America's Great Game (17 page)

In the absence of a viable Arab lobby, Kim turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers whose contribution to Middle Eastern development he praised in
Arabs, Oil, and History
. The Protestant presence in the Arab world was backed up by a domestic-support apparatus consisting of mission boards and educational bodies such as the Near East College Association, and it had some effective spokespersons, most notably the venerable AUB president Bayard Dodge. In addition, a small but influential body of Protestant theologians challenged fundamentalist
Protestants’ linking of Jewish restoration with the millennium, an argument expounded regularly by the Chicago-based weekly
Christian Century
. All this added up to a distinct tradition of Protestant American anti-Zionism available for mobilization by a would-be anti-Zionist organizer.
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Also ready to lend a hand was the American oil industry. The Arabian consortium ARAMCO depended for its access to Saudi oil fields on the goodwill of Ibn Saud, an irreconcilable anti-Zionist, and was developing plans for a trans-Arabian pipeline (TAPline) to the Mediterranean that would run through the Arab countries neighboring Palestine. Concerned lest US government policy hurt these ventures, the company launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab viewpoint. Predictably, the ubiquitous William Eddy, now in ARAMCO employ, featured heavily, briefing Washington officials about the hazards of a Zionist foreign policy before taking off on periodic tours of Arab capitals. (Archie Roosevelt met Eddy for the first time shortly after arriving in Beirut in 1947 and quickly declared him “a truly great man.”) Not as impressive in person as Eddy, but no less influential behind the scenes, was the ARAMCO vice president James Terry Duce, “a discreet and unostentatious man,” according to company historian William Mulligan, with “the face and figure of a Kewpie doll.” Duce set up an office in Washington, the Government Relations Organization, that functioned as a kind of ARAMCO State Department, with an Arabian affairs division reputedly modeled after OSS/Cairo. He also worked with Eddy to make sure that deserving causes in the United States, such as the Princeton Middle East program, received unpublicized ARAMCO assistance. Kim Roosevelt, meanwhile, boosted the company’s image to an American audience in
Arabs, Oil, and History
, describing its efforts to improve Arabian education, health care, and transportation as a model for the Marshall Plan–like program he hoped to see the US government enacting throughout the region. (This was, arguably, a more positive depiction of ARAMCO’s Saudi operation than it really deserved.)
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If there was nothing terribly surprising about the anti-Zionism of Arabist Protestants and oilmen, that of a third group that would prove an important ally for Kim Roosevelt requires a little more explanation. In the 1940s a subgroup of Jewish Americans felt distinctly uncomfortable about the recent successes of the Zionist movement. Generally of
high social status and old-stock, German descent, these Reform Jews questioned Zionism’s insistence on a distinct Jewish national identity, seeing it as a denial of their Americanism and an invitation to persecution by anti-Semites. In 1942, goaded by the support of the Central Conference of American Rabbis for the Zionist plan to form a Jewish army, this group formed a breakaway organization, the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). With the chair of the Sears Roebuck board, Lessing J. Rosenwald, serving as president, day-to-day running of the ACJ fell to Executive Director Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Despite a somewhat lugubrious appearance, Berger was an energetic and ingratiating young man who soon won the ACJ the support of a number of prominent lay Jews, among them George L. Levison, scion of an old and wealthy San Francisco family. Together with another well-connected anti-Zionist rabbi, Morris S. Lazaron, Berger and the others set to work trying to persuade the Jewish American community that Zionism was fundamentally opposed not only to American ideals but also to the universal, religious character of Judaism.
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It was an uphill struggle. No matter how hard they worked to craft compelling theological and practical arguments, the leaders of the American Council for Judaism simply could not compete with Zionism’s raw emotional appeal nor with the organizational and polemical skills of the Zionist leadership. Increasingly isolated within the Jewish community, they looked elsewhere for support—and found it among the Arabists of the State Department. It was Morris Lazaron who initiated this alliance, reporting to his friend, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, on the ructions in the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Lessing Rosenwald, who served in the early 1940s on the War Production Board, accepted the ACJ presidency only after having satisfied himself that the State Department would not object, and helped bring Dean Acheson and Loy Henderson into the organization’s orbit. The ACJ’s main representative in government circles, though, was the gregarious George Levison, who, thanks to wartime service in the State Department, enjoyed “intimate associations,” as Berger put it, with Acheson, Henderson, and Kim Roosevelt. Levison and Kim had roomed together in Cairo, where the former was serving as a special assistant in the Landis mission. After the war, when Kim was removed from the Middle East scene by his OSS history project duties, Levison worked with Henderson to counter the Zionist campaign for partition, pressing instead for a relaxation of federal
immigration restrictions so as to permit more Jewish displaced persons to enter the United States, as opposed to Palestine. Elmer Berger also became involved in this effort, after Levison had introduced him around Washington. Given this tangle of connections—several of them traceable, like so much of the CIA’s early program in the Middle East, back to OSS/Cairo—it was hardly surprising that Kim Roosevelt should have reached out to the Jews around the ACJ when he embarked on his anti-Zionist publicity campaign.
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It would be easy to view the collaboration that developed from these contacts as one in which a master spy used an apparently independent organization as a front for secret government purposes. There is an element of truth to this interpretation, but it also obscures a more complex, and interesting, reality. To begin with, correspondence between George Levison and Elmer Berger shows that it was the American Council for Judaism that first courted Kim Roosevelt, rather than vice versa; the anti-Zionist Jews clearly regarded the young American blue blood, with his combination of society connections and access to mass media like the
Saturday Evening Post
, as a potentially invaluable ally in promoting their cause. “Please keep your spies on the alert for the return from the Middle East of one young Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.,” Levison wrote Berger in June 1947 in his customarily jovial style. “I think we should grab said aforementioned young man quickly.”
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The plotting was successful. Soon after his return from his tour, Kim agreed to lecture in November 1947 to a local chapter of the American Council for Judaism in Houston, Texas. The run-up to this event revealed a service that the ACJ could perform in return for Kim. His reputation as an outspoken anti-Zionist preceded him to Texas, and Zionists there accused him of also being an anti-Semite, causing the Houston chapter to get cold feet about hosting his appearance. When word of this reached Levison, he was furious, writing the chapter president that he had known Kim “intimately for more than four years” and could “state without equivocation that there [was] not one iota of truth in the Zionists’ accusation.” The lecture passed off without incident, presumably because Kim, with his usual cool pragmatism, steered clear of comment about Palestine. Nonetheless, the episode showed the vulnerability of non-Jewish anti-Zionists to allegations of anti-Semitism. Henceforth, Levison and Berger deliberately offered the ACJ platform to eminent Gentiles wishing to go on record against Zionism as a means of deflecting
such charges. “We might be cited as an example of a group of
Jews
holding this viewpoint,” Berger wrote one potential spokesperson. “That fact has been found by some other people to be a reed upon which they could lean in the event that someone tried to make them anti-Semites ‘by appointment.’”
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Another noteworthy aspect of the collaboration between Kim Roosevelt and the anti-Zionist Jews of the American Council for Judaism was the strong element of friendship involved. “My father had very few close friends, very few, but one of them was certainly George Levison,” recalled Kim’s son Jonathan years later. “As a youth, George . . . was very much part of my life, he came to the house, [and] I remember visiting him in California once. . . . He was a wonderful, kind, fatherly-type man.” Kermit III had similar childhood memories: “I grew up knowing Elmer Berger, whom I liked, and I was surprised to discover later in life how controversial a figure [he] was.” Kim and Polly socialized with Elmer Berger and his wife, Ruth, whenever they got the chance. Berger gave the Roosevelt children presents, and in 1953 Kim asked Levison to be godfather to his newest child, daughter Anne. This was not just an expedient political alliance; it was also an intimate personal relationship.
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Of course, the timing of Kim’s enlistment in the ACJ’s campaign proved to be far from propitious, with the UN vote for partition coming at the end of November 1947, a development that demoralized many of the organization’s members and caused some even to consider disbanding. Berger, however, was determined to keep the ACJ flag flying and, by the end of the year, was detecting signs of a revival in anti-Zionist fortunes. Partition was running into trouble, the result of Arab opposition and growing intercommunal strife in Palestine, leading the State Department to suggest the creation of a UN trusteeship—effectively, a reversal of the November resolution. Meanwhile, Kim Roosevelt was busy networking in Arabist and anti-Zionist circles, trying to create the sort of movement momentum that had propelled Zionism in the run-up to partition. This was not the first time these disparate groups had interacted: for example, the anti-Zionist Protestants associated with the
Christian Century
and the Jews of the ACJ were engaged in ongoing dialogue. However, no one had ever attempted to give these sporadic connections organized form—until, that is, the launch of the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJP) in February 1948.

The Committee for Justice and Peace was a broad alliance of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, oddly reminiscent of the Popular Front, the diverse coalition against fascism stitched together by the communists in the 1930s. Kim Roosevelt was clearly the spark plug, identifying himself as “Organizing Secretary” in a telegram sent on February 21 to “100 prominent Americans,” inviting them to form a committee “to uphold international law and democratic principles” in the national debate about Palestine. Those subsequently listed as National Council members included an impressive assortment of religious figures, educators, and businessmen. Particularly striking were the names of the vice chairs—Morris Lazaron of the ACJ and Henry Sloane Coffin, the distinguished former president of Union Theological Seminary (and uncle of future CIA officer turned antiwar campaigner William Sloane Coffin)—and chair, Virginia C. Gildersleeve.

The long-serving dean of New York City’s Barnard College, the redoubtable Gildersleeve was a pioneer in American women’s higher education and the only female member of the US delegation to the 1945 founding conference of the UN. She was also a high-profile anti-Zionist, having become involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius. It was presumably this last quality that most recommended her to Kim Roosevelt, who already knew her through his sister, Clochette, a Barnard student (there was a Roosevelt family correspondence with Gildersleeve not unlike that with Endicott Peabody). The simple fact that Gildersleeve was a woman might also have been a factor in her selection as the public face of the CJP: women were often preferred for such roles in this period because they were deemed to embody the American associational impulse and to transcend the masculine world of vulgar power politics better than men. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired countless committees in the postwar years, was the most famous personification of this putative feminine trait.
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Gildersleeve announced the CJP’s formation on March 2, explaining that the Committee planned on pressing the UN Security Council to call a cease-fire in Palestine and then petition the General Assembly to reconsider its partition resolution. The same statement went on to identify Kim Roosevelt as the Committee’s executive director and Garland Evans Hopkins, a Virginia minister who had traveled in the Middle East on behalf of the Methodist Board of Missions, as its secretary. Not included in
Gildersleeve’s announcement was any information about the new organization’s finances. Later, a Zionist source reported that an unidentified ARAMCO official had handed Hopkins $2,000 in a dark corridor of the Willard Hotel. Although there is no other evidence of this transaction, ARAMCO’s record of donating to Arabist causes, and the appearance of James Terry Duce’s name on the Committee for Justice and Peace’s National Council roster, lends the claim some credibility. That said, the Committee’s overheads were minimal, as it received free administrative support from the ACJ’s Elmer Berger, who was more experienced in such matters than his aristocratic friend Kim Roosevelt. “He really is a swell guy but he is an innocent abroad in terms of organizational work,” Berger told Levison before going on to recount how, after a meandering meeting of the CJP executive committee held at Belle Roosevelt’s New York townhouse, he had coached Kim on how to prepare press statements and advertisements. (The two men then repaired to Berger’s apartment and “proceeded to get sufficiently inebriated to forget about the trying day.”) This was not the only service the ACJ provided for the CJP: Berger believed that Morris Lazaron’s overt participation in the Committee helped “remove any basis for saying it is an anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic organization.”
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