The ‘bald-headed son of a bitch’ who was key to Israel’s creation
A new book recounts the vital role played by ‘First Friend’ Eddie Jacobson in persuading Harry Truman to meet Weizmann
SPRING 1948. As the months, weeks and days ticked down to the expiration of the British Mandate in Palestine, Zionist leaders in America began to fret that Harry Truman’s commitment to the establishment of a Jewish state was waning. Six months previously, the US president had defied strong opposition within his own State Department to vote at the UN in favour of partitioning Palestine.
But intense Zionist lobbying aimed at stiffening Truman’s resolve had spectacularly backfired. The notoriously prickly president was now refusing to meet anyone, including Chaim Weizmann who, despite ill-health, had flown to Washington in the hope of shoring up Truman’s support.
The impasse was broken — and Weizmann’s ultimately successful meeting with the president secured — by a former travelling salesman for a shirt and pyjama company. The remarkable story of the pivotal role played in the weeks leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel by Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s oldest and closest friend, is told in a new book, First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents, by Gary Ginsberg.
“More so than other First Friendships, the bond between Truman and Jacobson illustrated the power of happenstance, the fortuitous way in which timing, place and talent intersect,” writes Ginsberg. “For both these men, history would intervene at multiple points in their lives, pressing them to rise to the moment.”
Truman and Jacobson’s relationship stretched back decades. The pair had met soon after the future president, who had taken a series of menial jobs to help his struggling family, had secured a position as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City in Missouri in 1903. Jacobson – the son of Lithuanian immigrants who had left school at 15 – worked at a local store and regularly came to deposit money at the bank. A friendship developed, based, argues Ginsberg, on the two young men’s shared outlook born of an “up-from-the-boot-straps discipline” and “lack of formal education alongside a hard-earned wisdom about the real world”.
Although they drifted apart, America’s entry into the First World War rekindled their friendship when Truman and Jacobson were both assigned to the same artillery unit. Truman was impressed by Jacobson’s already-evident entrepreneurial spirit. Before they were shipped out to France in early 1918, Jacobson, with his more senior friend’s support and backing, had staged a fundraiser in Kansas City which had earned the troops enough cash for better rations. Later, at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, Truman promoted Jacobson and put him in charge of the regimental canteen; it soon became the only one on the base to turn a profit.
Unsurprisingly, as they sailed home from France to New York five months after the armistice, Truman and Jacobson decided to go into business together. The result — the Truman & Jacobson Haberdashery, based inside the lobby of Kansas City’s upscale Glennon Hotel — initially prospered. Truman did the accounts, while Jacobson, who had a long track record in the clothing industry, was in charge of buying.
However, a sharp recession forced the business to close in 1922.
The two men’s paths now diverged. Over the next two decades, Truman – with help from the notoriously corrupt Kansas City Pendergast political machine – began his extraordinary ascent to the Oval Office, rising from a country judgeship to the US Senate in 1934 and, within ten years, the vice-presidency. Meanwhile, Jacobson stuck to selling clothes. The friendship, however, endured, buttressed by poker and hunting and fishing trips. Indeed, as speculation mounted in 1944 that Franklin Roosevelt intended to drop his vice-president, Henry Wallace, from the ticket and Truman’s name came to the fore, the Missouri senator retreated to Jacobson’s home to escape the furore. He confided that he would rather remain in the Senate. When Roosevelt sent Truman a telegram congratulating him on being selected as his running mate, it was to Jacobson that the future vice-president sent a copy, adding by hand at the bottom: “To Eddie Jacobson, my friend, buddy + partner in whom I repose the utmost confidence.”
Less than a year later, Roosevelt was dead and Truman was president. By late 1947, Palestine jockeyed with mounting domestic problems and the onset of the Cold War for the president’s attention. Truman was a man of his times and was, according to Ginsberg, “known periodically to traffic in Jewish stereotypes” and utter racial slurs. But as a senator
he had repeatedly made clear his sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish state, urging in 1943 that “free lands must be opened” to all those who had managed to flee “the Nazi butchers” and backing the Christian Zionist American Palestine Committee. The State Department, though, feared that backing a Jewish state would allow the Soviets to gain a foothold in the Arab world and imperil the supply of oil to the US economy.
Against this backdrop, the president’s refusal to meet with Weizmann – who he had described as “wonderful” and “one of the wisest people I think I ever met” after a previous meeting – appeared ominous. On 22 February 1948, deeply concerned by Truman’s stubborn refusal to see Weizmann, Frank Goldman, the national president of B’nai Brith, turned to Jacobson.
Jacobson had pressed the president prior to the UN vote and swiftly agreed to write to him about the Weizmann meeting. Truman’s response, however, showed his deep frustration. “The Jews are so emotional and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with,” he wrote to his old friend, suggesting that “the situation is not solvable as presently set up”.
Jacobson, however, was undeterred. Without arranging an appointment, he flew to Washington and turned up at the White House unannounced. Ushered into the Oval Office, he was urged by aides not to talk to the irritable president about Palestine. After their usual exchange of pleasantries, Jacobson urged Truman to see Weizmann. The president responded to his entreaties with a rant about how “mean and disrespectful” certain Jews had been to him. Casting around for a way to cut through to Truman, Jacobson alighted on a bust of the president’s ornery hero and predecessor, Andrew Jackson. Cleverly, Jacobson drew a parallel with his own hero – “the greatest Jew who ever lived” – Weizmann. After a seemingly interminable silence, the president relented: “You win, you bald-headed son of a bitch,” Truman said. “I will see him.”
Five days later, under cover of dark and without informing his Secretary of State, Truman received Weizmann in the Oval Office. In the 45-minute, off-the-record meeting, he informed Israel’s soon-to-be first president that he continued to support the partition plan. A relieved Weizmann departed, satisfied with Truman’s assurance and confident of his good intentions.
The road to the birth of the State of Israel two months later wasn’t without bumps. Not least when, without Truman’s authorisation, the State Department suggested the US was backing away from partition in favour of a temporary UN trusteeship. Again, Jacobson travelled to the White House, where Truman told him that nothing had changed and, he recorded, “agreed with a whole heart” that the US would publicly recognise the new Jewish state.
The president was good to his word, recognising Israel just 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion’s famous proclamation and providing it with vital diplomatic ballast at a critical moment. Jacobson, who Israel appointed its “temporary, unofficial ambassador” in the US, refused to take credit for what he later termed his “small part in this historic event”. Truman, however, disagreed, writing that, once Jacobson had overcome his “natural reluctance to petition me”, his role has been of “decisive importance”.
Truman left the White House in January 1953; their friendship continued until Jacobson’s death two years later. “He was absolutely trustworthy. I don’t know how I am going to get along without him,” the former president said.
That bond of trust was the key to Jacobson’s influence. He had, writes Ginsberg, “no hidden agenda, no singular self-interest beyond being a Jewish man who wanted to ‘do right’ by his people”.
Five days later, under cover of dark, Truman received Weizmann in the Oval Office