Eddie Jacobson’s Effort to Arrange Truman’s Meeting with Weizmann was a decisive act of personal persuasion amid a mounting crisis over Palestine. After official efforts to reach Harry S. Truman had failed, Jacobson pressed his old friend to see Chaim Weizmann, a sick and exhausted advocate for a Jewish state. Truman first refused, but Jacobson persisted, and their private conversation changed the immediate course of events: Truman agreed to meet Weizmann and then assured him that the United States would support partition. The success of the appeal was personal; its consequences reached far beyond the friendship that made it possible.

A Refusal in a Divided Policy Climate

By February 1948, Weizmann’s efforts to meet Truman had stalled. After arriving in New York from London, Weizmann had fallen ill from the strain of events, and attempts to make contact with the President had failed. Late on February 20, Frank Goldman, president of the national B’nai B’rith, telephoned Jacobson in Kansas City. Goldman said that no one, not even Ed Flynn, could move Truman to see Weizmann, and asked Jacobson to intervene.

Jacobson wrote urgently to Truman, asking him to meet Weizmann as soon as possible. Truman’s reply, sent from Key West on February 27, was discouraging: he saw nothing new Weizmann could tell him and considered the situation unsolvable as it then stood. That refusal came against a wider uncertainty in the administration. Loy W. Henderson doubted that Truman had made a final decision to support a Jewish state, and described the President as torn between domestic political pressures and concern about the longer-term consequences of Zionist-backed policies. The State Department, Henderson observed, had not persuaded Truman that the proposed Arab and Jewish states served U.S. interests.

Jacobson’s Personal Appeal

Jacobson did not treat Truman’s letter as the end of the matter. As soon as Truman returned to Washington, Jacobson travelled from Kansas City and, on Saturday, March 13, entered the White House West Wing without an appointment. Matt Connelly warned him not to bring up Palestine. Jacobson nevertheless raised the subject after greeting Truman. They had first talked about their families and Jacobson’s business, which Truman had always followed with a close friend’s interest; then the conversation turned abruptly to the issue Jacobson had come to discuss.

Truman became tense and spoke sharply, unlike himself in Jacobson’s recollection. He wanted no further discussion of Palestine, Jewish or Arab claims, or British policy, and said he would leave the matter to the United Nations. He also complained of abuse from some Jewish leaders. Jacobson later told Clark Clifford that Truman explained his anger as directed less at Jacobson than at those who were using their friendship to gain access to him. The exchange exposed the strain placed on that friendship: Jacobson had entered as a trusted old companion, but his appeal touched a subject Truman was determined to avoid.

Jacobson then pointed to a small bronze of Andrew Jackson on horseback on a table beside the wall. Truman prized the statuette, a model of the statue he had commissioned for the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City. Jacobson invoked Truman’s lifelong admiration for Jackson and compared it with his own admiration for Weizmann, whom he described as a gravely ill man who had travelled a great distance to plead for his people. He insisted that Weizmann should not be held responsible for insults from other American Jewish leaders. Abba Eban later judged the comparison between Weizmann and Jackson far-fetched, but effective. Truman drummed his fingers, turned his chair toward the window, and sat in silence before turning back and agreeing to see Weizmann. Jacobson left the White House and walked across Lafayette Square to the Statler Hotel, where he drank two double bourbons.

The Secret White House Meeting

On the evening of March 18, after dark, Weizmann was brought quietly into the White House through the East Wing to avoid reporters. Truman insisted that the meeting remain secret and had not informed the State Department. Jacobson, by then familiar to White House reporters, agreed to stay away. The private meeting lasted three quarters of an hour. In later accounts, both Truman and Weizmann described it as successful: Truman said he wanted justice without bloodshed and assured Weizmann that the United States would support partition. Truman later recalled that Weizmann had left with a clear understanding of his policy; he also remembered Jacobson as present, although Jacobson had not attended in person.

The meeting’s secrecy and timing mattered. Less than a day later, on March 19, Warren Austin, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, presented a policy reversal without warning. The change contradicted the understanding Truman had just reached with Weizmann and revived a position Truman had tacitly accepted several weeks earlier while in Key West. Truman had told neither Secretary of State George C. Marshall nor the State Department about the meeting or its outcome. The narrative presents this omission as consequential, whether because Marshall was away or because Truman resisted confronting the possibility that they were working at cross-purposes.

Personal Influence and Political Consequences

Jacobson’s intervention succeeded where formal approaches had failed because it drew on a relationship that was not merely political. Their conversation began with personal and business matters, and Jacobson could appeal to Truman through a shared history and a familiar symbol, the Andrew Jackson statuette. The episode does not show that friendship erased Truman’s doubts: he had refused the meeting, reacted angrily when Jacobson raised Palestine, and remained troubled by the policy’s risks. Rather, Jacobson’s appeal persuaded him to hear Weizmann directly, after which Truman gave a concrete assurance of U.S. support for partition.

The account also distinguishes persuasion from coordination. Jacobson could bring Truman to the meeting, but the President’s decision to keep it from the State Department left the administration without a shared understanding of the commitment. The abrupt public reversal the next day exposed the gap between Truman’s private assurance and the policy presented at the United Nations. The encounter thus stands both as a victory for Jacobson’s persistence and as a warning that personal diplomacy, even when it moves a President, cannot substitute for agreement across the government.