Yalta and the meeting with Ibn Saud exhausted the ailing Roosevelt. As usual, he sought solace and rest at what everyone called the Southern White House, his retreat and health spa at Warm Springs, Georgia. William D. Hassett, FDR’s correspondence secretary, accompanied the president. The sixty-one-year-old staff member and former journalist kept a daily diary of his White House years.1
The president had scheduled many events for the future—a state dinner for the regent of Iraq, a trip to San Diego to visit his grandchildren, and a short stop at Hyde Park before returning to the capital. None of these was to be. “In the quiet beauty of the Georgia spring,” Bill Hassett wrote in his diary, “like a thief in the night, came the day of the Lord.” On April 12, 1945, the president suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died.2
The nation, as well as many of the president’s own staff, was shocked. Today we have full knowledge of the extent of FDR’s ill health. At the time, his true condition was carefully sanitized by his own medical staff. Rear Admiral Ross McIntyre, the president’s personal physician—who knew the truth about FDR’s condition—told the press that his death had come “out of a clear sky.”3 Even Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s special counsel, was somewhat surprised. Rosenman had met with Roosevelt each night when he was at the White House. When FDR returned from Yalta, Rosenman thought the president looked sick. Yet when he got the news about Roosevelt’s hemorrhage and death he was unprepared, because FDR had always bounced back when he went to Warm Springs.4
But others had feared the worst. Vice President Truman’s old army buddy (and chief administrative assistant to Truman when he became president), Ed McKim, had been shocked by FDR’s appearance when Truman had taken him to a White House reception for the Hollywood film Wilson. Wondering if the president had long to live, McKim told Truman to take a long look at the White House, since he would soon be living there. “I’m afraid you’re right, Eddie,” Truman responded, “and it scares the hell out of me.”5 Truman was actually alarmed at FDR’s condition. When he met with Roosevelt, a very rare occurrence, the president’s “hands shook so badly…that he could not get the cream from the pitcher into his coffee,” and even speech was difficult. “I’m very much concerned about him,” Truman confided to his daughter, Margaret.6 And when Truman met the president a week after he returned from Yalta, he was stunned. “His eyes were sunken,” Truman recalled. “His magnificent smile was missing from his careworn face. He seemed a spent man.”7
It was a rainy day back in Washington that sad day in April. Truman had spent it listening to a rather dreary Senate debate about a Mexican-American water treaty. When the Senate adjourned, Truman walked over to the office of the speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. Waiting for him there were Rayburn and the House parliamentarian, Lewis Deschler. Sitting down for an end-of-the-day drink, they were joined by congressional liaison James M. Barnes. The vice president was looking forward to his favorite form of relaxation, a good game of poker at the Statler Hotel, where his friend Ed McKim was staying. Before Truman arrived, the speaker took a phone call from Steve Early, FDR’s assistant. He had asked Rayburn to tell Truman to phone him immediately at the White House when he arrived.
By the time Truman walked in, the men had forgotten about Early’s call. The vice president poured a bourbon and shone in the presence of the seasoned politicos. Deschler then remembered that Early had phoned. Wasn’t Truman supposed to return the call right away? Truman dialed the White House and asked to speak to Early. When he hung up, he looked pale and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson.” Early had told him to come to the White House immediately and enter through the main Pennsylvania Avenue entrance. Grabbing his coat on the way out, he said, “Boys, this is in the room, something must have happened.”8
Eluding his Secret Service retinue, Truman ran through the Capitol basement building to where his car and driver were waiting, stopping in his office to grab his hat. The vice president had his driver go as fast as possible in the evening rush-hour traffic. Truman speculated about why he had suddenly been summoned. He didn’t want to think the worst. Perhaps he had to meet FDR, who had secretly returned from Warm Springs to visit the grave of one of his good friends, the Episcopal bishop of Arizona, who had been buried in Washington that day. Perhaps, he thought, the president wanted him to undertake some special mission to Congress. He entered the White House at approximately 5:25 P.M. Taken to the second floor, he saw the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, sitting with Steve Early. “Harry,” Mrs. Roosevelt calmly told him, “the President is dead.” Truman found himself unable to speak. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he finally asked. She immediately replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”
Before long, Secretary of State Stettinius entered the room. Truman asked that the cabinet be assembled as quickly as possible. He was soon joined by Speaker Rayburn, the House majority leader, John W. McCormack, the minority leader, Joseph W. Martin, and Truman’s wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret. Rayburn searched for a Bible on which Truman could take the oath of office. All that could be found was a weathered, simple one that sat in the desk drawer of the Senate usher, Howell Crim. At 7:09 P.M.—Truman committed the exact moment to memory, looking at the clock beneath Woodrow Wilson’s portrait in the cabinet room—Chief Justice Harlan Stone administered the oath. “Standing erect,” one reporter wrote, “with his sharp features taut and looking straight ahead through his large round glasses,” Harry Truman “became the thirty-second President of the United States.” The ceremony took one minute.9 “His face was grave,” the Times columnist and Washington insider Arthur Krock reported, “but his lips were firm and his voice was strong.”10
Truman made his first presidential decision when he met with his cabinet a short time later. The press, and the nation, wanted to know if he would go through with plans for the San Francisco Conference to plan the new United Nations that was scheduled for April 25. Tom Connally, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was certain it would be postponed. Truman, by his own candid account, was rather uninformed about the issues pertaining to American foreign affairs, but he understood the need to let it proceed. The United Nations was crucial to the goal of winning the peace, and the United States’ European allies needed to be assured that the country was in good hands and that FDR’s policies would continue as planned.
Having settled that issue, Truman turned to his cabinet. He would be “President in his own right,” he informed them. He wanted their thoughts, and they should feel free to differ with him, but he alone would make the final decisions.11 Jonathan Daniels, the press secretary, would shortly announce Truman’s first goal. He promises, Daniels informed the world, “to prosecute the war on both fronts, East and West, with all the vigor we possess to a successful conclusion.” The president would be at his desk by nine the next morning.12 The many tough issues facing the country would now be his problems.
For a nation still in shock, the very idea of Harry S. Truman taking over as chief executive and commander in chief was simply unacceptable. Many saw him as a product of the Tom Pendergast political machine in Truman’s native Missouri, as a politician who only by accident had become the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. Truman himself knew he was not prepared. The few times he had met with Roosevelt, he had never been made privy to the nation’s top secrets or the considerations FDR had faced when making foreign policy decisions. Thus FDR’s secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, stayed behind as the cabinet adjourned. He had something important to let the new president know. There was a new explosive of immense power being developed, he told Truman. Ironically, the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, who had learned long ago about the A-bomb’s development from Soviet agents in the Manhattan Project, had known about it long before Harry S. Truman.
Many had doubts about Truman’s capacity to do the job. Yet once they saw him in action, they had to acknowledge the great contrast between Truman and FDR. At age sixty, just two years younger than FDR, Truman exuded vitality. He stood five feet, ten inches and weighed 167 pounds, with a compact frame. George Elsey, who worked in the White House Map Room—the heart of the government’s top secret intelligence and communications center—recalled that “it was hard to believe he was only two years younger than the gaunt man in the wheelchair whose hands trembled.”13
The new president not only knew that he had a great deal of catching up to do, he read regularly in the press how millions of Americans regarded Roosevelt as indispensable. Immediately, Truman sought to reassure Americans of both his good intentions and his capabilities. For that purpose, he turned to a journalist who was familiar with his roots, the editor of The Kansas City Star, Roy Roberts. He and another Missouri journalist, Duke Shoop, were the only members of the press who were given access to the president his first day in office.
Truman always felt the most comfortable with men from his home state. Americans were already commenting that Truman looked just like any average man on the street. That, Roberts said, was precisely his advantage. Unlike FDR, who was an upper-class patrician, Truman knew the meaning of hard work, debt, and struggle and the responsibilities of leadership during wartime. “He has plowed corn…he sold haberdashery, and failed at it. He worked in a mailing room. He fought bravely in his country’s war. Then he started climbing the ladder in politics, with a political machine, his sponsor, as the worst handicap to overcome in any possible climb to the Presidency.” As he was a true man of the people, Roberts implied, the shift of power would move from the capital to the Missouri River. The viewpoint in the White House would no longer be that of the nation’s East Coast elites. In the New Deal days, the gospel at the Roosevelt White House had been the New York City left-wing paper P.M., and the liberal newsweeklies The Nation and The New Republic. Most of the country had never heard of them, Roberts wrote, yet “they were bibles in Washington, D.C.” The journalist predicted that Truman would willingly shift power from the executive branch to the people’s representatives in Congress. He would soon develop his own Truman administration and Truman program; the postwar climate the new president envisioned would move the country slightly to the right. Truman’s innate Missouri conservatism would temper FDR’s desire to please the left wing of his party.14
Harry S. Truman woke up at 6:30 A.M. on his first morning as president. After his usual morning walk—his “constitutional,” as he would always refer to it—and breakfast, he left for the White House in order to arrive at 9 A.M., as he had promised. His new office, so recently occupied by FDR, was filled with the late president’s mementos and paraphernalia. There were Roosevelt’s ship models and ship prints, items foreign to Truman, whose own past was that of Missouri farm fields. And Truman as yet had no staff of his own. His only personal aide was his old vice presidential secretary, Matthew J. Connelly, whom he would soon make his new appointments secretary.15
In the afternoon he received a detailed memo from Secretary of State Stettinius, presenting a summary of the major world issues he would have to deal with. The long list included relations with Britain, the problems emerging between the United States and the Soviet Union, the question of how to deal with Poland and the Balkan areas, the issue of how to deal with Germany, Austria, and Italy at the war’s end, and other less pressing matters.
Later, he drove to the Capitol to meet with leaders of both houses of Congress, seeking their cooperation and bipartisan support. As he left, turning to both reporters and Senate pages who had lined up to applaud him, Truman made what would become one of his best-known statements: “Boys,” he said, “if you ever pray, pray for me now…. When they told me yesterday [about FDR’s passing] I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”16
Truman, as vice president and a man of the Senate, had a good grasp of domestic policy issues. But on the all-important and increasingly sticky areas surrounding foreign affairs, he was a greenhorn. “Everyone,” Admiral William D. Leahy said, “including Truman himself, knew that in the field of international relations he had much to learn.”17 Above all, the developing conflicts with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union stood as the most important. He would quickly hear, from men like Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Admiral Leahy, Ambassador to Russia W. Averell Harriman, Russian expert Charles E. (“Chip”) Bohlen, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, that tensions between the two wartime allies were beginning to heat up and the always tenuous alliance was beginning to slowly unravel.
What came to be called the Cold War would hover over the nation for half a century. In its earliest days, Truman would have to learn how to balance FDR’s hopes for a cooperative postwar relationship with the Soviets with the growing realization that Stalin’s expansionist goals would make such cooperation almost impossible to achieve. FDR had thought that his personal diplomacy would maintain a post-war alliance composed of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. Truman would be forced to adopt a different policy, based on a show of firmness and a refusal to make unwarranted concessions to the Russians. Communism and democracy, he understood, were bound to be in fundamental opposition and conflict; no charm or personal negotiating could succeed in taming Soviet ambitions.18
Truman was a quick learner. Admiral Leahy had quickly gotten to work gathering papers that the president would have to read, in order to make good policy judgments. These included summaries prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as other policy papers from various government departments. He was pleasantly surprised to see that within a few days, Truman had thoroughly digested them and was catching up on what had to be done to win the war. But it was a daunting task. When the Democratic financier and wealthy businessman Abe Feinberg came to see Truman at the White House, he found him in what he called a “semi-dazed” state. Explaining why he looked that way, Truman told Feinberg, “When I came into this office I asked for all the documents that I should know about.” Feinberg found them piled all around the president’s desk, standing higher than the desk from the floor.19
Aside from the critical foreign policy issues, Truman was busy deciding whom to appoint to the important presidential staff positions. Among those he retained from FDR’s staff were two Jewish men who would become instrumental in dealing with the Palestine issue: Judge Samuel I. Rosenman and David K. Niles.
Rosenman was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a clothing manufacturer who moved his family to New York City when his son was eight years old. After attending Columbia College and Law School, Rosenman was elected to the New York State Assembly. He began his career with FDR during the 1928 campaign for governor of New York. When Roosevelt won, Rosenman stayed on as a speechwriter and counsel. Elected in 1932 to the New York State Supreme Court, Rosenman in his spare time served Roosevelt in different capacities when he became president, including that of speechwriter. Retiring from the bench in 1943, he moved directly to the White House staff, as special counsel to the president.20 FDR appreciated Rosenman, whom he nicknamed “Sammy the Rose” but called Sam, for his intellect, judicious judgment, and writing abilities. He was a confidant of the president and worked in every Roosevelt political campaign, drafted nearly every speech, and coined the term “New Deal.”21
Truman realized that Rosenman’s two-decades-long relationship with Franklin Roosevelt would serve him well. His very presence became a reassuring symbol for old New Dealers who worried that Truman would not carry on the policies that had made FDR beloved to the American public. They worried that, as some people expected, Truman would be far more conservative than Roosevelt. If some had those fears, they were ill advised. Since 1944, Truman had become a major figure in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He had always had good relations with both the labor movement and blacks, the two key constituencies that had stood with FDR in the northern centers.22 Rosenman also became an important, though unofficial, adviser to Truman on the Jewish situation.
David K. Niles had served FDR as an adviser on patronage and minority-group issues and New York City politics. He also served as a liaison with the Jews, who were pressing FDR on the issues of rescue, refugees, and Palestine. Roosevelt counted on Niles to advise him on which Jewish leaders he had to see and which ones he could put off without harming his political capital with Jewish constituents. As Niles explained to one of Truman’s aides, “I envision my chief job to protect the President” from those who might “create some political damage.”23
Urging Truman to retain his services, Matthew Connelly told Truman that if he lost Niles, “he would lose somebody who would be completely loyal to him,” who had backed him for nomination as vice president in 1944, and who could be invaluable working for Truman in the same job he had had for FDR, as an adviser on minority groups. Niles, Connelly said, “was a very bright political analyst. He was quiet, he was receptive, he was never out in front.” In FDR’s days, the staff called him the “back stair boy at the White House.”24 Truman took Connelly’s advice and put Niles in charge of information coming to the White House that had to do with Jewish issues, including Palestine.25
Born in 1890, Niles grew up in Boston’s rough North End, where his father was a tailor. Always a hard worker, he earned a place at the elite Boston Latin School and upon graduation got a job at the information office of the Department of Labor during the First World War. Not being able to afford college, Niles engaged in a process of self-education. He gravitated toward the Ford Hall Forum, a Boston institution that was a center of lectures and discussions for the city’s intellectual community, eventually becoming its associate director. In that capacity, he made important political connections. Eventually he came to Washington to work for the New Deal and became a personal assistant to Harry Hopkins, FDR’s top aide.26
Somewhat of a loner with a passion for anonymity, Niles lived and breathed politics. A lifelong bachelor, he lived at a hotel close to the White House, where he followed the same routine every weekend. On Friday he would board a train at Union Station bound for New York City, where he would attend a Broadway play. The next morning, he would go back to his hometown of Boston, where he would visit his sister and preside over the regular Sunday-night meetings of the Ford Hall Forum.27
Like Rosenman, Niles had been a member of the anti-Zionist American Jewish Committee but Hitler’s war against the Jews had challenged their faith in the protection that assimilation could offer the Jews of Europe. Rosenman summed up his own trajectory: “Before Hitler came to power I was an anti-Zionist, then after that I became a non-Zionist. At the end of the War I became a full believer in the idea of political Zionism.”28 Both men’s sympathies lay with the so-called moderate Zionists represented by Nahum Goldmann and Chaim Weizmann, and they were close to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, one of the most important American Zionist leaders. Niles also had a long-standing relationship with Rabbi Stephen Wise. Niles, the shy bachelor, had secretly been in love with Wise’s daughter Justine, whom he had met at a Ford Hall Forum meeting while she was a student at Radcliffe. Even though nothing had come of that relationship, Niles had remained close to her father. Whenever Wise came to the capital to lobby for his cause, Niles welcomed the chance to see him.29
During his first days in office as president, Truman did his best both to gain support on the Hill and to persuade both the opposition Republicans and the majority Democrats to cooperate with him in carrying out FDR’s legacy. Rosenman thought that Truman was “over-awed, particularly at the beginning, about the responsibility, the authority, and most of all, the lonesomeness of the job.” He was very conscious of the fact that he held the job only because of FDR’s sudden passing. It was FDR’s policies that had gained the overwhelming approval of the nation. Each time Truman took a step, Rosenman put it, “he would say to himself: ‘I wonder what Roosevelt would have done?’” The Oval Office had a picture of FDR on the wall, and Truman would glance at it and say to Rosenman, “I’m trying to do what he would like.” Rosenman thought Truman looked to him for advice because “he knew that I knew what Roosevelt would have liked.”30
In the days and even months ahead, Truman continued to tell people that he did not want to be president under such terms. Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, exasperated, finally told the president it was not good to appear so self-deprecating. He let Truman know that he should appear to be confident, as did speaker of the House Sam Rayburn.31
Truman had reason to feel insecure. He was a modest man who was stepping into very big shoes. But because of his long tenure as a senator, one thing he did know was how to deal with Congress, as well as with the Democratic Party. He had always been a loyalist to the party of FDR and the New Deal. Some with a more conservative bent were predicting that Truman would move away from Roosevelt’s New Deal legacy. They were disappointed when he presented his postwar program to Congress in September 1945, in a speech Rosenman helped him to write. He urged extension of unemployment compensation, an increased minimum wage, farm price supports, extension of TVA projects to other rivers, and creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission—one of the key demands of the NAACP and northern liberals. Truman also called for national health insurance and expansion of the Social Security program. It was not, as his biographer Alonzo Hamby has pointed out, a moderate program; it was clearly one that was strongly left of center.32
In foreign as well as domestic affairs, Truman was becoming his own man. As time passed, he would make major decisions that would affect the state of the world for decades to come, and he did so decisively. He alone decided to make the call to drop atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to proceed with the creation of the new United Nations, to respond to North Korea’s aggression against South Korea in 1950 with military intervention, to dismiss the popular World War II General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War for insubordination, to offer the Marshall Plan for reconstruction of Western Europe, and to create a new military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would protect Europe’s security against Soviet expansionism. It was, the most recent historian of the period has noted, “a new conceptual worldview of America’s international role,” one commensurate with the need to fight and win what came to be called the Cold War.33
There was one area of foreign policy that Truman felt confident to handle and that he felt strongly about: the terrible situation of the Jews in Europe and the promises made to them for a homeland in Palestine. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and the resulting destruction of European Jewry, paralleled Truman’s own rise to political power. Truman had been elected to the Senate at the age of fifty in 1935. His years representing Missouri coincided with the strong support many Democrats gave to the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Truman, who was a lifelong history buff, was fascinated by the biographies of great political and military leaders, especially of his hero Andrew Jackson. Perhaps because from the age of eight he wore thick eyeglasses, which precluded some of the rough-and-tumble activity of his friends, Harry was drawn to quieter pastimes. He became an excellent pianist and for a while entertained the thought that he might make it his career. Truman was also an avid reader and supplemented his home library by regularly using Independence’s three-thousand-volume public library.34
Truman claimed his interest in Palestine went back to his childhood. Raised as a Baptist, he had read the Bible “at least a dozen times” before he was fifteen. He felt the biblical stories were stories about real people, and he felt he knew some of them better than the actual people in his life.35 Truman had an almost fundamentalist belief in the Bible and as an adult looked to it for inspiration and guidance. As a child, he had been told that what was in the Bible was the truth and that “the fundamental basis of all government” could be read about in its pages and “started with Moses on the Mount.”36 He believed this was true of America and in his memoirs wrote, “what came about in Philadelphia in 1776 really had its beginning in Hebrew times.”37 Truman drew on the Bible as a source of knowledge of the history of ancient Palestine.38 And in the Bible he read of the Jewish people’s longing to return to their ancient homeland and God’s desire for them to do so. His favorite psalm was number 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”39 Sam Rosenman thought that Truman’s religious training and familiarity with the Old Testament gave him, as one of his biographers put it, “a sense of appropriateness about the Jewish return to Palestine.”40
Truman was not alone among American presidents in this belief. Christian Zionism had its roots in the earliest days of the republic, when John Adams had supported the idea of the Jews’ returning to Judea as an independent nation, although he thought that they would “possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.”41 Every president from Woodrow Wilson, who had given his approval to the Balfour Declaration, down to Truman, expressed sympathy for, as FDR put it, the “noble ideal” of the restoration of Palestine to the Jewish people as a homeland.42
Truman’s first public support on behalf of Jewish settlement in Palestine came on May 25, 1939, eight days after the British announced the White Paper, which greatly limited Jewish immigration into and land purchases in Palestine. He asked that a newspaper article be printed as an appendix in the Congressional Record, along with remarks he had attached to it. The article, which appeared in The Washington Post, had the provocative title “British Surrender—A Munich for the Holy Land.” The author, Barnet Nover, argued that the new British policy was a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British had agreed to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Truman added in his attachment that the British government “has made a scrap of paper out of Lord Balfour’s promise to the Jews,” which amounted to nothing less than another addition “to the long list of surrenders to the axis powers.”43
Two years later, Senator Truman joined the American Palestine Committee, a pro-Zionist group. Rabbi Stephen Wise thanked him “on behalf of hundreds of thousands of organized Zionists” who wanted to express their “deep appreciation of your action in agreeing to join the American Palestine Committee, thereby lending your support to the Zionist cause.”44 The committee was organized in 1932 by Emanuel Neumann, with the support of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The founders meant it to be a vehicle through which prominent individuals in American political life, most of them religious Christians, would be able to offer support for the Zionist cause. The committee languished when Neumann decided to go to Palestine. Upon his return to the United States in 1941, Neumann moved to reconstitute the dormant organization. Rabbi Stephen Wise had introduced Neumann to New York’s senior senator, Robert F. Wagner, who immediately agreed to be the group’s new chairman.
At a luncheon held at the Shoreham Hotel in April 1941, a cross section of leading American political, civil, religious, labor, and cultural leaders came to hear a keynote speech by Senator Alben Barkley (who would later become Truman’s vice president). The majority leader told his distinguished audience that their membership reflected the overwhelming sentiment of the nation in favor of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine. The audience was composed of more than two hundred members of Congress, Cabinet officers, and religious leaders. The Jewish people, he told the assembled dignitaries, “gave the world the great moral laws and principles that have come down to us from the days of the Hebrew prophets.” America looked forward to the day when “the Jewish people shall again come into its ancient inheritance.” It was, he said, “their rightful heritage.”45
It was left to Chaim Weizmann to present to the group the major Zionist goals. Accurately predicting that at the war’s end the Jewish survivors would be “impoverished, dislocated, crushed and torn out of the economic fabric of which they had been a part,” the Zionist leader emphasized that only Palestine could be the place to give them refuge and a new homeland. Others had advocated exotic and improbable areas as a substitute—the first of many being Uganda—but these places did not have “the ties which bind an ancient people to its ancestral home.” Pausing to emphasize the importance of his remarks, Weizmann told his audience, “Fate, history, call it what you may, has linked the national destiny of the Jewish people with Palestine.”46
Senator Harry S. Truman joined sixty-eight other senators known as “the Wagner group” in signing a statement that called for “every possible encouragement to the movement for the restoration of the Jews in Palestine” and seconded a 1922 congressional resolution stating that it was the goal of the United States to create a national home for the world’s Jews in Palestine. Since Hitler had taken power in 1933, the statement read, 280,000 more refugees had come to Palestine. They were “streaming to its shores despite restrictive measures” enforced recently by Great Britain. To seek a home for them in Palestine was “in accordance with the spirit of Biblical prophecy.”47
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1942, the American Palestine Committee issued a statement calling on the world’s powers to enforce the promise made by the British “to open the gates of Palestine to homeless and harassed multitudes and to pave the way for the establishment of a Jewish Commonwealth.” The survivors of Hitler’s policy of extermination, the statement continued, must be able “to reconstruct their lives in Palestine.” The day following FDR’s sudden death, the Jewish Agency’s Political Department issued a note to its members, pointing out that Harry S. Truman had signed this important declaration. It was cautiously optimistic that it had a friend in the White House.48
Truman’s greatest expression of sympathy for the plight of Europe’s Jews was revealed in the speech he gave on April 14, 1943, to a massive crowd gathered at the Chicago Stadium. The seriousness of the rally was evident in the name given the event by its sponsors: “United Rally to Demand Rescue of Doomed Jews.” The event was sponsored by a number of Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, and various Jewish federations, rabbinical bodies, and Jewish charities.49
Truman’s speech reveals his strong feelings. U.S. troops had returned from the First World War with, he told the audience, “a consuming hatred for the forces of oppression.” Comrades who had lost their lives could not be honored, Truman continued, “unless the liberty they fought for came into being.” He continued:
In conquered Europe we find a once free people enslaved, crushed and brutalized by the most depraved tyrants of all time…. The people of that ancient race, the Jews, are being herded like animals into the Ghettoes, the concentration camps, and the wastelands of Europe. The men, women and the children of this honored people are being…actually murdered by the fiendish Huns and Fascists.
“Today—not tomorrow,” he continued, “—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and place of safety for all of those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” They had to have access to free lands and needed the United States to aid the oppressed and to show “national generosity.” It was not a Jewish problem, he concluded, but “an American problem,” and it had to be faced “squarely and honorably.”50
Senator Truman’s sympathy for the Jewish cause led him to move outside the ranks of the moderate mainstream Zionists. He joined Peter Bergson’s organization, which sought to create a Jewish army that would fight in the European theater in conjunction with the Allied forces. The militant Bergson had a supporter in Congress approach Truman and ask him to join the effort. But this particular solution did not grab him. “I think the best thing for the Jews to do,” Truman wrote Bergson, “is to go right into our Army as they did in the last war and make the same sort of good soldiers as they did before.”51 Bergson was persistent.
Before the end of 1942, Truman signed a petition supporting a Jewish army, which appeared first as a two-page ad in The New York Times and then in the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.52 Titled “A Proclamation on the Moral Rights of the Stateless and Palestinian Jews,” the ad galvanized the public with its jarring and dramatic petition, highlighted by a drawing of a Jewish soldier—Star of David on his helmet—carrying a sick or wounded religious Jew who is holding a Torah in his hands. Its main point: “We proclaim our belief in the moral right of the disinherited, stateless Jews of Europe and of the stalwart young Jewish people of Palestine to fight—as they ask to fight—as fellow-soldiers in this war, standing forth in their own name and under their own banner, fighting as The Jewish Army.” The signal, Bergson wrote, had to come from America: “To commiserate is not enough.” Justice alone demanded that Jews be allowed to form their own fighting force. The world, said Bergson, needed to see “the army of the Fighting Jew.”53
Those expecting a call for a Jewish homeland found no mention of it in the ad. Bergson’s tactic was to focus on one issue that could garner the most support. More people would support a call for a Jewish army—since Hitler’s war was one against the Jews—than would support a call for a Jewish homeland. The ad was signed by more than twenty-five senators, hundreds of representatives, the major labor leaders from both the AFL and CIO, prominent educators, newspapermen, and governors and mayors. Some of the best-known cultural figures signed including Cecil B. DeMille, Humphrey Bogart, Oscar Hammerstein, and Raymond Massey.
Bergson, however, soon overplayed his hand. The Roosevelt administration, under pressure to take steps about the Jewish refugee crisis, convened a twelve-day conference on the island of Bermuda in April 1943. The meeting was a formality that might as well never have taken place. Both Britain and the United States simply reiterated existing policy: they maintained tight control over immigration in their own homelands and refused to support free Jewish entry into Palestine. Little was accomplished. When it was over, the administration saw fit not even to release the recommendations to the press. The conference did not address the question of how to achieve any mass rescue of the Jews.54 For Bergson, all the Bermuda Conference accomplished, as one sympathetic biographer wrote, was to succeed “in dampening the pressures for action by giving the appearance of planning steps to rescue the Jews.”55
Bergson’s answer was to create more pressure, once again through a major ad campaign in America’s largest newspapers. First, on the day the conference began, Bergson took out an ad in The Washington Post demanding that the delegates act, not merely talk. Then, when it ended, the group again took out a full-page ad in The New York Times with the inflammatory heading “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap Bermuda Was a ‘Cruel Mockery.’” Bergson explained that to the trapped Jews of Europe, who lived in “Hitler’s hell,” the deliberations at Bermuda had meant to them nothing less than the last “ray of hope” for escaping from “torture, death, starvation and agony in slaughterhouses.” As it turned out, they had cherished an illusion. Hitler had now learned that the world’s powers had given him carte blanche to continue the process of extermination. Bergson concluded that stateless and Palestinian Jews should form commando squads that would go deep into territory controlled by Germany, “bringing their message of hope to Hitler’s victims.”56
The ad infuriated Senator Scott Lucas (D.–Illinois), who was a member of the U.S. delegation at Bermuda. Speaking to the Senate, he condemned the Bergson group as “aliens” who enjoyed America’s hospitality more “than they can get at any other place under God’s shining sun.” Bergson and company, Lucas charged, were “taking advantage of the courtesy and kindness extended to them” by now attacking U.S. policy and decent American efforts. He was so peeved that he asked both the State Department and the FBI to see if Bergson was subject to the military draft, as well as exploring how he had raised money for his many ads.57
Bergson saw the new ad as a continuation of the call he had made earlier for creation of a Jewish army, which was again listed as the sponsor. He assumed, therefore, that he could simply reprint the names of the people who had endorsed the earlier call in this new ad. Alongside the text were the names of the same thirty-three senators who had signed off on behalf of the Jewish army. That list included the name of Senator Harry S. Truman, who considered his colleague Lucas to be a good friend. For Harry S. Truman, loyalty to one’s friends stood above all else. Bending to Lucas’s wish, he publicly resigned from the Committee for a Jewish Army. Some have used Truman’s resignation as proof that he was not as favorable to the Jewish cause, as he claimed to be in his memoirs. But, as Bergson himself explained to his biographers, all Truman told him was “I wish to resign from the committee as of now.” That meant, Bergson added, that “he didn’t put any aspersions on the past.” He did it for one reason. Truman told him personally, “I like my friends. Scott Lucas is a friend of mine.” Bergson replied to Senator Truman, “Well, Senator, you know we are right and he is wrong.” Truman agreed. “Yes,” he told Bergson, “but he’s a friend of mine, and I’m loyal to my friends, and I want to help Scott Lucas.” He did it, Bergson thought, “as one politician to another.”58 From this point on, Truman informed Bergson, “greater caution [should be] exercised in publishing the names of Senators who favor our cause”59 (our emphasis).
Truman sent a copy of his resignation letter to Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was glad to receive it. Wise, who had always seen Bergson as a competitor and a political enemy, wrote Truman that Bergson’s work “has been a source of considerable embarrassment to the organized Zionist movement.” They feared the “appalling plight of the Jews of Europe” might be obscured by the fracas over Bergson’s tactics. But Wise had to agree with Bergson that he thought the Bermuda Conference had failed to tackle the issue in any effective way.60
“It is fellows like Mr. Bergson,” Truman wrote Wise, “who go off half cocked…and that cause all the trouble.” He now felt that the ad Bergson had placed in the newspapers might “be used to stir up trouble where our troops are fighting,” and hence he concluded it was “outside my policy” to be part of such a group. By this time, it was apparent by Truman’s tone that Lucas had given him a talking-to. Truman incorrectly argued—perhaps seeking to placate Wise—that the Bergson ad had been “used by all the Arabs in North Africa” and led them to “stab our fellows in the back.”61
Although Truman said he maintained his commitment to the rescue of the Jews and his sympathy for the cause of a Jewish homeland, he now followed FDR’s policy of deferring the issue until the war was won. In 1944, when the pro-Zionist forces succeeded in getting their friends in Congress to introduce a congressional resolution on behalf of a Jewish homeland and the abolishment of the White Paper, Truman disappointed many of his colleagues by supporting the president and opposing its passage. Some historians have argued that his position indicated that he was not really a supporter of Zionism and was only engaging in empty rhetoric.62
But Truman felt the administration’s reasons for opposing the resolution made sense and that he was acting in the American national interest. As he explained in a letter he sent out, the resolution had to be “very circumspectly handled until we know just exactly where we are going and why.” Of course, Truman noted, his sympathy “is with the Jewish people.” But financing the war to its conclusion was the prime consideration. He did not want to take any step that might “upset the applecart,” he wrote, “although when the right time comes I am willing to help make the fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.” 63 Opposition to the resolution was a tactical issue. As Truman explained to his pro-Zionist colleague Senator Wagner, “we want to help the Jews but we cannot do it at the expense of our military maneuvers.”64
The leaders of the Zionist movement were understandably disappointed by Truman’s failure to support the congressional resolution. Compared to the enthusiastic support that the junior senator from Missouri, Bennett C. Clark, gave the resolution, Truman’s vote must have dismayed the Jewish community living in Saint Louis and Kansas City, the largest Missouri cities. Clark, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, gave a rousing speech to the Senate on March 28, 1944. He denounced the administration for opposing the resolution and for not acting to abrogate the British White Paper, which was soon to expire, ending the possibility of further Jewish immigration into Palestine. Unless the White Paper was repudiated or modified, he said, “the tragedy of the Jew in our time will be infinitely worse than the tragedy throughout the ages. Where, then, Mr. President, will be our vaunted Christian civilization? Where, then, will be the long-time policy of this government? Where then will be our national self-respect? The time has passed when mere words will halt continuation of this tragedy,” he bellowed. “Action is needed.” He told his colleagues in the Senate that for the past few nights he had been reading Dr. Lowdermilk’s book Palestine, Land of Promise, and he urged them to do the same. In Palestine, he said, the soil was being reclaimed and “an ancient land is being returned to the fruitfulness which the Creator intended.”65 When Clark’s Zionist speech is compared to Truman’s hesitancy, one can see why the Zionists thought Truman was not completely on their side. From their point of view, Truman seemed unwilling to argue with the administration’s overall foreign policy.
American Jews, as well as the entire nation, were still in mourning for the passing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A few days after FDR’s death, Rabbi Stephen Wise presided over a Carnegie Hall memorial service, held under the auspices of his Reform congregation, the Free Synagogue. Three thousand, two hundred people filled every seat, and 2,500 more had to be turned away. Those unlucky mourners had to rush home and listen to the program on the New York radio station WMCA.
Roosevelt, Wise told the audience, had been “a warm and genuine supporter of the Zionist cause.” Referring to his last visit with Roosevelt the previous March, Wise emphasized that FDR had told him how he was trying to get the Arab nations of the Near East to appreciate “the miracle which the Jewish rebuilders had wrought in Palestine” but had been candidly disappointed at his “partial sense of failure…as far as Jewish hopes were concerned.” Wise explained that if FDR had not succeeded, it was only because of the influence of his “counselors in the State Department and the Colonial Office in England who exaggerated the importance and power of the…Near East rulers.” Before he died, Wise claimed—again inaccurately—that Roosevelt had been preparing for yet another conference on the Palestine issue, “the solution of which was bound to be the establishment of a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”66
The next day, Sumner Welles, FDR’s former undersecretary of state, spoke before 1,500 women of the New York City chapter of Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization. Before he spoke, the audience rose to its feet in tribute of the deceased wartime leader. “A tower has fallen,” Welles stated. No other American leader, he thought, “has done more for our country.” Welles offered another solution for Palestine: the one favored by the State Department calling for the creation of an international trusteeship by the new United Nations, which would replace the British Mandate.67
That kind of talk made the committed Zionists quite nervous. How would the new president, who they knew had been sympathetic when he was a senator, now treat their movement and its goals? Would he stay true to the policies he had espoused while in the Senate? Many of the prominent Zionists, who were used to dealing with Roosevelt, did not know much about the new president. Truman, Emanuel Neumann wrote, “almost completely lacked [FDR’s] finesse and sophistication.” Yet they thought he was more of a straightforward midwesterner, who meant what he said. Moreover, he had “generous humanitarian impulses,” which led them to hope that their movement might have an ally in the White House.68
When Eliahu Epstein asked the Zionist leader Louis Lipsky if he had any impressions about Truman, Lipsky pointed to Truman’s decision to join the American Palestine Committee. Lipsky added, “Many Jewish friends speak well of his personal integrity, sense of justice, and feelings of friendship and sympathy toward the Jewish people.”69 Senator Wagner, who had asked Truman to join the American Palestine Committee years earlier, was equally favorable. Truman, he told Epstein, was “endowed with a keen sense of humanity and justice, and after what has happened to the Jews under Hitler, we will find the president an attentive listener to our just claims and appeals.”70 New York congressman Emanuel Celler said he believed Truman to be “straightforward and modest.” Truman was not going to reverse FDR’s overall foreign policy, and he thought the prospects were good that “we may be able to gain Truman’s help in arriving at a satisfactory solution to the Palestine problem.” As a senator, he noted, Truman had responded positively to every appeal made to him on behalf of Zionist issues. Almost as an aside, Celler added that he knew Truman would face pressure from those opposed to Zionism, and it was too early to know if he would “bear the burden of his office” and be able to stand up to them.71
Celler had good reason to be concerned. On April 18, the president received an important letter from Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, presenting the views of the Department of State. “It is very likely,” the secretary warned, “that efforts will be made by some of the Zionist leaders” to obtain commitments from him in favor of “unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine and the establishment there of a Jewish state.” Declaring his and the public’s sympathy for the situation of Europe’s persecuted Jews, Stettinius warned that the Palestine question was a highly complex one that went beyond the plight of the Jews of Europe. He warned Truman that it would be best if he did not make any public statement on the issue without asking State for full and detailed information. Because the United States had vital interests in the region, the subject was one that should be handled with the greatest care.72
Two days later, the Zionist leaders had their first meeting with Truman when a small delegation from the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) went to the White House. The group, led by Rabbi Wise, had expected to spend close to an hour with Truman, but as they walked in, Secretary of State Stettinius, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, were also waiting for an audience with Truman. It didn’t look like an opportune time for a full meeting, but Wise and his group were pleased when Truman began the meeting by telling them that “he welcomed the opportunity to discuss the matter…because he was sympathetic to the Zionist cause.” When he had more time, he said, he wished to hear more, but at the moment he wanted to assure them “that he would follow the policies laid down by the late President Roosevelt on the Palestine issue.”73
Wise answered that he did not know if Truman understood the reasons why the Jewish people favored a national homeland in Palestine. Truman was polite but, as he said years later, “in those days nobody seemed to think I was aware of anything.”74 Two days earlier he had received a letter from Secretary of State Stettinius “telling me to watch my step, that I didn’t really understand what was going on over there and that I ought to leave it to the experts.”
To the contrary, Truman believed he was well versed on the situation and had prepared for the meeting by reviewing FDR’s public statements and record regarding Palestine. He reread the Balfour Declaration and familiarized himself with the history of demands for a Jewish homeland and the Arab and British views about it. Remembering the visit in his memoir, Truman noted that he “was skeptical” as he looked over the record and came across “the views and attitudes assumed by the ‘striped-pants boys’ in the State Department.” Truman at the time felt that State “didn’t care enough about what happened to the thousands of displaced persons,” and he thought that he could both “watch out for the long-range interests of our country while at the same time helping” the persecuted European Jews to find a home.75 Most important, Truman told Wise that State would not be allowed to make Near Eastern policy while he was president. “I’d see to it that I made policy,” Truman assured him, and State’s job “was to carry it out.”76 As he recalled the meeting, he believed that he had made that very clear to Wise.
A few weeks later, Wise bumped into Jewish Agency representative Eliahu Epstein in San Francisco at the first meeting of the new United Nations. Epstein asked him if Truman was sincere in his sympathetic statements toward the Jews, or would he feel differently now that he was president? Wise told him that at the April 20 meeting, “he detected no difference whatsoever between Truman the senator and Truman the president, regarding his views on Zionist affairs, except now he is in a position to act rather than simply to speak or promise.” Wise understood that the Jews’ greatest problem was not Truman but overcoming “the opposition of the State Department.” In fact, he added, Truman himself had “referred to this in no uncertain terms during their conversation.”77
Truman had told the nation that he would continue the policies of the beloved former president. But if Truman thought he knew what Roosevelt’s policy was in the Middle East, he was in for a surprise. Soon after, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew wrote to him that he thought it important to let him know “that although President Roosevelt at times gave expression to views sympathetic to certain Zionist aims, he also gave certain assurances to the Arabs which they regard as definite commitments on our part” (our emphasis). FDR had authorized the State Department to inform the heads of Arab governments that no decisions affecting them would be taken without consulting both Arabs and Jews. The Arabs, Grew stressed, “have made no secret of their hostility to Zionism,” and it would be “impossible to restrain them from rallying with arms, in defense of what they consider to be an Arab country.78 Truman should, Grew advised, renew FDR’s assurances to the Arabs.79 In a series of letters to the various Arab potentates submitted to him, Truman, without thinking too much about it, dutifully signed as Grew suggested.80
Later, Truman would be “embarrassed at having given such a pledge,” Loy Henderson, the head of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs at State, recalled.81 But at the time he was trying to honor Roosevelt’s wishes. Speaking in October with Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, James F. Byrnes, who had replaced Stettinius as secretary of state, told him that Truman “is greatly disturbed about this” and if he were asked to make such a pledge today “I don’t think it would be made.” Moreover, Byrnes argued, FDR had made the statements when he “was an ill man,” and he thought that had it not been for his ill health, he would not have made such promises to the Arab monarchs.82
Harry Truman had diligently tried to pursue the policies that he thought Roosevelt would have favored. In the case of Palestine, it quickly became clear that he would not be able to. FDR had had the war as an excuse not to take action on behalf of the Jews. He had told them that the best way he could help was to win the war, a policy that Senator Truman had accepted. But now the war would soon be over. The simple man from Missouri, who had never intended to be president, would find it impossible to live with FDR’s obfuscations. He would be confronted with decisions FDR had avoided. Was the new president, so inexperienced in foreign affairs, up to the challenge?