A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
Henderson also reported that the chief officials of the Iraqi Senate and Chamber of Deputies were telegraphing their opposite numbers in our Senate and House expressing the hope that the resolutions would not pass. Our Charge d'Affaires in Damascus told the Department that similar representations were being made by officials of the Syrian Parliament.
An interesting byproduct of these Arab parliamentary protests was that they elicited a characteristic comment from President Roosevelt. When Speaker Sam Rayburn of the House forwarded to the President a telegram he had received from the Iraqi parliamentarians, Roosevelt replied somewhat cynically that this message “is merely one of a volume of protests which have come in from practically all the Arab and Moorish [sic] countries. It merely illustrates what happens if delicate international situations get into party politics.”5 In other words, the President was well aware of the Arab attitude and of the complications caused by moves in Congress such as this.
The President and Secretary Hull urged Secretary Stimson to make his letter to the committee chairmen public, but Stimson resisted this. Colonel Hoskins was then sent by the State Department to the Pentagon and it was agreed that General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the War Department General Staff, would go up to Capitol Hill and testify against the resolutions in a private meeting, which he did. It was hoped that Marshall's immense prestige would convince the members of Congress.
On March 9, Rabbi Wise and Rabbi Silver, who were becoming apprehensive that the resolutions might not pass because of Executive branch opposition, called on the President. They handed him a draft statement, much along the lines of the resolutions, which they asked him to issue. Roosevelt, according to Silver's later account of the meeting, spent some ten minutes reworking the draft and told them that on leaving the White House they could issue it as their statement.6
Wise and Silver told the press that the President had authorized them to say that the American government had never given its approval to the White Paper, and that he was happy that the doors of Palestine remained open to Jewish refugees. They also said that the President had given them assurances that “when future decisions are reached, full justice will be done to those who seek a Jewish National Home.”
It is pretty clear that the two rabbis had hoped for some forthright statement of sympathy with the Zionist aims, and that the President, fully aware of the delicate issues involved, watered down their draft. In other words, he deftly turned the tables on Wise and Silver, who had no alternative but to make the best of it.
Even in its modified form the statement led to an immediate Arab reaction. It was given extensive coverage by the news media in a number of Arab countries and we received inquiries from our posts as to how to treat the incident. Henderson reported that for days the activities of the Zionists in the U.S. had been the “chief topic of discussion” among politically conscious Iraqis. Both the Imam Yahya, king of Yemen, and the Emir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan sent messages of concern and apprehension to Washington.
To counter this adverse Arab reaction, the President approved a circular telegram to our posts which pointed out, with some subtlety, that although it was true that the American government had never given its approval to the White Paper, it was equally true that we had never taken any position with respect to it. (This was Gordon Merriam's idea, as I recall.) The message noted that the rabbis'statement had referred to a Jewish National Home, not a Jewish state, and added that our policy was still based on full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Commenting in general on our attempts to put a gloss on Presidential statements, the pro-Zionist author, Frank Manuel, has some rather harsh words to say about what he calls the “clever doubledealing” of the members of the Near East Division. He says that we might think we were practicing astute diplomacy when our efforts were only a “clumsy imitation of the British.”7 I believe, on the other hand, that we did pretty well, here, and elsewhere, in getting the President out of a tight situation.
The shelving of the Congressional resolutions was eventually accomplished on March 17, when Stimson addressed another letter to Chairman Bloom of the House committee, reiterating that the passage of the resolutions would be “prejudicial to the successful prosecution of the war.” Bloom made this letter public and announced that his committee would take no further action.8 A similar statement was made by the Senate committee.
The entire episode turned out to be a bureaucratic muddle, with the State and War departments each trying to dodge responsibility for going on record as opposing passage. Silver claimed he had shown a draft in early January to Hull, who had offered no objection, but there is no record of this in the Department's files. Bloom also declared he had been given to understand there was no objection on the part of the Executive branch, as did Senator Robert A. Taft, one of the sponsors of the resolution in the Senate.
Later in the year, the War Department withdrew its objections to the resolutions and they were reintroduced into Congress. This was done in spite of the fact that Stettinius had told the Zionist leadership on November 15 that he and the President considered this step to be unwise. On December 6, Stettinius (who had succeeded Hull as Secretary of State at the end of November) was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on short notice and persuaded the committee to shelve the resolutions a second time. The committee insisted, however, that the Department issue a statement opposing passage “from the standpoint of the general international situation.” This was done and the resolutions were again withdrawn.9 The New York Sun commented on the Department's statement by running a cartoon showing the Palestine desk officer, in striped pants and cutaway, holding up his hand and saying “No” to a throng of homeless Jewish refugees. (I framed the Sun's cartoon and had it on the wall of my office throughout the rest of my tour in the Division.) Roosevelt later concurred in Stettinius's action and complimented him on the “fine manner” in which the problem had been handled by the Department.10 This was one of the last occasions on which the Department could be said to have played the decisive role in our Palestine policy.
The failure of the resolutions to pass caused a split between Wise and Silver, so serious that Silver, who had really instigated the resolutions in the first place and had been their strongest supporter, was forced to resign in late December as co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council. (He returned to this position six months later.) Other Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, Moshe Shertok, and Nahum Goldmann, joined Wise in opposing Silver's tactics.11
To complete the story of the Congressional resolutions, they were revived and passed by both Houses in December 1945, although in a somewhat modified form providing merely for a “democratic commonwealth” rather than a “free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.”12 These resolutions were in the form of concurrent resolutions, which, unlike the original Congressional Resolution of 1922, did not require Presidential approval. By that time the war was over, attention had been diverted to other aspects of the problem, and there was very little reaction in the Arab world or elsewhere. One year earlier, the circumstances were such that passage of the resolution at that time would have had an unfortunate effect on the standing of the United States in the area.
One of the turning points of the war had come in June 1944, with the Anglo-American landings in Normandy that signaled the invasion of Nazi occupied Europe. Rome had fallen earlier in the month. Later in the summer came such events as the unsuccessful assassination attempt against Hitler and the Allied landings in southern France. Paris was liberated on August 25, and Allied advances continued on the Russian front and in the Pacific. In October, General MacArthur returned to the Philippines, and later that same month, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf—the biggest naval action ever fought—the destruction of Japanese naval power was accomplished. With these favorable developments on the war fronts, there was more opportunity for Washington and London to be thinking about such issues as Palestine.
During the summer of 1944 both the Republican and Democratic conventions, for the first time ever in a Presidential campaign, adopted platform planks expressing support for the Zionist position.13 On July 26, Hull, at our prompting, sent a memorandum to the President, calling attention to the adverse effect that these developments were having on Arab opinion and urging that the leaders of both parties refrain during the campaign from making further statements of this nature. The record does not show that there was any