Clifford Breaks Silence on U.S. Attitude Toward Partition Plan

Elements hostile to Israel in the State Department kept both President Truman and his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, ignorant of major developments in their “sabotage” of Presidential policy on Palestine’s partition in 1948, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford said today.

Shattering a public silence of almost three decades on the internecine events of the period when he was Truman’s special counsel and Israel was born, Clifford said neither Truman nor Marshall were informed of the dissents by the State Department’s own legal office and international security affairs division from the anti-Israel policy pursued in the United Nations and elsewhere by Department elements led by Low Henderson, then chief of its Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (NEA).

“From the outset,” Clifford said the NEA office “made it its business to block Harry Truman from implementing a policy that was animated by his deepest human institute.” He said the NEA “did its best to uphold the British pro-Arab position and to thwart the President’s intentions.”

Clifford’s statements came in his presentation to a panel on “the Palestine Question in American History” sponsored jointly at the Shoreham Hotel here by the American Historical Association and the American Jewish Historical Society. This extraordinary union of the two organizations took place only five weeks after the State Department released its U.S. foreign relations volume for 1948 regarding the founding of Israel. A spokesman for the two groups, Ernest Wittenberg, said it was Clifford’s “first public discussion in 28 years of the struggle between the State Department and the White House over the recognition of Israel.”

FACTS REFUTE ASSUMPTION

Clifford also declared that “the facts totally refute the assumption” of a school of revisionist historiography which “argues that President Truman’s Palestine policy was motivated entirely by purely political considerations of wooing the Jewish electoral vote.” The revisionists argument “casts a shroud of suspicion over the Truman presidency, and portrays the birth of Israel, one of the most seminal events of modern times, as somehow illicit and ignoble,” Clifford wrote in his prepared statement, for delivery to the panel.

“I had the privilege of serving as White House counsel during this period and I was in a position to observe the attitude of the President and the role of the State Department toward the Middle East. I am gratified that my recollections of that period are confirmed by documents now available.”

During 1947 and 1948, Clifford said, “I heard President Truman express himself many times with reference to the Jewish problem. He had a deep, natural resentment against intolerance of any kind…The effort of the revisionists to portray President Truman’s risking the welfare of his country for cheap political advantage is bitterly resented by all of us who admired and respected him.”

Clifford “recalled” that Truman envisaged the recognition of Israel “as the logical culmination of his three years of personal diplomacy and sheer human concern for a people who had endured the torments of the damned and whose instincts for survival and nation-hood still refused to be extinguished.”

ROLE OF STATE DEPARTMENT

Referring to his claim that the State-Department did not serve Truman well, Clifford, who is now a Washington attorney, said “evidence, which includes documents that are not found” in the recently-released 1948 volume of the recommendation to the United Nations Security Council on March 19, 1948 by the then U.S. Ambassador, Warren. Austin, He said Austin’s recommendation, which came less than two months before the vote for par-

“The Zionists and their supporters, of course, were horrified,” Clifford said. “They asked how the President could have abandoned partition when only the day before he had assured Chaim Weizmann (soon to be Israel’s first president) of continued U.S. support.” But, Clifford noted. “Harry Truman had not abandoned support of partition.” He said the enemies of partition within the State Department believed that by pushing the trusteeship measure they could abort Israel’s birth.

Clifford said that “this rationale” was rejected by the lawyers in the office of State Department legal advisor Ernest Gross and Gross’ opinion was confirmed by a group of UN Charter experts who met at the State Department five weeks before Austin’s speech. “This caveat was ignored,” by the Department’s NEA group. Clifford declared, “and to my knowledge was never passed on to the White House.”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE PRESENTED

Another example presented by Clifford was that the Department’s Division of International Security Affairs said in February 1948 that several Arab states were “conspiring and executing a campaign of aggression against the Jewish community in Palestine” and “there is no basis at present for finding that the acts of the Palestinian Jews constitute an ‘attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged, by the General Assembly.” The divisions also said that “Jewish immigration is illegal only because it does not conform to the regulations of the Mandatory power (Britain).”

This division, Clifford continued, then recommended the imposition of an arms embargo against certain Arab states and the arming of a Jewish militia in Palestine.” Clifford said and it contended the U.S. could “initiate” military, economic and diplomatic measures at the UN to “facilitate the implementation of partition.”

This view, Clifford noted “like that of the legal advisor, was, to my knowledge, never presented to Secretary Marshall, let alone to the White House. Instead, Marshall was persuaded to argue the unworkability of partition in his meetings with the President, and to express this view as though apparently it represented the full consensus of the State Department.”

TRUMAN HAD DIFFERENT CONCEPTION

Truman had a “completely different conception” of the speech Austin was to make, Clifford said. He said Austin was to have proposed UN trusteeship only under three qualifications, which the UN Ambassador did not make in his speech, When Truman learned the next day that Marshall and Undersecretary Robert Lovett “had known in advance of the de facto reversal of the President’s policy, he was “simply confounded.” Clifford said.

“He felt he could not repudiate his own Secretary of State without appearing to have lost all control of U.S. foreign policy. Yet he was entirely unwilling to reverse his long standing commitment to partition” Clifford said Truman declared at the time that “They have made me out a liar and a double-crosser.”

A week later, Clifford said, Truman at an emergency White House meeting “rejected” out of hand Henderson’s contention that partition was dead. Instead, Truman told Clifford to prepare a statement that would seek to adapt the trusteeship proposal to partition. “I doubt that the statement satisfied either Jews or Arabs,” Clifford said. “In any case the Zionist leadership in Palestine categorically rejected any notion of trusteeship” and “I suspect that Truman was privately pleased by this unequivocal response.”

Clifford said that the State Department continued to oppose partition, despite an order by Lovett not to do so. He said that on May 14 he and Lovett drafted a statement approved by Truman by which “the U.S. became the first nation to recognize Israel some 16 minutes after it came into existence.”

Clifford said Lovett persuaded Marshall to “alter his attitude despite the implacable opposition of the NEA to the very end.” He said Truman was “deeply incensed at what he considered to be the consistent attitude of obstruction on the part of the State Department to his policy toward Palestine. He was angered even more at the innuendoes and ultimately the specific charge by the Department that the only reason for the President’s position was his effort to curry favor with the Jewish vote in this country.”