Truman and Israel

...Chaplain Oscar M. Lifshutz, US Army, was about to begin his Sabbath services for the refugees at the Riedenberg DP camp, near Salzburg, Saturday morning...

...A Jewish chaplain in the American army named Abraham J. Klausner took it upon himself to call on the presidential emmisary, and the two men sat up the night long in earnest discussion...

...It is unthinkable that it should fail to back up that decision in every possible way...

...Truman woke up on Saturday, March 20, 1948, to banner headlines: "Reversal...

...I felt I This article is adapted from Peter Grose's forthcoming book, Israel In The Mind Of America, to be published on November 1 by Alfred A. Knopf...

...A private poll taken in March revealed that fully half of American Protestants, and almost as many Catholics, would support a Jewish state...

...He asked for help from an American friend of the Ginsburg circle, Ben Cohen, and they drafted the letter together...

...Truman saw in the Harrison report a moving portrait of human beings, homeless, in desperate need of succor and support...

...He proposed the name of Joseph J. Schwartz, European director of the Joint Distribution Committee, foremost among the voluntary organizations in aiding the Jewish homeless...

...Speaking for the Jews of Palestine were Moshe Shertok, soon to become foreign minister of Israel under the Hebraic ized name of Sharett, and Eliahu Epstein, who changed his surname to Elath when he became Israel's first ambassador to the United States...

...If Palestine is what they wanted, and no other country was coming forward with resettlement offers—least of all the United States— then Palestine it should be...

...Truman was swom in as Vice-President of the United States in January 1945, to serve for only 82 days...

...Why should Russia or Yugoslavia or any other nation treat us with anything but contempt in light of our shilly-shallying appeasement of the Arabs...

...The story had gone to Truman's head: "What do you mean, 'helped create,' " he exclaimed...

...I had familiarized myself with the history of the question of a Jewish homeland and the position of the British and the Arabs...

...Weizmann kept silent, as instructed, but word of the President's intent began filtering out...

...The American Zionists, their public lobbying machine in high gear, were "getting under Truman's skin," one rabbi triumphantly declared...

...Lovett listened in ever fuller understanding of the imminence of the act...

...Title would be lying about for anybody to seize and a number of people had advised the President that this should not be permitted...

...This was not unusual...

...Even Winston Churchill, who often expressed his Zionist sympathies during his years as British prime minister, told the House of Commons that "the idea .that the Jewish problem could be solved or even helped by a vast dumping of the Jews of Europe into Palestine is really too silly to consume our time in the House this afternoon...

...Other concerned citizens were also quietly at work...

...George C. Marshall was not a man to banter...

...Speaking for himself and Weizmann, Weisgal wrote confidentially that "although Dr...

...Then he reverted to banter to try breaking the ice...

...Well, General," Truman said, "it sounds to me as if even you might vote against me in November if I go ahead to recognize...

...As the diplomats were preoccupied with the geopolitics of the Arab world, Truman grew troubled by another aspect of the Palestine dilemma, the human fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews left behind by Hitler's Holocaust...

...He let pass without comment the diplomats' first undermining move on December 5, an embargo on all military shipments to either side...

...Truman's association with the Irgun was short-lived, for the careless Bergson made the mistake of criticizing one of Truman's friends in print...

...Now that the official archives of the three main players— Britain, Israel and the United States— are open to view, it is evident how personal impulse directed decisions of state, and that the central figure in the drama, Truman himself, scarcely understood the step he was taking...

...The meeting was held in total secrecy, not only without public announcement but without even notice to the Department of State...

...Warren Austin, off the floor of the General Assembly...

...The DP fate was hopelessly embroiled in politics, and the answer was not as clear at the time as it seems in retrospect...

...Perhaps it would be a good idea if the two of them, just Lovett and Clifford, had a private little lunch on Friday...

...The 600,000 Zionists of Palestine accepted their assigned mini-state, but the million or so Arab Palestinians refused the state offered to them...

...Over the ensuing 18 months, the protests of the British and his own State Department failed to make a dent in Truman's humanitarian instinct...

...The Third Army command was trying to direct Harrison's itinerary away from the worst of the DP camps, but Klausner took Harrison in hand and showed him the full horrors of the Jewish survivors in Europe...

...Elected to the United States Senate through the ministrations of the Pendergast machine of Kansas City, Truman arrived in Washington in November 1934, an outspoken supporter of President Roosevelt and his New Deal...

...The stories in the Bible . . . were to me stories about real people,'' Truman reminisced in his old age...

...Grose is a Senior Fellow and Director of Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations...

...Noting that Truman's grandfather had been named Solomon—suspiciously Jewish-sounding—Klan political opponents spread rumors that he was partly Jewish...

...That was a low blow...

...It had all seemed technical and contingent when Truman approved it 11 days before...

...Schwartz's organization had been distinctly non-Zionist, sometimes even anti-Zionist, over decades past...

...My only interest," Truman told an old Senate friend in a moment of candor, "is to find some proper way to take care of these displaced persons, not only because they should be taken care of and are in a pitiful plight, but because it is to our own financial interest to have them taken care of because we are feeding most of them...

...We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them," Harrison noted (Truman underlined the passage...

...Treasury Secretary Henry J. Mor-genthau, Jr., urged priority consideration for the displaced persons' fate...

...Benjamin V. Cohen, back in private life after serving as the respected Counselor of the State Department, dropped in, along with Robert Nathan, Oscar Gass, Richard Gilbert and other second- and third-level members of the New Deal...

...Edward R. Murrow of CBS opened his live radio report from Dachau with the ominous words, "I pray that you will believe me...

...He had failed to detect the partisan maneuvering among various factions in the camps, in which the Zionists were often outnumbered by others who sought to return to their old homes in Poland...

...There would be no need for Marshall to retract his Wednesday advice, but by 6:00 that evening (midnight in Tel Aviv) the circumstances would be different...

...Weizmann received the message with relief, but his thoughts were elsewhere...

...All the evidence suggests that Truman viewed his recognition decision as only a tentative and tactical step...

...Just six days into his presidency, the Department sent him a curt memorandum of warning...

...The move was typical of Truman, a statement of personal integrity and intent, uncluttered by bureaucratic options and provisos...

...For all their connections, this group could hardly penetrate to the most intimate exchanges between the President and his closest aides...

...Arab and Jewish militias were fighting it out in almost daily skirmishes and terrorist attacks...

...Late April might be a good time for the vice-presidential tour, Roosevelt suggested...

...The Jews are worried and gloomy," reported the British embassy...

...Clifford had reviewed all the advice from the foreign policy experts, but he sensed the contrary mood of the public...

...On April 23, Weizmann received an urgent request for a meeting with Rosenman in New York...

...The immigration ceilings "made a scrap of paper out of Balfour's promise," he said...

...Meyer W. Weisgal, American representative of the Russian-born Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, quietly suggested to Morgenthau that the new envoy be accompanied by someone "thoroughly steeped in the Jewish situation...

...This ban hit the Zionists far harder than the Arabs, but for all the political pressure that would later arise, Truman made no move to lift the embargo until well after the election...

...He was concerned with the life-and-death situation facing the Jewish community in Palestine, war raging, survival a matter of morning to night...

...An international committee proposed that the former British-mandated territory be partitioned into two states, one for the Arabs, the other for the Jews, joined together in an economic union...

...I want to be able to tell my children how I once helped a people to find its home...

...Clifford is here at my personal request...

...For all his expertise in refugee matters, Harrison knew nothing of Jewish politics...

...The sole question is what is best for the United States of America...

...Whether he knew it or not, and in the final days the evidence is clear that he did indeed know what was going on, influential Americans in and out of government were using every means of persuasion at their disposal to convince smaller countries far from the scene that their vote for partition would be good for world peace—and good for their future economic and political relations with the United States...

...It was a singularly personal act...

...Truman put Sgt...

...Truman's many critics, including the revered Secretary of State George C. Marshall, accused him of political opportunism, granting recognition in a play for Jewish votes...

...New information now permits an accurate account...

...Truman brushed aside all talk of the Jewish vote, muttering to an old Senate friend, "I think a candidate on an anti-Semitic platform might sweep the country...

...A year or so after the Jewish State came into being, its chief rabbi paid an official call on Truman...

...It was his undersecretary, Robert A. Lovett, who had been handling the Palestine matter, and as Lovett thought about the meeting it dawned on him that Clifford had been speaking with an air of authority, as if he alone knew the President's mind was already made up...

...opposition was strong...

...He lent his name to various appeals which seemed humanitarian and patriotic, without bothering to detect that their promoter was a militant Zionist outcast named Peter Bergson, secret emissary of the underground Jewish army in Palestine, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi...

...The entire foreign policy establishment of the nation was opposed, and harrassed the President with repeated warnings that a Jewish state would threaten United States national interests...

...Unable to speak, the Jewish survivor took the flag and signalled a fellow inmate who had a large bundle under his arm...

...Lovett telephoned Clifford the next morning to convey his uneasiness...

...Unannounced, up drove a jeep from Army headquarters, bringing a senior staff officer, a Colonel Long...

...The State Department pulled the rug from under me today," he wrote in his diary...

...Clifford knew the kind of principled talk that appealed to Truman...

...coming from the midwest I doubt whether the President has any connection and relationship to Jews," commented David Ben-Gurion, head of the Palestinian labor movement...

...This was bold advice...

...For a final check of the legalities, they passed the text by a former colleague more experienced than they in drafting documents of state, the same Ben Cohen...

...Jacobson in charge of the battery canteen...

...Schwartz is on the staff of the JDC, we have absolute faith in his integrity and Zionist convictions...

...Yes, Mr...

...In those days nobody seemed to think I was aware of anything," Truman recalled...

...In the context in which it was given, it was as binding as an act of state...

...the Zionist representative in Washington, Eliahu Epstein, had no instructions from Palestine but he acted, without hesitation, on his own responsibility...

...I am Cyrus, I am Cyrus...

...The next morning up at UN headquarters, the American representative, Warren Austin, sought recognition in the Security Council to declare a reversal of United States' policy...

...Truman fell in with the local bigotries at first, until he came up against the Ku Klux Klan...

...Austin listened in silence to the information brusquely relayed to him, and found himself unable to return to his colleagues...

...They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops...

...Thrown together in the World War I field artillery, Lieut...

...Clifford recognized the crucial opening, and as they sat down to lunch at the 1925 F Street Club Friday noon, the presidential aide made it as easy as he could for the Secretary of State...

...Foreigners and Americans alike wondered what to expect of him...

...The State Department wasted no time in putting the inexperienced new chief executive on notice that Palestine was a diplomatic minefield...

...But a month of fine-tuned probing into the heart of American policymaking brought a sober conclusion...

...They knew their special role could be more subtle, their targets for persuasion pinpointed with intimate precision...

...The misery it depicted could not be allowed to continue," he wrote...

...A telephone call from Washington pulled America's UN delegate...

...And several years later, Jacobson introduced Truman to some Jewish scholars as "the man who helped create the State of Israel...

...Clifford's arguments were precisely those worked out by the dinner guests at the Ginsburgs a month earlier...

...We want you to remember us," he said...

...More than anything else that happened early in his presidency, it defined the,\issue for three years to come...

...Two DPs fixed the new flag to the halyard and pulled it to the top of the flagpole...

...Jacobson often dropped in on his World War I buddy—and the Zionists of the midwest had long since seen to it that he would know just what to say if the question of Palestine ever came up...

...The truth is otherwise...

...But young Truman knew all about the Jews of old...

...He and the others at State would be talking it all out among themselves that day, he said...

...I would recognize the State, of course," Truman replied...

...If the Jews of Palestine were about to proclaim the long prophesied Jewish state, and defend it with their lives, would the United States and other powers grant recognition...

...Lest Truman think he was concerned only as a Jew, Morgenthau persuaded the State Department to propose that a presidential emissary be sent on a fact-finding tour of the DP camps...

...in effect telling me to watch my step, that I didn't really understand what was going on over there and that I ought to leave it to the 'experts' . . . "I had carefully read the Balfour Declaration...

...Chaplain," the colonel began, "I'm a Protestant, but I feel that I too have given a helping hand in bringing these children of Israel to freedom...

...seasoned war correspondents could not suppress their anguish at the horror they described...

...Lovett remembered the words, and put them down in a formal memo for the Department's files...

...Between the Jews of Palestine, who had brought their state into being, and the Jews of the United States whose importunings had so angered the President, was that other Jewish community, the survivors of the Holocaust whose squalid state of homelessness was Truman's emotional concern throughout...

...Both men were aged and infirm, but Rosenman was immobilized with gout and literally could not move from his chair...

...For many years he was a foreign correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times, and he spent a year on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department...

...Ineptitude . . . Weakness...

...Direct confrontation was not Marshall's style, certainly not confrontation with his commander-in-chief, and on an issue which he so little understood...

...There would be no government or authority of any kind in Palestine," Clifford said...

...At the colonel's gesture, two American MPs advanced to the flagpole, lowered the American flag, folded it in regulation triangle, saluted and handed it to their colonel...

...for all the moral weight of the UN, would anyone recognize a Jewish state...

...Scarcely was the UN vote cast when second-echelon officers in the State Department moved to reverse United States' policy and withdraw from the campaign for a Jewish state...

...A small group of American Zionists spotted the opportunity which the Harrison mission presented...

...It has also been debunked by the professional Zionist lobbyists who saw any credit assigned to Jacobson as detracting from their own efforts...

...These sophisticated Jewish officials would have nothing to do with the flashy public lobby of the Zionist organization...

...The Wallaces, family of Bess Truman, were "aristocracy in these parts," explained Bluma Jacobson, "and under the circumstances the Trumans couldn't afford to have Jews at their house...

...On March 6, the very day of the telegram to Ben-Gurion, Truman received a memorandum from his Special Counsel, the man who helped him on his most sensitive political problems, Clark M. Clifford...

...Why did he do it...

...Something about diplomats turned Truman off from the start...

...It was a homemade flag of Israel...

...Harrison's report to Truman, submitted late in August 1945, was scathing...

...But he gave no further clue about what he would himself decide on May 15...

...Eddie Jacobson was 14, a stockboy with a flair for merchandising...

...Their collaboration won respect in the regiment, and after the war their mercantile partnership survived in the haberdashery business...

...They became the authoritative basis of the diplomats' case that Truman had acted only to grab the Jewish vote...

...Thus it was that Benjamin V. Cohen helped draft both sides of the exchange that confirmed America's recognition of Israel...

...On February 25, 1947, the British government admitted the failure of its pro-Arab policy in Palestine by turning the entire problem over to the new United Nations...

...I have Dr...

...Even years later, as he wrote his memoirs, he liked to think that the United States exerted no pressure on sovereign members of the world organization to influence their votes...

...Jacobson's influence on Truman has become a mythology in modern Israel...

...Clifford returned to the White House confidently and prepared the formalities...

...The dignitary of Israel blessed the President with the words, "God put you in your mother's womb so you would be the instrument to bring about Israel's rebirth after 2,000 years...

...Marshall himself sat silently, but his State Department aides argued vehemently for restraining the Zionists in the name of American strategic interests, with only Clifford to present the case for immediate recognition of the Jewish state...

...The policy of the United States must be to support the United Nations settlement of the Palestine issue," Clifford concluded...

...On Tuesday, February 3, 1948, a small group of friends met with some emissaries from Palestine over dinner at the home of Washington lawyer David Ginsburg...

...Yet the Jewish vote in 1948 was significant only in three states—New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois—and Truman's strategists calculated that he could win the presidency, as he did, without them...

...Harrison arrived in Europe early in July 1945...

...Weizmann on my conscience," the President had said...

...Abandoning a UN decision for partition would put this country "in the ridiculous role of trembling before threats of a few nomadic desert tribes...

...His anguish was that he had unwittingly misled a kindly old gent who had sat in his office just one day before the bomb burst...

...Truman asked if Rosenman, a non-Zionist Jew, knew how to get in touch with "the little doctor" and could reassure him that the President had not intentionally deceived him...

...One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy...

...Then Harrison exceeded his mandate to propose a political solution...

...Truman took wife Bess and daughter Margaret to a concert of the Don Cossack choir at Constitution Hall that evening...

...Long marched over to the leader of the Jewish camp inmates, saluted, and handed him the flag...

...Isn't that hell...

...Buchenwald was liberated the day before Roosevelt died, then four days later Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau on April 29...

...The correct solution," he wrote a friend on the very day of recognition, would be a single state of Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would share power, "and, I think, eventually we are going to get it worked out just that way...

...Let me say that the Palestine problem should not be approached as a Jewish question, or an Arab question, or a United Nations question," he argued...

...He had already made his personal promise to recognize the Jewish State, but unless he could bring Secretary of State Marshall along he would risk a serious political defection...

...Rosenman relayed Truman's sincere concern...

...Other camps in the American Occupation Zone had already come under control of Zionists from the Lithuanian ghettos, and Harrison took this as the general state of affairs...

...What was actually said at the meeting was less important than that the contact was made, the creation of a mood of amiability between two men, a mood that would dominate the concern of the President of the United States when the crisis erupted not 24 hours later...

...Truman retorted with the blunt-ness that marked his public style: "I am not Jewish, but if I were I would not be ashamed of it...

...Lower-ranking diplomats were in despair at the sudden announcement of American policy...

...Without warning to the world, or even to the President, the United States stopped the momentum to Jewish statehood dead in its tracks—and just one day after Truman had given assurances to that interesting old man, Dr...

...At Bergen-Belsen, for instance, loyalists of the anti-Zionist Socialist Bund were struggling with their Zionist rivals for control of the camps' internal organization at the time of Harrison's visit...

...His plate was full with the growing menace of Communist expansionism in eastern Europe and the Chinese mainland...

...the President was under unbearable pressure to recognize the Jewish state promptly...

...Support within the government for a future Israel was thin, they found...

...Over the next few weeks, Weizmann and Rosenman held some most discreet discussions, and Rosenman raised the recognition question with Truman...

...Refugees and American soldiers sang together the Jewish anthem, "Hatikvah," and "America the Beautiful...

...All he needed was advice in the formal drafting of such a weighty message...

...Truman never notified the State Department of his promise...

...At one point Marshall even questioned why a political advisor like Clifford should be present at a foreign policy meeting, provoking Truman to snap back, "Mr...

...Ignored by Roosevelt's inner circle, he was tantalized by the one mission tentatively assigned him by the ailing President: an inspection tour of the Arab Middle East, to ferret out the prospects for the postwar settlement in that area...

...May 15...

...The expert named was Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, an authority on refugee matters with no prior interest in Zionism...

...Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, and the little-known machine politician from Missouri became President of the United States...

...This was not what the underdog from Missouri needed in May 1948, just months before a presidential election in which he looked like a sure loser...

...Timing was "of the greatest possible importance to the President from a domestic point of view," Clifford admitted...

...It was the word of one amiable citizen to another, one from Independence, Missouri, the other from Pinsk, in the Russian Pale of Settlement...

...And with some sheepishness, he admitted years later, "Those Israelites have placed me on a pedestal alongside of Moses...

...Convinced of the compatibility of Zionism with American national interests, they set out to show "responsible figures in both political parties that it would be most unwise, from a strictly electioneering point of view, to jettison the United Nations decision" for partition...

...For all their professional and personal intimacy, Truman never once invited Jacobson and his wife, Bluma, to dinner at the family home...

...But on this one occasion, no one can be in doubt that the role of Jacobson was decisive...

...The real motives behind his decision have defied adequate explanation through all the ensuing decades...

...By the last week of the British Mandate, with no sign of weakening in Zionist resolve to declare the state, and with Arab armies poised to invade the moment the British withdrew, Truman could avoid confronting the issue no longer...

...He persuaded Truman, who had closed his door to all other Zionist petitioners, to receive the elder statesman of Jewish nationalism, Chaim Weizmann...

...In jest, perhaps, or possibly in all seriousness, Marshall was threatening to break politically with Truman...

...On Saturday morning, March 13, Eddie Jacobson of Kansas City flew to Washington and walked in to the White House without an appointment...

...The crucial meeting was set for 4 p.m., Wednesday, May 12, and from the start things went badly...

...Harry S. Truman's recognition of Israel 35 years ago stands as one of the great turning points in the world politics of the 20th century...

...I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser...

...Truman and Weizmann spent 45 minutes alone together on March 18...

...No one could suspect a partisan Zionist influence on the American fact-finding mission...

...That same Saturday moming, who should call at the White House but Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, an old New Dealer and political operator coming to brainstorm Truman's presidential campaign strategy...

...On March 6, Zionist representatives in Washington sent a terse cable to Ben-Gurion, leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, urging that he take a unilateral step: Ignore the diplomats, declare the State, establish a Jewish administration over whatever parts of Palestine were under Jewish control—in effect, "enforce partition by our own means...

...He was determined to keep his feet on the ground, he told the Elks Club: "All this precedence and other hooey accorded a senator isn't very good for the Republic...

...Yet Weisgal knew his man...

...Truman, concerned only about the human plight (and the financial burden) of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in Europe, tried to stay aloof...

...Would the judge tell Weizmann in the highest secrecy that if a Jewish state were declared, and if the United Nations remained stalled in its search for a compromise, the President of the United States would recognize the new state immediately...

...The actual drama of those days three and a half decades ago is stranger than either apologists or critics suppose...

...His first night in Munich, another influence bore down upon him, as helpful to the Zionist cause as Schwartz, but spontaneous in its origin...

...State Department experts, who doubted from the start that partition would be desirable, were overwhelmed by the politicians who saw Jewish votes in the prospect that the Jews of Palestine might at last have a state of their own...

...The big print in the family Bible enticed him from the age of five, and by 12 he had read the Scriptures through twice...

...The awful reality of Hitler's Holocaust became vivid to Americans...

...Truman did not follow the endless debates up at the UN over this issue...

...Truman was a 21-year-old bookkeeper in Kansas City when he made his first Jewish friend...

...As shrewd political operators who had sharpened their skills in the New Deal, these insiders sensed the mood of the public—Christian as well as Jewish...

...The actual record of those spring days of 1948 does not quite bear out Truman's inflated memories...

...Without informing anyone of the news, he walked to his limousine and went home...

...The Harrison mission the summer of 1945 had enduring impact upon Truman's Palestine policy...

...He concluded flatly that "Palestine is definitely and preeminently the first choice...

...The dinner was a "purely social" affair—but over three hours of talk, decisions were made...

...He had shuddered at old Nebuchadnezzar's wickedness, and thrilled at the readiness of Cyrus to let the Jewish exiles in Babylon return to Palestine and found their Second Commonwealth 2,500 years back...

...Truman's concerns were not those of policy—the "striped-pants boys" could take care of all that...

...One visitor asked what would happen if the Jews proclaimed their sovereignty in Jerusalem...

...The association with dressed-up diplomats has turned the heads of more than one senator, I can tell you...

...But what weight could be given to an offhand comment by the President, when a whole array of diplomats and generals and other statesmen was lined up against Jewish statehood...

...Foreign policy was not his interest, but he knew his history...

...Truman ended the meeting, authorizing the State Department to continue the diplomatic efforts at the UN...

...An official request for recognition was required...

...This was an inspired choice...

...the League of Nations . . . loss of American prestige...

...He had every reason to believe that he was acting with the full authority of the President, based on a routine position paper proposing that if partition seemed unworkable, the United States would favor an international trusteeship over Palestine—without a Jewish state...

...On November 29,1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews...

...Weizmann...

...In the American midwest that nurtured the 33rd president, the scattered Jewish communities, aspiring merchants and tradesmen held little prominence...

...Alerted that the official request was on its way, Clifford's staff started preparing the official announcement...

...Intercommunal warfare grew in intensity as the British colonial governors prepared to pull out by May and leave the Holy Land to an uncertain fate...

...The Zionist solution—moving the refugees to Palestine—was only one of the possible measures envisaged, and one that found no favor in the State Department...

...I was skeptical, as I read over the whole record up to date, about some of the views and attitudes assumed by the 'striped-pants boys.' " Some of them, Truman wrote, were plainly anti-Semitic...

...knew some of them better than actual people I knew...

...When Britain started restricting Jewish immigration in 1939, Truman recalled the declaration of Foreign Secretary Balfour in 1917 pledging to develop a Jewish homeland in Palestine...

...Would Weizmann be willing to call upon him at the Essex House hotel, on Central Park South...

...President, if I were to vote at all, 1 might do just that...

...even 25 years later the memory was fresh of that "communication from some of the 'striped-pants' boys...