‘I remarked to the President that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that the suggestions made by Mr Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by Mr Clifford. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not in fact achieve this purpose. The great dignity of the office of the President would be seriously diminished. The counsel offered by Mr Clifford was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem that confronted us was international.’
Then he added a most extraordinary bombshell: ‘I said bluntly that if the President were to follow Mr Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the President. ‘9
How the meeting was concluded is in some dispute. Jonathan Daniels, writing close to the event with good oral sources, says that Truman concluded that there was no alternative but to follow Marshall’s advice. Donovan, writing nearly thirty years later with much better written sources, mentions no such conclusion and implies that Truman, miserably shattered, nonetheless withstood the blast. What is certain however, is that whatever Truman said at the meeting, Marshall’s advice was not in fact followed. Daniels spans the contradiction by implying that the Secretary of State and his assistant thought they had pushed Truman too hard and recording that Lovett took the initiative to arrange a bridge-building luncheon with Clifford at which a compromise could be agreed. Marshall would accept recognition in return for a few days in which to prepare the diplomatic ground.
The lunch took place at the F Street Club, on Saturday, May 14th, but no compromise resulted. At 6.00 p.m. Washington time (midnight British time) that evening the mandate ended and the new state was proclaimed. At 6.11 p.m. the White House announced de facto recognition. And so far from the ground having been prepared the news surfaced in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. The UN General Assembly was in session and the United States was trying to rally support for a vote, just about to take place, on trusteeship for Jerusalem. The White House announcement was received with incredulity turning into consternation by the uninformed US delegation, and with bitter anger by many of the others. The delegate of Cuba, then more or less a client state of Washington, tried to get to the rostrum to announce (presumably without authority) the withdrawal of his country from an organization which had been disfigured by the duplicity of its leading member. The delegate of the Soviet union , beaten by 24 hours in the race to recognize (which had been one of Clifford’s objectives) was able to compensate with a large meal of unctuous propaganda. Marshall sent Dean Rusk, then assistant secretary for international organizations, to New York in case the US delegation resigned en masse. They did not, but Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to say that the United States was destroying its capacity to lead by changing its position so frequently and without consultation.
The déringolade was greater than that of March, but this time it was Truman who had got his way. He had had his tit-for-tat with Warren Austin, although this was hardly an appropriate pastime for the President of the United States. He had also more than balanced the account with Marshall. This in itself did not give him pleasure, although by so doing he had vindicated the authority if not ‘the great dignity of the office of the President’ (Marshall’s words of May 12th), and was probably influenced by the events of March in acting as he did. The Secretary of State fully accepted this vindication. He did not contemplate resignation. He believed in the sanctity of chains of command. The issues and the series of contretemps strained their relationship but did not come close to breaking it. Marshall almost certainly voted for Truman in November: he twice saw him off from union Station on electioneering swings with a display of commitment which, if false, would have been disgracefully alien to his public character. Fortunately the world was not confined to Palestine. And in 1948 there were a lot of other things happening in it on which Truman and Marshall saw much more eye to eye than on the tangled story of the emergence of the State of Israel.
The London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers over the New Year of 1948, was the end of any serious attempt to govern Germany and fashion a peace treaty upon a four-power basis. No progress was made at this week-long conference on any of the outstanding points. The Western representatives severally rather than jointly decided that if they wanted to move Europe out of the morass they had to move without Russia. Bevin opened up with Marshall the prospect of ‘some western democratic system’ which could be a barrier against ‘further Communist inroads’. Marshall was forthcoming but in a rather general way. In mid-January Bevin followed up this conversation with a much more precise memorandum, submitted through the British Embassy in Washington. He proposed to go ahead with the creation of Western union , a treaty of mutual defence linking in the first instance Britain, France and the Benelux countries. Around this core a wider European grouping was envisaged, but it could have little military validity unless the United States was prepared to join. Marshall, who had already been advised that a regional defence pact under Article 51 of the UN Charter was a practical and internationally respectable way to proceed, was encouraging. ‘The initiative which he (Bevin) is taking will be warmly applauded in the United States,’ he wrote to Lord Inverchapel, the British Ambassador.