Summary
Harry Truman’s adviser for minority affairs, a holdover from the Roosevelt administration, and in Perceptions of Palestine the Zionists’ principal entrée to the Truman White House (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 780-798).
Details
- With Clark Clifford and Max Lowenthal, Niles fed Truman a steady diet of material designed to influence his emotions and perceptions of Arabs and Jews; Niles and Lowenthal were firm Zionists, so emotional about the cause that Truman once said he found it disconcerting that they burst into tears whenever he tried to talk to either of them about Palestine (lines 780-798).
- Shortly after Truman assumed office Niles wrote him a memorandum attempting to plant the idea of strife between Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs in Palestine — not generally true in fact, Christison notes — holding it “obvious” that Christians, particularly Catholics, “have more to fear from the Moslems than from any other competitive religious groups”, whereas Jews had always gotten along well with all Middle Eastern Christians (lines 780-798).
- Niles had extensive contacts in Zionist organisations and was a conduit for information into and out of the White House; he is believed to have passed to the Zionists most of the State Department memoranda Truman received opposing partition, and was rated by his principal State Department opponent, Loy Henderson, as “the most powerful and diligent advocate of the Zionist cause”, chiefly responsible for getting the partition vote through the UN (lines 780-798).
- He was close enough to Truman to threaten emotionally, at an early 1948 Oval Office meeting, to resign unless Truman acted more emphatically for the Jewish cause, and to advise against appointing to the U.S. UN delegation people he deemed “unsympathetic to the Jewish viewpoint” (lines 780-798).
- He also served the Zionists as a principal entrée: there is good evidence the Jewish Agency considered him a friend in the White House usable to urge pro-Zionist public statements from Truman, and he was a member of or contact for several self-appointed “brain trusts” that advised the president, including the group that met Jewish Agency officials in February 1948 and settled the two-track approach of pressing Zionism’s compatibility with U.S. national interests and the electoral danger of not supporting partition (lines 798-806).
Related pages
Perceptions of Palestine, Harry Truman, Clark Clifford, Max Lowenthal