These statements did Bevin a lot of harm with American public opinion, in New York at least. On one occasion dockers there refused to unload his luggage from the Queen Mary1 and on another he was booed at a baseball game in Yankee Stadium. More importantly they infuriated Truman, and acted as a countervailing influence to the irritation with which he reacted to excessive Jewish lobbying. In June 1946 he at first refused to see a delegation of all the New York Congressmen, and finally received them only with obvious impatience. He was no better when the two Senators from the state, Wagner and Mead, brought a former member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (into Palestine) to see him. ‘I am not a New Yorker,’ Truman is alleged to have told them. ‘All these people are pleading for a special interest. I am an American’1 2 ‘… The Jews themselves are making it almost impossible to do anything for them’, he wrote to Edwin Pauley in October.2 And in August 1947, he used to Mrs Roosevelt the analogy he had applied to the labour union s over a year before: ‘I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.’2 A couple of months after this he pretended to Senator Pepper of Florida (to irritate not propitiate him) that he had personally burnt 35,000 pieces of unread pro-Zionist mail.
Then in February 1948 he refused to see Weizmann. This led to Jacobson being sent in to secure a reversal of the decision. He succeeded, but not without touching some of Truman’s rawest nerves. He arrived unannounced at the White House and as was habitual got an interview without difficulty, although he was urged not to talk to the President about Palestine. Needless to say, Jacobson did not for long stick to this advice. ‘He [Truman] immediately became tense in appearance, abrupt in speech, and very bitter in the words he was throwing my way,’ Jacobson recorded. ‘In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner or anything approaching it … I suddenly found myself thinking that my dear friend the President of the United States was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be, and I was shocked that some of our Jewish leaders should be responsible for Mr. Truman’s attitude.’3
Nonetheless Jacobson used his special powers of persuasion to get Weizmann his interview, which took place secretly on March 18th, 1948. It led to one of the worst foreign policy confusions of Truman’s presidency. On November 29th, 1947, the UN General Assembly, with the problem dumped in their laps by the British, had voted by 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, in favour of partition. As a two-thirds majority was required to give the resolution validity the margin was adequate but not handsome. The United States lobbied hard in its favour. Truman issued instructions that the delegation in New York was not to use ‘threats or improper pressure’ on other delegations. That instruction, however, even if fully carried out, and there is evidence that it was not, would have left some room for persuasion and ‘proper’ pressure. What is certain is that without not merely the vote, but the influence of the United States, then far greater in the General Assembly than today, there would have been no chance of the requisite numbers.
The resolution was greeted with Jewish jubilation and Arab violence. When the British announced that they would end the mandate on May 15th and would play no part in enforcing partition it became obvious that, unless Palestine was to be invited by the world peace-keeping organization to fight out its own destiny in a communal war, the policy inspired by the United States required the deployment of a large contingent of United States troops. This Truman was never prepared to contemplate. Without a special draft for Palestine he simply did not have the men available. Nor was this by any means his only consideration. The logical gap permitted a strong counter-attack from the State Department, which was in any event deeply concerned about the effect of the UN resolution upon United States-Arab relations.
Subsequent writers close to Truman, notably his daughter and Clark Clifford, have portrayed this counter-attack as stemming from the professional middle ranks of the Department where little loyalty was felt to Truman. Truman himself provided the base for this thesis when he wrote in his diary for March 19th, 1948, about the contretemps which followed his meeting with Weizmann: ‘There are people on the third and fourth levels of the State Department, who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve succeeded in doing so. Marshall’s in California and Lovett’s in Florida.’4 The false implication of the accurate statement about the locations of the Secretary and under-secretary stemmed from his unwillingness to blame those whom he admired. But the thesis is unsustainable. The views of the official State Department were shaped by those whom Truman himself had entrusted with the main responsibility for the formulation and execution of United States foreign and defence policy, not only by Marshall and Lovett, but by Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense; and all the indications from his previous attitude to the desirable scale of Jewish immigration are that they would have been shared by Acheson had he still been in office. These were not men who were disloyal to Truman, or whom Truman would ever have accused of so being.