevelt died three months into his fourth term of office, nothing had changed their view that Truman could not be trusted to carry out the FDR legacy at home or abroad.
Truman would never forget how fragile his hold on the Democratic Party was. Roosevelt’s personal authority and his unparalleled record of political success had not been enough to enable Roosevelt to master the party’s barons and interest groups, and southern conservatives had beaten back his effort to “purge” them from the party in 1938. Truman was in a much weaker position than Roosevelt and, much as Lyndon Johnson was haunted by the fear that the Kennedy family and its allies would undermine him, Truman was haunted by the fear that Eleanor Roosevelt and liberal lions like Wallace would combine to take the Democratic Party out from under him by challenging his legitimacy as the heir to FDR’s liberal mantle.
Even if Truman’s position had been stronger, the position of the Democratic coalition in 1945 was weak. As Roosevelt’s successor, Truman inherited the problems of an administration and a political coalition whose life had been artificially prolonged by the war. Had it not been for Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe in 1940, it is unlikely that FDR would have sought or obtained a third term. The international crisis of 1940 had become the greatest foreign war in American history by 1944, and once again the wartime emergency allowed Roosevelt to seek and to win an unprecedented fourth term. But the presidential race was again close, and the signs that the country was ready for a change were growing.[22] For the first few months of Truman’s presidency, his public support benefited both from sympathy and from the halo effect of V-E Day and V-J Day. With the war over, though, and peacetime problems like inflation and demobilization moving to the fore, the country’s desire for political change eroded the administration’s support. Truman’s approval rating fell from 87 percent in the summer of 1945 to 34 percent in the fall of 1946 as the Republicans swept back into control of Congress.[23] Democrats attributed their losses to Truman’s weak leadership.
By 1946, the broad Democratic coalition of Franklin Roosevelt was showing its age. The party had long been split between progressive northern liberals, big-city political machines, and conservative white southerners. The coalition had already begun to fray before World War II, and by the time Truman took office, the fractures were becoming serious. Conservative southern white Democrats had already begun to resist the New Deal, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s open sympathy for Black Americans alienated many in a region still committed to upholding white supremacy and Jim Crow. In the North, many urban Democrats, often first- or second-generation immigrants, yearned for a more aggressive social program and a more comprehensive social welfare net than the New Deal offered. Black migrants to the North had voting rights, unlike many of their friends and families in the South. They wanted a stronger federal stance in favor of their rights. The trade unions, newly empowered by Roosevelt-era pro-union legislation, wanted to consolidate their power and extend their control into new industries and new parts of the country.
As northern Democrats moved to the left, the country as a whole was coming to adopt a more conservative stance, led not just by Republicans but also by the southern and pro-business wings of the Democratic Party. In 1948 the party would split into three wings: the regular Democrats under Truman, the conservative Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond, and the left-wing Progressives under Henry Wallace. The effort to prevent the split, and to hold on to as much of the party as possible, would dominate Truman’s political calculations right up through his surprise victory in the 1948 vote.
Economic developments after the war exacerbated the party’s problems in 1946. The shift from a war economy to a peacetime economy was never going to be easy and the country was still scarred by the memories of the long Depression that had only really ended with the war. In order to return to something like a “normal” economy, wartime wage and price controls had to be abolished, shortages managed while industrial production shifted from mortars and tanks to civilian goods, government spending had to be reduced to peacetime levels, war contracts terminated, and returning veterans had to be integrated into the job market.
Meanwhile, Truman had to manage the demands of a force that was too strong to ignore and too demanding to appease: organized labor, then at the peak of its power. Working people suffered severely during the Depression and wartime rationing and wage controls fueled their frustration. At the same time, the pro-labor legislation of the New Deal gave labor unions much more power than they had ever enjoyed. Patriotism, assisted by the threat of severe government reprisals, kept organized labor relatively tractable during the war, but with the return of peace the American labor movement was determined to spread its wings and seek fundamental changes in the economic balance of power. Prices inevitably rose as wartime restraints ended and the pent-up demand for new cars, houses, and other goods met the shortages of goods resulting from the delays in conversion from wartime to peacetime production. Inflation made labor all the more determined to seek higher wages, and the result was the greatest outbreak of labor unrest in American history.
Between V-J Day and the end of 1946, millions of workers participated in a series of major strikes that shut down key industries ranging from coal (at a time when coal was the major fuel for the nation’s factories, homes, and the freight and passenger trains that were essential to economic activity before the advent of the interstate highway system), steel, railroads, and electricity providers. Coming at a time of rampant shortages and economic uncertainty, the strikes threatened the process of postwar recovery and presented Truman with a painful political dilemma.
The labor movement was an essential part of the Democratic coalition, yet the backlash against the strikers and the threat that some of the strikes posed to a fragile national economy were both very real. Truman saw no choice but to take strong action against striking workers, using the power of the federal government either to force management and labor to a compromise, or in some cases using injunctions and executive orders to break the strikes.[24] One can debate the effect of these measures on the national economy; there is no doubt that they undercut Truman’s position in Democratic Party politics.
These were the political realities that continually tested Truman’s ability to control his own party and the national agenda. That he survived as long as he did and won a full presidential term in the face of them is a remarkable accomplishment. That he was able to carry out a vigorous foreign policy under the circumstances is extraordinary; few presidents have accomplished so much in such difficult circumstances.
Trouble Abroad
Given his troubles at home, Truman might have wished for a calmer international scene. He didn’t get it. From the first day of his presidency as the fires of World War II still raged until he stepped down in the midst of the Korean War, international events would force him, time and time again, to set aside domestic goals and priorities to handle one foreign crisis after another.
The end of the Second World War left much of the world hungry, angry, and insecure. The cities of Japan, China, and most of Europe had been leveled by the most devastating air attacks in the history of warfare. Tens of millions had been killed, tens of millions more driven from their homes, forced into slave labor, or otherwise displaced by the tides of war. States had ceased to function in many places, most currencies were worthless, and trade, agriculture, and industry were prostrate and paralyzed. Food shortages stalked the civilized world. Stalin, it soon became clear, was grimly determined to impose the vicious system of communist rule wherever the Red Army stood. The gulags were stuffed with new prisoners as all those who opposed or might have opposed the Red Terror were hauled off into the living hell of concentration camps far behind what would soon be called the Iron Curtain.
The moral destruction was as bad as the physical. Years of war in both Asia and Europe had broken up families, brutalized millions, and left homeless orphans to fend for themselves in the rubble of great cities. The social capital embodied in churches, schools, and civic institutions had been heavily damaged and in many cases wrecked beyond repair. The veterans and survivors of war were scarred by their experiences. Some of the most glorious monuments humanity had ever produced had been deliberately destroyed. Total war in an age of science and technology resulted in millions of civilian deaths and the systematic destruction of the infrastructure on which the survivors depended. Untold numbers of people had committed atrocities that would scar their consciences forever; millions more had suffered them. Religious and political leadership was often compromised by alliance—however unwilling—with totalitarian power.
The web of world trade, already strained by a decade of Depression, further frayed during the war. Food-growing countries lacked the shipping to export their produce. Food-consuming countries lacked the foreign exchange to buy. Banking and trading systems had fallen apart. Famine threatened much of China and India, to say nothing of Europe and the Middle East. The factories that survived the war could not import the necessary raw materials or secure the needed energy. Shortages made the task of reconstruction extremely difficult. Particular attention had been paid during the war to the destruction of the vital rail networks and the rolling stock that operated on it. From commuter rail systems to the national and international railways needed to move cargo of every kind, rail transport had ground to a halt across Europe and Asia. Mines were flooded, power generators bombed, bridges blown up across the combat zone.
The global political situation was just as bad. The great powers and global empires of earlier times were crippled by the war. The French, British, Belgian, and Dutch colonial empires were suspended between imperial authorities who increasingly lacked the resources or legitimacy to act, and untried, untested nationalist movements just beginning to grapple with tasks of state building and development. China, devastated by a generation of warlordism and the vicious Japanese invasion, was ruined, exhausted, and about to undergo another round of civil war between the communists and the U.S.-supported Kuomintang. British India was moving toward independence even as growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims prefigured partition and the mass murder and flight that accompanied it.
In 1945, no one quite understood what the dynamics of the postwar world would be. Nobody knew whether or how after such horrific crimes Germany and Japan could rejoin the community of nations; Roosevelt advisor Bernard Baruch warned in November 1945 that both might be planning wars of revenge.[25] Great Britain had clearly been damaged by the war, but most British and foreign observers believed that to a large extent, it would recover. The United States, the only major economy to have escaped the physical devastation of the conflict, lacked both the experience and the will for global leadership. American forces had returned home quickly after World War I; most observers believed that the country would once again demobilize and close down the bases it had come to occupy during the war. The Soviet Union, while sustaining immense economic and manpower losses in the brutal fighting on the eastern front, had become the dominant military power on the European mainland as a result of the war. What use the Soviets would make of this position was unknown. Both the Americans and the British hoped that the wartime alliance could continue.
Over everything loomed the specter of the atomic bomb. Developed in the United States (with considerable help from British and exiled German scientists), this powerful weapon disturbed world politics. Initially, the Americans had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and no one in western governments knew how effective Stalin’s espionage was or how close he was to developing a bomb of his own. Humanity was in the early stages of a process that is still going on today: learning to live in the shadow of nuclear destruction.
Trouble at Home
There was bound to be a contentious debate over American foreign policy as the United States shifted from the problems of winning the greatest war in the history of the world to building peace in the midst of the greatest chaos and dislocation the world had ever seen. Just as Democratic liberals continued to support the New Deal policies at home, and believed that it was Truman’s duty to honor and extend FDR’s domestic policy legacy, they believed that FDR’s foreign policy should be preserved and honored abroad.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin’s charismatic, passionate, and politically active widow, had seen herself as the guardian of her husband’s liberal conscience during their years in the White House. After his death, she became the guardian of his liberal legacy. She had been the most prominent and politically engaged first lady in the history of the United States during her husband’s unprecedented twelve years in the presidency. With a syndicated newspaper column appearing six times a week across the country,[26] and a mass following among Democrats and liberals who revered her both for herself and for her association with FDR, she was the most powerful woman in the history of American politics. She was a committed internationalist who felt the horror of war, sympathized deeply with its victims around the world, remembered America’s failure to build a peaceful world following World War I, and was determined to ensure a different outcome this time.
For Eleanor Roosevelt, there was no doubt about the foreign policy that the United States should follow after her husband’s death: his, as understood by her. The postwar order should rest on two pillars: continued cooperation with the Soviet Union and the development of the United Nations as the principal forum for international politics. The emergence of postcolonial countries offered a great opportunity for the United States to ally with progressive forces around the world, ushering in a new and more peaceful and democratic era in world politics. By resolutely opposing efforts by countries like Britain and France to cling to their empires, by dealing honestly and openly with Stalin, and by offering support to emerging national movements around the world the United States could be true to its principles while building a strong foundation for world peace.
Aligned with Eleanor Roosevelt on these issues was the man who many liberal Democrats believed was Franklin Roosevelt’s preferred successor, Henry Wallace. After the end of Wallace’s vice presidential term, FDR (who never admitted publicly that he had agreed to replace Wallace with Truman) signaled his continuing respect for Wallace by naming him to the cabinet as commerce secretary.
This yearning for a progressive foreign policy was the vision not only of the former president’s widow and former vice president, but of the Democratic liberal establishment, the majority of the nation’s religious leaders, leading intellectuals, and the professional upper middle class. The horrors of war, the shock of the atomic bomb, the millennial aspirations that, as we have seen, play such an important role in American life: all combined to impress much of the United States with the conviction that the aftermath of World War II demanded a unique response.
The cascading disasters and crises of the postwar years were so immense, so unprecedented, so complex, and so terrifying that it is difficult for people today to comprehend the psychological and mental state of our ancestors on whose heads the great storm broke. It was not just the vast scale of the starvation and homelessness, the economic disarray, the physical disruption or the anarchic conditions in so much of the world. Something much bigger was at work. The unprecedented horrors of the war, with unspeakable cruelties practiced by Germany and Japan of which the Holocaust was only the most conspicuous, revealed a depravity in the human spirit that seemed to destroy all hope for the kind of gradual amelioration in the human condition that had for two centuries been the mainstay of American and Enlightenment optimism.
The rise of inhuman totalitarianisms in Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan also delivered a profound shock to believers in the doctrine of progress. The Enlightenment, Americans had long believed, was leading to an inexorable amelioration of the human condition. More wealth and more education would, by all the laws that governed human nature, lead societies to adopt more liberal and more humane forms of government. Societies that rested on free competition and cooperation would, Americans had long held, inevitably triumph over those that restricted human freedom or subjected human economic activity to the rigors of central control. The totalitarian governments of the 1930s made that assumption questionable; that victory over Germany and Japan had only been possible by an alliance with the most murderous and destructive regime of them all was a grim truth that deprived triumph of much of its joy. Triumph and Tragedy was the title Winston Churchill would choose for the final volume of his war memoir. While cynics might claim that the tragedy he had in mind was his unexpected general election defeat in the summer of 1945, the title struck most readers as an accurate description of the profoundly disturbing consequences of the bloodiest war ever fought.
At the same time, the detonation of American atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised the prospect, even the certainty that a third world war would be far more destructive than the second. It was not hard to look into the future and see the overthrow of all civilization and perhaps the annihilation of the human race coming about as the result of the next war.
These shocks felt by policymakers and national leaders echoed and reverberated through the whole of society. The terrible new realities of the human condition were anything but obscure. Everyone could see how Europe and Asia were filled with emaciated and shell-shocked survivors picking through the ruins of their lives in search of their daily bread. Even in sheltered America, millions of soldiers had seen the ferocity of technologically enabled war at first hand. Eyewitness accounts and newsreel footage of Nazi and Japanese atrocities were everywhere. The size and consequences of the nuclear blasts were discussed in full and at length at kitchen tables as much as in cabinet meetings.
Without taking these circumstances into account, it is difficult to understand both the motives and the actions of many American policymakers in the early postwar years. Otherwise intelligent people were willing to believe in Stalin’s good intentions and peaceable character less because they loved communism than because an accurate understanding of the evil he represented and the threat that he posed made the world look unendurably grim. Americans clung with such tenacity to the empty shell of the United Nations, imbuing it with unrealistic hopes less because they were stupid than because they could not imagine a future for human beings without an effective international institution that could prevent future wars.
Later generations, who have learned the limits of the United Nations through bitter experience, find it difficult to understand just how intensely so many Americans longed for a truly effective international organization to emerge or how determined they were to give the new organization the chance to succeed. Establishing an effective international organization to prevent war was going to be difficult, but since the alternative was annihilation, the effort had to be made—and it had to succeed. Clearly, reasoned Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and millions of Americans with them, the United States must not only join the United Nations; it must lead the world in supporting it.
In October 1946, the New York Times editorial board described the United Nations as “the great adventure in international cooperation that must be the foundation of peace and prosperity,” and “the Town Meeting of the World and the conscience of mankind.”[27] These views were unrealistic; they were even idiotic given the structure of the United Nations and the condition of the world, but they were to a large degree inevitable under the circumstances of the time. And idiotic or not, they were the settled views of a large section of both the leadership and the base of a political party that Harry Truman led but did not control.
Opposed to this consensus, which dominated the Democratic Party and the internationalist, establishment wing of the Republicans, was an equally irrational and equally unrealistic isolationist school associated with conservative Republicans like Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. This school, which was by and large bitterly opposed to the New Deal’s expansion of federal power, believed that the United States should have as little to do as possible with questions of world order. While some Taftians supported membership in the United Nations, they opposed all talk of a global superstate.[28] They mistrusted both the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and believed that other powers were using the gullibility of American liberals to enlist the power of the United States for their own selfish ends. The United States was the strongest power in the world, unique in its possession of nuclear weapons, the greatest oil producer, the greatest industrial power, the most technologically advanced country in the world, the world’s greatest producer of food; of course other, weaker nations sought to bend American power to their own purposes. The League of Nations had been a fraud and a disaster; the United Nations was likely to fail whether or not the United States belonged to it. The safest course was for the United States to tend to its own strength at home, secure the Western Hemisphere, and remember George Washington’s wise advice against participating in entangling alliances in Europe. Against the Wilsonian liberals, the Jacksonian and Jeffersonian conservatives on the right flank of the Republican Party wanted as limited an American foreign policy as possible. In its way, this approach was as naive about the Soviet danger as the most woolly-minded followers of Eleanor Roosevelt. The belief that the world would somehow stabilize without American engagement was as utopian and impossible as any fantasy that Henry Wallace could conceive.
There was also a third school, which represented the opinion of many of the people in the State Department and the Pentagon. These officials had been close to power under FDR and watched the evolution of Soviet policy in 1944 and 1945 with dismay. One by one, key foreign policy officials like Averell Harriman, George Kennan, and Robert Lovett came to feel the need for a tougher American stance against Stalin. While many in this group remained modestly hopeful about the future of the United Nations, the need to balance the Soviet Union’s power was becoming their highest priority, and Great Britain, the strongest remaining noncommunist power in the world next to the United States, was seen as an indispensable ally. Including soldiers like Marshall and diplomats like Kennan and Lovett, this group sought to build American alliances with noncommunist Europe in order to limit the power of the Soviet Union. They had chafed as Franklin Roosevelt, in their view, refused to rethink his Soviet policy as Stalin broke one pledge after another in Eastern Europe.[29]
As Truman, whom FDR kept out of the loop on all important foreign policy and war strategy issues even after he was inaugurated as vice president, struggled to find his footing in the hurricane of events following FDR’s death, he faced two major problems. The first was his own inexperience. Truman was a newcomer in the world of international diplomacy. He had no idea how to carry on negotiations with foreign leaders. When he meant to sound firm, he would often sound brash. Missteps with the Soviets in particular worried even some of the State Department officials who approved of Truman’s tougher stand against Stalin, and helped to promote an image of Truman as a bumbling amateur that would undermine his authority throughout his presidency.
More seriously, Truman gradually came to the view that both the liberal Democratic and conservative Republican approaches to American foreign policy were hopelessly out of touch with the requirements of national strategy. The State Department mandarins were right and the Roosevelt approach to Stalin had to end. The United Nations was a hopeful experiment and Truman would use it as much as he could, but the Soviet veto and the inherent limits on the effectiveness of international institutions constrained its ability to manage the Soviet challenge. To check Stalin’s ambitions, the United States would need to work with European allies. These ideas were anathema to Taftian Republicans. More importantly for Truman, they were also directly opposed to the foreign policy approach that Democratic icons like Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt wanted him to follow.
The story of Truman’s foreign policy is the story of his dogged attempt to keep as much of the Democratic Party as possible with him while he led the country on the path toward a Cold War strategy that, initially at least, most liberal Democrats abhorred.[30] Right up to his upset victory over Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election, most observers thought he would fail. His Cold War policy faced intense and unrelenting opposition from liberal Democrats and New Dealers who saw Truman turning away from the United Nations and diplomacy, away from the wartime alliance with Moscow, away from a program of domestic reform and support of the trade unions, and toward a militarized foreign policy based on global containment. Instead of working with anticolonial nationalists and progressive forces around the world, the United States was collaborating with European colonial powers.
Truman tried to paper over the deepening schism, sometimes resorting to less than candid language. In a diary entry for October 15, 1945, Wallace described a conversation he had with President Truman. “Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing,” Wallace quotes Truman as telling him, to which Wallace responded that “the purpose of Britain was to promote an irreparable break between us and Russia.”
“I said Britain’s game in international affairs has always been intrigue,” Wallace told his diary. “I said Britain may have plenty of excuse for playing the game the way she does; it may fit into her geographical position, but we must not play her game. The president said he agreed.”[31]
Cooperation with the U.K. and confrontation with the Soviet Union continued to be unpopular in the United States. George Kennan’s Long Telegram on Soviet behavior with its systematic exposition of Stalin’s determination to impose dictatorial Soviet rule across Europe electrified official circles in Washington in February 1946,[32] but the Democratic base wasn’t interested in anti-Soviet warnings from an elitist State Department. Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, as Truman sat in the audience, called for a renewal of the wartime transatlantic relationship in the light of the Soviet threat. This was not yet acceptable to antiwar and anti-British liberal opinion, and despite his enduring personal popularity in the United States, Churchill’s remarks about the Soviet Union were attacked by liberals and isolationists alike. Truman had to distance himself from Churchill’s call for close cooperation with Britain even as he endorsed Churchill’s criticisms of Stalin. Liberal Democrats argued strenuously that Stalin’s hostile behavior was driven by his fear of encirclement, and that close U.K.-U.S. cooperation would provoke Moscow and increase the chances of a great power confrontation. To preserve the peace, the United States had to keep its distance from the United Kingdom while working with Stalin wherever it could.
Liberal unhappiness with Truman continued to mount. By September of 1946, when Truman demanded the resignation of Henry Wallace from the cabinet after Wallace refused to stop making dovish foreign policy speeches, leading liberals like Helen Keller and Albert Einstein were becoming harshly critical of the administration and warning that Truman was pushing the country into another world war.[33] After leaving the cabinet, Wallace was invited to edit the then-influential New Republic. Cheered on by much of the labor movement and progressive opinion, both The New Republic and the other leading liberal publication of the day, The Nation, would hurl blasts of criticism at the White House. By 1947, Wallace was ready to organize a third-party presidential campaign to block Truman’s reelection. The widespread belief among political observers that Wallace’s insurgency would siphon off liberal and progressive votes is why so few people expected Truman to win the 1948 presidential election.
With Wallace in open revolt, Eleanor Roosevelt’s importance to the embattled president grew. This did not cause her to rally to Truman. Much as the Kennedys distanced themselves from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the Roosevelt family grew colder and more distant toward Truman’s administration. Franklin Roosevelt’s sons would ultimately try to block Truman’s quest for the Democratic nomination in 1948.[34] He could not afford to lose Eleanor, too.
Complicating Truman’s life in 1945 and early 1946 was the overlap between his liberal and isolationist critics on the questions of military preparedness and relations with Britain. Both liberal internationalists and conservative isolationists favored the rapid demobilization of American forces following Japan’s surrender. Liberals wanted an expansive internationalist foreign policy, but they saw a strong American military presence overseas as both wasteful and provocative. Isolationists also wanted American forces to come home, and both liberals and isolationists were intensely skeptical of what they saw as cunning British efforts to fool naive Americans into paying the bills for Britain’s imperial schemes.
Later in 1946, and more substantively in 1947, the balance in American politics began to change. The evidence that Stalin intended to ignore his Yalta commitments to FDR and impose draconian communist dictatorships everywhere the Red Army could reach alarmed a growing number of Americans into rethinking the benefits of U.S.-Soviet cooperation. Immigrant communities from countries like Poland and Hungary, along with Catholic religious leaders, reacted to Soviet oppression in Eastern and Central Europe by supporting tougher American policies. Growing evidence that the Western European economies were recovering slowly from the war alarmed American businesses who needed export markets abroad. A number of formerly isolationist Republicans, led by Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, moved to support Truman administration strategy in Europe; others leapfrogged over the Truman administration to denounce the State Department as insufficiently alert to the communist menace. The February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, crushing the last independent political force behind the Iron Curtain, led some liberal Democrats to conclude that the hope of conciliating Stalin through American concessions could no longer be sustained. A split between Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt began to develop as Wallace became more public in his criticism of Truman and more radical in his politics, and Roosevelt publicly supported the Marshall Plan as Wallace bitterly condemned it.[35] Even as the movement to drop Truman from the Democratic ticket in 1948 gained momentum among liberals, Truman could see a path forward.
Under these circumstances, Truman’s approach to Palestine was necessarily and appropriately political, but those who see it as a simple exercise in ethnic pandering to American Jews miss the drama and meaning of one of the most important episodes in the history of American foreign policy. President Truman integrated his approach to Palestine into the central political and diplomatic effort of his first term, using his Palestine policy to help reconcile American liberals to his shift away from FDR’s World War II foreign policy toward the Cold War strategy that would guide the United States for the next forty years.
Truman’s Palestine policy was often awkward and at times as “rough as a cob,” but in the end it has to be seen as an integral part of one of the most accomplished presidential foreign policy performances in the history of the United States. That one of the most important examples of brilliant presidential leadership in difficult times has been obscured by stale polemics is part of the price America pays for a constricted understanding of the nature and sources of the U.S.-Israel relationship.