Harry S. Truman never expected or wished to be president of the United States. A senator from Missouri, Truman was picked at the Democratic Party convention as a compromise choice. The labor movement and the left wing of the party favored the candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s “progressive” vice president. Wallace had written a New Deal bestseller, The Century of the Common Man, which became a textbook for the hopes and dreams of the strong left-wing component of the New Deal. Wallace, however, had some major handicaps for a party seeking a candidate who might be elevated to the presidency. He was a devotee of a mystical guru, and letters he had written to him threatened to be made public by the Republican opposition. Even more important, Wallace had what historian Alonzo Hamby accurately describes as “ideological rigidity,” which later on would reveal itself as an ever increasing tendency to look too kindly on the Soviet Union, and to even embrace American Communists as allies of liberal Democrats. In 1944, more than a few loyal Democratic supporters of FDR began to view Wallace as an unguided missile, too close to becoming president.1
Party leaders shifted to the little-known senator from Missouri, much to the consternation of his wife, Bess, who wished to avoid the limelight and was more than content with her husband’s current position. Roosevelt kept Truman at arm’s length as vice president, as he ran the country with the counsel and support of his trusted longtime advisers. When Roosevelt died of a stroke at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, Truman found himself immediately confronted with some of the most pressing problems facing the nation. Eventually, the public as well as professional historians would rate him as one of the great American presidents. Few would have predicted that when Truman entered the office, or in fact, when he left in political disgrace with the lowest popularity polls of any American President to date.
History, as we know, has been kinder to him than his own country’s contemporaries had been. Forgotten by most were his inept domestic decisions, such as his misguided call to draft striking railroad workers into the Army to force them to keep working. Even more unpopular was his announcement that to prevent a steel strike in 1952, he was using executive authority to seize the factories and make them government property. The courts ruled that unconstitutional, but the damage had been done. With the plants back in private hands, the country went through a fifty-three-day strike. When the political pollsters asked the public to rate the president, only 32 percent gave him a good rating.
Things looked no better when one turned to events abroad. China had gone Communist during Truman’s watch, as Mao Tse-tung defeated the Kuomintang Nationalists and took power on the Chinese mainland. Mao’s victory led Republicans to put the blame on the Truman administration. The supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and Pat McCarran of Nevada began to gain strength by raising the question: “Who lost China?” In Korea, Truman brought the United States into battle after North Korea crossed that 38th parallel, which divided South from North Korea. American troops quickly pushed back the invading North Koreans, but events turned for the worse when Chinese “volunteers” entered the fight on the side of the North. The Korean War dragged on, as the public grew weary and the troops filled with disdain at fighting a seemingly endless series of battles to take small hills. Truman had fired the popular General Douglas MacArthur for threatening civilian leadership of the military. MacArthur made known his plan to extend the war across the Yalu River into China, thereby threatening Soviet intervention on China’s side and a potential new world war. The war became a stalemate, and lingered on until the new Eisenhower administration negotiated a truce that holds to our own time.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose leadership in the war propelled him to major attention as a potential candidate, gained the Republican nomination and easily defeated the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The election was widely seen as a personal repudiation of Truman. A saying of the day made the rounds, “To Err is Truman.” The nation seemed to forget Truman’s many foreign policy triumphs—the Marshall Plan for reconstruction of Western Europe; the creation of NATO to protect the West against potential Soviet aggression; and the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby shortening the war and saving thousands of American lives. Above all, Truman began the slow reversal of a soft policy towards Stalin and the Soviet Union. The Soviets were moving towards the creation of a new Cold War, and at the Potsdam Conference and after, Truman began a major reorientation of America’s position in the world. No one has explained it better than the historian Wilson D. Miscamble. “Under Truman’s leadership,” he writes, “the United States moved to a level of world engagement and assumed international commitments far beyond anything that Roosevelt had conceived.”2
All these actions took guts and leadership. Yet Truman would leave office unpopular and repudiated. In 1962, the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., asked seventy-five people to rank the American presidents. How satisfied Truman must have felt to learn that historians, ten years after he had left the White House, declared him a “near great” president. Truman was put into the same category as his own personal hero, President Andrew Jackson. The reason he received a high rating was because of his series of triumphs, from the Truman Doctrine to protect Greece and Turkey from Communist aggression, to the Berlin airlift, the Point Four program for economic aid to Third World nations, all policies that Schlesinger called “landmarks in an assumption of global responsibilities.”3 Subsequent polls of historians, as well as the public, have consistently shown that Truman’s standing remains high.
While American policy toward Palestine, including Truman’s decision to recognize Israel, did not turn up in any of the polls as one of the accomplishments that led him to be highly regarded, it ranked among the hardest he had to deal with. On most other critical issues, and in the days of the early Cold War there were many, Truman relegated day-to-day policy to his secretaries of state, first Edward Stettinius, then James F. Byrnes, and finally General George C. Marshall. But on the issue of the future of Palestine, Truman was often at odds with his own Defense and State departments. The State Department’s Near East Division was staffed by a group of men whose experience and outlook led them to emulate British policy and tilt toward the Arabs. They were vehemently opposed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, which they thought would be a disaster. Much of Truman’s handling of policy questions relating to Palestine and the Middle East involved removing this group’s decision-making abilities on the issue, and placing them under his control in the White House.
Palestine was, his daughter Margaret pointed out, “the most difficult dilemma of his entire administration.” In the midst of an emerging Cold War with the Soviets, and scores of international crises, from the sealing off of Berlin by the Russians to the Czech coup that put the Communists into power, there were various events that demanded the president’s immediate attention. Among these, Palestine was the one constant crisis. He had done his best to deal with it, Margaret Truman wrote, but “his best was probably not good enough.” As the days and months went by, the depths of the problem seemed to defy a solution. On one day in July 1946, Truman told his wife, Bess, that he had “the most awful day I’ve ever had.” He held a Cabinet luncheon “and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere.”4 In fact, during the next two years Truman would have many such days. A plain-talking and straightforward man who valued loyalty and friendship, Truman would find his values tested and his decisions second-guessed.
Truman became president as the concentration camps were being liberated, exposing the full horror of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews. The Jewish survivors, in pitiable condition, were among the refugees housed in European Displaced Persons camps. Those in Germany and Austria were the responsibility of the United States. This situation could not go on indefinitely; they would have to be settled somewhere. But where? When asked where they wanted to go, most answered “We want to go to Palestine.” The British, the mandatory power in Palestine, was refusing their entry, limiting Jewish immigration to a small quota. Although Truman found Britain a major ally when it came to dealing with the Soviets and fighting the Cold War, he could not say the same regarding Britain’s relations with the United States when it came to Palestine. And in Palestine, there were constant skirmishes and fighting between the Yishuv (the Jewish community), the Arabs of Palestine who vehemently opposed what they considered to be Jewish interlopers, and the British who held the Mandate.
At home, Truman received conflicting advice from his State Department and the Jewish community. The Jews had prospered in pluralistic and democratic America. For many it was their Zion. But after the Holocaust, the assimilationists became Zionists. The inability of the Western democracies to save their brethren from the gas chambers and their refusal, even now, to admit the survivors, strengthened the Zionist argument that the Jews, persecuted throughout history in the Diaspora, would only be safe once they had their own country. American Jews did not want this other country for themselves, but rather for the suffering Jews across the seas. A large segment of American public opinion came to support them.
Harry Truman was insecure about many things when he became president, but he was confident he could handle the issue of Palestine in a just way. He did not anticipate the maelstrom he was about to enter. In his memoir, Truman wrote that his challenge was to create neither an Arab nor a Jewish policy, but “an American policy [that]…aimed at the peaceful solution of a world trouble spot…based on the desire to see promises kept and human misery relieved.”5 That task would consume him from the day he became president to the day he recognized Israel on May 14, 1948, and beyond. The story of why he made the decisions and took the actions he did is the subject of our book.