Truman(45)

When Henry Wallace announced his independent candidature on December 19th it did little to spoil Truman’s Christmas. Indeed the President organized the holiday rather better than usual, with a large family party in the White House in place of the usual rather bad-tempered dash for thirty hours to Independence. The reason for the family party was that it was the first Christmas without ‘Mamma Truman’. Paradoxically but rather typically, however, the large White House party was made up overwhelmingly of relations of Bess rather than of Harry Truman. The President’s brother, Vivian, could not come because he had too many of his own family to entertain at home in Missouri. ‘I am sure they had a grand dinner’, Truman wrote ruminatively, ‘a much happier one than a formal, butler served one, although ours was nice enough. But a family dinner, cooked by the family mother, daughters, grand-daughters and served by them, is not equalled by the White House, Delmonico’s, Antoine’s or any other formal one.’10 Truman had launched himslf on a modest quest for racial equality but he was a long way from embracing the idea of women’s liberation. An ideal to which however his dedication could never be doubted, whether in good times or in bad, was that of a simpler, earlier, more honest America. But it was always something which, whether he was in Washington or Independence or Grandview was just beyond the receding horizon. It was the nostalgia of an incurable romantic, mostly slightly dissatisfied but rarely self-pitying. And unlike some of his successors he did not try to inflict his nostalgia as political stock-in-trade upon the nation.





8

VICTORY OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEFEAT


1948, in contrast with its revolutionary predecessor a century before and in contradiction of Yeats, was a year when the centre held. The word of Marshall was made flesh in the form of the European Recovery Programme. The foundations of NATO were laid. And Truman confounded Dewey, the Chicago Tribune and Dr Gallup by being re-elected President of the United States.

During the first part of the year, however, leading up to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14th and its immediate recognition by the United States, the divisive issue of Palestine was repeatedly hovering over the international landscape. It was divisive between the White House and the State Department. It was divisive within Truman’s own mind. In an intermittent way it had been all of these things since the first months of his presidency. It was the greatest irritant of the period to Anglo-American relations. It probably was the factor which most inhibited the growth of real respect, let alone affection, between Truman and his most powerful European auxiliary, Ernest Bevin. And it certainly strained the President’s relationship with his much admired Secretary of State more than every other issue put together.

Truman appeared, in the eyes of the British Government and to some extent of the State Department, to be determinedly, even carelessly, pro-Zionist. In fact he was much more objectively than subjectively so. He had a general predisposition in favour of a Jewish national home, and indeed a Jewish state, but no great emotional commitment to the cause. He was however subject to a number of influences, personal and political. There were two determined Zionists in the White House staff. The first was David K. Niles, whom he had inherited from Roosevelt, and greatly liked. The second and more central was Clark Clifford, who from 1946 had constant access to the President and never hesitated to take on the State Department. Then there was his old haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, who had re-established himself more successfully in similar business in Kansas City and re-entered Truman’s life as an unofficial but extremely effective ambassador of the Jewish Agency in the summer of 1946. On several crucial occasions he applied pressure upon Truman in a way that the President would have accepted from few other people. In addition, Weizmann himself, operating less intrusively but with a grander sweep than Jacobson, never failed on the three or four occasions when they met to exercise almost as magnetic an effect upon Truman as he had upon Balfour thirty years before.

The political pressures came from the Democratic machine, both nationally through Hannegan and his successor McGrath, and from State leaders, primarily but not exclusively in New York. It was funds, still more than votes, that they were concerned about. Their pressure was re-inforced by the fact that the Republicans, Dewey and even Taft, were prepared to outbid the President whenever he veered towards accepting State Department caution towards the rapid creation of a Jewish state.

To Attlee and Bevin, who at least until 1947 when they tried to hand over the problem to the United Nations, had direct responsibility, Truman emerged from all this as a rampant partisan, careless alike of Arab opinion and the prospects of peace in the area and concerned only with the exigencies of American domestic politics. Attlee responded with some tart private messages which Bevin supplemented with occasional exasperated and ill-judged public speeches. In June 1946, he enlivened the Labour Party Conference by saying ‘Regarding the agitation in the United States … for 100,000 Jews to be put into Palestine, I hope it will not be misunderstood in America if I say, with the purest of motives, that that was because they did not want too many of them in New York.’ The hope with which he prefaced his delicate irony, it need hardly be said, was misplaced. Nine months later, he had another go: ‘I really must point out that in international affairs I cannot settle things,’ he told the House of Commons in typically egotistical terms, ‘if my problem is made the subject of local elections. I hope I am not saying anything to cause bad feeling in the United States, but I feel so intense about this …’