The working out by the State Department during January and February of an alternative to partition was therefore an enterprise which carried the authority of the Department at all levels. Moreover it was one of which they kept the President informed and for which they secured his general approval. A message sent him on February 21st, when he was cruising in the Williamsburg, stated that if in the face of Arab intransigence the Security Council failed to work out a satisfactory solution, the issue should be referred back for re-consideration by a special session of the General Assembly. ‘The Department of State,’ the message continued, ‘considers that it would then be clear that Palestine is not yet ready for self-government and that some form of United Nations trusteeship for an additional period of time will be necessary.’5 The next day Truman cabled to Marshall: ‘I approve in principle this basic position.’ But, confusingly, he added the illogical stipulation that this should not be interpreted as a shift from the position the United States had previously taken in the General Assembly. To compound the confusion the State Department, when sending the President the text of a speech which Warren Austin, the head of the US delegation to the UN, was to make in the Security Council of February 24th, gave him that assurance in relation to the speech. The assurance was just compatible with the speech itself, but not with the policy for which the speech was intended to pave the way.
Then on March 8th, following the failure in the Security Council on March 5th of a US move to endorse the General Assembly partition resolution, Truman had a meeting with Marshall and Lovett and agreed that trusteeship should be the fall-back position. Then there took place the ‘secret’ meeting on March 18th between Truman and Weizmann, of which the State Department at least was not informed. The following day Austin made another and more important speech to the Security Council of the imminence of which Truman had not been informed. On March 18th Truman told Weizmann that his policy was still partition. On March 19th Austin told the Security Council that the policy of the United States was to suspend partition, to impose a temporary trusteeship and to summon a special session of the General Assembly. The contradiction was blatant. Almost every articulate Jew in the United States, except for Weizmann, who wisely held his counsel, accused the President of gross betrayal. Truman himself wrote in his diary: ‘This morning I find that the State Department has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell! I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser.’6
It was of course substantially but not wholly Truman’s own fault. Clifford however was instructed to remonstrate with the absent Marshall and Lovett. He got fairly robust answers. Lovett responded with a memorandum setting out the whole issue of the State Department’s transactions with the President on the issue. Marshall held a press conference in Los Angeles and spoke with a calm firmness. ‘The course of action … which was proposed … by Ambassador Austin’, he said, ‘appeared to me after the most careful consideration, to be the wisest course to follow. I recommended it to the President and he approved my recommendation.’7
Truman was left with little more to do than to try to explain to a press conference of his own that trusteeship did not exclude partition but merely postponed it, to persuade Mrs Roosevelt not to resign as a member of the UN delegation, and to complain that he was ‘feeling blue’.
This inglorious episode in American dipomatic history left Truman battered and disgruntled and Marshall in charge but unhappy. The point at issue was in fact rather academic. The special General Assembly met in April, but completely failed to agree on trusteeship. Meanwhile the Jews in Palestine achieved partition for themselves and made it clear that they intended formally to proclaim the State of Israel the moment the British mandate ended. On May 8th Marshall warned the putative Israeli Foreign Minister (Moshe Shertok, later Sharett) that if the new state got into trouble he must not expect military help from the Americans. There was no dispute with the White House about this. Truman was no more willing to commit troops than was the State Department or the Pentagon.
What was at issue was the recognition by the United States of the unilaterally proclaimed state, and particularly the timing of such an act. This was considered at a White House meeting on May 12th. Marshall, Lovett and a regional expert represented the State Department. Truman was buttressed by his Zionist advisors, Clifford and Niles. This composition plus the fact that Clifford was invited to open with a fifteen minute exposition of the case for immediate recognition riled Marshall. He was not softened by the explicitly political form in which Clifford put the case. It would enable the President to recover some of the support lost in March. Marshall accordingly responded in the most magisterial terms (or, as Clifford claimed, ‘he said it all in a righteous God-damned Baptist tone’8):