(2003-07-11) — Senator Trent Lott introduced a bill today to take away Harry Truman’s title as President after a newly-discovered diary indicated the plain-spoken Missourian may have been an anti-Semite.
Sen. Lott lost his own leadership position earlier this year after saying the country would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, instead of Mr. Truman.
The recently-found Truman diary contains a 1947 entry in which the President reflected on a meeting with former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, who requested the President’s help with a ship full of Jews that couldn’t get permission to dock in British-ruled Palestine.
“He’d no business, whatever to call me,” Truman wrote. “The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.”
President Truman went on to write: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment.
Sen. Lott said Mr. Truman’s secret beliefs about Jews were as repugnant as the late Sen. Thurmond’s early pronouncements about blacks.
“If I have to lose my Senate leadership role because I said it would have been better to elect Thurmond than Truman, then Harry should lose his position too,” said Sen. Lott. “We can’t have generations of American children admiring this man. He clearly had flaws, moral blind spots, sins and other human characteristics which should forever besmirch his legacy.”

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