A Calculated Risk. Evan M. Wilson
and appointed General George C. Marshall as Secretary. Marshall, the wartime Army Chief of Staff and one of the most respected figures in the country, had recently been serving in China on a special mission for the President.
Like his predecessor, Marshall resisted getting involved in Palestine, preferring to focus on the problems of European recovery and East-West relations. In mid-1947, Robert A. Lovett, a New York lawyer and member of the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman, succeeded Acheson as Under Secretary. This was of importance to the Department's work on Palestine, as Marshall delegated almost all of it to his Under Secretary.
The Division of Near Eastern Affairs, under which Palestine came, was headed in the early 1940s by the redoubtable Wallace S. Murray whose previous Near Eastern experience had been in Iran. He had been with the Division since 1925 and Chief since 1929. To be precise, Murray had the title Adviser on Political Relations, while his deputy, Paul H. Alling, was the nominal chief of the Division, but since the two of them worked very closely together as a team, the titles made no real difference. Immediate supervision over the work relating to Palestine came under Gordon P. Merriam, assistant chief of the Division and one of the earliest crop of Arabist Foreign Service officers.
In 1944, as a result of the Stettinius reorganization, an Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs was created with Murray as Director and Alling as Deputy Director. This office was the forerunner of the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs of today. The Division of Near Eastern Affairs, with Merriam as chief, then became one of the component elements of the Office. In early 1945, Murray was appointed Ambassador to Iran while Alling went to Morocco as Diplomatic Agent and Consul General. Murray's successor was Loy W. Henderson, then serving in Baghdad. First George V. Allen, then Henry S. Villard, and later Joseph C. Satterthwaite held the position of Deputy Director; all three were career Foreign Officers with area experience. These changes took place as the State Department and the Foreign Service were beginning to expand to meet our nation's postwar global responsibilities. Additional staff was taken on, and many of our legations were raised to embassy status.
THE OLD NEAR EAST DIVISION: ITS CHARACTER AND ITS PERSONALITIES
A 1937 article on the Department made the comment that the Near East Division “is not often marked with excitement … our relations with these peoples are not important.”3 A similar attitude of condescension prevailed in other offices of the Department, to the extent that when I was assigned to Cairo in 1938, a friend in the European Division commiserated with me by saying: “The Near East! Nothing ever happens there.”
That the problems of the Near East were indeed not of primary importance in the Department of prewar days is revealed in a passage from Hull's memoirs in which he lists the pressing matters which were on his desk when he became Secretary of State. Although he mentions over a dozen problems, not one of them relates to the Near East.
The Division was still rather quiet when I entered it in 1943. The entire Division numbered only fourteen officers: by way of comparison, today's Bureau has a staff of over 150. As an indication of the workload, Palestine was handled by a desk officer along with Egypt and Iraq. The Palestine work, however, was soon to register a dramatic increase, as is shown by the number of pages devoted to it in the Foreign Relations volumes: 1942, 21 pages; 1943, 82; 1944, 97; 1945, 166; 1946, 167; 1947, 330; and 1948, one entire volume.
We were housed in a few offices along the west side of the third floor of the old Department. Two other desk officers (dealing with Turkey and Saudi Arabia), a secretary, and I were crowded into a room (No. 345) which had accommodated a single officer up to the outbreak of the war. Merriam was squeezed into an adjoining cubbyhole. Working conditions were chaotic most of the time. In the long Washington summers the heat became almost unbearable as the afternoon sun beat down. There was of course no air conditioning and though it was customary in those days to dismiss the government employees when the thermometer touched the mid-90s, the urgent nature of our work and the small size of our staff did not generally make it possible for us to leave early. With the aid of the salt tablets which we kept handy we managed to put in a full six-day week, rarely leaving before six or seven in the evening.
Even under normal conditions our room would have been full enough, and we often were crowded beyond capacity when officers arriving from the field or awaiting transportation to a post abroad—and there were always delays under the aircraft priority system—made the Division their headquarters. As soon as the doors of the Department opened in the morning these individuals would rush to preempt the chairs standing by our desks. We called them the “kibbitzers.” This invasion caused problems when any of us had visitors, as frequently happened.
The visitors to the office gave us plenty of problems in any event. Once, when the Saudi desk officer and the Turkish desk officer both had a number of callers grouped around their desks, the Saudi desk officer asked a question and one of the Turkish visitors replied. Fortunately there were not too many instances of this sort, but things could get rather touchy when the Saudi desk officer, for example, was receiving an Arab visitor and I was receiving a Jewish one. Simultaneously the Turkish desk officer, who had a wide acquaintance among the members of the press covering the Department, was apt to be entertaining some correspondent who might not be above taking advantage of the opportunity to overhear what the rest of us were saying.
On top of this general va et vient, the phones kept ringing incessantly and our lone secretary kept pounding away at her typewriter. Incidentally she was the only person in the room who was allowed to have one, as all typewriters had been taken away from the officers when the war began. It was this same secretary, Marilyn Woods, who unwittingly provided me with an anecdote which I often used afterward in my work, when she remarked one day in bewilderment: “Mr. Wilson, I don't understand why you let yourself get so bothered about Palestine when everyone knows it says in the Bible that the Jews are going back there some day!” Miss Woods, in the end, literally got herself to a nunnery, and gave up the Department in favor of a convent.
In the field, the Division had supervision over some thirty-nine Foreign Service posts, including one embassy (Turkey), ten legations, and twenty-eight consular or other offices. Beginning in 1944 there was also an officer attached to the Embassy in London (Raymond A. Hare) who followed Near Eastern developments from that vantage point and reported to the Division. Hare subsequently had a distinguished career, and held a number of high level positions in the Department, as well as serving as ambassador to several Near Eastern countries.
Within the Department, the officers concerned with Palestine had frequent contact with two scholars who had been brought in from academic life to work on postwar planning in the Division of Territorial Studies—Dr. Philip W. Ireland and Professor William Yale, who with several members of our Division made up the so-called Interdivisional Area Committee on Arab Countries. One of their colleagues was Ralph Bunche, who although not working directly on Palestine at this time was to be intimately associated with the problem later on as the second United Nations Mediator for Palestine and for many years thereafter as Under Secretary-General of the U.N. In the early 1940s, Bunche was one of the few African Americans holding positions at the officer level in the Department. Washington was a very different place in those days. I recall that when any of us wanted to go out to lunch with him there were only two places where we could go-Union Station and the YWCA.
Then there was Lieutenant Colonel Harold B. Hoskins, who had been born in Beirut and was sent out to the Near East on special missions in 1942 and 1943. Though not a member of the Division, Hoskins participated in many of the important discussions of the Palestine question and his name appears frequently in the official documents for the period. Because of his background and his contacts in the White House and the Pentagon, Hoskins sometimes played a key role, as for example in the case of the resolutions introduced into Congress in early 1944 respecting Palestine. Although the published documents do not reveal it, he was largely responsible for the shelving of the resolutions at that time. He was a cousin of Colonel William A. Eddy, also born in Beirut and Arabic-speaking, who interpreted for FDR and Ibn Saud.
The Foreign Service posts under the supervision of the Near East Division, like the Division itself, were staffed largely by officers who had had experience in the area. This was natural enough from the administrative standpoint, but there was also a sound reason why it should be so.