Anhall, the United Nations

anhall, the United Nations, A N k’ of Marshall’s dealings with European and World Powers required his attendence at conferences abroad. Others focused on activities at the United Nations, usually at the temporary headquarters in New York. The problems associated with the status of Palestine required his attention in the fall of 1947. During part of the time, he found it necessary, as the true head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, to attend the meetings in person. But during much of the time he acted through his subor- dinates at the State Department and through the delegates in New Yor-k appointed by the President. The United Nations as yet had no permanent headquarters -in New York City. In 1947, it was using buildiiigs left over from the 1939-40 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow on Long Island. Most delegation members were housed in New York hotels, with the elegant Waldorf Astoria a favorite site. When Marshall found that he had been given a suite there, he told an assistant to move him to a less expensive hotel near Pennsylvania Station: Many of the delegates staying at the Waldorf, he explained, would come to hirn to request loans for their countries, and it might help hirn keep the price down if the): saw him living more simply than they were. Former Republican Senator Warren H. Austin of Vermont had been appointed by the President to head the delegation, with Ani- bassador Herschel Johnson as deputy. Other delegates appointed to U.N. special committees included Eleanor Roosevelt, John Fos- ter Dulles, Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, Philip Jessup, and Major General John Hilldring. From time to time, substitutions were made and heads of State Department divisions were sum- moned to attend debates on questions of special interest to them. One such was Dean Rusk, whose title of Special Assistant for Politi- 336 Marshall, the United Nations, and Palestine 337 cal Affairs was later changed to Assistant Secretary for the United Nations. From Washington, Marshall normally dealt with Austin through Under Secretary Lovett. On a number of important matters, he gave direct instructions or went to New York to seek agreement ainong delegation members. Truman handled most U.N. matters through the Secretary of State, but since Austin was his personal representative at the U.N., the President also felt free to call directly on him or his delegation members. The President usually consulted directly with Marshall or Lovett on foreigii affairs or had Marshall discuss these matters in Cabinet meetings. In 1947, a National Security Council was established, in which the Secretary of State met regularly with the President, the secretaries of Defense and of the Treasury, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the service secretaries. Depart- ments or agencies could ask to have a special topic placed on the agenda, or, if the President so requested, would be asked by the ’ council*ssecretary to prepare a paper for consideration. There was not at that time, as there is now, a National Security Adviser to give special advice to the President. The nearest thing to such a func- tionary was the counsel to the President, Clark Clifford. In matters of particular interest to Truman, Clifford saw that the President’s view was made known to Cabinet members and his wishes carried out. The possibility of clashes came in 1947 and again in 1948, when Clifford managed Truman’s campaign for the presidency. Although he steadily denied that political factors influenced his judgment, Clifford found, as the election approached, that political leaders who wished to get the President’s ear focused on the office of the counsel, who described the situation to the President, ex- plaining what each politician was trying to achieve and how he could influence the election. Marshall was to find that much of the 1947 U.N. General As- sembly session was concerned with the problem of Palestine. For some historians the problem of Palestine began with what was #called the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a statement by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that Britain would favor a , homeland for the Jews there. For others, the question went back to the Zionist Congress at Base1 in 1897, when Theodor Herzl organized a meeting of Jewish leaders and called for the establish- ment of a Jewish state. For still others, the problem sprang from the dispersion of the Jews from Palestine by the Roman gover- nors in the first and second centuries A.D. Only a small remnant was left to keep a Jewish presence in the land of their fathers. 338 Statesman Through the centuries, groups of several hundred or, occasion- ally, a few thousand Jews had ventured back, and were usually tolerated by Arabs controlling the area In the nineteenth century, Russian nationalism and the develop- ment of a distrust for foreigners led the tsarist government to restrict the freedom of Jews in Russia and often to launch violent attacks on Jewish villages. These pogroms and persecutions else- where in Eastern Europe led to widespread’emigration. Herzl was moved to proclaim a Zionism that demanded a Jewish state His appeal found sympathy abroad, not only among Jews but also among non-Jewish statesmen. Even before Balfour’s declaration, an American Zionist, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, had won President Woodrow Wilson’s approval of Zionist hopes. After the end of World War I, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a special mandate over Pales tine, with the understanding that the country would be made ready for independence at a suit- able time. Britain's obligations to seek a homeland for the Jews and to prepare Palestine for independence conflicted with British national interests in the Near East. The period after World War I saw intense effort by British firms to get increasingly valuable oil concessions in Arab lands, which meant seeking Arab friendship. Stability in the Near and Middle East was an important safeguard for the Suez Canal. As the Palestinian Arabs, who outnumbered the Jews by more than two to one, saw the increasing- flow of Jewish immigrants under the British mandate, they and their Arab broth- ers in neighboring states clamored for the British to restrict or stop the flow of Jews into the mandated area 1 I The rise of Hitler and the flight ofyews from his control brought Jewish demands and pleas for the admission of larger numbers of their people to Palestine. But Arab nationalism had grown rapidly since the war, and it fed to a great extent on anti-Zionism. Arab groups attacked new Jewish settlements, and the Jews learned to retaliate. The British, trying to keep order, were attacked by both sides. Pointing out instances of the British favoring the Arabs, some ’ militant young Jews organized small underground organizations to force concessions from the British through terrorism. Attempts of Jewish groups and sympathizers to send shiploads ofJews rendered homeless by World War I1 displacements were thwarted when the British blocked their landings or sent them back as illegal immigrants to the ports from which they had sailed. The sufferings of the Jews at the hands of Mitler, the incontro- vertible evidence that concentration-ca’mp atrocities and the fright- Marshall, the United Nations, and Palestine 339 fulness of the Holocaust had not been anti-German propaganda, made the Zionist cause more popular than it had ever been, particu- larly in the United States. On the eve of Yon1 Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in 1946, President Truman called for a lifting of limits on the admission of Jews to Palestine. All British attempts to solve the Palestinian problem by an An- glo-American inquiry and other measures of conciliation were re- jected by both Arabs and Jews. In the spring of 1947, the British government announced that it would withdraw from Its mandate by the summer of 1948 and hand the Palestine question over to the United Nations If there was to be an orderly transition to any form of self-government by Arab and Jew, the United Nations would have to find it.2 Conveniently, the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs had prepared for Secretary Byrnes a summary on U.S policy in the Near East a week before Marshall became Secretary. Head of the Office of Near Eastern ,and African Affairs was a well-known expert on Soviet policy and the Middle East, Loy Henderson. He had been with the first group of Foreign Service officers to go to Moscow after Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, and was known as a hard-liner on the Soviet Union and a watchful opponent of its extension of influence in the Near and Middle East. He fa- vored good relations with the Arabs and a policy of cooperation with the British, and the Arabs considered him a friend. To the Jews he was the leading State Department opponent to a Jewish state. One member of his division, Fraser Wilkins, prepared the summary of U.S. Middle East policy that Marshall would find as his introduc- tion to the Palestine question a few days later. Wilkins recalled that the Balfour Declaration had come as a result of the pleas of Chaim Weizrnann, a prominent Zionist, to Sir Arthur Balfour to seek a Jewish homeland. Wilkins described the Pales- ‘tinian Arabs’ growing fears of becoming a minority in Palestine if the displaced Jewish population of Europe was admitted, and their preparations to resist Zionist plans. American support of the Zion- ist hopes for a Jewish state had been repeated in presidential state- ments, in congressional resolutions, and by the platforms of the two major political parties in 1944.

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