Letter from Dean Alfange to Major General Harry Vaughan, with a Letter from President Harry S. Truman to Dean Alfange

May 18, 1948 Personal and Confidential Dear Dean: Harry Vaughan handed me your letter of the fifth and I read it with a lot of interest. It looks as if things have turned out as you anticipated in your letter. The main difficulty with our friends, the Jews in this country, is that they are very emotional - they, the Irish and the Latin- Americans have something in common along that line. The President of the United States has to be very careful not to be emotional or to forget that he is working for one hundred and forty-five million people primarily and for peace in the world as his next objective. I certainly appreciated the chance to read your letter very much. My soul objective in the Palestine procedure has been to prevent bloodshed. The way things look today we apparently have not been very successful. Nobody in the country has given the problem more time and thought than I have. In 1946 when the British- American Commission on Palestine was appointed and Mr. Bevin had made an agreement with me that he would accept the findings of that Commission I thought we had the problem solved but the emotional Jews of the United States and the equally emotional Arabs in Egypt and Syria prevented that settlement from taking place, principally because of the immigration clause in that settlement, We are faced with an entirely new problem now and I sincerely hope that sanity will come to both sides so that a peaceful approach can be made to a settlement which should have been worked out by the British some twenty odd years ago. Sincerely yours, MARRY S. TRUMAN Honorable Dean Alfange Nine East 40th Street New York, New York