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T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 615–624 The Venting of Presidential Spleen: Harry S. Truman’s Jewish Problem MONTY NOAM PENKOWER ON JULY 10, 2003, the National Archives released a diary from 1947, kept by the thirty-third president of the United States and recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. The forty-two entries, comprising about 5,500 words (far more than the twenty-three pages combined of four other Truman diaries in the National Archives), appear in a blue-jacketed book titled The Real Estate Board of New York, Inc., Diary and Manual 1947. The volume’s first 160 pages are filled with real estate agent listings and advertisements, which had led the library staff to catalog it with other books from Harry S. Truman’s estate. The famously frugal chief executive, who received the book as a gift in 1946, then filled the pages at the back in a neat lefthanded script. A fair share of spelling and grammatical errors therein notwithstanding, Truman’s private musings constitute his most extensive personal record for that year. Understandably, the serendipity was soon hailed as the most important discovery that the Truman Library has made in the twenty years since the president’s widow, Bess, died in 1982.1 Media trumpeted the story the very next day, with sources such as the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the BBC’s World Edition highlighting the diary’s contents. The sporadic notations, many observed, do not touch on the Truman Doctrine , on the Marshall Plan, or on civil rights—major issues of that momentous year. They do reflect Truman’s feeling oppressed by the burdens of ‘‘the great white jail’’ at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his unqualified admiration for Secretary of State George Marshall, and the desolation he felt at his mother’s funeral. Candor and optimism are evident, as in this reaction to a doctor’s report that he had ‘‘cardiac asthma’’: ‘‘Aint that hell! 1. For the entire diary, see the Truman Library’s Web site, http://www.truman library.org/diary/transcript.htm. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 616 JQR 94:4 (2004) Well it makes no diff. will go on as before. I’ve sworn him to secrecy! So what!’’ In another memorable entry, Truman offered to yield the 1948 Democratic presidential nomination to Dwight D. Eisenhower if General Douglas MacArthur campaigned for the Republican nomination. He also prophesied of forty-year-old aide Clark Clifford: ‘‘He’s a nice boy and will go places.’’ Plain-spoken wit is manifest, too, in Truman’s rejoinder to Lady Astor’s praising his policies but thinking that he had become ‘‘rather too much ‘Yankee’: I couldn’t help telling her that my purported ‘Yankee’ tendencies were not half so bad as her ultra conservative British leanings. She almost had a stroke.’’ What captured most headlines, however, was Truman’s recorded anger at the former Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., for having sought his intervention on behalf of a ship of stateless Jewish refugees who had been denied entry by Great Britain to mandatory Palestine. ‘‘He’d no business whatever to call me,’’ the president wrote in three loose pages on July 21, 1947. ‘‘The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.’’ Truman then went on a rant: The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians , Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist...

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