Remembering General George Marshall’s Clash With Clark Clifford Over Premature Recognition of Israel

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

It was August 1991, when I was on Nantucket Island recuperating from a long, miserable bout with a back disk problem, that the BCCI scandal erupted, forcing the resignation of the late Clark Clifford from First American Bank, a subsidiary of BCCI. He, only very occasionally, and his wife, more frequently, spent time in their lovely sprawling Nantucket home on Union Street, just a few blocks away from my small rented cottage on Back Street.

At the time many of the island’s summer residents were reading the newly published memoirs, Counsel to the President, from the pen of their neighbor, who had served Harry Truman as White House counsel, was personal lawyer to John F. Kennedy, and had been secretary of defense under Lyndon Johnson at the height of the Vietnam War. It was Clifford’s initial bad advice to Harry Truman at the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian saga that is the subject of this article.

In his initial chapter, “Showdown in the Oval Office,” Clifford details his version of events over the final three days in 1948 prior to the establishment of the state of Israel at 12:01 a.m. Israeli time on May 15 and its recognition by the Truman administration 11 minutes later. This precipitous action ushered in the problem which has most baffled and bewildered Washington and the world for 51 years.

At the White House on the afternoon of May 12, President Truman and his top advisers were discussing the appropriate action to be taken in the face of the likely announcement on May 15 in Tel Aviv of the establishment of a Jewish state. Clifford, who was adviser to the president for domestic political affairs, came to the meeting with a draft statement which he hoped the president would agree to issue even though the borders of the Jewish state had not yet been defined, nor its name adopted. The U.S. statement was to be issued even as the United Nations General Assembly still was considering the best course to be taken in this latest crisis over Palestine.

The plan for premature U.S. recognition of the state-to-be was motivated primarily by Clifford’s concern over the loss by a Democratic Party candidate for Congress to a Labor Party candidate in a special election held a month previously in New York. The winning Labor Party candidate had assailed Truman’s inactivity on the Palestine question. This, of course, was the beginning of what was to become an increasingly frequent campaign strategy for the next half-century as candidates from all parties chose the path of political expediency in a quest for Jewish political donations and votes in contrast to support for foreign policies in which domestic politics or parochial interests would be subordinated to the national interest of the United States.

Super-white heat prevailed as the president found himself caught between the arguments of his counsel and those of his secretary of state. The latter, General of the Armies George Marshall, America’s highest-ranking uniformed officer in World War II and, by 1948, probably the most popular man in the United States, strongly opposed the premature recognition of the Zionist state about to be declared. Such an action by the United States was also deplored by Marshall’s undersecretary of state, Robert Lovett, who decried it as a “pig in a poke.” Defense Secretary Forrestal also opposed the contemplated recognition, based on his feeling that this would certainly antagonize the Arab states.

Denying that his proposed stand on Israel was motivated by domestic politics, Clifford contended that it was the Jewish-American commitment to liberal political and economic policies that would decide how the important bloc vote was cast. And Clifford further argued that the unstable Middle East would receive a fresh direction with the creation there of a new nation committed to democratic principles.

In his book, Clifford described Marshall as being “red with suppressed anger as I set forth the case for the immediate recognition of the Israeli state.” Continuing, Clifford wrote: “When I finished he exploded: ‘Mr. President, I thought this meeting was called to consider an important, complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here.’”

Truman calmly responded: “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be.”

An angry Marshall, according to Clifford, shot back, “I fear that the only reason Clifford is here is so that he can press for a political solution of this issue. I do not think that politics should play any role in our decision.”

The meeting eventually broke up amidst growing ire on both sides, but not before Clifford reluctantly admitted that the presidential statement he had drafted was now clearly out of order, and he wished to withdraw it. Truman, only too anxious to calm his secretary of state’s agitation, rose and, turning to Marshall, said: “I understand your position, General, and I’m inclined to side with you on this matter.”

The president scarcely meant a word he had just uttered. Previously, he had clearly indicated that he would do exactly what Clifford was advising: promptly recognize the new State of Israel. It was only a question as to when that recognition ought to take place. A premature recognition coming on the day before Israel’s own declaration of statehood would be, the president finally admitted, a rash and incorrect move.

In his book, Clifford makes much of what he felt to be Marshall’s deep personal hatred toward him. According to the general’s advisers and confidants, they never again were allowed to mention Clifford’s name. And to ensure that his words warning against domestic political considerations becoming the criterion for U.S. foreign policy were remembered, Marshall inserted his own account of the meeting into the State Department’s permanent record as follows:

“I remarked to the president that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by him. 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 damaged. The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford’s advice was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem confronting us was international. I stated bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against the president.”

So as to counter the charge of both Marshall and Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett that his recommendation that President Truman prematurely recognize Israel was motivated by a quest for the Jewish vote, Clifford had grossly exaggerated the political strength of anti-Zionist Jewry opposed to any recognition of Israeli statehood. His figure of 14,000 members of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism was taken from a Council brochure, which naturally exaggerated its membership. Further, Clifford wrote that Eugene Meyer and Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, the publishers, respectively, of The Washington Post and The New York Times, were Jews opposed to Zionism. In fact, they were non-Zionists, not anti-Zionists, and while opposed to Jewish nationhood they were reluctant to take any action which might possibly endanger the advertising in their newspapers.

A Lesson Learned

To his great regret, Sulzberger, some years earlier, had rejected an advertisement submitted by the American League for a Free Palestine, the U.S. counterpart of Menachem Begin’s extremist Irgun Zvai Leumi. The ad had defended their leader’s terrorist activity against the British and called for immediate establishment of the Zionist state of Palestine. The Times rejection of the extremist Zionist advertisement had been met with what Sulzberger later was to describe to me as “a frightening experience,” a virtual boycott of the paper, the details of which remain one of the most guarded secrets tucked away in a Times Square safe.

Zionism has had, of course, many faces. While some Jews might have been opposed to the concept of political Zionism, they had favored the creation of a Jewish state for humanitarian or religious reasons. As it happened, Eugene Meyer, whose wife Agnes was not Jewish (their daughter, Katherine Graham, is now the owner of The Washington Post), became an errand boy for the American Jewish Committee, although Meyer personally deeply opposed the basic premise of Zionist ideology that only in a state of their own could Jews find real security. It was after President Truman refused to receive any longer the abrasive Rabbi Stephen Wise because of Wise’s desk-pounding tantrums that Meyer carried the message from the Jewish community to the president to bolster his stand in relation to Israel and the creation of the new state embracing Palestine.

When the provisional government in Jerusalem declared the state of Israel, it was Clifford who pulled together all the necessary loose ends by helping both in drafting the Jewish Agency request to the White House for recognition and the positive U.S. response. With the help of presidential aide David Niles, another inveterate Zionist who was a holdover from the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the doors to the White House and the State Department were opened to Elihu Epstein(who later changed his name to Elihu Elath), who became the first Israeli ambassador to the United States. The result was the speedy recognition of the Israeli state as it was promulgated in Jerusalem by the Jewish Agency.

That mid-May 1948 action by the Truman administration was at odds not only with the actions that the United Nations had been in the process of taking, but also with a March 1948 statement in which President Truman had expressed the fear that open warfare in the Middle East was just over the horizon. That month Truman seemed to be opposed to the 1947 United Nations partition resolution favoring partition (for which he had lobbied hard before it was passed in November 1947). Instead, he proposed a step-by-step approach, shifting in his sentiment (at least publicly) to trusteeship under which both the Arabs and the Jews could come to an agreement. That is why there had been such a Jewish outcry against him for a sell-out of Israel, which in turn accounted for the leftist Labor Party’s success in that special congressional election in New York, the outcome of which had so deeply concerned Clifford.

Zionists At His Heels

The Zionists were constantly at Clifford’s heels. The role of a wealthy contributor to the Democratic Party, Max Lowenthal, ought not to have been overlooked as it was in Clifford’s account of the affair. And there was also Abe Feinberg, who exercised strong influence on Clifford. Both of these two wealthy contributors to the coffers of the Democratic Party just happened to be strong supporters of the Israeli cause. The whole battle was between Clifford’s argument that “speed is essential to pre-empt the Russians” versus Lovett’s view that “an indecent haste in recognizing the new state would lead to a tremendous reaction in the Arab world which we had been wooing for years.”

Clifford insists that he fought for the creation and immediate recognition of the state of Israel because of the plight of displaced and homeless Jews in Europe. Like his chief, he had totally mixed up the concept in the Balfour Declaration of a “Jewish national home,” to be shared with other people who had rights in that home, with that of a Jewish state. Way back in April 1947 I quipped to the American Council for Judaism: “Just as ‘a house is not a home,’ as Polly Adler once wrote, equally so a home is not a state.”

To boot, Truman was a Biblical fundamentalist who constantly pointed to these words of the Old Testament: “Behold I have given up the land before you; go in and take possession of the land which the Lord has sworn unto your fathers; to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” [Deuteronomy 1:8]. The extent of Truman’s devotion to fundamentalism was pointed up in the writings of his sister after his death.

The chaos that has occurred and is still occurring on the West Bank and in Gaza has followed naturally from Truman’s action. It was foreseen in my writings and public statements both before and after Zionism’s creation of the state of Israel.

Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, the long-time editor of Middle East Perspectives, is the author of five pioneering books about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and its repercussions in the United States. They are What Price Israel?, The Other Side of the Coin, There Goes the Middle East, The Zionist Connection and The Zionist Connection II. The latter is available from the AET Book Club.