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* Morale at the Embassy having sunk low under the effect of Hurley’s rages and vendettas, the officers on duty in Chungking, whose careers were vulnerable to unfavorable action by the chief of mission, were anxious to be transferred or, in the case of two who were on leave in the United States, not to return. Atcheson, as Hurley’s ranking subordinate, though too senior to be adversely affected, could not remain under the Ambassador’s violent objection, and was transferred to General MacArthur’s command as political adviser. Hurley personally obtained the removal of Service, whom he correctly guessed to be the principal drafter of the telegram, by direct request to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (Service being attached to the Military Command). In the case of Raymond Ludden, a political officer who had also served with the Dixie Mission and after a four-month tour of Communist territory had reported the likelihood of their coming to power, Hurley obtained a statement from Wedemeyer that he “no longer required Ludden’s services.” Fulton Freeman, third secretary of the Embassy, Japan Language Officer Yuni, and Arthur Ringwalt, former consul in Kweilin recently transferred to Chungking, who suffered the longest under Hurley’s vindictiveness, were all variously reassigned. With the exception of Atcheson, who died shortly thereafter, the careers of all these men were slowed or otherwise damaged to greater or less degree by this episode. (Information supplied to the author by John S. Service.)

The author wishes to acknowledge with thanks the assistance of Mr. Ray Cromley and Mr. John S. Service, and of Mr. William Cunliffe of the Military Records Division, National Archives, who found and secured declassification of the relevant documents.

The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story

The incident that suggested Henry Morgenthau, Sr., as a focus of the modern Jewish dilemma is one of history’s classic ironies: that by his alert dispatch of assistance to the Jewish colony of Palestine in August 1914—when serving as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey—he saved it from starvation and probable extinction, thus preserving it for the ultimate statehood which he came to believe was a “stupendous fallacy” and “blackest error.” Measured in material terms, the aid was minuscule, and the incident remains virtually unknown except to a few investigators; but it was of decisive and immense historical importance.

The circumstances were these: The Jewish settlement in Palestine, numbering about 100,000, consisted, on the one hand, of pious and impoverished believers who had trickled in over the centuries to die in Jerusalem, together with some families who had never left the homeland, and, on the other hand, of the later wave of conscious Zionists who had immigrated since the 1880s and were endeavoring to establish themselves on land sold to them as worthless by Turkish and Arab landlords. Almost all were dependent either on remittances from abroad or, in the case of the new colonists, on the export of agricultural products to the West and some subsidy from the Diaspora. They would be cut off from these contacts if Turkey joined the Central Powers—which, Morgenthau foresaw, contrary to Allied expectations, was bound to occur. From his close, and at that time friendly, relations with the Turkish leaders—who were so taken with this unorthodox Ambassador that they offered him a Turkish cabinet post—he knew the hope of Turkish neutrality was a delusion.

On August 27 he cabled to the American Jewish Committee in New York, the earliest group of its kind organized in this country for the defense of Jewish interests and of “Jewish civil and religious rights, in any part of the world.” The AJC was the organ of what has been called the Jewish “establishment” of those days—that is to say, mainly the German Jews. Dedicated to assimilation in their country of residence, they were ipso facto opponents of the Zionist movement for a Jewish state, though not of Palestine as a center