Beshert

In 1899, fifteen-year-old Harry S. Truman penned an essay on courage that opened with his favorite quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Behavior is the mirror in which each man shows his image.” For the young Harry, that quote seemed to capture his life’s mantra. It echoed the Horatio Alger myths he grew up reading, those rags-to-riches stories about humble boys working hard to achieve lives of middle-class comfort. Like Alger, Emerson affirmed a kind of pioneer positivity that Truman worshipped: the conviction that personal behavior could change the course of history; that right and wrong existed purely and unambiguously; and that by displaying a certain gutsiness, a man could create an image he’d be proud of.

Two years later, Truman was forced to put these juvenile musings into actual practice. Ever since the Spanish-American War erupted in the summer of 1898, he had dreamed of becoming a professional soldier. With the neighborhood boys, he formed a drill company that trooped through the streets, camped in the woods, and shot at chickens. By his second year of high school, he began preparing for the US Military Academy by taking special lessons in history and geography.

But after graduating from Independence High School at age seventeen, he faced an unexpected setback: his poor eyesight torpedoed his candidacy into West Point. The sinking of his dream coincided with yet another obstacle. His father, John Truman, suffered calamitous financial losses in the commodities market, a crushing blow that meant the family did not have the means to send Harry to any college with a tuition bill attached. Amid these troubles, Truman recalled his essay from two years ago, when he had defined true courage as a quality that emerged “in taking care of those at home.” Now “those at home” needed him, and Truman perceived an opportunity to prove his mettle, to be an Emersonian kind of man.

Decades later, reflecting on those hard times, Truman admitted, “It took all I received to help pay family expenses and keep my brother and sister in school.” Over the next two years, the teen held a succession of small gigs, never considering any job beneath him. Though he dropped out of business college after one semester, he cleverly used that short-lived experience to secure work as a timekeeper at the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, forced to sleep in camps along the rail lines. Next, he turned to a series of clerical jobs, including a lowly position at the Kansas City Star. Then in 1903, at nineteen years old, he heard about a promising position as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City, Missouri, the largest bank west of the Mississippi.

With his eyes on the prize, Truman set out to establish his image as a disciplined go-getter. In the employment application, under a section labeled “Habits,” Truman was asked, “Have you any tastes or habits extravagant in proportion to your means?” “Don’t think so,” the applicant replied. Truman listed his favorite pastimes as “theatre and reading,” and confessed that he typically spent his evenings and Sundays “at home.”

Dr. G. T. Twyman, the Truman family physician in Independence, enthusiastically supported the application. “I have known Harry Truman since infancy,” the doctor wrote. “He is a modle [sic] young man worthy of all confidence being strictly sober, truthful and industrious.”

Truman easily landed the job, securing a starting weekly salary of $20, which soon doubled. His performance proved Dr. Twyman right; in his annual review, A. D. Flintom, Truman’s supervisor at Commerce, wrote: “He is a willing worker, almost always here and tries hard to please everybody. We never had a boy in the vault like him before. He watches everything very closely and by his watchfulness detects many errors which a careless boy would let slip through. His appearance is good and his habits and character are of the best.”

In the next review, Flintom went even further: “I do not know of a better young man at the bank than Trueman [sic].”

Though he only worked at Commerce for two years, Truman made his mark as a dedicated young banking clerk. He moved into a boardinghouse (where his housemate was Arthur Eisenhower, brother of Dwight) so his commute would be a manageable walk down a long hill. He gained valuable experience learning what it took to make it in the workaday world, meeting with customers who came in to make deposits and withdrawals.

One of those customers was a fifteen-year-old high school dropout, also helping to support his own struggling family. He worked at Burger, Hannah, Monger, a dry goods store housed in a sprawling brick building a few blocks from the bank. The youngster would regularly visit the bank with a bag of cash to deposit. Soon enough, he grew friendly with the vault clerk, Harry, who was seven years older but much closer in age to him than the other bank employees. The young customer’s name was Edward Jacobson, but everybody called him Eddie.

Over the next few years, this routine transaction evolved into something much more meaningful, with vast historical implications. As Jacobson’s daughter later stated, “Harry Truman was [my father’s] closest friend—there is no doubt about that.” More so than any other First Friendship, the bond between Truman and Jacobson illustrated the power of happenstance, the fortuitous way in which timing, place, and talent intersect. For both these men, history would intervene at multiple points in their lives, pressing them to rise to the moment.

Truman would become known for his endless contradictions: someone with deep-seated insecurities yet outsized ambitions; the most powerful leader in the land who never earned a college degree; a hard-drinking, poker-playing pugilist who was acutely sensitive to public opinion; a man who used racial and anti-Semitic slurs but who also made civil rights a federal priority and who recognized the state of Israel. For that latter point in particular, it was Eddie Jacobson who played a crucial role in encouraging Truman to be the man he had long aspired to be.

As one of Truman’s closest aides, Harry Vaughan, once said, Truman was “one tough son-of-a-bitch of a man.… And that was part of the secret of understanding him.” No one better than Jacobson—a businessman without any formal political involvement—grasped that secret. Though far less is known about him than about Truman, Jacobson undoubtedly held his own tacit power. Decades later, the nation’s first Cold War president would critically need someone like Jacobson to remind him of his roots and of their shared ideals.

As president, Truman would keep on his desk one of his favorite maxims by Mark Twain: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” That maxim perfectly echoed the one Truman had cited at fifteen, hailing the lone individual who acted virtuously to control his destiny and impress the world. Deep down, however, Truman knew that however much he loved such pithy phrases, they oversimplified. On one of his most consequential decisions—the recognition of the state of Israel—he knew it was shaped as much by the quiet influence of his dearest friend Eddie as it was by his own personal mantra to always do right. As an immature teen, Truman idealized the image of the self-reliant trailblazer. But as the emergent leader of a post–World War II world, at a defining moment, he would depend on the hidden counsel of someone he’d known for more than half his life.

Beginning with those casual noon encounters at the bank, Truman and Jacobson embarked on a rich and varied friendship, one that spanned over fifty years and encompassed National Guard service, boot camp, the battlefields of France in World War I, a business partnership, poker games, hunting trips, lunches in downtown Kansas City, a historic meeting in the Oval Office, and frequent letters on White House stationery that the president always signed off in the same way: “Harry.”

Despite the fact that over twenty-four million Americans would later elect him president of the United Sates, Truman himself was the first to admit that he grew up unpopular, someone who struggled to win the respect of his peers. Decades later, he recounted, “The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.” The glasses—prescribed to him for his misshaped cornea—indeed posed a handicap for the young Truman, especially in a boyish world where athleticism counted more than anything. Even at the age of sixty-five, he would describe his poor vision as a “deformity,” one that undermined his already shaky sense of self.

The bulky eyewear also didn’t make it easier for six-year-old Harry to adjust to life in a new town, Independence, where his parents had moved so their son could get a better education. Truman had spent his infancy at four different locales, mostly growing up at his grandmother’s six-hundred-acre farm in Grandview, Missouri, surrounded by pastures and ponies. Independence was different—a town only ten miles east of the budding metropolis of Kansas City. When the Truman family moved there, Independence lacked even the basic markers of habitability: water systems, paved roads, electricity. Yet it seemed to be emerging from its rough frontier roots into the modern twentieth century, promising countless opportunities for any ambitious entrepreneur. The spunky Truman had already decided he would be one of those entrepreneurs. To make a little pocket money, he began serving his Jewish neighbors as a “Shabbos goy,” someone who performed tasks for them on Sabbath—his first informal job in what would grow into quite a long list.

In the fall of 1892, newly fitted with a pair of thick, expensive glasses, Truman started the first grade. From his teacher Myra Ewin, along with a succession of other single Victorian women, Truman absorbed the values of diligence, obedience, punctuality, and respect. Perhaps most important, he discovered what he believed to be the key to success in life. “Whenever I entered a new school room I would watch the teacher and her attitude toward the pupils, study hard, and try to know my lesson better than anyone else.” As Myra Ewin recalled, “He just smiled his way along,” doing whatever it took to land in the good graces of his superiors.

This yearning for praise and attention burned most strongly at home. Truman always suspected that his father favored his younger brother, Vivian, a mischievous child who hated school and whose passion for the outdoors and livestock trading endeared him to his father. Harry, gentler and protected by his mother, could not have been more different from Vivian, a fact that John Truman tried to offset by impressing upon his older son the need to be a fighter. His method was tough love. When a young Harry fell off his pony one day, John Truman told him any boy who couldn’t stay upright at a walking pace didn’t deserve to ride. So he made Harry walk his pony home. Seventy years later, Truman tried to frame the episode in his usual rosy way: “In spite of my crying all the way to the house, I learned a lesson.”

John Truman remained a caring patriarch, though, keeping a stern but loving eye on his bright young son. In 1900, drawing upon his ties to local politicians, he secured a job for Harry at the Democratic Convention in Kansas City. He arranged for Harry to work as a page, running errands and delivering messages to and from delegates.

Harry served as little more than a glorified gofer, but he didn’t mind. The work was a significant upgrade from his current job, swabbing floors, dusting bottles, and churning the ice cream machine at J. H. Clinton’s Drug Store in downtown Independence.

That Kansas City was selected by the Democratic Party as the convention site—the westernmost location it had ever been held in—was the source of much civic pride, validation of the city’s status as an emergent riverside boomtown. With the completion of the Hannibal Bridge over the Missouri River and a new east–west rail link, Kansas City had become a meatpacking hub and major shipping and distribution center. It also boasted a burgeoning garment industry. A town of just over thirty thousand people at the end of the Civil War, Kansas City’s population had grown fivefold by 1900. Still, not all Democratic delegates were enthralled with the convention’s site selection. Kansas Citians had to endure a barrage of snarky comments from convention goers about how they would have to dodge gunfights at every street corner and be on the lookout for cattle stampedes.

Such observations surely annoyed the sixteen-year-old Truman, the beginning of a lifelong insecurity about how his rough roots reflected on his own image as a man. But overall, he was simply too spellbound by the convention’s throbbing energy and soaring spectacle to care about outside perceptions. Everything about the moment stirred him: the seventeen thousand Democrats packed into the Convention Hall and especially the thunderous oratory of William Jennings Bryan, who won the nomination for a second consecutive time.

Though the convention marked the birth of Truman’s political consciousness, any fresh dreams had to be put on pause. Easing his family’s financial desperation took first priority. Truman would spend the next seventeen years focused on nothing more glamorous than honest, hard work. And at this precise time, while he faced his first real challenge, his life intersected with Eddie Jacobson’s.

Eddie was the son of a poor Jewish shoemaker, the fourth of six children born to David and Sarah Jacobson, both of whom fled religious persecution in their Lithuanian homeland to arrive in New York City around 1880. The couple married in New York and settled into the rough-and-tumble tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. David struggled to make a living, and Sarah’s health teetered on the edge. Since Sarah had a sibling in Leavenworth, Kansas, the family packed their bags and moved once again.

The transition to the Midwest had its challenges at first; several of the Jacobson boys had a knack for getting into mischief, and their mother’s native language—Yiddish—did not allow for many fruitful discussions with the Leavenworth sheriff. Still struggling to make ends meet, the Jacobsons—like the Trumans—kept their eyes open for any opportunity that seemed better than the last. Twenty-five miles to the southeast was the bigger metropolis of Kansas City, which had a robust economy and a much larger Jewish community. And so the Jacobsons uprooted themselves for a third time and headed to Kansas City, settling into a small home on East Thirty-Sixth Street.

In Kansas City, Eddie dropped out of school at fifteen years old and went to work for Burger, Hannah, Monger, “deciding in my boyish unwisdom that an education doesn’t buy bread,” as he would write later in an autobiographical sketch. Already, Jacobson exhibited the qualities that would ultimately draw him to Truman: pragmatic, sensible, and entrepreneurial, with the same up-from-the-bootstraps discipline that defined Truman’s early life on the frontier. These characteristics bound someone like Jacobson to someone like Truman: Though one would go on to become president, both shared a lack of formal education alongside a hard-earned wisdom about the real world. Eddie didn’t stay with Burger, Hannah, Monger for long, but he did stick with the clothing business, moving on to the Baltimore Shirt Store in Kansas City, working variously as a stock boy and an all-around helper.

During this time, Eddie briefly fell out of touch with Truman, who by then had left the city at his father’s request and returned to Grandview to help run the family farm—grinding and unrelenting work that led him to forever characterize himself as a farmer. “Prosperous farmers make for a prosperous nation, and when farmers are in trouble, the nation is in trouble,” Truman would later say. As president, Truman proudly identified with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, champions of “the people” who worked the nation’s farms.

Tracing his presidential lineage to Jefferson and Jackson certainly made sense to Truman in hindsight. But in 1906, quitting his banking job, abandoning the city’s cultural excitements, and ignoring his simmering political interests was no easy decision. Reluctant to disappoint his father, the twenty-two-year-old Truman moved back to his childhood stomping grounds, without direction and about to face eleven years of grueling labor.

It would seem, then, that Eddie and Harry had embarked on separate paths unlikely to ever intersect again: the businessman in the city and the farmer in the country. Once again, however, history conspired to bring them together.

Truman likely would’ve remained on the farm, but the outbreak of the Great War brought another call of duty, and an improbable reunion with the young customer from his banking days. A National Guard veteran, Truman wasn’t obligated to enlist for World War I. He was thirty-three years old and had not been active for years. But when President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, Truman felt compelled to join the cause. The decision testified to his sense of patriotism and represented a modest fulfillment of his teenage military aspirations. After reenlisting in June 1917, he was made a first lieutenant and assigned to Missouri’s Second Field Artillery, a National Guard outfit eventually folded into the Army’s 129th Field Artillery.

Moved by the same call as Truman, Eddie Jacobson enlisted and, by pure coincidence, was assigned to the Second Field Artillery as well, reuniting the men after more than a decade apart. In yet another coincidence, the regiment established barracks in Kansas City’s Convention Hall—the same place where Truman had made his first foray into politics as a lowly page for the 1900 Democratic Convention.

Truman and Jacobson seized the moment to show their ingenuity and pluck. As the enlisted men drilled in preparation for war, Private Jacobson took note of the drab fare the soldiers were being fed and went to Lieutenant Truman with an idea that would allow for the purchase of an occasional steak, ice cream, and other meal upgrades.

“While we are out on maneuvers, firing our guns and going through our mock battles, why not record the whole thing in movies?” Jacobson said. “Then, when we return, we could show the movies at Convention Hall and follow them with a dance.” Jacobson figured that with all the soldiers hailing from the Kansas City area, many friends and relatives would buy tickets to the event. It would become a fund-raiser—and a spirit-raiser—and bring in money that would allow the troops to eat better.

Truman loved the idea. It not only honored the values of comradeship that had motivated him to join the Artillery; it also enabled him and Jacobson to work together as a team.

“You go ahead and make all the arrangements. I’ll back you one hundred percent,” Truman promised.

Delighted to hear of his superior’s support, Jacobson asked Truman for one more favor. Taking care of the logistics and promoting the event would require Jacobson to be all over town. It would be much easier if he had access to a car. Truman, Jacobson knew, had a red convertible Stafford roadster. Eddie asked if he could borrow it, and Harry agreed.

Jacobson and a sergeant took care of all the pickups and the publicity work, motoring productively around town until one day, they got into an accident. When they returned to the barracks, a sheepish Jacobson told Truman what happened. The lieutenant took it well, all things considered.

“Your show better turn out well and make a lot of money for the boys, or I know two candidates for the guardhouse,” Truman joked. The event proved to be a rousing success, clearing $2,600, “enough to keep our outfit in steaks for months to come,” Jacobson remembered. Truman dropped the guardhouse threat.

Several months later, the 129th Field Artillery was dispatched to Camp Doniphan, a sprawling tent compound on a dusty plain outside Lawton, Oklahoma. Doniphan had been established in 1917 to help ready more than twenty-five thousand National Guardsmen for war, drilling them on the operation of seventy-five-millimeter cannons and other weaponry. It was a desolate place notorious for its dust storms, the wind whipping over treeless tundra, gritty red dirt flying everywhere. In a letter to his future wife, Bess Wallace, Truman wrote, “A tent fifty yards away is invisible. Dust is in my teeth, eyes, hair, nose, and down my neck. The cook next door brought me a piece of apple dumpling… when I ate it there was a grinding sound.… I ate it anyway, sand and all.”

No amount of dust and dirt could dim the partners’ continued motivation to improve camp life. One of Truman’s responsibilities as a lieutenant was to run the regimental canteen, the base store stocked with soda, cigarettes, candy, and other sundries coveted by young soldiers. Jacobson’s success with the movie and his demonstrated business acumen made him the obvious choice to help. So Truman promoted Jacobson to sergeant and made him his aide-de-canteen. From the outset, Jacobson noticed flaws in the canteen operation, overstaffed (with eighteen men working the small store) and not a single cash register—just a collection of cigar boxes to hold the receipts. “I’ve always believed that most people are honest and I know that Harry Truman always goes on that assumption, too—but there’s such a thing as offering too much temptation,” Jacobson said.

Truman and Jacobson convinced their commanding officer to sign off on a $700 investment in cash registers. Then they collected two dollars from all 1,100 soldiers in the regiment and raised $2,200, which enabled them to stock the canteen with a variety of goods. Soldiers were reimbursed almost immediately, and within six months the canteen had made $15,000—the only one in Doniphan to be in the black. In light of the robust canteen business he built, Truman earned a promotion to captain. But he credited the success almost wholly to Jacobson. In a letter to his future wife, Truman wrote:

I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson, and he is a crackerjack.

His fellow officers took note, referring to him as a “lucky Jew” and “Trumanheimer.” Truman remained unabashed. “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability,” he said.

A successful canteen is one thing; surviving war together quite another. Truman left for France in March 1918, to undergo additional training in field artillery school. He was put in charge of Battery D of the 129th, a notoriously incorrigible group that Truman forged into a war-ready battalion. His skillful leadership left a deep impression on his soldiers and especially on Jacobson, who though posted to a different battery shared the details he had gleaned years later in an interview with the Kansas City Times:

Battery D had been bracketed by enemy fire. German shells fell to one side of the battery’s position and then, equidistant, to the other, in range. The next round would find the battery. One of the sergeants went chicken and hollered, “Every man for himself.” Captain Truman was standing nearby, studying fire-order reports and preparing to make counterbattery on the enemy positions. He heard the sergeant yell, whipped out his automatic and shouted, “I’ll shoot any xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx who leaves his gun!” The men went back to their jobs, and we got the German battery in the next few minutes.

Under Truman’s firm (and profanity-laden) command, Battery D pulled off a remarkable feat: Not a single man was lost during the final six weeks of the war, even when it came under heavy assault from German forces during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Truman had entered the war a mild, reserved man, unsure of his abilities and still craving respect. He would return home with a reputation for bravery and decisive leadership. His grateful charges even gifted him an ornamental drinking cup to mark their deep appreciation.

Five months after the war’s armistice, on April 9, 1919, Truman, Jacobson, and more than 1,300 other officers and soldiers from the 129th Field Artillery departed France for New York City on a steamship named Zeppelin. It wasn’t an easy passage; Truman reported feeling terribly seasick for most of the long voyage. But he could take comfort in one thing: He now realized that he truly did possess courage, the sort of audacity he had waxed lyrical about as a mere fifteen-year-old. Until that point, he had never been involved in any fights, the “sissy” whose mother had kept him from roughhousing because of his glasses. But after enduring the horrors of war, Truman saw that he could genuinely lead people on the strength of his own gifts.

In the immediate moment, though, more practical matters dominated Truman’s thoughts. After the strains and stresses of war, he and Jacobson wanted nothing more than to restore a sense of normalcy. When they finally made it back to Missouri, their first order of business was to marry their sweethearts. After a courtship that spanned more than a decade and one rejected proposal in 1911, Harry Truman finally won the hand of Bess Wallace, a high-society girl from Independence, marrying her on the steamy afternoon of June 28, 1919, in Trinity Episcopal Church. On that same day, the Versailles Treaty officially brought World War I to an end. Six months later, Eddie Jacobson followed his friend by marrying Bluma Rosenbaum in Kansas City’s oldest reform temple, B’nai Jehudah. The two friends could now say with confidence that they had experienced the best and worst together.

No longer bachelors, Eddie and Harry now turned to their second priority. Bolstered by the profitability of the canteen operation, Truman and Jacobson had already, before reaching shore in New York, hatched a plan to go into business together. With Jacobson’s extensive experience in the garment industry, the men decided to open a haberdashery in downtown Kansas City, their mutual trust so great that the partnership was made strictly with a handshake. They signed a lease for a space inside the lobby of the stately Glennon Hotel at Twelfth and Baltimore, across the street from the Hotel Muehlebach, a palatial, newly built, twelve-story property that would become a destination for Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, and a procession of presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Truman himself (who would stay in the Presidential Suite so often it came to be called “White House West”).

With gleaming glass displays and polished tile, Truman & Jacobson Haberdashery specialized in silk ties and shirts, hats, belts, and other upscale furnishings. It flourished from the start, thanks to a steady stream of well-heeled guests from the Muehlebach and the Glennon, as well as regular visits from Truman’s loyal men in Battery D. The partners hit the ground running, working six days a week from 8 a.m. until 9 p.m. Behind the scenes, Jacobson handled the buying and Truman kept the books. They sunk $35,000 into inventory to get started and sold $70,000 worth of goods their first year. Business stayed strong for the next year and a half, the partnership worked, and the future looked secure.

But in late 1921, a collapse in grain prices hammered the local economy, and soon the country confronted a full-blown depression. For Truman, the downturn must have conjured up dark memories of his father’s own failed business ventures. He and Jacobson held on as long as they could—even borrowing more money to keep the failing store afloat—but would-be customers no longer had the means to buy their merchandise, and so they closed their doors in 1922, never to reopen. The partners declined to file for bankruptcy protection that would’ve wiped out their $35,000 in debts.

“No creditor of ours ever lost a cent,” Jacobson later said, though he himself would be forced to declare bankruptcy three years later.

If grain prices had held that year, it’s highly likely no one outside of Missouri would have ever known the name Harry Truman. But through yet another twist of fate, they didn’t. So Truman would be forced to find a new line of work, starting him on a path that would inexplicably lead him just two decades later to the highest office in the land.

After the collapse of their business, Truman and Jacobson’s friendship diverged again. The first time they drifted apart, Truman had withdrawn to the country and Jacobson had remained in the city. This time, Truman’s fortunes led him irrevocably into politics, while Jacobson remained closer to home.

Truman’s last vivid memory of Missouri politics dated all the way back to his small role as a page at the fiery Democratic Convention in 1900. His curiosity had been sparked then, only to be quickly snuffed out by his family’s financial struggles. But this time, one of Truman’s Army buddies from the 129th Field Artillery happened to be Jim Pendergast, the nephew of none other than Tom Pendergast, the notorious Democratic boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County. The Pendergast machine was just that: a highly disciplined operation that plowed through local elections like a tractor in a field, winning loyalty by handing out patronage jobs and government contracts. Pendergast consolidated his wealth by taking care of folks (many of them poor immigrants), who would in turn take care of Pendergast-favored politicians at the ballot box.

In a surprising turn of events, Truman’s political future now depended on the Pendergast machine. In 1922, Jim Pendergast brought his father, Mike, a wingman to big brother Tom, to meet Truman at the haberdashery. Mike asked Truman if he would be interested in running for a “judgeship” in Jackson County, actually an administrative job based in Independence. Truman agreed. With female voters on the electoral rolls for the first time, Truman won a bruising Democratic primary by 279 votes, then won an easy victory in November, along with all the other Democrats in the region. Thus began Truman’s political ascent, an unblemished record of electoral victories save for one setback, in 1924, when he lost his reelection campaign for judge to an Independence harness maker, Henry Rummel—the only man in history to win an election over Harry Truman.

After losing his judgeship, Truman supported his family by selling automobile-club memberships, but a few years later, in part driven by a vague sense of inadequacy over his lack of education, he enrolled in law school. He got through the treacherous first year, survived a second, but ultimately never got his degree when the chance to run again for chief judge in Jackson County presented itself. He won, going on to serve two four-year terms before earning the surprise backing of the Pendergasts for US senator in 1934. Truman again prevailed in a tight Democratic primary and coasted to victory in the election, despite being derided as a political lightweight in some corners and as “the Senator from Pendergast” in others.

It wasn’t an ideal linkage—between someone who liked to model himself as an honest, homespun hero and one of America’s most corrupt political bosses. After Pendergast’s conviction for tax evasion, Truman would spend much of his time trying to dodge accusations that he had been under Pendergast’s thumb. He largely managed to escape the taint of corruption and to establish his reputation for personal integrity. But the gnawing insecurity about being a rube among sophisticates lingered. Truman often questioned how a small-town kid with little formal education and scant political experience would fare in his daunting new position. James Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, the Senate’s majority whip, reassured him, “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.” Those words could not have been better timed, as Truman stood on the brink of gaining national prominence.

Eddie Jacobson, meanwhile, stuck with the business he knew best: clothing. He took a job as a traveling salesman for a shirt and pajama company, spending the next twenty years mostly on the road, visiting his accounts in Missouri and Kansas. His wife, Bluma, assumed most of the responsibilities of raising their two daughters, but Eddie remained a doting, playful father. According to his oldest daughter, Elinor, her gregarious father “would’ve laughed his way through life” were it not for the financial pressures of supporting his young family, particularly after the onset of the Great Depression.

The extent of Jacobson’s affection surfaced in even the smallest ways. One Friday, after a week on the road, he returned home and said to Elinor, “C’mon, it’s springtime, we have to plant a garden. What would you like to grow in the garden?”

She replied that she wanted to plant flowers, so they went to a nursery, chose seeds, and carefully planted and watered them.

Early the next morning, Eddie entered Elinor’s bedroom and shook her awake. “Come here and look what happened!” he exclaimed. After his daughter went to bed, Eddie had planted artificial flowers all through the garden.

“My garden was blooming already!” Elinor said. “[My father] was the happiest thing in the world.”

Just like Eddie’s willingness to maintain a certain level of fantasy for his child, Truman displayed a similar devotion to his daughter—though perhaps of another magnitude. In one well-known episode, Truman threatened bodily injury to the Washington Post’s music critic, Paul Hume, after Hume criticized Margaret Truman’s singing abilities. Truman’s December 6, 1950, reply did not hold back:

It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful.… Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!

Though planting fake flowers and writing enraged letters were entirely different undertakings, they hint at a common thread running through the lives of both men as fathers. They remained exceedingly loyal to their loved ones, to each other, and to their Missouri heritage. Because of this shared foundation, they stayed in touch even as they moved in very different orbits. Whenever they had spare time, they would share lunch at Dixon’s Chili Parlor at Fifteenth and Olive in Kansas City. Periodic reunions of the 129th Field Artillery also brought them together to reflect on old times. They enjoyed countless poker games, usually in Jacobson’s wood-paneled basement, where one ironclad rule was that no females were allowed. Elinor would bring refreshments to the basement door, but under no circumstances would she be permitted to walk downstairs. Other times, the poker games would be held at the home of Eddie’s brother Abe or at the Oakwood Country Club.

When they longed for more substantial escapes, they retreated to nature. An avid outdoorsman, Jacobson often invited Truman on hunting and fishing trips. They and a few pals would head to a hunting shack on the banks of the Missouri River, just a short ride from Independence. Jacobson also had a camp on a lake where he and his friends would go, Truman always among them, even though he never hunted; it wasn’t an activity he ever warmed to, especially due to his poor eyesight. While his buddies roamed the woods with their guns, Truman would bring a big stack of books and catch up on his reading. When everyone returned, Truman would then serve as the camp cook.

By 1944, fate intervened once again. Truman was becoming a national figure at the very moment that FDR began searching for a new vice presidential running mate. With the war grinding on, the Senate decided to investigate gargantuan military contracts in the hopes of exposing waste and corruption. Truman chaired the Senate committee that would ultimately save the government $15 billion (equivalent to $220 billion today), an accomplishment that landed him on the cover of Time. Meanwhile, rumors started swirling that Franklin Delano Roosevelt might jettison Vice President Henry Wallace, whose liberal views and personal eccentricities had become a distraction and liability. Though Truman did not seek out the nomination, he ended up on the very long list of replacement candidates—a natural choice given his growing acclaim. Still, many New Dealers joked that Truman as vice president would be the “second Missouri Compromise.” They viewed the country bumpkin with disdain, describing him as “a small-bore politician of country courthouse caliber only.”

Amidst this storm of speculation, praise, and condescension, Truman returned home to Missouri. At this critical moment, he had no interest in engaging in the power struggle, instead seeking out the comforts of his best friend’s Missouri home. Truman spent the time playing the piano alongside Gloria, Jacobson’s fourteen-year-old daughter. They took turns performing solo numbers, then shared some duets. When the piano playing ended, Truman confessed to his friend, “Honest to gosh, Eddie, I don’t want to be vice president. I think I can do a better job where I am, in the Senate.”

Truman’s wish did not come true. When he was nominated for vice president at the Chicago convention in July 1944, President Roosevelt sent him a telegram with his “heartiest congratulations.” Truman wired a copy of it to Jacobson, writing by hand at the bottom:

To Eddie Jacobson, my friend, buddy + partner in whom I repose the utmost confidence.

Harry Truman USS Mo.

Four months later, an ailing FDR was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term, along with his new running mate, the former haberdasher from Kansas City. Jacobson and other close friends threw a celebratory bash for Truman at the Hotel Muehlebach, across the street from the former site of Truman & Jacobson. Jacobson brought along Elinor and her fiancé, Joe Borenstine, a major in the Army, who had just proposed in the same wood-paneled basement where Harry, Eddie, and pals played their poker games. Jacobson wanted Truman, the newly elected vice president, to give Elinor’s marriage his approval before he gave his own. Truman took a moment to size up Borenstine. “Major, I think it’s a good idea,” Truman concluded. With that, the young couple went out ring shopping. “The marriage was approved by Truman. Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken place,” Elinor Borenstine recalled.

As celebrations resumed, the friends switched from settling Elinor’s future to pondering Truman’s own. “I really meant it when I said I didn’t want to be vice president,” Truman told Jacobson candidly. “But now that I have the job, I promise you I’ll do the best I know how.”

Harry Truman was vice president for only eighty-two days. His tenure ended on April 12, 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. As the nation mourned, Truman was administered the oath of office by Chief Justice Harlan Stone at 7:09 p.m. Truman’s first act as president was to kiss the Bible that he’d placed his right hand on as he was sworn in. The next morning, in Kansas City, Eddie and Elinor Jacobson went to temple to pray for the new president. Elinor said the only other time she and her father had made such a special trip was when they prayed for the soldiers who had landed on the coast of Normandy on D-Day.

In the nation’s 169-year history, with the possible exception of Washington or Lincoln, no president had taken office under so much pressure, or with so many matters requiring his urgent attention. While the war in Europe would soon end—Adolf Hitler’s suicide came just eighteen days later—the Pacific theater was still far from won, with top Allied strategists predicting that Japan would not surrender for at least another year.

Truman had been president for all of twelve days when Secretary of War Henry Stimson came into his office and handed him a note. It said, “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” Advisors soon presented a detailed report on the so-called Manhattan Project to Truman, who had heard nothing about it while vice president. Stimson asked if he could empanel a select committee to explore all facets of the weapon and the likely consequences of employing it. Truman agreed. A little more than three months later, on the morning of August 6, Truman broadcast a message to the American people. It began:

Sixteen hours ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.… It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. Five days after that, Truman received word from Japan that it agreed to an unconditional surrender, thus ending World War II. Truman called his mother at the farm in Grandview. “I’d known he’d call. He always calls me after something that happens is over,” Martha Truman said.

As massive a relief as it was for Truman to have the war over, the postwar challenges facing the president were no less daunting. The US economy had to be transitioned from wartime to peacetime. Critical decisions on how to mobilize the Marshall Plan to rebuild the war-ravaged European continent had to be made. Moreover, relations with the Soviet Union, an erstwhile ally against Germany and Japan, seemed to grow more tenuous by the day: Stalin was steadfastly setting out to expand the Soviet bloc and establish what would become known as the Iron Curtain. Containment became the foreign policy watchword, as manifested in the Truman Doctrine, which called for the United States to provide economic and military support to Greece and Turkey and other nations under siege from authoritarian forces.

With no electoral mandate, Truman struggled to find a core constituency and to muster support for his policies, particularly with a Republican-controlled Congress. As the 1948 election year approached, these factors made it that much more difficult for Truman to grapple with one of his most vexing geopolitical issues: the “puzzle of Palestine,” as Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson called it.

Palestine was home to Arabs and Jews, and from 1929 on, almost unending strife. The land had been controlled by Great Britain since 1918, when they took it over from the failed Ottoman Empire, but was scheduled to be turned over to the United Nations in 1948, amid deepening discord and mutual distrust. Since Theodore Herzl first conceived of creating a Jewish state in the land of Israel in the late 1890s, oppressed Jews worldwide had longed for a state they could call their own, a place where they could exercise their religious and political rights without fear of persecution. In the half century between the founding of Zionism and the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Jews had emigrated to Palestine, building cities alongside their Arab neighbors while bringing to life vast tracts of land once thought uninhabitable. After Hitler’s war machine slaughtered six million Jews, and tens of thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust came to Palestine in search of a new home, pressure to create a Jewish state heightened. The issue of a Jewish state could no longer be postponed. A resolution would have to be found, now, and Truman would be the decision-maker.

The plight of Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany had attracted Truman’s interest during his time in the Senate. In a 1943 speech in Chicago, Truman proclaimed, “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers. Free lands must be opened to them.” As World War II came to a close, he again underscored the urgency of the matter, pushing for more Jews to be permitted to emigrate to Palestine, describing it as “the most distressful situation that has happened in the world since Attila made his invasion of Europe.”

A devout Baptist who had read the Bible cover to cover while still a teenager, Truman was well aware of the Old Testament narrative that the Jewish people should one day have their own homeland. After two thousand years of exile, this was exactly what the Zionists were pressing for, but in practicality the matter was complicated by a thicket of strategic, economic, political, and moral concerns. FDR, for his part, spent years essentially playing Palestine down the middle, trying to appease both Arab and Jewish leaders. However, with the British and their forces withdrawing and the United Nations set to determine Palestine’s fate, Truman didn’t have this luxury. Truman’s own State Department, led by General George Marshall, a World War II hero and a man almost universally revered, adamantly opposed the idea of partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, believing it would push the Arab world into the Soviet sphere. Marshall also argued that such a move would imperil American access to Arab oil, and almost certainly require the presence of US troops to contain the violence.

On November 29, 1947, the UN, with US support, voted to adopt a plan to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Jews were ecstatic, but the Arab nations said the vote meant war. The British, about to withdraw their fifty thousand troops, thought the partition plan was untenable and that violence, if not full-blown war, was inevitable. Positions hardened all around. State Department officials kept reminding Truman how devastating it would be for the US economy should the Arabs get payback by withholding oil. And what if the Arabs, in their quest to drive the Jews out, enlisted military support from the Soviets?

While the debate over the effects of partition raged, the White House began receiving cards and telegrams by the hundreds of thousands in support of a Jewish state. The question became whether the United States would continue to support the partition plan or, if that failed, recognize an independent Jewish state once it was declared. Truman had supported the partition, but now he faced even greater pressure, and he seemed to be wavering. Zionist leaders, fearful that Marshall and others in the State Department would persuade Truman to change his mind, grew increasingly aggressive advocating for their cause. Truman started getting barraged with demands from such Zionist leaders as Stephen Wise, co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, a man who at one point pounded a fist on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. Another account told of a wealthy New York garment-district businessman who showed up at a meeting in Washington with wads of cash tucked inside an umbrella, which he then opened, scattering bankrolls everywhere and announcing he was ready to do business if the president supported Israel.

“Tell the bastard to go to hell,” Truman reportedly replied. Already on record as supporting a Jewish state, Truman felt increasingly annoyed by what he considered the Zionists’ over-the-top zealotry.

“Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on the earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?” he said when the subject of the Zionists came up in a Cabinet meeting.

Believing that the most important matter in the history of their people—the creation of a Jewish state—was at stake, the Zionists pressed for Truman to meet with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the renowned scientist and venerable leader of the world Zionist movement, a man whose commitment to the Jewish state went back decades. During the First World War, Weizmann had developed a process to mass-produce acetone, a key component in the production of gunpowder. His discovery was later credited with helping the Allies win the Great War. In appreciation, the British government asked Weizmann what he wanted. “A national home for my people,” he boldly replied. The government thereafter issued its famous Balfour Declaration, committing Britain to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Now seventy-four years old and in failing health, Weizmann was seeking to realize his life-long dream. He had met Truman before and impressed him deeply, the president calling him “a wonderful man, one of the wisest people I think I ever met.”

In the hope of securing a meeting with Truman, Weizmann traveled from London to New York in late February 1948 despite being in poor health. Truman remained so put off by Zionist pressure that he declined to meet with anyone, even Weizmann.

Fears mounted among Jewish leaders that if Weizmann—their most persuasive and authoritative voice—returned to Israel without meeting Truman, the chances of Truman recognizing a Jewish state would disappear as fast as Weizmann himself. Frank Goldman, the national president of B’nai Brith, then (and still) one of the most influential Jewish organizations in the country, grew desperate. Having exhausted all other options, he decided his last option was to contact Truman’s best friend, Eddie Jacobson.

The late-night phone call on February 20, 1948, jarred Jacobson from his sleep, but he was already deeply familiar with the issue and the urgency of the historical moment. Jacobson was committed enough to the cause to have brought small groups to the White House to lobby the president. After arranging one such visit to see the president with a New York rabbi and a clothing company executive, Charles Kaplan, Jacobson told reporters, “Kaplan sells shirts, I sell furnishings, and the Rabbi sells notions.” When Truman was mulling whether to support the UN partition plan earlier that fall, Jacobson had made two separate trips to the White House to urge his friend to vote yes, even sending a two-page wire following one visit to lay out his rationale. Goldman now explained to a sympathetic Jacobson that Weizmann had come all the way from London to see Truman, and it would be most unfortunate if this trip had been made for naught. Goldman’s hope was that Jacobson’s longtime friendship with Truman might forge a change in the president’s thinking.

Goldman’s call roused Jacobson into action. Knowing that Truman would soon depart for vacation in Key West, Jacobson wired a letter via the president’s appointments secretary, writing, “Mr. President, I have asked you for very little in the way of favors in all our years of friendship, but I am begging of you to see Dr. Weizmann as soon as possible.” Jacobson anxiously awaited a reply. Almost a week later, Truman responded from Key West. He remained as cordial as ever with his old friend, but insisted that a meeting with Weizmann would change nothing.

“This situation has been a headache for me for two and a half years,” Truman wrote bluntly.

The Jews are so emotional and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with it is almost impossible to get anything done. The British… have been completely noncooperative in arriving at a conclusion. The Zionists, of course, want us to take a big-stick approach and have naturally been disappointed when we can’t do that.

I hope it will work out, but I have about come to the conclusion that the situation is not solvable as presently set up; but I shall continue to try to get the situation outlined in the United Nations resolution.

I hope everything is going well with you.

Sincerely yours,

Harry Truman

It was a disappointing reply, but Jacobson remained undaunted. As much as he understood his old friend’s quandary, he would not accept anything less than affirmation. So he decided to fly to Washington to deliver his appeal in person. Without even securing an appointment beforehand, Jacobson traipsed up the White House driveway on the morning of March 13 and into the West Wing office of Matt Connelly, Truman’s appointments secretary and gatekeeper. Connelly knew Jacobson and the close bond he had with the president and immediately granted the meeting, but still implored Jacobson not to bring up Truman’s least favorite subject: Palestine.

Jacobson entered the office, shook hands, and sat down. He was heartened to see that Truman looked recharged from his time in the Keys. They exchanged pleasantries and gave family updates, and Truman, like always, wanted to know how business was going for Jacobson, who had recently opened a new clothing store at Thirty-Ninth and Main in Kansas City. Jacobson, who regularly sent shirts, ties, and even pajamas to the White House (never including a bill), proudly reported on the store’s thriving success. Then, when the moment arrived to turn to the matter at hand, Jacobson paused while looking his friend straight in the eyes. To Truman, the pause seemed interminable: “I finally said ‘Eddie what in the world is the matter with you. Have you at last come to get something from me because you never have asked me for anything since I’ve been in the White House and since we’ve been friends.’” Finally, Jacobson broached the topic Truman least wanted to confront:

“You must see Dr. Weizmann; you must support an independent Jewish state.”

In an instant, Truman’s face hardened and his demeanor changed. Jacobson had never seen or heard Harry Truman acting this way. He appeared brusque, almost unreachable. He didn’t want any dialogue on the matter, whether pertaining to a Weizmann meeting or anything remotely connected. Jacobson persisted, reminding Truman of the esteem in which he held Weizmann, employing every argument he could think of, from the plight of refugees to the biblical roots of a Jewish homeland.

Truman remained unmovable, hectoring Jacobson about how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jews had been to him.

At that moment, Jacobson later wrote, he felt for the first time that “my dear friend, the President of the United States, was… as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be.”

But Jacobson persisted. Like a defense lawyer trying to sway a jury, he searched his mind for another tack to take, some way to break through. He looked around the office for a moment and spotted a bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, a replica of the one Truman had commissioned for the Jackson County Courthouse back home in Independence. Truman adored Jackson’s strong, pioneering spirit, and Jacobson well knew that Truman loved to compare himself to his predecessor. In his Memoirs, published in 1955, Truman praised Jackson for being an outspoken leader for plain folk: “People knew what he stood for and what he was against.” Now, Jacobson seized on those connections, highlighting this as a moment for Truman to take his own stand, to show his naysayers that he was no sissy from rural Missouri but an Emersonian pioneer who now held the power to determine the fate of the Jewish state:

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

When Jacobson had finished his appeal, Truman “began drumming his fingers on his desk.” He swiveled his chair away from Jacobson and looked out at the Rose Garden, gazing through the window that was just beyond the photos of his mother, wife, and daughter. The Oval Office resounded with silence. To Jacobson, it seemed that this silence lasted “for centuries.” Finally, Harry Truman swiveled his chair back around.

“You win, you bald-headed son of a bitch. I will see him,” Truman declared.

An utterly relieved Jacobson described these as “the most endearing words I ever heard from his lips.”

Truman buzzed Connelly to set up the meeting time with Weizmann. Jacobson thanked his former partner and departed, walking happily up Sixteenth Street to the Statler Hotel, where he was staying. He stopped at the hotel bar and ordered two double bourbons. He had never done that before in his life.

Chaim Weizmann arrived at the White House after dark on Thursday, March 18. He entered through the East Wing to attract as little press attention as possible. Truman informed nobody about the visit, not even his secretary of state; this meeting would be completely off the record. It lasted forty-five minutes, and by all accounts it went well. The men held each other in high regard, and Truman made a point to reassure Weizmann that he supported partition and wanted to do whatever he could to minimize bloodshed. To Weizmann, the meeting marked a complete triumph, but the relief the Zionists felt was short-lived. The next day, Warren Austin, the United States’ ambassador to the UN, announced that the US was reconsidering the partition plan and wanted to invoke a temporary UN trusteeship over Palestine to allow for more time to consider all options.

It was a stunning reversal, leaving Jacobson blindsided. Jacobson was soon fielding calls from people accusing Truman of being a duplicitous scoundrel and a traitor to the Jewish cause. Heartbroken, Jacobson took to his bed for the entire weekend: “There wasn’t one… who expressed faith and confidence in the word of the President of the United States.” Still, Jacobson refused to believe the President had betrayed him until he heard the words from Truman directly. The truth was that while nobody at the State Department knew about Truman’s meeting with Weizmann, let alone his vow of support, the president had never authorized Austin’s back-tracking statement. In fact, the president felt betrayed by a group of men he called “the striped-pants boys” in the State Department who he believed were out to sabotage him. Now, with the May 14 expiration of the British Mandate over Palestine looming, this mess needed to be straightened out quickly.

Weizmann wrote to Truman on April 9, seeking to underscore the high stakes:

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

On a follow-up trip to the White House shortly after the tempest, Jacobson sought to clarify where things stood. Truman reaffirmed his support for statehood, saying that nothing had changed in the substance of what he’d told Weizmann. Jacobson, immensely relieved, then told his friend how vital it was for the United States to publicly recognize the new Jewish state when it was finally declared. Jacobson wrote later that Truman “agreed with a whole heart.”

Two days before the British Mandate was set to expire, Truman convened an Oval Office meeting to hear final arguments on whether to recognize the new and as yet unnamed Jewish state. Days before, knowing time was running out and that his most revered Cabinet member, George Marshall, remained opposed, Truman had asked Clark Clifford to prepare the argument for recognition, as if he were arguing a case before the Supreme Court. A lawyer by training and now White House counsel, Clifford went to work, studying everything from the text of Deuteronomy to the horrors of the Holocaust to compile his most persuasive arguments. But instead of preparing for nine Justices, he would effectively have an audience of one: George Marshall. His goal wasn’t necessarily to convince the war hero to accept recognition but to ensure that he wouldn’t resign in the event the president did decide to recognize the Jewish state. Truman understood how damaging Marshall’s resignation would be to his re-election prospects, and was determined to avoid that danger.

The tension was palpable in the Oval Office as Marshall and three State Department aides quietly took their seats to Truman’s right. To his left sat Matt Connelly and one other White House aide. Directly in front sat Clifford. Truman opened with a noncommittal statement, then turned to Marshall for his view. Marshall’s deputy, Robert Lovett, made their case: Recognition would be premature and counterproductive. The more prudent course would be to continue the UN trusteeship of Palestine until a truce and an enforceable plan could be put in place. Marshall’s core point, Clifford would say later, was that “there were twenty or thirty million Arabs as compared to a million and a half Israelis and the Israelis were going to end up being pushed into the Mediterranean.” Factoring in the importance of Arab oil and the strong likelihood that the Soviets would align themselves with the Arabs, Marshall insisted siding with the Jews constituted both dangerous and foolish policy. He also insinuated that the only reason they were even debating the idea of an independent Jewish state was to secure both the Jewish vote and the financial backing of prominent Jewish businessmen.

Truman then called on Clifford to deliver his argument in favor of recognition. Unbowed by what he had just heard, Clifford upped the stakes: America should not only recognize the new Jewish state in forty-eight hours, but also beat the Soviets by being the first country to do it. For fifteen minutes, speaking fluently and in perfectly structured sentences, Clifford asserted that there were effectively Jewish and Arab states in Palestine already, and with the Mandate ending, the Jews could wait no longer. Moreover, with six million Jews having been murdered by the Nazis, and refugees desperate for a place to live, the only humane option was to support a Jewish homeland. The longer Clifford talked, the redder Marshall’s face became. At one point Marshall asked why Clifford, a domestic affairs advisor, was even in the meeting. “General, he is here because I asked him to be here,” Truman said. The tension in the office was palpable. Now fully agitated, Marshall delivered the coup de grace: If the president followed Clifford’s advice, he would vote against him in November. “That brought the meeting to a grinding halt,” Clifford later remarked, adding it was the “sharpest rebuke” of Truman’s presidency. When the meeting ended, Marshall departed without even looking at Clifford.

The ultimate decision belonged to one man: Harry S. Truman. As much as he admired and respected Marshall, Truman had to heed what was in his own heart—and what Jacobson had persuaded him to do. Now was his chance to fulfill that Mark Twain maxim that sat on his desk, to “gratify” the nation and “astonish” the world. The next day, after Lovett informed Clifford that the secretary wouldn’t publicly oppose Truman’s recognition, the path was cleared.

At midnight the next evening in Jerusalem, David Ben-Gurion declared the new Jewish state of Israel. Eleven minutes later, at 6:11 p.m. in Washington, DC, came this statement from President Harry Truman:

This government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel.

The United States thus became the first nation to extend de facto recognition to Israel. To later American diplomats like Dennis Ross, it had enormous consequences, not the least conferring on the fledgling new state “standing internationally when it would otherwise not have had it. Psychologically, that was huge, effectively signaling American support. It also undercut the messages that the State and Defense Departments had been sending to the Europeans and the Arabs that the US opposed the advent of the state.”

As jubilant Israelis danced in the streets of Jerusalem, Jacobson celebrated in Kansas City. Within a day, he was headed to New York to meet with the new president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann. Three days later, he arrived at the White House to be received as Israel’s “temporary, unofficial ambassador.”

May 14, 1948, was one of the most heartening days of Harry Truman’s tenure as president. If professionals at the State and War Departments found his decision bewildering and his decision-making sloppy, the public and the press supported him. Isaac Halevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Israel, visited the White House soon thereafter and told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.” The words brought tears to Truman’s eyes.

Eddie Jacobson always downplayed his “small part in this historic event.” He said his role came down to beshert—a Yiddish expression that means “destiny.” To Harry Truman, the destiny was undergirded by a lifetime not only of trust and friendship, but also of humor, laughter long being a staple between them. When Jacobson was named one of the directors of a prominent Kansas City bank after news emerged of the pivotal role he had played, Truman wrote to him, “You and I seem to be getting up in the world—you a Bank Director and me the president of the United States.”

Jacobson’s stock had indeed risen in the world. In 1949, Jacobson traveled to Israel as a personal emissary of Truman’s. Over the course of four weeks, he was feted by both Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Israeli president Chaim Weizmann. Upon his return, one Kansas City rabbi even floated the idea that Jacobson should succeed Weizmann when he retired, a suggestion Eddie promptly rejected. Truman, for his part, joined the debate, saying that while he hoped Jacobson wouldn’t take it, “Israel couldn’t nominate a better man.”

Jacobson had no hidden agenda, no singular self-interest beyond being a Jewish man who wanted to “do right” by his people. He loved Harry Truman, and the feeling was mutual. Across decades of friendship, Jacobson made it his business not to intrude on Truman’s time or trade on his closeness to the man. They were Harry and Eddie, Eddie and Harry, and that never changed, even when Truman was writing him on stationery that said “The White House” on top.

“When the day came when Eddie Jacobson was persuaded to forego his natural reluctance to petition me and he came to talk to me about the plight of the Jews… I paid careful attention,” Truman wrote years later. He called Jacobson’s involvement of “decisive importance,” the one man who had spoken truth to power and who did not sacrifice his friendship along the way. Truman once said that reading history taught him “that a leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do, and like it.” Based on that definition, it was Jacobson—even more than Truman—who operated as a silent leader on one of the most fraught issues in US foreign policy.

To more than a few observers of Truman’s life and political career, he stood as an unlikely candidate to champion the cause of Jewish statehood. Truman was known periodically to traffic in Jewish stereotypes; when referring to Jews, he also often resorted to slurs not uncommon in the Midwestern world in which he’d grown up. He made the “crackerjack Jew” comment about Eddie when he was doing such a “splendid job with the canteen,” and he once wrote to Bess that he had little use for Miami because it was nothing but “hotels, filling stations, Hebrews, and cabins.” In a 1947 diary entry, Truman assailed Henry Morgenthau, the former secretary of the Treasury, who had appealed to him on behalf of Jewish refugees.

“The Jews I find very, very selfish,” Truman wrote. “They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] Persons as long as the Jews get special treatment.”

On a more personal level, as close as Jacobson was to Truman, he and his wife, Bluma, were never invited into the Wallace family home, where Harry and Bess lived with Bess’s mother, Madge Wallace. Madge was widely thought to have a strict no-Jews policy in her home. Elinor Borenstine said years later in an interview with the Truman Library that Bess Truman and daughter Margaret adhered to a similar, if unstated, attitude.

“We felt they didn’t care for Jews or want any part of them so, you know, we didn’t care,” Borenstine said. “We knew Harry was alright with us, but we also knew Bess was not. After all, she was raised at her mother’s knee. They were the first family of Independence, Missouri for God’s sake, this big place! So, that was alright, we didn’t care. We didn’t miss ’em.”

And yet, in his long friendship with Jacobson, and in his words and deeds in both the Senate and in the White House, Truman advocated passionately and tirelessly on behalf of the Jewish people and their statehood. As a Christian senator, he lent his name to the American Palestine Committee, a Christian Zionist group. He even supported the Committee for a Jewish Army, a group that advocated for Jews taking up arms against the Nazi war machine. Publicly, his words and deeds did not reflect the feelings of an anti-Semite. Nevertheless, decades after his death, there is still that open question: Was Truman an anti-Semite?

In an interview with the Washington Post, Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, tried to provide context for understanding Truman’s views. She ascribed Truman’s private commentaries on Jews as “typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at that time in all parts of American society. That was an acceptable way to talk.” That doesn’t make his comments any less alarming or offensive, but people who knew Truman and his character best—count Eddie Jacobson and Chaim Weizmann among them—would rightly argue that his actions were far more meaningful than his asides. David Holzel made precisely this point, writing in Washington Jewish Week in 2018:

Truman was an imperfect man with imperfect views. The unfavorable regard he had for Jews does not negate his many contributions to the Jewish community or the country as a whole. One should judge Truman on his actions, not on a few unflattering comments.

Eddie Jacobson’s health started to falter in 1950. His heart was weakening. When Truman heard the news, he told Jacobson what a privilege it was to have such a good and loyal friend, and he admonished him to take good care of himself. “I sure don’t want to send flowers to Mrs. Jacobson for you,” Truman said in a handwritten note. Their correspondence was steady and always heartfelt. When Truman announced that he would not run for reelection in 1952, Jacobson was among the first to congratulate him.

Truman returned to his beloved Independence, and the handsome Victorian home at 219 Delaware, where Bess Wallace Truman had grown up. He would get together regularly with the boys from the 129th Field Artillery, and he continued to be the resident reader and chief cook on annual hunting and fishing outings with his buddies. His friendship with Eddie Jacobson only got stronger. In June 1955, Truman suggested they take a long trip with their wives, traveling to London, Holland, and France, meeting the leaders of each country, and proceeding on to Italy, for an audience with the Pope. Then they would take a ship to Israel, and follow that with visits to Turkey and Greece. Truman wanted to do this in the fall of 1955, but Bess Truman needed some extensive dental work done, so they had to put it off until the spring of 1956. On October 25, 1955, Eddie Jacobson suffered a heart attack and died en route to the hospital. He was sixty-four years old.

Harry Truman visited the Jacobson family as they sat shiva in their Kansas City home. He was so overcome with emotion he could barely speak. When Elinor Borenstine asked him to sign copies of his memoirs, he began to sob. He said he would gladly sign the copies but could not do it at that moment.

“Eddie was one of the best friends I had in this world,” Truman said later. “He was absolutely trustworthy. I don’t know how I am going to get along without him.”

Just over a year after Eddie Jacobson’s passing, his closest friends held a memorial service in Kansas City, launching a foundation in his name. The featured speakers were Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and President Harry Truman, whose friendship with Eddie Jacobson spanned a half century. Truman struggled with how to capture the richness of their friendship in just a few remarks. He knew nothing he would say that morning would do it justice, but he tried. His voice quivering with emotion, Harry Truman began:

Eddie was one of those men that you read about in the Torah. If you read the articles in Genesis concerning two just men [Enoch and Noah] you’ll find those descriptions will fit Eddie Jacobson to the dot.

Truman continued: “I don’t think I’ve ever known a man I thought more of, outside my own family, than I did of Eddie Jacobson. He was an honorable man. He’s one of the finest men that ever walked on this earth, and that’s covering a lot of territory.”