Harry Truman (49 page)

“I have heard on good authority you have on board the No. 1 pollywog of your country, Captain,” Davy solemnly said after this announcement was read.

“That’s correct,” Captain Dennison said and introduced Dad.

“How do you do, Mr, Jones,” Dad said.

Davy, who was really a chief petty officer, was so awestruck by finding himself face to face with the President that he blew his lines. Captain Dennison rescued him by introducing the No. 1 shellback of the United States Navy, Admiral Leahy.

“I remember you very well,” Davy said. “I first met you in 1898 when you crossed the line in the battleship
Oregon
while en route around Cape Horn to take part in the battle of Santiago.”

Davy then said goodnight, and everybody went to bed.

I wrote in my diary that night: “Grown men have to act like boys now and then, I suppose. I haven’t seen anything like it since I was in junior high school and even then we weren’t so silly.”

At eight bells the next morning, we were summoned to fall in on deck. We were at latitude 0 degrees, 0 minutes. Ten minutes later the
Mis
souri’s loudspeaker blared: “King Neptune and his royal party standing towards the ship.”

Neptune wore a long white beard and a green robe. His queen wore a similar costume and was smoking a long black cigar. The royal family was accompanied by a staff of sixty, which made them more formidable than the Truman Traveling Troupe. The band played six ruffles, and a one-gun salute was fired. Then - an incredible sight - the Jolly Roger - the old pirate skull and crossed bones - went soaring up the
Missouri’s
mast. King Neptune was in command. After inspecting the ship, he took his seat with his queen on a throne set up on the fantail. Admiral Leahy, the senior shellback, sat on His Majesty’s left. Above the throne, a banner announced the royal policy, “Expect no justice.”

The royal prosecutor then summoned the No. 1 pollywog to stand trial. Dad advanced to the foot of the throne, and the royal prosecutor accused him of having insulted King Neptune by using “a despicable and unnatural means of travel, namely by air” on his trip south.

Dad pleaded guilty, but said a No. 1 pollywog had to do this sort of thing occasionally. The royal prosecutor, in one of his few displays of benevolence that day, decided to recommend a light sentence. “In recognition of the fact that you have finally delivered this large number of pollywogs for judgment before his royal court, His Majesty is disposed to exercise some leniency in your case. You are commanded to furnish each member of his royal court a card bearing your autograph, and you will further be prepared to continue to furnish a bountiful supply of Corona Corona cheroots for the shellback members of the President’s mess during the remainder of this cruise and forever after.”

Dad agreed to “cop this plea” and was proclaimed a trusty shellback.

Mother was the next victim. She too was charged with flying by air, and she was also blamed for showing “typical feminine disregard of our royal whim” by having “so cozened and comforted our No. 1 pollywog and otherwise made home so delightful for him that you have delayed for many years this long-sought audience with Harry S. Truman.”

Mother pleaded guilty and things looked grim for her, for a moment. But the royal prosecutor decided he would indulge in his “royal prerogative and pleasure to grant an occasional amnesty every few centuries.” So he proclaimed Mother a trusty shellback and first lady of Neptune’s domain.

I was next. I was accused of living in a fishbowl (the White House) without getting permission from His Royal Highness. To escape worse punishment I had to bow down before the King and then lead six pollywog ensigns in “Anchors Aweigh.”

The rest of the Truman Traveling Troupe did not fare so well. Most of them got clamped to the royal operating table and had some royal medicine - a dreadful mixture of alum, mustard, quinine, and epsom salts - poured down their throats. They were then jabbed with electrically charged pitchforks until they reached the domain of the royal barber who anointed them with grease. Finally, the royal undertaker flipped them backward from a teetering chair into the royal tank. They crawled out of there, shivering and covered with grease, and had to negotiate a sixty-foot double line of shellbacks who powdered their rear ends with heavy ropes. Everyone got the business, including the reporters, and then the shellbacks went to work on the crew. I wrote in my diary: “I didn’t much like this horseplay.” But Dad thought it was so much fun that two months later, he held a black tie dinner in the White House for the shellback members of the Truman Troupe.

I had more fun playing deck tennis on the
Missouri.
Stanley Woodward, the chief of protocol, and I made quite a team. We beat almost everybody who came up against us. Sometimes the deck would be wet from spray, and that made the going even trickier. There is a hilarious picture of me swinging at a high lob while Stanley is kicking his foot excitedly in my direction. The two-dimensional photograph makes it look like he is boosting me off the deck on the end of his toe.

We were at sea for twelve happy days, but Dad was never out of touch with what was happening. The communications center on the
Missouri
averaged 52,000 words of messages from the White House each day, and he made numerous presidential decisions on board. Because of the world situation, he ordered Secretary of Defense Forrestal to be sworn in ahead of schedule. When a hurricane devastated Florida and churned up the ocean around us, he authorized special federal aid for the state.

On Sunday, September 21, I was back home in Independence, and Dad had already spent a full day of work in the White House. It was a wonderful trip, rich in unforgettable memories. But I summed up a typical Truman reaction to an exotic three weeks with the following line in my diary: “We all had family dinner together. My own bed feels so good!”

BEFORE THE 1948 campaign picked up the kind of steam I have described in the opening pages of this book, my father had to deal with one more large international problem which had intensely emotional domestic roots - Palestine - and an equally pressing national problem - civil rights.

In some ways, Palestine was the most difficult dilemma of his entire administration. He did his best to solve it and later admitted his best was probably not good enough. Perhaps the situation was impossible, from the start. I have already mentioned the intense pressure which numerous American Jews put on Dad from the moment he entered the White House - and his increasing resentment of this pressure.

But my father never allowed his emotions to influence the creation of a sound policy. Nor did he allow a minor personal annoyance to interfere with his deep sympathy for the tragic remnants of Europe’s Jews, who were huddling, miserable and demoralized, in refugee camps. By now, Dad and the rest of America knew the full dimensions of Hitler’s terrible “final solution,” and his heart went out to these pathetic survivors. At the same time, he had to face the unrelenting stand of the Arabs against further Jewish immigration to Palestine. Russia stood in the wings, ready to take advantage of any miscalculation.

Both the Republican and Democratic platforms in 1944 had backed unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. This was another strong factor in Dad’s position. He had campaigned and won on the Democratic platform and felt committed to it. President Roosevelt had authorized Rabbi Stephen Wise to tell newsmen he gave “full backing” to the Palestine plank. But he had also assured King Ibn Saud no decisions would be made on Palestine without full consultation with the Arabs, and he confirmed this promise in a letter a week before his death. Once more, FDR was relying on the magic of his personal diplomacy to reconcile two peoples, who were in many ways more hostile than the Russians and the Americans.

The election of the Labour government in Great Britain added fuel to the smoldering situation. For eleven annual Labour party conferences, and as recently as May 1945, a few weeks before the election, Labour had declared it was “in favor of building Palestine as the Jewish national home.” The impending shift in British policy aroused Arab leaders, and they sent a stream of vehement letters to the White House.

Dad, the man in the middle, tried to work out a compromise he thought was both just and merciful. As early as the Potsdam Conference, he discussed with the British the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe to Palestine. If the British, who controlled the country under a League of Nations mandate, had accepted this idea, the explosive elements in the situation might have been defused.

But Labour Prime Minister Attlee and his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, did a dismaying about-face when they came into power in London. They took the advice of the senior officials in the British Colonial Office and turned their backs on the Labour party’s repeated calls for a Jewish national home. They announced that no more than 1,500 immigration certificates a month would be issued. For the next two years, Dad continued to press his 100,000-refugee compromise on Bevin and Attlee. Meanwhile, the situation in Palestine drifted into the hands of the extremists. The Haganah, the illegal Jewish armed force which had been formed to defend Jewish settlements against roving Arab bands, began attacking and destroying radar installations, police stations, railway bridges, in a campaign to weaken British control. This provoked Bevin into angry outbursts against the Jews for wanting “to get too much to the head of the queue.” The American State Department career men were equally convinced that Jewish desires had to be balanced against the danger of driving the Arabs into the arms of the Soviet Union.

With Dad’s support, Britain and America created a Committee of Inquiry, six Americans and six Englishmen, to study the situation thoroughly and make a report to both governments. The committee held hearings in Washington and London and traveled throughout Western Europe and the Near East. Their report was a strong endorsement that Palestine become a national home for the Jewish people. It refuted the notion that the idea had been nurtured by wealthy foreign Jews. Many Jews of Western Europe, especially the refugees, believed in it so thoroughly they were prepared to give their lives for it. Finally, the committee accepted Dad’s idea that 100,000 immigration certificates - approximately the number of Jews then in refugee camps in Germany and Austria - be issued immediately. Dad hailed this report. Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, who had previously said he would back any unanimous conclusions - and the 100,000-certificates recommendation was unanimous - rejected it, and called on the United States to share all the problems of Palestine with Great Britain, including the cost of maintaining some 90,000 troops in the country.

At this point, the full dimensions of Britain’s financial collapse were not yet evident, and Dad was assuming they were prepared to share at least some of the burdens of maintaining the peace and standing firm against Russian aggression. He rejected Bevin’s proposal but demonstrated amazing patience with the foreign secretary, who continued to make indiscreet public comments on Palestine. On June 12, 1946, at a Labour party conference, Bevin sneered that Truman wanted 100,000 Jews admitted to Palestine because the Americans did not want any more Jews in New York City. Later, at the height of the Greek-Turkish crisis, he made a similar remark on Palestine which aroused violent anti-British hostility in the United States and threatened Dad’s whole program of resistance to Russian aggression.

The effort Dad was making to untangle the mess in Palestine can be seen in a comment he made to his mother on July 31, 1946: “Had the most awful day I’ve ever had Tuesday - saw somebody every fifteen minutes on a different subject, and held a Cabinet luncheon and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere.”

In the autumn of 1946, Bevin announced that Great Britain was washing its hands of Palestine and handed the entire dispute to the United Nations. There the Russians leaped eagerly into the troubled waters, lashing out at the British and declaring themselves thoroughly in favor of the Jewish aspiration for a national home. In the light of later developments in the Middle East, it is, indeed, ironic to recall this bit of history. It was, of course, the most cynical of political gambits. Stalin himself was anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist, but Russia was looking for any opportunity to establish a foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean.

The UN, after months of wrangling, voted in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Dad did his utmost to remain neutral during this vote. He was deeply disturbed by the pressure which some Zionist leaders put on him to browbeat South American countries and other nations where we might have influence into supporting partition. “I have never approved of the practice of the strong imposing their will on the weak, whether among men or nations,” Dad said. When I speak of pressure, perhaps a bit of statistics will help. In 1947, 1948, and 1949, the White House received 86,500 letters, 841, 903 postcards, and 51,400 telegrams on the subject of Palestine.

In spite of the UN vote, the British and the Arabs remained irreconcilable to partition and it soon became apparent the solution could be imposed only by force. But the UN had no army, and the demobilized American armed forces were practically impotent, even if Dad had been willing to consider committing them. In April 1948, in the midst of the grave crisis with Russia, which Dad felt was drawing us close to war, he asked the Joint Chiefs how many troops we would need if we took over the trusteeship of Palestine. The answer was 104,000, as a minimum, and the United States could not send more than a division - about 15,000 - anywhere without “partial mobilization.”

A passage from a letter which Dad wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt around this time sheds more light on the problems he was facing.

After the partition vote, he sounded a similar note in a letter to Henry Morgenthau, Jr.:

A few months later, it was the British who were being criticized in another letter to Mrs. Roosevelt.

Not all of the leaders of the American Jewish community attacked Dad’s policy. When the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry’s report was made public, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, probably the most prominent supporter of Palestine in public life, told Dave Niles, the White House specialist on minority groups, he had only one regret, “that Justice Brandeis did not live to see this report - he would have called it a miracle.” Frankfurter then launched into a tirade against those Jewish spokesmen who, he said, “preferred a Jewish state on paper rather than doing something real for human beings.”

More than once, the Palestine question was put to Dad in terms of American politics. At a Cabinet luncheon on October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan almost made a speech, pointing out how many Jews were major contributors to the Democratic Party’s campaign fund and were expecting the United States to support the Zionists’ position on Palestine. My father observed that if they would only keep quiet, the situation might yet be rescued without war. He refused to go beyond the report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which had recommended partition.

Many Zionists were vigorously protesting the boundaries allotted the Jewish state, which excluded the southern section of Palestine, the Negev. On November 19, Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, visited Dad and described, with the eye of the imaginative scientist he was, what Israel could do with the Negev, if it was given to them. His vivid description ignited the enthusiasm of the ex-senator who had toiled for years to create regional development and flood controls in the Missouri Valley, and Dad immediately telephoned our representative at the UN and told him to support the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state. But the UN refused to agree.

My father was blamed for this failure, and attacks on him by Jewish spokesmen, and would-be spokesmen, multiplied. On March 11, 1948, Dad was forced to open his press conference with one of the angriest statements he ever made: “I want to pay attention to a vicious statement that was made by a columnist in a New York gossip paper, in which he said I had made the statement to the editor of a New York paper here that the Jews in New York were disloyal. I had thought I wouldn’t have to add another liar’s star to that fellow’s crown, but I will have to do it. That is just a lie out of the whole cloth. That is as emphatic as I can put it.”

By now, the British had announced they were withdrawing from Palestine on May 15, and they made it clear they did not care what happened after that. The Arabs and the Jews seemed to be preparing for war. We were bracing for war with Russia at the same time and this was absorbing most of Dad’s waking hours. Partition now seemed out of the question, if war was to be avoided. The State Department, which had never favored partition, advanced an alternate plan for a temporary UN trusteeship that would replace the British mandate and maintain a status quo. My father never formally committed himself to this plan. It was conceived by career officers in the State Department who were convinced our support of partition would cost us the friendship of the Arab states and the loss of their vast oil resources. Meanwhile, the Jews announced that the moment the British withdrew they intended to declare the creation of the State of Israel.

At this point in the mounting tension, Eddie Jacobson, Dad’s old partner in his Kansas City men’s clothing store, called at the White House. He begged my father to issue a statement supporting the idea of this Jewish state. A great deal of myth and emotional exaggeration has been wrapped around this meeting. I have been told by very intelligent people, and have read in the memoirs of men whom I admire, such as Dean Acheson, that Eddie Jacobson was responsible for Dad’s entire stand on Israel. There is even a myth that Eddie saw Dad secretly innumerable times during his White House years, using his friendship to bring Dad over to a pro-Jewish point of view. The whole thing is absurd. Eddie Jacobson was one of hundreds of army friends my father made during World War I. After the clothing store folded, Dad saw comparatively little of him. I don’t believe they ever discussed politics, except in the most offhand fashion.