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Reflections of Ken Towery
President Truman and the Jews By R.K Towery
Once upon a time, gentle reader, when our son was about a year old, and before your Hesperian editor Alice Gilroy was born, we went down on north Getty Street in Uvalde, Texas, where we lived at the time, to see the Honorable Harry Truman ride in a local parade while campaigning for President of the United States. We were in the second year of college, and Truman was on his now-famous "whistle stop" tour of the country, seeking to defeat one Thomas Dewey, of New York. Nearly everybody figured Dewey would defeat Truman, despite the fact that many Republicans didn't like Dewey, who reminded some of them, at least, of a prissy little mustached groom atop a wedding cake. Still, there was an awful lot of animosity directed toward Truman for a variety of reasons, and many Democrats feared Dewey would win. Obviously, things didn't work out that way. Truman won, Dewey lost.
Nevertheless, since we figured it would be the only chance a son of ours would ever have of seeing a President of the United States in person, even if he wouldn't remember it, and regardless of the circumstances, we put him on our shoulder and braved the crowd. At that time, Uvalde was a thoroughly Democratic bastion, being home to former Democratic Vice President John Nance Garner. It is still home to former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, whom we will call a friend until he says otherwise, and who is also one of the richest men in the state of Texas, and a thorough-going Democrat, as were we at that time. The town is no longer a Democratic bastion. Garner, who broke with Roosevelt over the third term issue, is no longer alive, and Briscoe, while still a Democrat, now mostly limits his political activity to giving money and lending his name. Anyhow, the crowd along North Getty Street was huge, and we counted ourselves lucky that we got a glimpse of a sitting President, not realizing that time and tide would provide many, many opportunities to not only glimpse Presidents, but work for them as well.
To be honest about it, we had mixed emotions about Truman at that time. In one sense he was due our loyalty. He was a Democrat, and nearly all white people in the South at that time were Democrats. He was a former Captain in the Artillery, in France during World War One, so that made all us artillerymen somewhat proud.. He was plain spoken and obviously not afraid to ruffle feathers. But he was a product of the old Pendergast machine in Missouri, noted for its tendency to produce controllable (and mediocre) party hacks. We had no use for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who obviously had little use for the precedent established by George Washington, and who figured nobody in the United States was qualified to hold the Presidency except him. Truman, we came to believe, had been selected by Roosevelt, with former Vice President Henry Wallace in mind, to sit in silence. Which is about what happened.
Truman did indeed sit in silence, so much so that when he became President, he had to be brought up to speed, according to people who wrote about it at the time, on things like the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. So much did Roosevelt dominate American political life at that time, that when he died and word of his passing filtered into a Japanese prisoner of war camp we inhabited in China at the time, few people could imagine that a relatively unknown (to us) Senator from Missouri would be, or had been, elevated to the Presidency of the United States. At that time, I was on an "outside" work gang, and some Chinese walking on the other side of the fence shouted to us, in Chinese, that "America's number one is dead." Somebody else picked up a story from somebody else at the MKK (Mitsubishi) factory where we worked that the new President was named Truman. Someone in camp, from Missouri, finally figured out that they must have been talking about Harry Truman, a Senator from Missouri. But how did he get to be Vice President? Nobody knew.
Anyhow, as history would have it, it fell Truman's lot to approve use of the atomic bomb on Japan, remove General Douglas MacArthur as head of U.S. forces in the Far East, (primarily because MacArthur wanted to liquidate once and for all the Communist state of North Korea), seize (for awhile) an important segment of American industry, recognize (finally) the imperial designs of the Soviet Union, and initiate an effort (the Marshall Plan) to save Europe from Communist domination.
And Truman did one other thing that loomed very large in the future of American politics, especially for success of the Democratic Party. He was the first world leader to officially extend diplomatic recognition to Israel (beating out the Soviet Union), thereby solidifying ties between most, but not all, of America's Jewish community with the Democratic Party.
Rumors of huge amounts of money flowing to Truman's campaign coffers as a result of the diplomatic recognition remained just that, rumors and nothing more. As far as we know, and as far as we choose to believe, the ties between Truman, the Democratic Party, and the American Jewish community, were based on the official recognition of the Jewish state by the American government, which happened at that time to be headed by a Democratic President. Had Republican Thomas Dewey headed the government when Israel was recognized, we suspect Jewish voting patterns in America would be somewhat different today. Dewey pandered to the Jewish vote then, due in large measure to his political history in New York, just as the Republican President, George W. Bush panders today. Ever since that date, Republicans have been trying, without much avail, to make inroads into American Jewish voting patterns.
The current President, Bush, seems determined to rearrange voting patterns in America, but he is not the first to think along those lines, nor will he be the last. The ethnic patterns crafted by Roosevelt, and later reinforced by Truman and Lyndon Johnson, have pretty much held firm through the years. The vast majority of black voters, and Jewish voters, have remained stable Democrats, even as that body of American voters known as "white conservatives" have mostly gone Republican. Blacks and Jews may differ among themselves (and they do), but when the votes are counted in November, they are mostly in the Democratic camp.
With that background, imagine the consternation that must have greeted America's political establishment recently when Truman's private diary was made public by the National Archives and given front page treatment by the Washington Post. So much internal turmoil resulted that the New York Times' op-ed columnist Bill Safire, one few, widely syndicated and almost conservative writers on the Times' payroll, felt called upon to reassure the faithful. Safire was in President Nixon's entourage, as a speech writer, as I remember, and returned to the Times after that stint. Over the years he has been all over the lot, criticizing the former President Bush for his Middle East policies, voting for Clinton in the process, and finally finding peace with the younger Bush's pro-Israeli policy. Through it all, Safire has been a staunch supporter of any policy he thinks will ultimately benefit Israel, and the Times, of course, has given him free rein in that regard. His writings are looked to as an indication of how Jews should address issues, from Safire's standpoint.
But now he and many other supporters of Israel must confront the private thoughts of a man whom they had thought was their champion in all things. What to think, for instance, about an American President who writes, in his secret personal diary, "The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP (displaced persons) as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial, or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog."
There was more, much more. Evidently, the Truman tirade was precipitated by a July, 1947 telephone call the President had received from one Henry Morgenthau, who was calling on behalf of a shipload of Jewish refugees, then off the coast of what was the British mandate of Palestine. Morgenthau had been a cabinet member under Franklin Roosevelt, and when he called Truman he was head of an outfit called United Jewish Appeal. Morgenthau, in addition to being a cabinet member under Roosevelt, gained a certain amount of fame by advancing the so-called "Morgenthau Plan" after World War 11, in which Germany would have been converted into a pastoral state for eternity.
"He'd no business, whatever to call me," Truman wrote after the telephone call. Truman continued, "The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgement (sic) on world affairs. Henry (Morgenthau, the man who had just called Truman) brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed."
Safire takes the position that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Distressing as Truman's words may be, Safire urges his readers to remember the important aspects of the former president's years in office, that no matter what he might think of Jews, in the final analysis he proffered help when that help was wanted. Safire concludes his New York Times column by saying "the private words of Truman and Nixon are far outweighed by their pro-Israeli public actions."
In that respect, Safire is entirely right. Quite frankly we had never heard, or read, anything to indicate that Truman was less than enthralled with those he calls "The Jews" in his diary. Nixon's less than flattering comments about Jews are legendary, but so are his public actions on behalf of Israel…and in the creation of his own staff for that matter. (Henry Kissinger was a member of Nixon's staff, as was Bill Safire himself, and as were many other Jews.) But of Truman's private attitude toward Jews, not a word, to our knowledge, has been written, until now. Even despite Safire's admonition of forgiveness, the Truman comments are bound to cause some rethinking of his place among the heroes of Israel, and, in some cases, among the friends of Israel in America as well. True, Truman's comments were made years before political correctness descended upon America, but nevertheless they were revealed publicly during a time when such comments are completely unacceptable in those circles the media accepts as acceptable. In all probability, Truman's comments will die a quiet, very quiet, death, given both the religious and political convictions of most who own and control American media. But nevertheless there is also bound to be some quiet, very quiet, rethinking of the former president's position as one of America's premier champions of the Jewish community.
But all that does not address the central question: Why do so many American politicians walk gingerly around the subject of Jewish participation in politics? Why do so many gentile politicians accept without argument the Jewish claim that they are a unique people deserving of special treatment? In short, why do so many American politicians agree with Harry Truman's assessments and characterizations of Jews even as they vote otherwise? And believe me, gentle reader, they do.
Truman was not the only President to indicate differing public and private opinions concerning Jews. I well remember a time during the campaign of Ronald Reagan for the Presidency in 1980 when the subject came up. Like all campaigns, the Reagan campaign had its "Polish-Americans" for Reagan, and its "Italian-Americans" for Reagan, and the like. We had, within those groupings, a group whose primary job it was to organize and get to the polls those Jews who might be favorably disposed toward Reagan, despite the fact he was running as a Republican. My job, or one of my jobs, was to ride herd over those various groupings, approving, or disapproving, their proposed public comments. Probably the most effective groups we had were those dealing with agriculture and the Polish-Americans. The agricultural section was headed up by a former California Farm Bureau official who understood politics, and the Polish-American section was headed by someone long forgotten, but who relied heavily on a Polish-American congressman from Michigan, named, if memory serves, Derwinski. The most demanding, least effective group was that dealing with the Jews. They demanded more and produced less than any group within all the groupings that banded together to help elect Reagan. Yet, when the election was over, and when Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter by a landslide, our Jewish group wished to release a statement (in the words of the President-elect, of course) giving American Jews credit for the Reagan victory. The claim was bogus, and I would not approve it. My own position was that if they wished to make any such claim on their own, they were free of course to say what they wished, but the campaign was not going to make the claim, since it was untrue, nor was the campaign about to lend its name to the claim.
(Reagan did get a small proportion of the Jewish vote, mostly from his own days in Hollywood and the personal friendships he had built during those years, but the bulk of America's Jewish vote went Democratic, as it had always done, despite the fact that Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee, claimed to be a "born again" Christian.)
It was not the first time our Jewish group had come forth with proposals to put self-serving comments in the mouth of the candidate. It happened so often, so early in the campaign, that I raised the subject with one (a former weekly newspaperman who had served as Reagan's press secretary) who had been with Reagan for years, even during the days when Reagan was Governor of California. Did not Reagan, I asked, ever grow tired of the constant demands on behalf of Jewish individuals or groups. Oh, yes, he said. He had seen Reagan, after entirely conciliatory meetings in which various Jews implored the Governor to take this position or that position for the benefit of Jews, essentially "blow his cool", throwing various documents to the floor, with heated, rhetorical, shouts of "don't these people ever get enough? " And "can't we ever satisfy them?"
That one attribute, the incessant demand for special favors is, in our opinion, one of the principal reasons American politicians both fear and solicit the Jewish vote. Jews are not at all bashful about demanding favors, even from politicians they do not, or will not, support in the elective process. Too, they are not at all bashful about trading their support for favorable votes in the passage of legislation. In that last matter, the trading of support for support, Jews are no different than others ought to be. In the world of politics it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and they have learned, over the centuries, to squeak louder than most. People in public office must simply tolerate the squeak, and address it as best they can. Evidently, former President Truman did just that, but that did not keep him from recording his thoughts in his personal diary.
Personally, we welcome Jewish participation in American public life, and would prefer to see other religions, and/or other ethnic groups feel that their own participation in public life is commendable. It is sad, in our own view, that so much political participation is hinged on group politics, or what position some self-styled "leader" is successful in claiming as home turf for his own followers. But it is equally sad, from our point of view, for so terribly many citizens to turn their back on involvement in the public arena. For many years, America's Christian community simply did not engage in politics, believing that politics involved things that were distinctly "un-Christian". Too, many Christians looked upon politics as merely an extension of government and felt that the world of government belonged to Caesar, not to the common man. We will not say those days are gone forever, but at least now there are just about as many Christian voices as there are Christians. Somebody finally figured out that if one does not involve himself, or herself, in political participation, the art of governing is left to those who do become involved, even if their solution to problems of government is to run and hide in Oklahoma or New Mexico.
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