Diaries
of first ambassador to Israel given to Holocaust Museum
By Peter Carlson
The Washington Post (edited CJM) |
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| U.S. Ambassador James McDonald, left,
chats with David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime
minister, in 1949. Earlier, McDonald was League of
Nations high commissioner for refugees coming from
Germany |
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On Thursday, Barbara McDonald-Stewart presented her
father's diaries, letters and photographs — more than 12,000 pages
of documents — to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its historians
are excited about McDonald's account of the birth of Israel, but they
are even more interested in his diaries from the 1930s, when he was
an eyewitness to the early days of Adolf Hitler's persecution of the
Jews.
From 1933 through 1935, McDonald served the League of Nations as high
commissioner for refugees coming from Germany. He spent those years
discussing the Nazi crusade against Jews with many of the most powerful
men on Earth: Benito Mussolini, Joseph Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
even Hitler himself. At night, he'd summon his secretary and dictate
detailed diary entries about those conversations.
"My father could talk to anybody," Stewart says. "He
could get people to talk, anybody from an elevator operator to the president."
In his diaries, she says, "he thought of himself as a reporter.
He wanted to report what was said and his impressions."
Born in 1886 in Coldwater, Ohio, McDonald received a Ph.D. in history
from Harvard, then founded the Foreign Policy Association in 1919 to
promote internationalism and the League of Nations. As FPA chairman,
he traveled widely in the '20s, meeting many of the world's top political
and business leaders.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the League of Nations sent McDonald
to find out what could be done about the steady stream of Jews fleeing
Germany. McDonald found the Nazis surprisingly candid with him about
their virulent anti-Semitism, in part because he looked like their Aryan
ideal: tall, slim and blond.
"When I indicated my disbelief in their racial theories,"
he wrote in the diary, "they said what other Nazis had said, 'But
surely you, a perfect type of Aryan, could not be unsympathetic with
our views.'"
On April 8, 1933, McDonald met Hitler, who promptly began railing against
the Jews.
"As to Jews," Hitler told McDonald, "why should there
be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of
thousands of Aryan Germans are out on the streets. No, the world has
no ground for complaint. Germany is not fighting merely the battle of
Germany. It is fighting the battle of the world."
McDonald recorded his impressions of the Führer: "The man
does have ... the eyes of a fanatic, but he has in addition, I think,
much more reserve and control and intelligence than most fanatics."
Alarmed, McDonald tried to warn world leaders about Hitler, but he found
many indifferent and some anti-Semitic. The archbishop of Canterbury
suggested to McDonald that "the Jews themselves" might be
responsible for the "excesses of the Nazis.
"
McDonald was disappointed when he raised the treatment of the Jews with
Cardinal Pacelli, who was to become Pius XII, the controversial pope
of the Holocaust period. "The response was noncommittal,"
McDonald wrote, "but left me with the definite impression that
no vigorous cooperation could be expected."
In contrast, McDonald found Roosevelt interested and informed about
the plight of German Jews.
"My father found that (FDR) was very interested and aware and would
have liked to help, but there were real political problems," Stewart
says. "It was the Depression, and how many refugees could he allow
to immigrate when millions were out of work in America?"
By December 1935, McDonald was so angry at the world's indifference
to the plight of German Jews that he resigned as high commissioner in
a long, scathing letter of protest that was printed in newspapers worldwide
— and banned in Germany.
In 1936 he took a job writing editorials for The New York Times. Later
he did radio commentaries for NBC and became president of the Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences.
On June 22, 1948, McDonald got a call from Clark Clifford, an aide to
President Truman.
"Could I, he wanted to know, go to Israel as the government's first
representative?" McDonald wrote in the diary.
He eagerly accepted and flew to Israel with Barbara, who had just received
her history degree. (Her mother remained in New York with Barbara's
pregnant sister.) Barbara became, at 22, the official hostess of the
U.S. mission to Israel.
McDonald and his daughter — he calls her Bobby in the diaries
— socialized frequently with Israel's founding fathers, Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Chaim Weizmann. "There
was just time to drive out with Bobby to the Weizmanns' for lunch,"
he wrote in the diary Nov. 5, 1948. "Dr. W was so contemptuous
of Arab weakness that he said the Israeli forces could take Damascus
in an hour if they chose."
Bobby played hostess to brilliant guests. One night, everyone repaired
to the flat roof of the ambassador's residence to catch a cool breeze.
"I remember Leonard Bernstein lying on the parapet, propped up
on his elbow, carrying on a conversation," she says.
Despite the periodic air raids and occasional battles, the mood in the
new nation was upbeat. "They were fighting for their life, but
it was a very exciting and optimistic time," she says.
"I remember my father saying, 'It'll take 25 years to make peace.'
Now, that seems optimistic."
McDonald served as ambassador until 1951, then returned to New York
to write a book, "My Mission to Israel." He spent the rest
of his life, until his 1964 death, raising money for Israel.
Barbara got her Ph.D. in history, using her father's 1930s diaries as
a source for her dissertation on American policy toward German refugees
before the war. She married and raised two children. In 1990 she retired
from teaching, determined to find a publisher for her father's diaries
but could find no takers. Finally, she gave up.
But last May, the Holocaust Museum received a letter from the daughter
of Thomas Sugrue, the writer who had helped McDonald with his book on
Israel. Among Sugrue's papers was a 500-page section of McDonald's diary
from 1933. Stephen Mize, an archivist at the museum, read it and was
astounded at its richness. Realizing it was part of a larger diary,
he tracked down Barbara Stewart.
Thrilled that somebody had located the missing part, Stewart agreed
to donate the entire diary to the museum, which agreed to publish all
of McDonald's diaries from the high-commissioner years. Stewart thinks
the book will change the way historians view the era.
"They've been writing that nobody knew and nobody cared and nobody
was doing anything about the Jews in Germany," she says. "The
diaries show that there were people who did their best to try to help."
She pauses. "Of course, it will also show that there were people
who didn't help, who refused to help."
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