Truman (18 page)

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.'
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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.

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.'
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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.'
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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'
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):

‘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.

Thereafter events proceeded with an extraordinary momentum. Bevin got his Western Union treaty signed by March 17th. Six days earlier he had used the occasion of Soviet pressure on Norway to lay before the American Government an
aide-memoire
going considerably beyond the note of January 13th. ‘Mr Bevin considers,' it ran, ‘that the most effective course would be to take very early steps, before Norway goes under, to conclude under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations
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a regional Atlantic Approaches Pact of Mutual Assistance, in which all the countries directly threatened by a Russian move to the Atlantic could participate …'Within 24 hours on March 12th Marshall responded with another of the handful of momentous statements in American diplomatic history: ‘Please inform Mr Bevin that … we are prepared to proceed at once in the joint discussions on the establishment of an Atlantic security system.'