| In 2003, the US National Archives released a diary kept by Harry S Truman. In an entry dated July 21, 1947, Truman described a visit from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.. Morgenthau asked the president to preasure the British over their decision to send the refugees onboard the Exodus 1947 back to Europe.
Morgenthau had "no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed" wrote Truman in his diary.
The "thousand Jews" were a group of mostly Jewish refugees brought to Fort Ontario near Oswego, New York, during the Roosevelt administration. The stay was supposed to be temporary, but at the end of the war, the refugees were allowed to apply for American residency and some became citizens.
Truman's diary entry continued: "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 DPs 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 under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I´ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
Publicly, Truman endorsed the admission of Holocaust survivors to the US, but he signed legislation which did little to help the DPs. When Israel became a state in 1948, Truman granted the new country diplomatic recognition, but refused to send weapons to Israel to defend itself. Movie and TV Credits: |
