A well-known photograph of the Truman and Jacobson Haberdashery located at 104 W. 12th Street, Kansas City. Jacobson is on the left; Truman on the right with two unidentified customers. Circa 1919. JCHS PHL 26495 C.

President Harry Truman’s decision to issue de facto recognition to the infant state of Israel 75 years ago was one of the most consequential moments in 20th Century world politics. The international ramifications of that decision were profoundly significant in 1948, and remain so today. The account of how Truman reached that decision included a remarkable Jackson County story. That involves the president’s longtime Army friend and later haberdashery business partner, Eddie Jacobson.

The story is told here by Shirley Christian, a Kansas City area journalist and historian. Christian worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the Miami Herald. In 1980 she joined the Herald’s Latin America Bureau, where she covered the wars then being fought in Central America. She received a 1981 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Her first book, “Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family,” appeared in 1985. She also is the author of “Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier,” published in 2004.

This article first appeared in two parts in 2014 in the Jackson County Historical Society Journal. The Society is pleased to reprint this article, and it thanks the author for her permission to do so.

By Shirley Christian

On the afternoon of May 17, 1948, Kansas City shopkeeper Eddie Jacobson slipped out of the White House after taking leave of his nearly lifelong friend Harry Truman and boarded the first flight to New York.

For two years, the pudgy cobbler’s son with an eighth-grade education had been at the center of negotiations between Zionists and President Truman over the future of Palestine and whether Jews would have their own nation.

Chaim Weizmann (left) and Eddie Jacobson (right) in a photo circa 1949. The event and location are unknown. Copyright unknown, Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library, Accession number 2004-36.

Generally operating beneath the radar of the press, which knew him only as the president’s jocular war buddy and one-time business partner, Jacobson had enjoyed regular access to Chaim Weizmann, the patriarch of the Zionist movement, and for a time had been the only Jew outside the government whom Truman would receive.

Eddie told his wife and daughters that his heady experiences in the seats of power were the result of what his Yiddish-speaking parents would have called beshert – being there at the right time. A man with a talent for loyalty and friendship, Eddie was trusted by both sides to carry proposals and arguments.

He paid from his own pocket for the frequent trips to Washington and New York and joked to his daughters that he was spending their inheritance. But wealthy acquaintances, those he met after he agreed to argue the case for a Jewish state before Truman, had shown their gratitude with such things as the diamond cufflinks he now wore.

In recent weeks, as the Truman Administration engaged in a ferocious internal debate over whether to recognize Israel as an independent nation, Eddie had had to defend Harry to Zionists, who became infuriated when Truman seemed to be waffling on the deal they thought had already been struck. Letters poured into the small office at the back of his shirt shop at 39th and Main from people “telling me what a terrible traitor my friend, Harry S. Truman, turned out to be, and how he betrayed the Jewish People …”

Then, in one stroke, Truman had brushed aside the protestations of General George Marshall and the entire State and Defense establishments and recognized Israel at 6 p.m. on May 14, 1948, immediately after the new nation proclaimed its independent existence. That was three days before this visit. Now, the burden and the tension were lifted from Eddie, whose tendency toward stress and over-excitement kept him under the watchful eye of cardiologists.

Over the months of conversations with Chaim Weizmann, Eddie came to idolize the brilliant scientist who had crusaded for a homeland for Jews for most of his adult life and who was now, at 73, exhausted by respiratory ailments and nearly blind with cataracts.

As soon as he learned of Truman’s recognition of Israel, Eddie had flown to New York from Kansas City and presented himself in Weizmann’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Weizmann told him to go to Washington immediately and plead Israel’s case to Truman on three points: urge him to lift the arms embargo against the Jewish settlers in Palestine, back Israel’s request for a $135 million American loan, and try to halt Britain’s arming of Arabs.

Eddie went to Washington Monday morning, saw Harry the same day, and laid out Weizmann’s requests and concerns. Without committing himself on any of the points, Harry told Eddie to invite Weizmann to visit Washington a few days later and stay at Blair House. After he landed back in New York that evening, Eddie took a limousine to the Waldorf, where an excited crowd was gathered outside. For the first time, Israel’s blue and white Star of David was flying overhead beside the Stars and Stripes. Eddie got out of the car, stood on the sidewalk, looked up at the two flags, and sobbed. “This is the payoff,” he thought, “my reward.”

Lithuania to Leavenworth

Eddie Jacobson’s parents never devoted much time to explaining to their six children how they came to Leavenworth, Kansas, just after Eddie’s birth in New York in 1891.

The Jacobson family had arrived in New York around the time that the city’s affluent long-established German Jews were becoming concerned about the image projected by the large numbers of poor Russian Jews crowding into the Lower East Side. These concerns led to the diversion of some ships carrying Central and Eastern European Jews to the Port of Galveston, Texas, from which the new arrivals established themselves in communities up and down the mid-section of the country, including Kansas City.

In fact, Jewish immigrants had been making their way across the Mississippi River since long before the arrival of the Jacobsons and those from the so-called “Galveston Project.”

By the 1840s Jewish peddlers and small shopkeepers were already working at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, drawn perhaps by President John Tyler’s 1841 appeal for new arrivals to head west “as members of our rapidly growing family.” Less than twenty years after French fur traders put down the first footprints of the future Kansas City the ledgers of the Jewish-owned businesses recorded trade with the French and the arriving farmers from the eastern areas of the country.

Perhaps the unwelcoming scene in New York led the Jacobsons to join the westward tide, or perhaps it was the lure of boom times around Kansas City, where the population had multiplied rapidly after the Civil War. They settled in Leavenworth, the military outpost twenty miles up the Missouri River, where relatives had preceded them. Eddie and his siblings went to school, and his father made and repaired shoes until the family moved to Kansas City in 1905, by which time Eddie had completed the eighth grade.

A Wild, Wicked, Sensual Place

Kansas City at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was changing rapidly from a town of the Old West astride a Civil War fault line to an urban hothouse of immigrants, former enslaved persons, youths escaping family farms, white shoe bankers, and upwardly striving Babbitts.

Jesse James and Cole Younger were gone from the scene. Also gone were the New England abolitionists who had poured into the adjacent Kansas Territory a half-century earlier to make a stand against slavery. Their crusade over, most of them had returned East. The French-Osage who once farmed the bottomlands where the two rivers meet had given way to cattle barons and money men who developed the teeming livestock yards.

Now, Slavs and Mexicans put their shoulders to the grinding labor of the meatpacking houses and railroads. Irish did the laundry and the street work, tended the taverns, and had not yet taken over the police force. Jews sought places to ply their needle trades and planted the beginnings of the garment industry. Italians ran gambling tables in the back rooms of restaurants where bullets sometimes settled disputes. Blacks came from the South and from across Missouri, found work in the mansions stretching south from Quality Hill, and built their own housing settlements among the hidden ravines and almost inaccessible bluffs.

Like the fictional cowboy Will Parker in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma,” countless young men from five of six surrounding states found excitement at “the big theatre they call a bule-que,” where strippers displayed attributes that were “absolutely real.”

The writer Edward Dahlberg, whose mother Lizzie ran a barbershop where young women gave shaves and trims, and sometimes more, to traveling salesmen disgorged from arriving trains, remembered the city of his youth as “a wild, concupiscent” place.

It was already the wide-open town for which it would gain notoriety during Prohibition, its rivers the “washpots of joyous Dianas from St. Joseph and Joplin.” There were “more sporting houses and saloons than churches,” and vice was good for business.

John Edwards, skillful P.R. man for Jesse James and chronicler of the Missouri Confederate dreamers who fled to Mexico after the Battle of Westport in 1864, had drunk himself to death in 1889. By 1901, the newspaper he founded, The Kansas City Times, had been acquired by William Rockhill Nelson, who came from Indiana vowing to elevate the standards and culture of a tasteless town. Nelson converted Edwards’ Times into the morning edition of his afternoon Kansas City, Star where Ernest Hemingway learned to gather news and write a declarative sentence in time to go off to drive an ambulance in World War I.

Somewhere in this milieu Eddie Jacobson and Harry Truman crossed paths. Eddie, who was about fifteen when his family moved to Kansas City from Leavenworth, found work as a stock boy in the garment businesses opening on the west side of the city’s downtown.

Harry Truman’s family had farmed and dabbled in related trades and businesses, including freighting and livestock brokering, and had some social and economic pretensions, but his father was never successful enough to advance the family dreams. After bouncing around various Missouri farming communities, the Trumans settled in Independence, where Harry attended public high school and received the benefits of a classical education. After high school, Harry found his first job opportunities a streetcar ride away, in downtown Kansas City where the banks of the Kemper family and the Jewish-owned garment factories were near-neighbors.

Harry was seven years older than Eddie, and they came from vastly different places in Kansas City’s spectrum, but they shared common desires to be good citizens and to advance in a challenging world where neither had a toehold on privilege. Civic spirit led both of them into the Missouri National Guard. Its activation for service in World War I started them on a path of influencing, and being influenced by, each other for the remainder of their lives.

Truman and Jacobson met at Camp Doniphan, OK where they operated a successful canteen for the 129th Field Artillery. The photograph is marked “A Jolly Bunch.” Truman is fifth from the right; Jacobson is seventh from the left. F.G. Willard, 1917, Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library, Accession number 97-2024.

Fort Sill to Meuse-Argonne

In September 1917 Harry and Eddie were sent to Camp Doniphan at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for training as part of the National Guard’s 35 th Division, made up mostly of men from Missouri and eastern Kansas. A Guardsman since 1905, Harry held the rank of second lieutenant; Eddie reached the rank of sergeant in the Guard, but was eventually listed on regular Army rolls as a private.

Soon after they arrived in Oklahoma Harry was assigned to organize a commissary where the men could buy toiletries and other personal items. Assuming as he wrote his girlfriend Bess Wallace, that Jews had a good head for business, Harry chose Eddie as his assistant.

Each man in the regiment provided $2 in startup capital, and the partnership quickly returned a handsome profit, which put Harry in good standing with the men as well as the officers above him. He always gave credit to Eddie for their success. Eddie, for his part, was immensely grateful to Harry for the fact that he forgave him when he wrecked the future president’s little red Stafford roadster during a buying trip to nearby Lawton.

The stint at Doniphan sealed their friendship, and the subsequent months in France positioned both men among a group of contemporaries who would become successful and influential in Kansas City after their military service, or who would provide loyal support and friendship for as long as any of them lived. By far the most significant of those was Jim Pendergast, whose father and uncles were then building the dominant Kansas City political machine. Lieutenant Truman had pulled Jim Pendergast from the ranks of privates and recommended him for officer training. Like Truman, Pendergast eventually made captain in France.

They sailed from New York harbor on May 20, 1918, aboard the R.M.S. Saxonia, landing at LeHarvre on June 8. They entered combat on August 25 in the Vosges sector and finished at Verdun on November 11. As a battery commander in the 129 th Field Artillery, Harry saw the inside of a few chateaus and other elegant spots. Private Jacobson, assigned to a supply battery, found himself slogging through the mud. When the war ended he was in the hospital with a foot wound.

“Raining, cold,” Eddie wrote on September 18 inside his three-by-four-inch copy of Readings from the Holy Scriptures for Jewish Soldiers and Sailors. “Hope I never see another Yom Kippur like this. Hiked all night wet through and through.”

It is unlikely that Harry or Eddie, or anyone else in the 35 th Division, was aware of events that had occurred in the Middle East during the months they had been preparing for combat in France. With the Ottoman Empire disintegrating, Britain’s General Sir Edmund Allenby had marched into Palestine on Christmas Day 1916 and into Baghdad in March 1917. This marked the beginning of British involvement in the Middle East that over the coming three decades would lead to creation of the nation states of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and, above all, set the stage for the explosive future of Palestine. All of this would be handed off to Harry Truman when he became president of the United States in 1945.

Outfitters to Gentlemen

But the returning war buddies had a lot to do before they would both become players on the global stage. Back in Kansas City after the war, Harry married Bess, and Eddie married his sweetheart Bluma Rosenbaum, a daughter of German Jews who had moved to Kansas City from Memphis. Together, the young men opened a classy haberdashery on Twelfth Street in the heart of the downtown business district, an idea that apparently just popped into their heads on the homeward-bound ship.

The store became a gathering place for the boys from Battery D and other units of the 129th, who shopped when they had money. Many turned to “Captain Harry” for advice and occasional loans. Eddie did the buying for the store. Harry kept the books. They had one clerk.

By then, the wide-open town that was Kansas City at the turn of the century had gradually come under the control of Tom Pendergast, whose nephew Jim have been made an army officer on Harry’s recommendation during the war. Just about anything still went in Kansas City, but it was done with Boss Tom’s authorization. In the years before the war, two of Tom’s older brothers, Mike and James, had laid the groundwork for one of the most effective city political machines in the country. The fourth of the brothers, John, ran the family saloons.

Tom Pendergast’s nephew Jim was one of the war buddies who stopped by Truman & Jacobson from time to time, and probably noticed when the store began to struggle under the weight of a national economic recession and competition from nearby department stores. One day, as the future was looking grim for the young businessmen, Jim’s father Mike came by and asked Harry if he would like to run for political office. Harry jumped at the opportunity.

In 1922, the Pendergasts backed Harry Truman for eastern district representative on the Jackson County Court, essentially the county commission. The seat that Harry won served Independence and the more rural parts of the county, where voters had little to do with Kansas City’s machine politics.

In his campaign, Harry successfully straddled the urban and rural camps of the Democratic Party, and his wartime network enabled him to draw Republican support as well. Thus began Harry’s rise in Jackson County politics, which culminated in his election to the U.S. Senate in 1934. To his detractors Truman became “the man from Pendergast,” but his defenders might say that Tom Pendergast, a racing fanatic, simply recognized a horse worthy of a large bet.

Hit hard by the bankruptcy, Eddie, Bluma, and their toddler daughter Elinor moved in with Bluma’s parents at 36th and Garfield. Eddie again found work in the garment industry. He and Harry continued regular contact, even after settling their business affairs.

On his politicking forays around the rural parts of the county, Harry would stop by a weekend cottage that Eddie and his family rented on a lake. The Jacobsons enjoyed no reciprocal socializing with Bess in the impressive house in Independence – not then, and not ever. It’s not clear whether that was Bess’s doing, or that of her mother, who still ran the household.

Years later, when people began to ask Eddie whether the Trumans were anti-Semitic, he would insist that Harry was not, adding: “I understand his problems as he understands mine.”

There were weekend getaways with National Guard buddies, when Harry usually read and did the cooking while others fished and hunted. Later, when Eddie had a home of his own, there were poker game in his basement, which sometimes included one or more of the Pendergasts.

The Tug of Roots

Eddie Jacobson acquired an existing shop at 39th and Main streets from a retiring owner and went back into the retail men’s wear business. Circa 1945. JCHS PHL 25324.

By the late Twenties the world that Eddie’s family had left behind in Europe was beginning to change in ways that would shape the lives of both Eddie and Harry as neither could have imagined from the relatively small and benign setting of Kansas City. Nor had it occurred to them during their combat days that the war they saw as a battle to protect France and Belgium from Germany would have the far-reaching consequences brought on by the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Turkish empires. These multi-ethnic dynasties had provided a degree of protection to the Jews living under them while also holding in check the nationalist passions that would soon engulf Eastern and Central Europe and the Arab and Moslem kingdoms of the Middle East.

Small numbers of Jews had lived and farmed peaceably in Palestine alongside Arabs for many generations, but when the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over Palestine after the Great War the British government opened the territory to increased Jewish settlement. This was the response of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and Prime Minister David Lloyd George to the appeals of British Zionists, particularly Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, for eventual creation of a homeland in Palestine for Jews.

By the 1930s Eddie was the representative of a Baltimore shirt manufacturer, driving his big Chevy around several states to sell the line to shopkeepers. He had an office in downtown Kansas City and made regular business trips to Baltimore. Gradually, he found himself drawn into the far-away problems of Europe. His relatives and acquaintances began receiving letters from European Jews seeking visas or other help in leaving Europe.

Although Eddie’s rabbi and temple remained non-Zionist in perspective, the concern for their brethren in Europe focused their attention on the issue. Some Kansas City Jews gradually became sympathetic to the idea of Jewish statehood as a way to provide a homeland for those suffering in Europe.

On rare occasions Eddie turned to his friend Senator Truman for help in obtaining visas for German or Polish relatives of Kansas City Jews, and Truman obliged. Harry, who had become a major figure in Washington as chairman of a Senate committee investigating government waste and fraud, was also receiving regular letters and reports from the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the American Palestine Committee, and smaller groups detailing repression of Jews in Germany and expressing the desire of Zionists for a Jewish homeland. Truman responded by joining a number of senators in signing a statement of general support for creating such a homeland.

The Presidency and the President’s Shop

In February 1945, Eddie wrote his friend – by then vice president under the ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt – with the news that “after twenty-five years I am back in the retail business again, and if only 1/10 of the people will come in my store and trade with me, who told me before the election that they bought goods from us on 12th street, I should have a real big business.” Eddie had bought a store from a retiring owner at 39th and Main Street in the midtown Westport district of Kansas City. His new letterhead said Westport Men’s Shop.

“I am pleased to death you are back in the game again,” Harry told Eddie, warning him against getting caught in “an inflation squeeze,” which he blamed for their failure in 1922. Continuing an arrangement begun during Harry’s Senate years, Eddie mailed shirts, ties, hats, and even underwear to the new vice president.

Much more significant issues were soon to arise involving both of them. On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt died, and Harry Truman became President. The next day the new President was the subject of an unsigned memo written by someone at Weizmann’s World Zionist Organization noting that twice during his Senate years Truman had given his support to the concept of establishing Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Over the coming year, Truman received a barrage of requests from Zionists and refugee aid groups urging him to resolve visa problems for Jewish refugees in the United States, to pressure the British to allow 100,000 displaced European Jews into Palestine, and to receive men seeking to shape his thinking on the future of Palestine.

By then, a half-million Jews were living in Palestine as the result of Britain’s gradual opening of the area to Jewish settlers. At the end of World War II pressure mounted on Britain to open Palestine to even more Jews, and warfare broke out between Jews and Arabs there. Having developed close Arab ties during the previous three decades at the behest of Lawrence of Arabia and British military leaders, the London government now seemed to weaken in its support for Jewish rights in Palestine. Angry Zionists set out to prevent such restrictions.

Meanwhile, the genial and accommodating Eddie Jacobson was becoming a media star. In June 1945, Harry made his first visit back home as president and stopped by Eddie’s new store surrounded by the Secret Service and trailed by the Washington press corps. A flustered Eddie showed Harry around the store. They discussed merchandising and posed for photographs with Harry looking over the neckties.

In a nation weary of war, the story of the decades-long friendship became front-page news. Hardly a newspaper could resist the story and photo. Soon, Eddie was being interviewed regularly by the national press for personal anecdotes about the President and their shared history. He sometimes had to work his way through waiting journalists when he arrived to open the store in the mornings. Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg wrote an article about Eddie that appeared in Liberal Judaism and the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. The article concluded with Eddie’s comment that he would never ask the President for a personal favor but would be happy “to urge the President to use every influence he has to rescue and save as many of the desperate and homeless Jews of Europe as possible.”

Wooing of Eddie Jacobson

Among those who saw Eddie Jacobson’s photo with Harry and read the interview about their friendship was Frank Goldman, national president of B’nai B’rith. Goldman quickly picked up the phone in New York and called a man in Kansas City who was active in national B’nai B’rith affairs, the lawyer Abe Granoff.

“Do you know this fellow Eddie?” asked Goldman. Yes, Granoff said, explaining that Eddie gave him shirts in exchange for legal work and their children shared rides to religious school.

Goldman and other committed Zionists went to work educating Eddie about why they wanted a Jewish national state. Despite his concern for the plight of European Jews during the war years, Eddie, like his rabbi, had remained noncommittal about the need for a separate Jewish state. The subject was apparently never discussed in the Jacobson household. Eddie’s younger daughter, Gloria, who started college shortly after the war, recalled her boyfriend and future husband telling her that he was a Zionist. Not understanding the term, she asked, “Will I have to keep kosher?”

Eddie was not an avid reader of books, but he did read newspapers and magazines. His admiration for Harry made him a keen follower of public affairs, and he was a quick learner. Frank Goldman and Maurice Bisgyer, the national executive director of B’nai B’rith, began regular trips to Kansas City to meet with Eddie in the homes of people committed to the cause. As his daughters recalled, the visitors educated Eddie in Zionism and the geopolitics of the Holy Land.

Truman diary entry - July 21, 1947. Photo courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.

“Frank Goldman and Maurice Bisgyer used to come out to Kansas City to court my father in the parlors of many of the rich Jews in Kansas City. I remember them all very well,” Elinor said years later. Although most of his teachers were men, Gloria recalled her father also making friends with “a lady named Nell Peiser, and she taught him a lot.”

Eddie was soon seeking appointments with Harry on behalf of Zionists. In June 1946, he escorted Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of New York to the White House, along with Charles Kaplan, the Baltimore shirt manufacturer whose line Eddie represented. On his frequent trips to the East to buy merchandise Eddie also made a point of stopping by Washington to see Harry or one of his senior aides so he could stay abreast of developments.

Efforts to influence Harry became more intense in 1947 after the United Nations General Assembly began considering a proposal to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Truman received many of those concerned with Palestine and the Jewish refugees, but became angry and testy when he thought they were demanding too much of him. At times he tried to divert the policy questions to Secretary of State James Byrnes or his successor, General George C. Marshall.

“You can’t satisfy these people,” Truman was soon saying. “The Jews aren’t going to write the history of the United States or my history.”

He took off on tangents about how ungrateful the Jews were. At first, he saw little distinction between Zionists and all Jews. “I am not from New York,” he told New York’s Senator Robert Wagner. “I am from the Middle West. I must do what I think is right.”

On July 21, 1947, after a telephone call from former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. seeking permission for a ship loaded with refugees to land in still British-controlled Palestine. Truman exploded on the pages of his diary. “He’d no business whatever to call me,” the President fumed. “The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs. … They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D. P. (Displaced Persons) as long as the Jews get special treatment.”

Policy, Politics, and Human Suffering

As 1947 passed, President Truman felt increasingly trapped. On one side, he faced the pressures of the Zionists to support creation of the Jewish state in Palestine coupled with his own sympathies for Jews who had suffered in Europe. On the other side, he faced the strong opposition of the State and Defense Departments and the British government, all of which argued that the West should not endanger its oil supply by angering the Arabs. Even after Truman replaced Byrnes with General Marshall as secretary of state, the career Foreign Service quickly won over Marshall to its anti-Zionist perspective.

Later in the year, Harry and his political advisors began to focus on the 1948 elections, and so did the Republicans. Anything Truman might do for Jewish displaced persons the Republicans promised to top. Right after the war ended, when Truman called for opening the doors of Palestine to 100,000 refugees, GOP hopefuls Governor Tom Dewey and Senator Robert Taft both announced that they were in favor of admitting several times that number. This put added pressure on Truman.

After Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, co-chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, raised his voice and angrily pounded the desk in the Oval Office, a frustrated and confused Truman decided to cut contact with all Jewish representatives, Zionist or otherwise.

James G. McDonald, who as League of Nations refugee commissioner in the 1930s had been one of the first to raise the alarm about repression of Jews in Germany, met with the president as part of one delegation and concluded that Truman “has a mind set which incapacitates him from understanding Jewish psychology.” McDonald also advised Jewish friends that Truman trusted only people introduced “via Kansas City and Missouri.”

That may have explained why Harry continued to receive Eddie at the White House, even without an appointment. In mid-October 1947, Eddie returned to Kansas City from a Washington visit and reported that Harry was “fighting [the] entire Cabinet and State Department” about the partition of Palestine. A month later, Kansas City Zionists were telling Eddie “Truman was going to give [the] Negev to [the] British. Truman denied this to me – Zionists still frantic.”

On Nov. 29, 1947, the first of two crucial events occurred leading to the birth of the state of Israel. The United Nations General Assembly, including the U.S. delegation, voted for partition of Palestine between Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem to remain a separate entity under international oversight.

The Negev area was included in the Jewish state. Zionists were happy with this outcome, but Arabs were angry, and the vote was followed by intensified warfare in Palestine, with neither side showing much interest in organizing a government.

Britain was still the mandate power in Palestine until new governing authorities could be created in accord with the partition resolution, but it was ready to wash its hands of the situation. British troops were often caught in the bloodshed between Arabs and Zionists, with a substantial loss of lives. Britain also felt the need to concentrate its resources on its own recovery from the war.

In the face of British insistence on a quick withdrawal, the United Nations General Assembly set May 15, 1948, as the date for British withdrawal. Before that time, the United Nations had to decide how to bring about the two-state solution amidst the violence in Palestine. In reality, given the weakened state of most nations after the war, it was the United States that was expected to shoulder the burden of cooling the flames in Palestine.

The American government, however, was poorly equipped to handle the situation that Britain had allowed to develop. Americans had a general familiarity with Jewish issues and felt great sympathy with the plight of those who had suffered under Hitler, but except for experts in the State and Defense Departments Americans knew almost nothing about Arabs and Muslims and the complexities emerging among tribal clans and families trying to assert leadership there.

By early 1948 American and British opponents of the partition plan were urging a delay in carrying it out. They wanted to backtrack and create a temporary United Nations trusteeship, with the use of American troops, after the British withdrawal.

Worried about the violence, Truman seemed to waver in his own resolve and to consider the trusteeship idea, but Zionists were determined to prevent any kind of international trusteeship.

Letter to Eddie Jacobson from Truman. Copyright unknown.

Once again, they turned to their most useful liaison with Truman.

Eddie Asks a Favor

Late on the night of Feb. 20, 1948, the telephone rang at Eddie’s home in Kansas City. A worried Frank Goldman was calling from New York to say that Dr. Weizmann had been turned down when he requested an appointment with President Rruman to seek reassurance that the United States would abide by its agreement to the partitioning of Palestine. Goldman wanted Eddie to charter a plane and get to Washington in time to see the President before he left for a Key West vacation.

Hanging up, Eddie concluded that there was not enough time, even with a chartered plane, to reach Washington before Harry’s departure. Instead, he sent a telegram in the early hours of February 21. “Mr. President,” he wrote, “I have asked you for very little in the way of favors during all our years of friendship, but am begging of you to see Dr. Weizmann as soon as possible.”

Eddie waited nervously as a week went by. Finally, a letter arrived from Harry in Key West. He said he had made it a policy to see no one regarding Palestine until the Security Council could act upon an American suggestion for a police force to enforce partitioning. Then he vented some of his frustrations.

“The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done. The British, of course, have been exceedingly noncooperative in arriving at a conclusion. The Zionists, of course, have expected a big stick approach on our part.”

Harry gave no commitment about seeing Weizmann. On March 12, after Harry returned to Washington, Eddie flew to the capital and the next day, a Saturday, showed up at the White House unannounced. Matt Connelly begged him not to discuss Palestine with the President. Eddie said that was the reason he had come.

After they exchanged a few pleasantries about families, Harry’s vacation, and Eddie’s business, Eddie renewed his plea for Harry to again receive Dr. Weizmann. As soon as Eddie brought up the subject of Palestine Harry turned tense, began to complain about how disrespectful and mean some Jewish leaders had been to him, and then turned down the request.

Eddie felt crushed. Then he noticed in the office a small statue of Andrew Jackson and gathered the courage to say: “Harry, all your life you had a hero. You are probably the best-read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson. … Well, Harry, I too have a hero, a man I never met but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived.” He tearfully begged Harry to receive Dr. Weizmann.

As Eddie watched, Harry began drumming on his desk with his fingers, then swiveled in his chair and stared out the window at the Rose Garden. Eddie knew the sign; Harry was changing his mind. He suddenly turned back to Eddie and blurted out: “You win, you baldheaded son of a bitch. I will see him.” Eddie later called those “the most endearing words I had ever heard from his lips.”

Eddie, who normally drank hard liquor only on St. Patrick’s Day, raced back to the Statler, went straight to the bar and downed two double bourbons before heading upstairs to tell his news to the waiting Frank Goldman and Maurice Bisgyer. Goldman kissed him; Bisgyer was speechless.

The three went to New York the next day, and Eddie had his first-ever meeting with Weizmann. Over tea, Weizmann smoothly dispelled any doubts Eddie felt about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Eddie called Matt Connelly and set up the meeting between the President and Weizmann for March 18. Truman said it had to be entirely off the record, and Eddie was told to stay away for fear the White House press corps would recognize him. Instead, Herman Rosenberg, another Kansas City businessman and war comrade of Harry’s and Eddie’s accompanied Weizmann.

Birth of Israel

Despite Eddie’s accomplishment in persuading Harry to receive Weizmann, nothing was really settled about what would happen after Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine, then less than two months away. The White House and the State Department were still at odds over how to handle partition; at the United Nations the concept of a temporary trusteeship was still being batted around. Revealing the extent of disagreement and poor communication between the White House and State Department, Ambassador Warren Austin spoke at the Security Council the day after Truman saw Weizmann and proposed suspension of partition to allow time for Dean Rusk of the State Department to try to work out a truce between Jews and Arabs. Austin thought he had Truman’s approval for the statement, but Truman was angered and surprised by it.

For the next few weeks, American officials awkwardly tried to sort out things among themselves. By then, the coming presidential election loomed large, and Clark Clifford, the former St. Louis lawyer who had become the President’s chief domestic policy adviser, took a major role in the discussions.

Nationwide, the Jewish vote was not large enough to be a determining factor in the outcome of the election, but in some key places, particularly New York and Illinois, it was viewed as having the potential to sway a close race, and Jewish financial support could be critical.

However in campaign strategy memos written later that summer, Clifford argued that Truman could still win even if Dewey took New York and Pennsylvania as long as the Democrats maintained their traditional power bases in the South and the West and with organized labor. He urged Truman to focus his campaign speeches on domestic issues, but also wanted him to be more assertive in foreign affairs so voters would see the President as being in charge instead of the hugely popular General Marshall.

In the days just before the scheduled British withdrawal from Palestine on May 15, Truman sought advice from all perspectives within the government. The Zionists and their supporters expected that Israel would declare its independent statehood on May 14 and wanted Truman to quickly recognize the new nation.

The State Department continued to write memos supporting a temporary U.N. trusteeship until a truce could be arranged and negotiations opened to create governing authorities for both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The CIA argued that the partition plan could not be implemented amidst the violence and cautioned that the Soviet Union might be behind some of the actions of the Zionist extremist groups, such as the Stern Gang.

Truman finally convened a meeting in his office with Secretary of State Marshall and others connected with the issue. Clark Clifford made the case for recognition. Echoing the argument made by Weizmann, Clifford told Truman that the United States should accept what already existed in Palestine - two states, Jewish and Arab - and recognize them. The situation on the ground in Palestine, Clifford said, had overtaken diplomatic maneuvers for a trusteeship.

Years later, in an oral history interview with an archivist from the Truman Library, Clifford said he had made the argument for recognition at Truman’s request. He said Truman expected Marshall to argue strongly for delay and wanted someone to take the other side in the debates allowing the President to weigh the two arguments.

In general, Clifford said, General Marshall’s argument was that “there were twenty or thirty million Arabs as compared to a million and a half Israelis and the Israelis were going to end up being pushed into the Mediterranean. Further, General Marshall spoke of the natural resources that existed, the oil in the area, our relationship with the Arabs, our ability to keep peace, and so forth and so on.”

When it was his turn, Clifford said he approached the issue like a lawyer making a summation to the jury, ending up “with a ringing peroration.”

“Well, it infuriated General Marshall,” Clifford said. “He said something to the effect that he had been proceeding on the assumption that he was Secretary of State and that this was his area of responsibility; he didn’t understand why Clifford was even there at the meeting. …He rather assumed I was there because there was some political facet to it. He argued that it should not be decided on a political basis but should be decided upon the merits. …President Truman rather tartly said that Clifford was there because President Truman had asked him to come.”

Truman did not reveal his decision at that time but waited a day or so and managed to obtain reluctant agreement from General Marshall. The United States announced its recognition of Israel at 6 p.m. on May 14, immediately after the new nation proclaimed its own independent being. The Holy Land again erupted into violence as Eddie set out for New York and Washington.

President Truman receives a Torah from Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of Israel, during a May 1948 visit to the White House. Brown-Suarez Photo, Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library, Accession number 59-848.

After Eddie’s trip to Washington with Weizmann’s request for money and other support, Truman received Weizmann and promised $100 million in aid, not quite the $135 million Weizmann had requested through Eddie but the beginning of the commitment of the United States to guarantee the life of the Jewish state with money and weapons.

Reelection of Harry

This time around, Eddie’s store was a success, the volume of business enhanced by his White House connections. His shop was so well known that out-of-town mail reached him addressed simply: “Eddie Jacobson, Kansas City, Mo.”

Soon after he opened the store the Jacobsons bought a slightly nicer house. Eddie, however, continued to live a simple life. He still drove a Chevrolet, replacing it every year or two, as he had done in his years on the road.

Half a world away, Palestine was still beset by violence. Even after the recognition of Israel by the Truman Administration, regular demands were made for Eddie’s services. For one thing, Israeli leaders still felt insecure about their borders. On behalf of the United Nations, Sweden’s Count Bernadotte, assisted by Ralph Bunche, was trying to revise the partition boundaries in ways that would satisfy Arabs in Palestine sufficiently that they would agree to a truce. Essentially, he wanted to transfer control of the Negev to the Arab side and to try to force both sides to join some type of governing confederation. Neither side liked Bernadotte’s proposal. The Zionists stood pat for an independent Israel, and the Arab League still wanted all of Palestine to be controlled by Arabs.

Everything exploded on Sept. 17, 1948, when Bernadotte was murdered by the Stern Gang. Revealing the thin line that separated the new Israeli government from the extremists, government leaders hardly bothered to condemn the killing before renewing efforts to be certain that Bernadotte’s plan had died with him. The somewhat dovish Weizmann, now in Israel as president of the new nation, was under constant pressure from Premier David Ben-Gurion not to permit anything less than a fully independent Israel within firm boundaries. It was Weizmann’s successful research as a scientist during World War I that had helped persuade the grateful London government to issue the Balfour Declaration, the underpinning of Jewish settlement in Palestine, but by 1948 Weizmann had been eclipsed in the Zionist movement by Ben-Gurion and other hardliners.

Just two days before the murder of Bernadotte, Eddie and Frank Goldman saw Truman and came away with the happy feeling that everything was going well from their perspective. But the murder created new uncertainty, so Eddie traveled to Oklahoma City to catch up with Harry’s campaign train. The next evening Eddie attended a dinner and reception given by the governor of Oklahoma in Harry’s honor, and then settled into the parlor of the presidential train with Truman and his closest advisers: Clark Clifford, Jonathan Daniels, Matt Connelly, and Charles Ross.

“The entire White House staff convinced me that they were not only [Israel’s] friends but were going all out on Palestine,” Eddie recalled later. “H.S.T. told us he would not budget from U.N. [partition] decision of Nov. 29th, regardless of what Marshall or anyone else said.”

This Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick cartoon “O SAY CAN’T YOU SEE” ran Nov. 17, 1948 in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. State Historical Society of Missouri, The St. Louis Post Dispatch Editorial Cartoon Collection.

Eddie could not afford large campaign contributions himself, but his hard work for the Zionist cause gave him easy access to people able and willing to donate to Truman’s struggling campaign. Eddie felt emboldened enough that night in Oklahoma City to tell Harry: “You are out here shaking the bushes for a few votes while you are losing millions of them in New York and Pennsylvania by the actions of a State Department tied body and soul to the British Foreign Office.”

At another time that summer or fall, his daughters remembered Eddie leaving Harry’s campaign train to race home and gather contributions.

“The train simply stopped, there was no money to pay it to come West,” daughter Elinor recalled in a 2004 interview. “So, Harry called Daddy, and Daddy rounded up some rich Jews in Kansas City - I can name them still, Earl Tranin was one, Hyman Brand was another, Herman Rosenberg was another - and got together a purse and took it out to Ohio.” Elinor and her husband picked up Eddie when the train finally pulled into Union Station on that trip. “I never saw a bunch of grayer old men in my life,” she remembered. “They knew they were beat. They got off that train, all of them somber, with their heads down.” Truman himself continued onward with the Whistle Stop Tour.

Eddie, his cardiac health increasingly a concern, was admitted to Menorah Hospital soon after he returned to Kansas City from Oklahoma. He was released a week later with the admonishment of his doctors to take things easy, but after a week of rest at home he received word from the White House that the President would make a major speech on Palestine at Madison Square Garden. Eddie and Bluma flew to New York on October 27 and the next evening heard Truman’s speech at the Garden in which he repeated the statement he had made to Eddie in Oklahoma City promising to stand by the independence of Israel. In Eddie’s view it quieted all the dissent within the government. It also sealed the commitment of American Zionists to vote for Harry, and to donate heavily to his cash-strapped campaign.

The next day Eddie accompanied Harry on campaign visits to Harlem, Queens, and Brooklyn, and then set out on the presidential train for the ride home to Kansas City to await the election returns. On November 3 - “that Great Day” - Eddie was among the happy friends in the penthouse at the Muehlebach Hotel sharing the joy of Harry’s unexpected victory over Dewey.

Eddie as Hero

Before Eddie and Bluma went to Washington for Harry’s inauguration, Eddie himself was honored at a luncheon at the Muehlebach arranged by Kansas City businessmen grateful for his role in the creation of Israel.

Tom Evans, owner of a drugstore chain and another of the Great War buddies, asked Harry to send a telegram to be read at the event on Dec. 27. Harry said he would attend himself, but told Evans to keep it a secret. As the banquet room filled up, the organizers evaded Eddie’s questions about why one seat remained vacant at the head table.

The guests were nearly finished with the meal when Truman walked in, trailed by aides and the Secret Service. After the introductions, the President took the podium and initially reminisced about his and Eddie’s war days together, starting with the commissary at Fort Sill. Placing his hand on Eddie’s shoulder, he said that after thirty years they were “still partners.” Then he launched into a major foreign policy speech focusing relations with the Soviet Union.

Former President Harry Truman walking with Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City just outside B’nai Jehudah Temple on May 1953. The temple was then located on the corner of Linwood Blvd. and Flora Ave. Copyright unknown, Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library, Accession 75-497.

The Kansas City luncheon was the first of many tributes to Eddie in America and Israel over the next few years. He was feted by Jewish and Zionist groups in New York, Washington, and elsewhere in the United States. He traveled twice to Israel, where he was given the honors of a head of state. His name was placed on monuments in Israel and in the garden of B’nai Jehudah, his temple in Kansas City.

Postcard showing B’nai Jehudah Temple which is one of the oldest synagogues in the Kansas City area, having been founded in 1870. Courtesy of the Steve Noll Postcard Collection at JCHS.

As Eddie’s fame grew, Truman regularly acknowledged that his friend had had great influence on his decision to partition Palestine and recognize Israel. Whatever hesitation Truman may have once felt about the wisdom of creating the Jewish nation he now seemed content to live with that decision. The interplay during the 1947-48 of American Zionists and American politics was a watershed in establishing mutual reliance between the nation of Israel and American elected officials. It created the basis for what became strong Jewish financial support for American politicians who worked for the security and wellbeing of Israel, and the ongoing testimonials to Eddie were an expression of that.

Despite Truman’s acknowledgement of Eddie’s influence on him, many in the Zionist movement, both nationally and internationally, claimed that their public pressure campaign - as distinct from Eddie’s private efforts - won over Truman. For example, the Zionists orchestrated a letter- and card-writing campaign that produced more than a half-million pieces of mail in the White House mailroom. Some 85-90 per cent of all the mail received at the White House in the second half of 1947 and all of 1948 was in support of Israel, much of it from Jewish school children. The Zionists ran full-page newspaper advertisements and made countless speeches and, at every opportunity, met with Truman, their blunt demands often angering him. And they twisted the arms of members of Congress and leaders of both political parties.

Even in Washington there was an uncertainty about who or what had been the deciding factor in Truman’s decision. In policy circles, for years after the decision, people usually attributed the recognition to Clifford’s strong argument and placed much more emphasis on the linkage of the decision to the need for financial support in the 1948 election than did Clifford himself. When Clifford was asked, in 1971, about Eddie’s possible influence he said he was not aware of any but acknowledged that Eddie “occasionally would be on the boat with us.”

However, Dean Acheson, who succeeded Marshall as secretary of state in January 1949, gave considerable weight to Eddie’s influence. In a 1969 television interview with Eric Savareid of CBS News, Acheson also dismissed domestic political considerations as a possible factor in Truman’s thinking.

“I think [Truman] was moved by two things,” Acheson told Sevareid. “First, that we had over a hundred thousand displaced persons in our military camps after the war, mostly Jews. They had nowhere to go. … Some countries offered to help. Brazil, for example, offered to take a great many. But it was not enough. The President tried to get Congress to ease our immigration laws.”

When that failed, Acheson said, he turned to Palestine as the solution.

“The President also, I think, was morally and emotionally moved to accept the Zionist position. This came from his partner in business, Eddie Jacobson. Eddie was a convinced Zionist and talked to the President about it. The President was very fond of him. [This was] one of the most extraordinary examples of history being made by secret pressures.”

Harry Comes Home

When Truman left the White House in January 1953 and returned to live in the house in Independence he took an office in the Federal Reserve Bank Building in downtown Kansas City. He went back to the old crowd of men he had met during or even before the Great War, Eddie among them. Except for concessions to age, they mostly did the same things they had always done. During the years that Harry worked on his memoirs and oversaw construction of his library, a group of them would sometimes walk over to the restaurant of Eddie’s friend Max Bretton and lunch in the back room.

Harry also returned to the poker games. He played at Club 822, a club-within-a-club at the Kansas City Club. Club 822 had come into being during Prohibition as a place where the rich and powerful could drink and play poker without fear of police raids or other public inconveniences.

Harry had been extended a free, lifetime membership on the day in 1945 when he was first sworn in as President. Many of Harry’s old friends, including Tom Evans, the drugstore millionaire, played there.

Eddie did not play at Club 822, where the old Jew-Gentile divides remained. Herry enjoyed poker with another group that included Eddie and his brother, A.D. “Doc” Jacobson, a plumbing contractor, and sometimes Abe Granoff, the lawyer who had introduced Eddie to the Zionist movement.

Although Eddie had been to Israel twice, he and Harry had long talked of making a trip to Europe and Israel together. Truman wanted them to sail to England, where he would pick up an honorary Oxford degree, call on Churchill, Attlee, and the Queen, continue through the Netherlands, France, and Italy, then go to Israel for a ceremony honoring both of them, and finally visiting Greece and Turkey. Their wives would accompany them, and Eddie’s brother Doc. But just when they had a schedule worked out for the fall of 1955, Bess needed extensive dental work. Harry said he would have to put off the trip until the spring. Before spring came, Eddie died in an ambulance on the way to Menorah Hospital. He was 64 years old when he died on Oct. 25, 1955, and had suffered from coronary artery disease for several years.

Harry Truman was among those arriving at the Jacobson home just hours after Eddie’s death. Gloria recalled that she was lying down when her sister came to tell her the President was there. She went downstairs, shook hands with him, and said, “Oh, Mr. President, my dad loved you so. He didn’t answer me, and I looked at him and there was a big tear rolling down his cheek.”

In funeral services at Temple B’nai Jehudah, Rabbi Mayerberg said Eddie had been “as faithful to the American flag which embraces him now as any man. …He also conceived it was a restoration of justice in history to restore the state of Israel.

He knew that little land would be a refuge for many and a bastion of freedom. Jewish history can never be written without these two names - Harry S. Truman and Eddie Jacobson.”

Harry and Eddie: A Hometown Friendship that Changed the World