Eleven Minutes to Recognize Israel, and the Fight Behind Them

At 4 p.m. on Friday, May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in a Tel Aviv museum and read a declaration of independence. The state would take effect at midnight, when the British Mandate for Palestine expired. In Washington, that was 6 p.m.

At 6:11 p.m., the White House announced that the United States recognized the provisional government of the new state. Eleven minutes. The United States was first in line, and the Soviet Union's formal recognition came three days later.

Eleven minutes sounds like a reflex. It wasn't. It was the end of a fight that nearly broke Truman's cabinet.

A man who'd stopped taking meetings

By the start of 1948, Harry Truman had history on his side and no patience left. In August 1945 he'd written to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee asking that 100,000 Jewish survivors of the camps be admitted to Palestine. Then came the pressure. Zionist delegations, letters, telegrams, pickets. Truman resented it. His private diary from July 1947 includes remarks about Jews that nobody would print today, and he doesn't look good in them.

He had also been burned. The United States had backed the UN partition plan in November 1947, which passed 33 to 13. Then the State Department started backing away from its own vote. By early 1948, Truman told his staff he wouldn't see any more Zionist leaders.

That's where a retired shopkeeper from Kansas City comes in.

Eddie Jacobson and the bust of Andrew Jackson

Eddie Jacobson had served with Truman in the artillery in 1917 and run the Army canteen alongside him. After the war they opened a men's clothing store in Kansas City. It went under in the 1921 recession, and the two stayed friends for life.

Jacobson was Jewish, and he'd been asked to talk to his old partner. On March 13, 1948, he walked into the Oval Office. Truman was cold and shut him down. Jacobson, by his own account, noticed a figurine of Andrew Jackson on the office's furniture and said that Truman had a hero, and that he had one too, a man named Chaim Weizmann. Truman looked at him for a moment and then agreed to receive Weizmann.

Weizmann, the elderly scientist who'd spent decades on the Zionist cause, came in through a side entrance on March 18. The meeting wasn't on the public schedule. Truman reportedly gave him the assurances he wanted.

Then, the next day, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Warren Austin, proposed a temporary trusteeship in place of partition. Truman hadn't signed off on that. He was furious. His word had been undercut by his own department, and the world now thought American policy was a mess.

The meeting on May 12

Clark Clifford was Truman's 41-year-old special counsel, and he took the other side of the argument from his own State Department. On May 12, in the Oval Office, he made the case for recognition the moment the state declared itself. Secretary of State George Marshall was across from him.

Marshall's credentials were above argument. He'd run the Army through World War II, and he was now the architect of the plan that would carry his name across Europe. Truman called him the greatest living American. He was also the man who'd been Army chief of staff on the morning of Pearl Harbor.

Marshall's objections were serious. Arab oil mattered. The United States had few troops to spare. A new Jewish state faced five Arab armies and might not survive, and the U.S. would be tied to the loser. Defense Secretary James Forrestal shared those worries. In Clifford's account, Marshall also thought the whole push was a transparent play for votes in an election year, and that Truman was trailing badly.

Then Marshall said the sentence Clifford remembered for the rest of his life: if Truman followed Clifford's advice, and Marshall were to vote in November, he'd vote against him.

That's not a small thing to say to a president. In Clifford's telling, Truman ended the meeting without ruling either way.

What actually moved Truman

Politics was part of it, and nobody serious denies that. Clifford's argument included the election, and Truman was a politician. But Clifford's memo also made the points that carried weight on the merits. The U.S. had voted for partition. Reversing course would look weak. And the Soviets would almost surely recognize the new state first, which they did.

Truman had also seen the Harrison report in 1945, which described displaced Jewish survivors still living behind wire in camps in Germany. He didn't need a lobbyist to tell him where those people could not go home to.

Over the next two days, Clifford worked with Marshall's deputy, Robert Lovett, and the opposition softened. Marshall made clear he still thought it was a mistake. But he told Truman he wouldn't oppose the decision in public. For a man of his stature, that was an act of discipline. He lost the argument and he stayed loyal.

Eleven minutes

On May 14, the Jewish Agency's man in Washington, Eliahu Epstein, delivered a letter requesting recognition. The new state's name hadn't reached the White House officially. By most accounts, "Israel" was penciled onto the typed statement after it came over the news.

At 6:11 p.m., press secretary Charlie Ross read it out. The United States recognized the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new state. De jure recognition followed on January 31, 1949.

At the UN, the U.S. delegation was reportedly stunned. They'd heard it from reporters.

The next day, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon sent armies across the border. The war began within hours. America kept an arms embargo in place, and recognition was a political act, not a shipment of rifles. The young state fought on its own.

What it cost, and what it meant

Truman paid for it with some of his own people. He strained a friendship with the man he most admired in government. He took the blame from the Arabists in his own department for years. He also took credit he didn't always want, because the lobby kept insisting it had turned him. The record doesn't say that. It says a stubborn man made up his own mind late, against advice, and then held to it.

Commentary: We think he got it right. Recognizing the one democracy in that region, the day it asked, was the correct call for a country that had just finished a war against tyranny. It also cost the president nothing he wasn't willing to lose. Being first isn't always wise. Here it was.

Truman went on to win that November, in the biggest upset in modern American politics. He didn't know that on May 14. He'd made the decision when it looked like the opposite would happen.

Some of the best decisions in American history look that way at 6:11 p.m. Nobody knows yet if they'll hold.

For another president who started out with little and ended up making the call, see the presidents who had nothing.