by Roy Jenkins
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.
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):
‘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 assista
nt 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 Nations3 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.’
The rapid authority of this response would not have been possible without the coincidence of three factors. First there was the Secretary of State’s confidence in the President’s capacity for robust decision making. Second there was solid bipartisan support in the Senate for a forward position in Europe. When the ‘Vandenberg Resolution’, which gave general endorsement to the idea of an Article 51 military engagement, was put to the vote in April it was carried by 64 votes to 4. Third, and this made speed necessary as well as possible, there was a background of mounting menace in Europe. On February 25th there had been the Communist takeover of the Czech Government. On March 10th Jan Masaryk had been found dead on the flagstones of the Prague Foreign Ministry. During the same weeks, as plans developed for the setting-up of a West German government, there came the first sporadic signs of Soviet interference with Western military rail traffic to Berlin.
These events helped to concentrate many minds in Washington. Even so, the speed and firmness of decision making was prodigious by any standards. That spring the Marshall Aid appropriations were obtained from Congress. Truman came out with a demand for compulsory selective service accompanied by universal military training on a part-time basis. A clear decision was made within the administration that even though the Nationalist régime in China was declining into defeat, a strict limit should be set to the amount of bolstering support which it would receive from the United States. ‘… the costs of an all-out effort to see Communist forces resisted and destroyed in China would … be impossible to estimate,’ Marshall stated. ‘But the magnitude of the task and the probable costs thereof would clearly be out of all proportion to the results to be achieved.’10 Europe was to have priority, even though this was to involve a lot of trouble for Truman with the China lobby. The ‘bipartisanship’ which lubricated US foreign policy in Europe did not extend to the Far East.
This priority expressed itself in the momentum with which the creation of NATO was carried forward; and the need for it was demonstrated when the sporadic harassment of the spring turned into the full Berlin blockade of the summer. On June 20th the new currency that was to be at once a cause and symbol of the wirtschaftswünder was bestowed by the allies upon West Germany. At first the deutschmark was not intended for Berlin. But when the Russians retaliated by introducing a new currency of their own into all sectors of the city, the allies re-retaliated by extending the D-mark to the three Western sectors. The next day, June 24th, a full blockade was imposed by the Russians.
Truman responded with a mixture of firmness and restraint. There were three possible courses. One was to give in, to allow Berlin to be strangled into the Soviet zone. The second was to send an armoured train up the railway track, or perhaps more plausibly, a fighting column up the autobahn, with orders that if necessary it should try to shoot its way through. The wisdom of this course depended upon a calculation that the Russians would climb down when confronted with the challenge of war. In the days when the Americans still, just, had a nuclear monopoly, it was not an obviously foolish course. It was advocated by General Clay, the American military commandant in Berlin, and some Air Force opinion (although not by the J
oint Chiefs of Staff), as well as by Aneurin Bevan from within the British Cabinet. It clearly had its risks but it also offered the chance of a quick victory, attractive at any time but particularly so in an election year.
It was not however the course which Truman chose. He preferred the third option of the airlift. That carried the risk that it might not work and the near certainty that it would involve months of hard slog. But it offered less of a flash-point of danger, it was in accordance with the weight of advice which he received, and it was best calculated to hold the allies together. The fact that Truman chose it is another example of his happy capacity to act more wisely than he often spoke or wrote.
All of these issues had to be faced with lonely courage rather than the gregarious self-confidence which comes with a back-drop of popular esteem. Personally and politically Truman suffered a wounding spring and summer. His rising ratings of 1947 proved to be a false dawn. A sharp plunge began that autumn. By April 1948, his Gallup approval rating was down to 36%, almost as low as in 1946. On February 17th the Democrats had suffered a sensational loss in a by-election in the Bronx, one of their safest seats; the victor was not a Republican but a supporter of Henry Wallace. This accompanied by serious sulking in the South made it look as though the Democratic Party under Truman’s pilotage was losing both its left and its right wings. There were some who did not hesitate to point this out to him. Ickes wrote with a special venom: ‘You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on a pond break in every conceivable direction under the rays of the warming spring sun? That is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine.’11
