July 14, 2003
Truman on
Underdogs
By
WILLIAM
SAFIRE
WASHINGTON
A 5,500-word diary in President
Harry Truman's handwriting, unnoticed for decades,
recently turned up at the Truman
Library in Independence,
Mo. Three pages were
mysteriously loose and interleaved in the
journal.
On these detached and reinserted
pages was this entry: "6:00 P.M. Monday July 21, 1947.
Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about
Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would
talk to Gen[eral George] Marshall about
it."
On that day, news reached the
world that 4,500 Jewish refugees seeking entry to
Palestine aboard the ship Exodus 1947 had been seized by
British soldiers. These "displaced persons" had been
placed on three vessels ostensibly headed to nearby
Cyprus for detention until permitted entry to the Holy
Land, where other Jews waited to welcome them. Instead,
the homeless families, including a thousand children,
were encaged on decks being taken back to a hostile
Europe.
"He'd no business, whatever to
call me," Truman wrote. Morgenthau, who had served as
F.D.R.'s treasury secretary, was telephoning Truman as
chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, and had an
obligation to get through to the president to stop this
further atrocity.
"The Jews have no sense of
proportion," wrote the incensed Truman after he hung up,
"nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry
brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly
temporary basis and they stayed." These refugees were
welcomed in Oswego, N.Y., just after the war, and Truman
saw political implications in Gov. Thomas E. Dewey's
support for Jewish immigration: "When the country went
backward -- and Republican in the election of 1946, this
incident loomed large on the D[isplaced]
P[ersons] program."
Then the president vented his
spleen on the ethnic group trying desperately to escape
from Europe's hatred: "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 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 under
dog."
After equating the cruelty of
Jews with that of Hitler and Stalin, Truman waxed
philosophic about ingratitude: "Put an underdog on top
and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian,
Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes
haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their
past condition when prosperity comes."
Truman wrongly assumed that the
plight of all of Europe's displaced was the same --
ignoring the "special treatment" Hitler had inflicted on
the Jews of the Holocaust, resulting in six million
murdered, genocide beyond all other groups' suffering.
The homeless survivors now faced sullen populations of
former neighbors who wanted no part of the Jews'
return.
This diary outburst reflected a
longstanding judgment about the ungrateful nature of the
oppressed; in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he repeated
that "Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top
they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people
were to them when they were underneath."
Did this deep-seated belief
affect Truman's policy about taking immigrants into the
U.S., or in failing to urge the British to allow the
Exodus refugees haven in Palestine? Maybe; when the
National Archives release was front-paged last week in
The Washington Post, historians and other liberals
hastened to remind us that the long-buried embarrassing
entry was written when such talk was "acceptable." The
director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum dismissed
it as "typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that
was common at that time."
For decades, I have refused to
make such excuses to defend President Nixon for his slurs
about Jews on his tapes. This is more
dismaying.
Lest we forget, Harry Truman
overruled Secretary of State George Marshall and beat the
Russians to be first to recognize the state of Israel.
The private words of Truman and Nixon are far outweighed
by their pro-Israel public actions.
But underdogs of every
generation must disprove Truman's cynical theory and have
a duty to speak up. I asked Robert Morgenthau, the great
Manhattan D.A., about Truman's angry diary entry, and he
said, "I'm glad my father made that
call."
.
