Diplomat’s Diaries Open a Window to the Past

Diplomat James Grover McDonald passed through the history of the 20th century like a privileged bit player. He met with Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt and was intimately involved in the birth of Israel as Harry S. Truman’s first envoy to the fledgling nation -- faithfully recording his encounters in a massive cache of private diaries.

McDonald’s detailed accounts remained hidden for decades, unavailable to diplomatic historians until this week, when the U.S. Holocaust Museum made the diaries public under an arrangement with his daughter.

In thousands of typed, onionskin pages, McDonald described a lost world of diplomacy in which foreign officers traveled by train and ocean liner and discussed the state of mankind over high tea. He raised the mistreatment of Jews with an unyielding Hitler, tried to secure Vatican help for refugees from the papal secretary of state who later became Pope Pius XII and joined Israeli leaders at a 1948 orchestral performance by conductor Leonard Bernstein while air raid sirens wailed in the distance.

Museum officials say the diaries offer fresh insight into the rise of the Nazi state and the conflicted policy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward dispossessed Jews and the creation of Israel. The McDonald diaries, said museum historian Severin Hochberg, are “a treasure trove that reinforces much of what we know with new detail.”

Diplomatic historians said they would welcome a new source of information on world events of the 1930s and 1940s. But they expressed doubt that McDonald’s perspective would alter much of what is known about the era.

“We already have a lot of detail from most of the key participants from that time,” said Neil Betten, a Florida State University historian who is an expert in 1940s U.S. diplomacy. “Still, even someone on the periphery can add to our understanding.”

McDonald’s daughter, Barbara Stewart, said she was pleased the museum would become a home for her father’s diaries, which until last year took over an entire bookcase in her Virginia home. McDonald, who died in 1964, had hoped to write his memoirs, she said, but never found a publisher.

“I always worried that if I had a house fire, I wouldn’t know which diary to grab because there were so many of them,” Stewart said. “Now they’ve got a proper home.”

Born in 1886 in Ohio, McDonald grew up in Indiana and attended Indiana University and Harvard, later teaching at Harvard and founding the influential Foreign Policy Assn. in 1919. An abiding interest in the affairs of German Jews led to his appointment in 1933 as high commissioner for Refugees for the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.

In that post, McDonald traveled the world trying to persuade governments to aid refugees caught in the gathering storm that led to World War II.

In a Berlin restaurant in March 1933, McDonald sat, dumbfounded, while Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengel, Hitler’s Harvard-educated foreign press chief, blithely described how the Nazis planned to “strangle all Jewish business” with a boycott and then menace the Jews themselves.

“Six hundred thousand Jews would be simple,” Hanfstaengel told McDonald. “Each Jew has his S.A. [storm trooper]. In a single night, it could be finished.”

A week later, Hitler sat across from McDonald in the office he had just won in violence-plagued elections. Noticing how the German leader “glanced at him suspiciously,” McDonald listened as the Nazi leader dismissed the threat to Jewish refugees.

“As to Jews,” Hitler told him, “why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets [unemployed]? No, the world has no just grounds for complaint.”

As the Nazi treatment of Jews worsened, McDonald met with President Roosevelt and other U.S. officials, seeking to open up immigration. But American “anti-Semitism was at its peak,” and Roosevelt’s “hands were tied,” Betten said. Roosevelt “wasn’t willing to push for more refugees because he needed Southern Democrats to help rebuild the American military.”

Frustrated, McDonald resigned from the League of Nations post, blasting the indifference of world leaders. He became a commentator on foreign affairs for the Blue radio network, which later became NBC, and spent several years as an editorial writer for the New York Times.

He spent the war years as an unofficial advisor to Roosevelt on refugee affairs, a period during which he curtailed his diary entries. McDonald took to writing again at the war’s end, when he served on the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, the international organization charged with finding a postwar solution for the British territory in the Mideast. In 1948, he was named as the first envoy to Israel while the U.S. mulled whether to support its creation as a nation.

From a makeshift ministry in partitioned Palestine, McDonald sparred with State Department officials -- including Secretary of State George Marshall -- who were cool to the idea of an independent Israel.

He tried to placate Truman when the president grew impatient with Israeli leaders and Jewish lobbyists.

And he had to worry for his own safety after Israelis assassinated French diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte and rumors swirled that an American would be next. McDonald’s exchanges with Truman and other leaders, Hochberg said, “reinforce our understanding of how worried American leaders were about leaning too far toward Israel and giving the Soviet Union leverage in the Arab world.”

Michael T. Benson, president of Snow College in Utah and an analyst of postwar U.S. policy toward Israel, cautioned that while McDonald was a rare pro-Israeli voice in the State Department, Truman was guided more by his own conviction that “establishing a homeland for Jewish people was the right thing to do. Truman allowed his own sentiment and emotion to come into play.”

Holocaust Museum archivists have spent recent months poring through the diaries, but as late as this week, they still were marveling over nuggets mined from McDonald’s neatly typewritten papers and faded letters.

“Some of these passages are amazing,” said museum archivist Stephen Mize.

“There’s a remarkable scene in Israel where he describes listening to Leonard Bernstein conduct an orchestra playing Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ as the bombs are falling. Look at this.”

The frail pages crackle.

“What an eerie feeling,” McDonald typed as bombers droned overhead, “listening to the indescribable beauty of this slow movement ... with the chance that suddenly the roof might cave in.”