A very important
history lesson
Truman Adviser Recalls May
14,1948 US Decision to Recognize Israel
By Richard H. Curtiss
May 1991: (American Educational Trust) With US President
George Bush increasingly frustrated by the
Israeli-Palestinian problem, a new generation of
Americans is asking an old question: Why must the US deal
with this seemingly intractable dispute?
The answer, unfortunately, is that the US is largely
responsible for the problem because of two American
decisions in 1947 and 1948. Now, only the US can break
the impasse, by forcing its Israeli client state to give
back all or most of the land the United Nations allotted
to Muslim and Christian inhabitants when it partitioned
Palestine in 1947.
An "insider's account" of the discussions
leading up to these decisions has just been published by
former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, one of the
few living parties to the discussions leading to
partition.
Most people who knew the Middle East at first hand
opposed the partition plan, adopted by the United Nations
on November 29, 1947. Patently unfair, it awarded 56
percent of Palestine to its 650,000 Jewish inhabitants,
and 44 percent to its 1,300,000 Muslim and Christian Arab
inhabitants.
Partition was adopted only after ruthless arm-twisting by
the US government and by 26 pro-Zionist US senators who,
in telegrams to a number of UN member states, warned that
US goodwill in rebuilding their World War H-devastated
economies might depend on a favorable vote for partition.
In a Nov. 10, 1945 meeting with American diplomats
brought in from their posts in the Middle East to urge
Truman not to heed Zionist urgings, Truman had bluntly
explained his motivation:
"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to
hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of
Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs
among my constituents."
Immediately after the plan was adopted, however,
extensive fighting broke out between Jews and Arabs, just
as US diplomats had predicted. The Arab states
categorically rejected the partition by outside parties
of an overwhelmingly Arab land.
David Ben-Gurion, soon to be Israel's first prime
minister, had ordered his representatives at the UN to
accept the plan, but not to enter into any discussion or
agreement defining the new Jewish state's borders. To his
followers, who, like the Arabs, laid claim to the entire
land, Ben-Gurion promised that his acceptance was only
tactical.
As well-organized Jewish militias seized Village after
village assigned by the UN plan to the Arabs, and badly
organized Arab villagers retaliated with bloody but
purposeless attacks on Jewish vehicles and convoys,
Secretary of State George C. Marshall urged Truman to
reconsider.
The British Army was resolved to withdraw from Palestine
on May 15, 1948 regardless of the outcome of events in
the UN. The fighting was spreading all over the mandate,
including Jerusalem, which was supposed to remain a
"corpus separatum" under international control
and not be assigned either to the Jewish or the Arab
state.
"I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among
my constituents."
Marshall and a majority of diplomats at the UN saw a
direct UN trusteeship, succeeding the British mandate, as
the only solution to halt the bloodshed. Otherwise, they
knew, neighboring Arab states would send military units
across the border into Palestine the day the British
withdrew, in an attempt to reoccupy the Arab towns and
villages seized by Jewish forces. The State Department
urged Truman not to grant diplomatic recognition to the
Jewish state when the British withdrew, but instead to
side with rapidly growing sentiment in the United Nations
in favor of trusteeship. Truman wavered and, for a time,
both sides in a bitter battle for the president's ear
thought they had his support.
Forty-four years after these events, Clifford, Truman's
principal domestic advisor, has produced his memoir.
Written in two parts with Richard Holbrooke, the first
part of the memoir was published in the March 25, 1991
New Yorker. It covers events from 1944, when Clifford, a
37-year-old lawyer and newly commissioned lieutenant,
junior grade, in the naval reserve from St. Louis, MO,
Truman's home town, took up duties in the White House,
through the decision to recognize Israel on May 14, 1948.
A little
History of Clark Cliffords accession to favour: Truman's favorite poker venue while he
was President was the presidential yacht Williamsburg.
"You know I'm almost like a kid; I can
hardly wait to start," he wrote to his wife,
Bess, as he looked forward to a poker outing on
the Williamsburg in the summer of 1946.
The President, together with some of his regular
poker buddies, and perhaps some special guests
too, would typically board ship on Friday
afternoon and sail on the Potomac River until
Sunday afternoon. Truman liked an eight-handed
game best. His cronies joined him around the
table. Fred Vinson, secretary of the treasury and
later chief justice of the United States, was his
favorite poker companion. Other regulars included
Clinton Anderson, secretary of agriculture and
later a senator; Stuart Symington, a Missourian
who served Truman in several positions, including
secretary of the air force; and longtime friend
Harry Vaughan, now Truman's military aide. Future
President Lyndon Johnson sometimes joined these
games too, his attention focused more on the
political talk than on the cards. Truman's young
naval aide and later special counsel Clark
Clifford organized the games. Clifford had
replaced a naval aide who told the President that
he didn't drink and didn't play cards. Truman
listened to this with interest and very quickly
found the man a good job somewhere else. He liked
Clifford better; his new naval aide did drink and
play cards, the latter so skillfully that he
usually won a little money.
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Astonishingly, it confirms the key role
of Clifford, Truman's inexperienced domestic political
adviser, in overriding the wishes of General of the
Armies George C. Marshall, the World War II chief of
staff.
Marshall had returned to government to serve as secretary
of state to the inexperienced former vice president, who
was ill-prepared for the presidency when it was thrust
upon him by the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on
April 12, 1945, just a month before the Allied victory in
Europe and four months before the victory over Japan.
A Hasty Decision
Confirming charges by "Arabists" that the
decision to recognize Israel was hasty and based upon
domestic political considerations, Clifford writes:
"Marshall firmly opposed American recognition of the
new Jewish state; I did not. Marshall's opposition was
shared by almost every member of the
brilliant and now legendary group of presidential
advisers, later referred to as the Wise Men, who were
then in the process of creating a post-war foreign policy
that would endure for more than 40 years. The opposition
included the respected Under Secretary of State Robert
Lovett; his predecessor, Dean Acheson; the No. 3 man in
the State Department, Charles Bohlen; the brilliant chief
of the Policy Planning Staff George Kennan; (Navy
Secretary James V.) Forrestal; and
... Dean Rusk, then the director of the Office of United
Nations Affairs...
"Officials in the State Department had done
everything in their power to prevent, thwart, or delay
the President's Palestine policy in 1947 and 1948, while
I had fought for assistance to the Jewish Agency.
"At midnight on May 14, 1948 (6 pm in Washington),
the British would relinquish control of Palestine, which
they had been administering under a mandate from the old
League of Nations since the First World War. One minute
later, the Jewish Agency, under the leadership of David
Ben-Gurion, would proclaim the new state.
"I had already had several serious disagreements
with General Marshall's protege, Dean Rusk, and with Loy
Henderson, the director of Near Eastern and African
Affairs, over State's position ... He had no use for
White House interference in what he saw as his personal
domain in American policy in the Middle East. A number of
Middle East experts in the State Department were widely
regarded as anti-Semitic. On May 7th, a week before the
end of the British mandate, I met with President Truman
for our customary. private day-end chat...
"I handed the president a draft of a public
statement I had prepared, and proposed that at his next
press conference, scheduled for May 13th, the day before
the British mandate would end, he announce that it was
his intention to recognize the Jewish state. The
president was sympathetic to the proposal, but, being
keenly aware of Marshall's strong feelings, he picked up
the telephone to
get the Secretary's views ... I could tell that Marshall
objected strongly to the proposed statement. The
president listened politely, then told Marshall he wanted
to have a meeting on the subject ...
"On ending the conversation, the president swiveled
his chair toward me. 'Clark, I am impressed with General
Marshall's argument that we should not recognize the new
state so fast,' he said. 'He does not want to recognize
it at all-at least, not now. I've asked him and Lovett to
come in next week to discuss this business. I think
Marshall is going to continue to take a very strong
position. When he does, I would like you to make the case
in favor of recognition'. . .
"President Truman had asked me to debate the man he
most admired, a man whose participation in the
administration was essential to its success. I was 41
years old, in my third year at the White House as a
presidential aide. Virtually every American regarded
General Marshall, then 67, with a
respect bordering on awe. He had capped his central
contribution to victory in the Second World War with his
speech at Harvard a year earlier proposing what became
known as the Marshall Plan ... Without his towering
presence, the administration would be much diminished,
perhaps even mortally wounded, at home and abroad ...
A Crucial Meeting
"At 4 pm on Wednesday, May 12 ... seven of us joined
President Truman in the Oval Office ... President Truman
did not raise the issue of recognition; his desire was
that I be the first to raise it, but only after Marshall
and Lovett had spoken, so that he would be able to
ascertain the degree of
Marshall's opposition before showing his own hand.
"Lovett began by criticizing what he termed signs of
growing 'assertiveness' by the Jewish Agency ... Marshall
interrupted Lovett. He was strongly opposed to the
behavior of the Jewish Agency, he said. He had met on May
8th with Moshe Shertok, its political representative, and
had told Shertok that it was 'dangerous to base
long-range policy on temporary military success.'
Moreover,
Marshall said, he had told Shertok that if the Jews got
into trouble and 'came running to us for help ... there
was no warrant to expect help from the United States,
which had warned them of the grave risk which they were
running'. . The United States, he said, should continue
to support those resolutions in the United Nations which
would turn Palestine over to the UN as a trusteeship, and
defer any decision on recognition."
Clifford then relates his own arguments, citing the
British Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising a Jewish
homeland, the European Holocaust, and the possibility of
establishing "a nation committed to the democratic
system" in the Middle East.
"The new Jewish state can be such %a place, "
Clifford reports he told the group. "We should
strengthen it in its infancy by prompt recognition. I had
noticed Marshall's face reddening with suppressed anger
as I talked. When I finished, he exploded. 'Mr.
President, I thought this meeting was called to consider
an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I
don't even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic
adviser, and this is a foreign-policy matter.'
"I will never forget President Truman's
characteristically simple reply: 'Well, General, he's
here because I asked him to be here.' Marshall, scarcely
concealing his ire, shot back, 'These considerations have
nothing to do with the issue. I fear that the only reason
Clifford is here is that he is pressing a political
consideration with regard to this issue. I don't think
politics should play any part in this.'
"Injurious to the Prestige of the President"
"Lovett joined the attack. 'It would be highly
injurious to the United Nations to announce the
recognition of the Jewish state even before it had come
into existence and while the General Assembly is still
considering the question. Furthermore, such a move would
be injurious to the prestige of the President. It is
obviously designed to win the Jewish vote, but in my
opinion it would lose more votes than it would gain.'
Lovett had finally brought to the surface the root cause
of Marshall's fury: his view that the position I
presented was dictated by domestic political
considerations ...
"When Lovett concluded his attack, Marshall spoke
again. Speaking with great and barely contained anger and
with more than a hint of self-righteousness, he made the
most remarkable threat I have ever heard anyone make
directly to a president. He said, 'If you follow
Clifford's advice and if I were to vote in the election,
I would vote against you.' Everyone in the room was
stunned. "Here was the indispensable symbol of
continuity, whom President Truman revered
and needed, making a threat that, if it became public,
could virtually seal the dissolution of the Truman
administration and send the Western Alliance, then in the
process of creation, into disarray before it had been
fully structured. Marshall's statement fell short of an
explicit threat to resign, but it
came very close.
"Lovett and I both tried to step into the ensuing
silence with words of conciliation. We both knew how
important it was to get this dreadful meeting over with
quickly, before Marshall said something even more
irretrievable
...
President Truman also knew that the meeting had to be
ended ... Seeing that Marshall was still highly agitated,
he rose and turned to him and said, 'I understand your
position, General, and I'm inclined to side with you in
this matter'. . .
Clifford did not consult Truman on some of Marshall's
proposals.
"Marshall did not even glance at me as he and Lovett
left. In fact, he not only never spoke to me again after
that meeting but, according to his official biographer,
never mentioned my name again. At the end of that day,
still steaming, he did something quite unusual, which the
president and I were
unaware of at the time. Certain that history would prove
him right, he wanted his personal comments included in
the official State Department record of the meeting. His
record, exactly as he wanted historians to find it when
it was declassified, almost three deco4es later, reads as
follows:
'"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 which confronted us was international.
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. "'
Clifford's article details at length his further
negotiations, through Undersecretary of State Robert
Lovett, to stick to his own plan to recognize the Jewish
state while keeping the general from resigning. To do
this, he pretended to take to President Truman Marshall's
suggestions, as relayed
by Lovett. In fact, Clifford did not consult Truman on
some of Marshall's proposals, but simply waited for a
while and then called Lovett back, saying in one case,
the President "is not going to budge an inch."
In recounting this, however, Clifford indicates
throughout the New Yorker article that he represented
President Truman's own personal position, even when he
did not consult the president.
Truman's own accounts, however, and those of his
biographers, indicate that he vacillated and was honestly
confused. He was pulled one way by Jewish White House
adviser David Niles, and Truman's old Jewish army buddy
and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, and another by the
professionals at the State Department.
Meanwhile Clifford and Niles, as well as the Department
of State, were dealing directly with Eliahu Epstein, the
Jewish Agency (predecessor to the government of Israel)
representative in Washington. Clifford describes his own
role on May 14 as follows:
Setting the Machinery in Motion
"Even without a clear signal from Lovett and
Marshall, I felt, we had to set in motion the machinery
for recognition, in the event that a favorable decision
was made. At 10 am, I made a different call-one that I
looked on later with great pleasure.
... Mr. Epstein,'I told the Jewish Agency representative,
'we would like you to send an official letter to
President Truman before 12 o'clock today formally
requesting the United States to recognize the new Jewish
state. I would also request that you send a copy of the
letter directly to Secretary
Marshall.'
"Epstein was ecstatic. He did not realize that the
president had still not decided how to respond to the
request I had just solicited ... It was particularly
important, I said, that the new state claim nothing
beyond the boundaries outlined in the UN resolution of
Nov. 29, 1947, because those boundaries were the only
ones that had been agreed to...
"A few minutes later, Epstein called me. 'We've
never done this before, and we're not quite sure how to
go about it,' he said... With my knowledge and
encouragement, Epstein then turned for additional advice
to two of the wisest lawyers in Washington, David
Ginsburg and Benjamin Cohen, both of whom were great New
Dealers and strong supporters of the Zionist cause.
Working
together during the rest of the morning, he and they
drafted the recognition request. . . "
Clifford closes with the well-known story of how a Jewish
Agency employee driving to the White House with the
request for recognition of "the Jewish state"
was overhauled by another Jewish Agency employee. Epstein
had just heard on the radio that the new state was to be
called "Israel" and instructed the second
employee to write in that name in ink before handing over
the request
for recognition to the White House.
Meanwhile, General Marshall agreed that, although he
could not support President Truman on the issue, he would
not oppose it. When the news was broken to the American
delegation at the UN, which had been lining up votes for
continued trusteeship, US Ambassador Warren Austin left
the building in order not to be present when US
recognition of Israel was announced, just 11 minutes
after the state's creation. Dean Rusk subsequently had to
rush to the UN to talk US delegation members out of
resigning en masse in protest.
Lovett, who Clifford believes talked General Marshall out
of resigning because "this issue did not merit
resignation," remained friendly with Clifford, who
writes:
"Lovett remained adamant for the rest of his life,
however, in his view that the president and I had been
wrong. So did most of his colleagues. Nothing could ever
convince him, Marshall, Acheson, Forrestal, or Rusk that
President Truman had made the right decision ... Because
President Truman was often annoyed by the tone and
fierceness of the pressure exerted on him by American
Zionists, he left some people with the impression that he
was ambivalent about the events of May 1948. This was not
true. He never wavered in his belief that he had taken
the right action."
Nor, apparently, does Clifford, who never once expresses
any regret about the 750,000 Palestinians pushed out of
their country during the 1947 to 1949 fighting, and never
allowed by Israel to return to their homes. Nor does
Clifford seem to realize that his opponents in the
bureaucratic battle he describes are vindicated by the
five ArabIsraeli wars. These and the Middle
East instability that has led to the overthrow of several
Arab governments and, perhaps, the two bloody wars in the
Persian Gulf, are largely attributable to US recognition
of Israel before it officially agreed to the borders
assigned it by the United Nations in 1947. That
recognition has led subsequently to the US military and
economic support of every elected government of Israel,
even
the Likudist fanatics presently in charge there, that
postpones the necessity for those governments to settle
with the Palestinians on the basis of UN Security Council
Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula.
Clifford's story once again disproves the assertion that
American diplomatic or military personnel ever viewed
Israel as a " strategic asset." The foreign
policy establishment, 43 years ago as today, saw Israel
as a geopolitical liability that owes its US support to
the extraordinary clout of its apologists within the
American Jewish community and the American political
system.
Still-Pertinent Implications
Other implications of the story are still pertinent. Had
General Marshall resigned the moment he realized
President Truman was bent on his unwise course of
recognition, the subsequent tragedies might have been
averted. Too often leaders like General Marshall, who
could have resigned without personal sacrifice, acquiesce
in small evils in order to remain in office to fight
larger ones. The small evils, however, become the larger
problems that overwhelm their successors.
The US is once again the world's only superpower, just as
it was in 1947 and 1948 when it had the world's only
atomic weapons. Now, as then, it cannot afford to base
foreign policy decisions on domestic political
considerations without reaping a bitter future harvest.
Clifford, a cabinet member in the Lyndon Johnson
administration and adviser to Democratic presidents for
more than 45 years, has been described as the most
powerful man in Washington and the "consumate
insider. " Now, at 84 years of age, he faces, for
the first time in his life, serious legal problems.
As lawyer for some Arab businessmen, and as a director of
a bank they illegally took over, he will likely face
trial and prison. In recent media interviews he has made
little attempt to prove his innocence in activities that
seem to have brought him $6.5 million in 1988 alone.
Instead, he indicates that age must have dulled his
judgment.
His article in the New Yorker, however, is not entirely
candid. Biographies of Truman indicate Clifford was
deeply concerned that if Truman, who had succeeded to the
presidency on Roosevelt's death, did not court the
"Jewish vote, " he would not be elected
president in his own right in 1948.
With his current article claiming more altruistic motives
for supporting Israel, and taking such cheap shots as
claiming that his State Department opponents in 1948
"were widely regarded as anti-Semitic, "
Clifford once again demonstrates shrewd, and amoral,
political calculation.
Winston
Churchill plays poker with Harry Truman Clark Clifford records:
An amusing little incident [happened] in the
course of the afternoon, towards the end. Mr.
Churchill said, "I've read in the press from
time to time, Harry, that, you play poker."
And President Truman said, "Yes, I've played
a good deal." Mr. Churchill said,
"Well, I played my first poker game in the
Boer War." Well, that was very impressive;
none of us could remember when the Boer War was,
but it sounded like a long time ago. And Mr.
Churchill said, "Is there any possibility
that we might have a game on the trip?" The
president said, "I can guarantee you that we
will."
So that evening
after dinner ... we settled down to play poker
together. And from the way Mr. Churchill had
talked, we thought he was gonna be a pretty good
poker player. It turned out he wasn't. So that
we'd been playing for about an hour and a half
when he excused himself; Mr. Churchill said he'd
be right back, and he left. And the president
said, "Men, you aren't treating our guest
very well. " He looked at his chips [and] he
said, "Looks to me like he's lost about
$300." One of the fellas spoke up and said,
"Mr. President, you've got to have it one
way or another. We're either gonna do our best,
and if we do we'll take his pants. But if you
want us to play 'business poker,' we'll do
that." The president said, "Well, give
him a good time, but don't let him go back and
say that he beat us in the American game of
poker."
So we had a
charming time, played late, [and] he just didn't
want to quit. And I think that at the end of it
he may have lost about $250, but he had a
wonderful time. Time and again, if fellas saw
that they had him beat, they'd fold and let him
win a pot. Which he did not know about. But he
enjoyed it thoroughly.
www.cnn.com/.../episodes/
02/interviews/clifford/
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Clearly he seeks mercy in his travails
not from the courts, but from the media. What better way
to get it than to remind a younger generation of American
journalists, many of them avid Jewish supporters of
Israel, that he, as much as any other American, was
responsible for Truman-era policies that not only created
Israel, but also turned it into the pampered client state
of a reluctant America?
"So
I would say to you, and I would say to the
public, that the five years following the Second
World War, 1946-1950, was one of the proudest
periods in the history of our country. Because in
my opinion the United States under Truman's
leadership saved the free world. "
www.cnn.com/.../episodes/
02/interviews/clifford/
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Copyright: American Educational Trust
The Fixer (Clark
Clifford) 1991 by Pat Oliphant
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