Zionists Tried To Kill Truman In 1947

The date is December 3, 1972, and it’s right there in a headline of the Tri-City Herald, the newspaper that serves Pasco-Kennewick-Richland in the state of Washington:  “Jews sent President Truman letter bombs, book tells.”  The newspaper picked up the article, we see, from the Associated Press (AP).

Not only does the article carry the authority of the AP, but the book in question bears the authority of none other than President Harry Truman’s own daughter, Margaret.  It is her biography of her father, entitled simply Harry S. Truman, and at the time the article was written, the book had just been published.   The passage in question—a long paragraph that begins on page 489 and ends on page 490 (pp. 533-534 of the paperback edition)—is in a section on threats and attempts on President Truman’s life.  Note that she misidentifies Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary, which he had not been since 1938.  Later, of course, he would become Prime Minister.  Ernest Bevin was Foreign Secretary in 1947, and he was the primary target to the assassination attempts:

In the summer of 1947, the so-called Stern Gang of Palestine terrorists tried to assassinate Dad by mail.  A number of cream-colored envelopes about eight by six inches, arrived in the White House, addressed to the President and various members of the staff.  Inside them was a smaller envelope marked “Private and Confidential.”  Inside that second envelope was powdered gelignite, a pencil battery and a detonator rigged to explode the gelignite when the envelope was opened.  Fortunately, the White House mail room was alert to the possibility that such letters might arrive.  The previous June at least eight were sent to British government officials, including Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.  The British police exploded one of these experimentally and said it could kill, or at the very least maim, anyone unlucky enough to open it.  The mail room turned the letters over to the Secret Service and they were defused by their bomb experts.  The Secret Service still screens all our mail.

The AP article also reminds us that the news of the aborted attack on Truman did not originate with Margaret Truman, some quarter century after the fact.  It had been reported in far greater and more accurate detail by White House staff mail reader Ira R. T. Smith (with Joe Alex Morris) in his 1949 book, Dear Mr. President … The Story of Fifty Years in the White House Mail Room.  Fortunately, that entire book is now online here.  This is from pp. 229-230:

On another occasion, in the summer of 1947 I was summoned back to Washington from my vacation because controversy over important issues, including the Palestine question, had greatly increased the volume of mail to the President.  I was rather surprised that the volume should be more than could be handled routinely by the office but when I got back I found that not all the difficulty was due to volume.  Some of the letters received had obviously been intended to kill. 

There had been a flurry in England in June of that summer because eight or more government officials and political personages had received terrorist letters in which explosives were cleverly concealed.  Among those who got such letters were Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, President of the Board of Trade Sir Stafford Cripps, and former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.  Cripps’s secretary noticed that the letter he received was hot (police said later it was apparently about ready to explode) and he stuck it in water.  Eden carried his letter unopened in his briefcase for twenty-four hours before a secretary, tipped off by police, found it.  There were two envelopes, the outer one about eight by six inches and cream-colored.  The inner envelope was marked “Private and Confidential,” presumably in an effort to see that it was opened by the man to whom it was addressed.  Inside the second envelope was powdered gelignite, a pencil battery, and a detonator arranged to explode when the envelope was opened.  Police exploded one experimentally and said that it was powerful enough to kill a man.  The so-called Stern gang of Palestine terrorists later claimed responsibility for having sent the letters from its “branch in Europe.”  The letters were postmarked from Italy. 

The same kind of terrorist letters had been found in the White House mail, and as a result the staff had been handling all letters with great care, thus slowing up the routine.  So far as I know none of those received in this country resulted in an explosion, which may have been due to the excellent system introduced for handling the White House mail during the war.

Upon reading these two accounts, two questions come immediately to mind:  Why is this attempted assassination of the president of the United States not common knowledge and what is the larger political context?  That is to say, why would the Stern Gang want to kill President Truman?

Why Kill Truman?

Addressing the second question first, the reader can’t help but note that the books use the identical vague term “Stern Gang of Palestine terrorists” to refer to the perpetrators.  One might get the impression that they were Palestinian terrorists, except for the fact that the Stern Gang is well known as a Jewish extremist group with a long string of murderous outrages to its credit (or discredit, if you prefer).  Both accounts at least tell us that the White House bombs were part of a pattern, that similar attempts had previously been made by the Stern Gang upon various British officials.  But their common purpose in telling us this is to explain why the White House was on alert for such bombs and was successful in interdicting them.  They don’t give us the slightest clue as to why the bombs might have been sent in the first place.

In 1946 the British were still in political control of Palestine, formerly ruled by the Ottomons, under an arrangement created in the wake of World War I and approved by the League of Nations in 1923.  Prior to WW I, it should be pointed out, Palestine had been part of the Muslim Ottoman Syria since 1516, more than a century before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and before that it had been part of the Muslim Mamluk Empire centered in Egypt.  The Zionist movement, led primarily by Jews from Eastern Europe, was determined to drive the British out and terrorism of all sorts—assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, extortion, etc.—was at the very core of the effort.

The problem with the British was that they were carrying out their commitment under the Balfour Declaration far too conscientiously.   As a means of gaining support from world Jewry, especially in the United States and Russia, against their enemies in World War I, which included the Ottomon Empire, the Balfour Declaration endorsed the Zionist objective of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (still at that time under Ottomon control), “it being clearly understood that nothing [would be] done which [would] prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….” 

The Zionists wanted massive Jewish immigration from Europe and total political control of Palestine, with the apparent eventual goal of supplanting the entire non-Jewish population from the area.  Such policies would certainly have been—and have been—prejudicial in the extreme toward the rights of the locals, and the British refused to institute them, incurring the murderous wrath of the terrorist Stern Gang, which counted future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir(born Icchak Jeziernicky) among its leaders and its brother in terror, Irgun, one of whose leaders was future Prime Minister Menachem Begin (born Mieczysław Biegun).  Why British government officials, and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in particular, would have been targeted for killing by the Zionist terrorists can be well appreciated by reference to Bevin’s Wikipedia page. 

Although the attempted assassinations in Britain were unsuccessful, the terror campaign against the British worked.  The British gave up their mandate and turned the whole question of Palestine’s future over to the United Nations to decide.  Under heavy pressure from the United States, the majority of the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and non-Jewish sectors.  This final arrangement, according to Bevin, was “…so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how we could reconcile it with our conscience.”

Terror had worked on the British, but why would anyone have thought it necessary against President Truman, of all people?  With a village and an institute named for him there, he is regarded today as a hero in Israel for defying almost all his foreign policy advisers and recognizing the new Jewish state of Israel as soon as David Ben Gurion declared its existence in May of 1948. But in the summer of 1947 it was far from a foregone conclusion that Truman would come through for the Zionists.  Some idea of his thinking on Palestine at the time can be gleaned from a letter he wrote to a friend, Edward W. Pauley, on October 22, 1946:

That situation is insoluble in my opinion.  I have spent a year and a month trying to get some concrete action on it.  Not only are the British highly successful in muddling the situation as completely as it could possibly be muddled, but the Jews themselves are making it almost impossible to do anything for them.  They seem to have the same attitude toward the “underdog” when they are on top as they have been treated as “underdogs” themselves.  I suppose that is human frailty.    –Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman, A Life (1994), p. 307.

Some more evidence of his thinking in 1946 can be had from Truman’s memoirs:

My efforts to persuade the British to relax immigration restrictions in Palestine might have fallen on more receptive ears if it had not been for the increasing acts of terrorism that were being committed in Palestine.  There were armed groups of extremists who were guilty of numerous outrages.  On June 16 eight bridges were blown up near the Trans-Jordan border, and two other explosions were set off in Haifa.  The following day there was a pitched battle between Jews and British troops in Haifa, other explosions had started a fire and caused great damage in the rail yards there.  British officers were kidnapped.  Others were shot at from passing automobiles.  Explosions took place in ever-increasing numbers, and the British uncovered a plot by one extremist group to kidnap the British commander in chief in Palestine.  –Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, Vol. 2, Years of Hope (1956). pp. 150-151

Many of the signals being picked up by the Jewish leadership in the United States, as Truman expressed his exasperation over their heavy pressure campaign, could easily have made their way to the Stern Gang, persuading them that in this Missouri Baptist from a relatively humble background they had an American Bevin on their hands:

In June of 1946 he at first refused to see a delegation of all the New York Congressmen, and finally received them only with obvious impatience.  He was no better when the two Senators from the state, [Robert] Wagner and [James] Mead, brought a former member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (into Palestine) to see him.  “I am not a New Yorker,” Truman is alleged to have told them.  “All these people are pleading for a special interest.  I am an American.” – Roy Jenkins, Truman (1986), p. 117

Particularly offensive to Truman was the attitude of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, who, with Stephen Wise, was co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council.  A Republican and close ally of Senator Taft, Rabbi Silver had helped write a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform.  At one point during a meeting in Truman’s office, Silver had hammered on Truman’s desk and shouted at him. “Terror and Silver are the causes of some, if not all, of our troubles,” Truman later said, and at one Cabinet meeting he reportedly grew so furious over the subject of the Jews that he snapped, “Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.” –David McCullough,Truman (1992), p. 599

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