We’re back. Thank you, Doc. George, uh George Burns is is a phenomenon. Uh at the age of 93, uh I would guess he is probably certainly America’s oldest active entertainer. And the amazing thing is I guess the greatest success that George had came in the last 20 or 23 years of his life. Um, he’s still entertaining, shows no signs of slowing down.

And if I’m right, Irving, doesn’t he have a date to play the London Palladium on his 100th birthday? That’s right. And I think he’s going to make it. Would you welcome Mr. George Burn? A we got a nice all right. Doc looks good. Does he look good? Looks good. Oh yeah. Looks like he came in first. UH, WHAT number of cigar is this for you today? Now, this is my 10th or 11th cigar.

I smoke between 15 and 20 cigars a day. Yeah. And it’s very exciting. Yeah. At 90 at 93, if I can get it into a hold UP WELL, it’s it’s the little things in life, not yours. Huh? Hasn’t your doctor said to you, “Now, George, you got My doctor’s dead. The hell with him, huh?” I read I read in the paper that spinach is bad for you.

Spinach is bad for you. I read that when I was a kid. You know, eat spinach. Yeah. I never never had spinach. No. Yeah. Don’t like water. Don’t I like martinis? You have right. Okay. Right, sir. How do you Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you have a martini for lunch at night time? No.

No. I I I play bridge in the afternoon until about 3:00. Then I go home, go to bed, and um I got to be very careful when I go to bed. Yeah. So I I don’t wake her up. Sneak into bed. And I get up at 5:30, have a double martini, and maybe more. I stay home. Yeah. I I drink a little bit. Yeah. But I when I got a cold, I don’t drink.

I don’t smoke. I do the other thing. Oh, you don’t? So, you’re looking forward to your next cold, too soon. Okay. I read the book the other night. It’s a marvelous book. It’s not a good book. It’s a great book. It’s called All My Best Friends, and it is about all the marvelous entertainers you’ve worked with all of your life.

I wish I’d have known a lot of these people. I didn’t know Al Jolson at all. I I knew Eddie Caner and I knew Groucho, but I used to sit at the same table, the Jolson and Caner and the Marx Brothers and Danny Kay and Georgie Jessel and I’m the only one left. You’re the only one I know that’s alive. Now that was that was a famous I guess uh round table and the table at Hill Chris Country.

Chris Country. Yeah. And the I would say that the funniest guy at the table or Grouch show was funny, you know, but Georgie Jessel. Now a lot of people wouldn’t know that. Yeah. But I I agree with you. Jessel said funny things like um this goes back about 40 years. I’m sitting there having coffee at 9:00 in the morning and I’m watching Jessel at the bar. Thigh brandy 9:00 in the morning.

I went I said, “Georgie, is that your thigh brandy?” He said, “Haven’t you heard?” I said, “What?” He says, “Norma Towns left me.” I says, “But Norma Towns left you 35 years ago.” He says, “I still miss her. Let’s talk about uh let’s talk about Al Jolson a little bit.” Now, you say in his book, you thought he probably was the greatest entertainer, and Jose was not miss letting you know he was the world’s greatest entertainer.

Well, he was. He was the greatest wasn’t wasn’t the greatest talent. Yeah. But the greatest entertainer. Look, David Jolson, Jewish boy. Father was a Jewish cander. And he used to blacken up and get down on one knee and sing I got a mammy in Alabama and made the people cry.

You know, you got to be great to do that. Didn’t Didn’t Jessel once say about Joseph? I saw it when Jessel did his stage show once. He says he said Joseph never got any further south in Baltimore. He said he had a bad plate of chit and his threw up and went back to New York. I think Joseph said that. Maybe not like that, but I’ll tell you a story about Joseph.

During World War I, they have a benefit performance at Medway Theater in Columbus Circle and on the shows Sam Bernard, Louis man, um George M. Cohan and William Kier and George M. Cohen sang over there for the first time and then Caruso came out and sang Paliachi and then out came Joel. What do you think he said? You ain’t heard nothing yet.

Is that where that started? You ain’t heard. And he was a riot. I mean there was nobody like Jose. Is it true? I I nor you had this I think you touched on as your book. If Jolson would be working and he would see somebody or hear a line that he liked in somebody else’s act, he take it. He would take it and then some of his people would go to the guy and say, “Mr. Jolson, that’s Mr.

Jolson’s line.” Yeah. Take it out of your act. Also, Jolson, when you were on the stage on the same show with Jolson, Jolson had the water running. He didn’t want to hear you get laughs. So, you’re kidding. Oh, yeah. Well, he didn’t It’s very hard to explain Jolson. They were I used to I used to come to the club and I’d compliment Jolson cuz I I love to sing, right? I’d tell him how great he was.

One day he says, “George,” he says, “I sent for Sturgeon from New York. It didn’t allow sturgeon in California.” He says, “If you’d like a little sturgeon for lunch, well, I love Sturgeon. I had so every day I’d come and I’d compliment Jolson.” And I’d get Sturgeon. I got So, I like Sturgeon better than I did Jolson.

And finally, I came they they did they they did the Jolson story with Larry Parks. Yeah. with Larry Parks and the soundtrack stole the picture. I had something to say to Joson. I came in. I said, “Jolie, the soundtrack is the greatest track the greatest.” I kept complimenting him. He says, “George, I might have sto.

” I said, “Well, Jolie, I didn’t see the picture.” Yeah. His career had kind of gone down. Now, the story really revived his career, didn’t it? No, it never went down. The places never played the Palace Theater. I didn’t know that. wouldn’t play it. The places were not big enough for Jolson. Jose never played Vegas.

U Jolson didn’t do well on television. He had to see Jolson, right? I went, we were in in in in Denver, Gracie and I, we were a little man and woman night. round number three and Bombbo was playing in Denver and we got two tickets ran over never took off our makeup got to the theater around 9 9 10 minutes after 9 Jose 9:30 no Joson quarter to 10 finally the audience is applauding Joson came out with snow all over was snowing in he said I’m sorry I was at somebody’s house for dinner I got carried away he said do you mind if I

put on my makeup right here and he stripped from here put on his makeup, told a few jokes, and Joson was a great comedian, great light comedian, but people didn’t appreciate that because his singing was so great, right? And Bombo went on. Bambo was on for 10 minutes when he said to the audience, “Do you know the story? The horse wins the race, the fella gets the girl.

You want that? You want me to entertain you?” I said, “Entertain us.” He brought out the cast. He said, “You you girls got dates?” Three or four had dates. He said, “Go ahead.” The rest sit down on the floor. He entertained the audience from 10:00 that night till 1:00 in the morning.

And then he said, “I’m going to take off my makeup and I’m going next door. There’s a in the restaurant there’s a piano, right? I’ll meet you and then I’ll sing you a few songs.” Everybody got, you know, nobody could do that. I wish I’d have seen him. That must have been sensational. Great. That’s great. We’re going to take a break.

We’re coming right back. Stay where you are. YEAH. OKAY. WE’RE TALKING TO GEORGE BURNS. You know, want to talk about Groucho a little bit. You once you kind of got Groucho mad or you offended him at one time, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t mean to get him mad. Edward G. Robinsons gave a dinner party, right? About eight or 10 people.

And one woman said, “Who’s the funniest comedian?” I said, “Charlie Chaplan.” And Groucho said, “He’s not the funniest comedian I am.” I said, “Well, Groucho, if he’s the funniest comedian, then I must be the funniest comedian cuz I’m funnier than you are.” And I said, “And I did it without my brothers.” Well, Joe got very mad and the next day he wrote an article in the paper.

He said, “Jag Benny is a very talented fellow and George Wes wears a toupe.” Later on you you you were friends. Well, we we got to be friends, but Groucho was fearless. If you said something and Groucho topped it and if that same thing came on 20 times that day, he topped it with the same joke. Now Sophie Tucker used to sing, “If you can’t see mama every night, you can’t see mama at all.

” And said, “Yeah.” And when whenever you ordered sea bass, Groucho would say, “If you can’t see bass every night, you can’t see bass at all.” That is not Nobody’s going to steal that joke. That’s right. That’s not a great joke. But after you’ve heard it for 17 years, you got tired of it, right? So I came to the table, there was sea bass.

Well, I love sea bass, but I didn’t want to hear that god, that lousy joke. So I I I whispered I whispered to the waiter. I says, “I’ll have sea bass.” And the waiter whispered back, “If you can’t see bass, you can’t see that.” Okay. Oh, isn’t that marvelous? Does it seem that your good friend uh Jack Benny has been gone as long as he has? I mean, he was my closest friend.

I know he was. Yeah. He’s a wonderful man. Why was he Why were was he such an easy mark for you? Well, because if you told Jack Benny a joke, you wouldn’t laugh. Yeah. Well, well, Jack Benny brought all these things on himself. Jack Benny signed a contract for a couple of million dollars and was at the club. Looked excited.

I walked over to him. I knew he signed the contract. I said, “Jack, you look excited.” He says, “I am.” I I was downtown and I found out that if you you get into a car and if you go 25 m 26 miles a day, 26 miles an hour, you miss every red light. Here’s a guy that signed a $2 million contract and he misses every red light.

And then he said to me once at the club, he says, “Did you take a shower today?” He says, “Take one.” The the uh the the the towels are fluffy fluffy towels. Then he said, “Uh, did you take a shine today?” True shine. Yeah, boy. Gives you the world’s greatest shine. I said, “I’ll give him one shoe.

If I like it, I’ll give him the other one.” You know, I’d heard you do those things about Jack and I never believed it. But everything was great. The towels were the great. He’d say, “Go to a restaurant.” It was the greatest cup of coffee he’d ever had in his life. He said he never had a good cup of coffee. Right. I said, “If you never had a good cup of coffee, how can you tell this is bad?” You know, and we were we were sitting at the Brown Ivy and the waiter came over.

I said, “I’ll have bacon legs for lunch.” He said, “I’ll have cream of wheat.” He says, “And I hate cream of wheat.” I said, “Why do you order cream of wheat?” He says, “Mary says it’s good for me.” I said, “Tell Mary to eat cream of wheat.” I said, “I’m going to have bacon and eggs.” He said, “I’m I love bacon and eggs.

” I Why don’t you have bacon and eggs? He said, “Mary says it’s bad for me.” I said, “Tell Mary not to eat bacon and eggs.” Then the waiter came over. He said, “I bacon and eggs.” And Jack says, “I’ll have bacon and eggs.” I said, “When the Jack comes, give it to Jack Benny.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Why should I pay for the check?” I says, “If you don’t pay for the check, I’ll tell Mary I beg.

” Okay, we’ll do this. We’re coming back. Um, we could uh we could spend a minute talking about this. Anyway, if you want to uh if you really want to have a good time, I recommend this book. George Burns, all my best friends. And as usual, we’re not going to let you get away without doing a song. Morning over there.

Morty Jenkins at the piano. my piano player, Morty Jacobs. Not too much. I want more money. Uh, here’s a song I introduced in 1916 and I predicted then it would be a big hit and I’m going to keep singing it until it is the weeper. Ever hear the story? It’s high. Ever ever hear the Willy Willy the Weeper? Ever hear this? Ever hear the story about Willie the Weeper? Ever hear the story about Willie the Weeper? Willie the Weeper was a chimney sweeper.

He got the dope habit and he got it bad. Listen and I’ll tell you of all the dreams that Willie had. He dreamed he had a barrel of diamond rings and money. Mas by the scoff to love and call them honey. Everywhere he went, he heard the people say, “There’s the guy who put the bee in old Broadway. He went to London town.

Bought the piccadilly. Told the people there that it belonged to Willie. Learned the patchy dancing just to show his thanks. Tipped the patchy queen a half a million franks. In the morning, just before the lights go up, and all the lights are low, Willie starts a dreaming and a gleaming and he gets that glow.

But now poor Willie, he’s down below. He’s gone. Forgotten resting where the daisies go. Willie died and so did I singing that song on the Johnny Carson show. May maybe this is the answer. We’ll be right back. Stay where you are. was there.

What Truman Did When Israel Shot Down a British Plane and Britain Called It an Act of War

January 7th, 1949. 7 months after Israel declared independence. Over the Sinai desert, four British Spitfires were flying a reconnaissance mission along the Egyptian side of the Israeli-Egyptian front lines. The RAF pilots had taken off from a base in the Canal Zone, the strip of Egyptian territory along the Suez Canal where Britain maintained the largest military garrison in the world outside the British Isles.
Their mission was to assess the military situation on the ground below them, to photograph the positions of the armies that had been fighting since May, and that were now theoretically moving toward a ceasefire. They were not flying a combat mission. They were not armed for engagement. They were doing what reconnaissance aircraft do, looking.
Israeli Air Force pilots found them and shot all four of them down. One British pilot was killed, the others survived, some of them taken prisoner by Israeli forces on the ground. The aircraft, Spitfires that carried the roundels of the Royal Air Force of the most powerful empire on Earth, were burning wreckage in the desert.
In London, the reaction was not diplomatic. It was not a strongly worded note delivered through normal channels. It was a phone call from the British Foreign Office to the American State Department that used language that diplomats almost never use, language that said, in terms that left no room for interpretation, that Britain was considering whether the shooting down of its aircraft by the armed forces of Israel constituted an act of war.
An act of war against Britain by a country that was 7 months old. Harry Truman received the report from the State Department and understood immediately that the crisis sitting on his desk was not a military crisis or a diplomatic crisis in the ordinary sense. It was a crisis that went to the foundations of everything he had built in the 11 minutes on May 14th, 1948, when he had recognized Israel and set American policy on the course it had been on ever since.
This is the story of what Truman did about it, what the British wanted, what the Israelis had done and why, and how close a 7-month-old country came to finding itself at war with the British Empire because its pilots had done their jobs too well. To understand why British Spitfires were flying reconnaissance missions over the Sinai in January 1949, you have to understand the specific military and diplomatic situation that the Israeli War of Independence had produced by the end of its seventh month.
The war had begun the moment Israel declared independence on May 14th, 1948. Five Arab armies had crossed the borders simultaneously. Egypt from the south, Jordan from the east, Syria and Lebanon and Iraq from the north and northeast. The stated objective, repeated in the public statements of the Arab League and in the private communications of every government involved, was the destruction of the new state before it could establish itself as a military and political fact.
The destruction had not happened. Israel had survived the first weeks through a combination of desperate improvisation and the specific military effectiveness that comes from fighting with the understanding that losing means annihilation. It had used the first United Nations ceasefire in June 1948 to rearm and reorganize and emerge from the ceasefire with a military capability that was qualitatively different from what it had fielded in May.
By the end of 1948, the military situation had shifted decisively. Israel had not merely survived, it had advanced. It had pushed Egyptian forces back across the Negev desert. It had driven the Egyptian army out of most of the territory it had held in the summer. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force that had entered Palestine in May with confidence was by December in a position that its generals were describing with words that generals use when they are losing.
The specific military operation that had produced the January 7th incident was called Operation Horeb. It had begun in late December 1948 and its objective was the final destruction of the Egyptian army’s capacity to continue the war. The Israeli forces conducting Horeb had pushed deep into the Sinai, crossing what had been the international boundary between mandatory Palestine and Egypt proper, pursuing the Egyptian army into Egyptian territory with the kind of momentum that decisive military advantage produces. This was the
situation that had produced the British reconnaissance mission. Britain was the imperial power that had administered Palestine until May 1948. It still had enormous military assets in the region, the Canal Zone garrison that numbered tens of thousands of troops, the relationships with the Arab states that it had cultivated through decades of imperial administration, and a treaty relationship with Egypt that obligated it to consider Egyptian security as a British interest.
The Egyptian government had been in contact with London. Egypt was losing. The Israeli advance into the Sinai was continuing. Egypt wanted Britain to do what Britain’s treaty obligations theoretically required, intervene, apply military pressure on Israel, force the Israelis back across the border. The British government was not prepared to go to war with Israel over the Sinai, but it was prepared to gather intelligence about the military situation, to understand the extent of the Israeli advance, and to position itself for whatever diplomatic
intervention might be possible. The reconnaissance mission on January 7th was part of that positioning. The British pilots had been briefed on the sensitivity of their mission. They had been told to stay on the Egyptian side of the lines. They were flying over active combat territory where two armies had been fighting for 7 months and where the rules of engagement were not those of peacetime aviation.
The Israeli pilots who shot them down had not asked questions about who was flying the aircraft above them or what roundels they were carrying. They had seen aircraft over their operational area and they had responded the way combat pilots in a shooting war respond. All four aircraft were down inside 7 minutes. The British reaction in London was immediate and genuine in its fury.
And it is important to understand that the fury was not manufactured for diplomatic effect. Britain in 1949 was a country that was still processing what it meant to have won a world war and emerged from it diminished rather than enlarged. The empire was cracking. India had become independent in 1947. The Palestine mandate had ended in humiliation with Britain unable to manage the conflict between Arabs and Jews that it had helped create and unable to hand the territory to anyone in a condition that satisfied either
party. The British army had been fighting Jewish underground groups in Palestine as recently as 1947. British soldiers had been killed by Jewish forces that were now the armed forces of a recognized state. And now that state had shot down four RAF aircraft. The Foreign Office communication to Washington was not a diplomatic faint.
It was the expression of a British government that was genuinely considering its options. The treaty with Egypt, the British military presence in the Canal Zone, the RAF units that were operational in the region, the specific question of whether a country that had just killed a British pilot and destroyed four British military aircraft had committed an act that British national honor and British treaty obligations required a military response to.
The man at the center of the British response was Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Bevin had been the most consistently hostile senior British official toward the idea of a Jewish state throughout the period of the mandate and the war. He had blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine in the years after the Holocaust with a stubbornness that had made him despised by the Jewish world and had strained Anglo-American relations repeatedly.
He had believed, with a conviction that the events of 1948 had not entirely dislodged, that Israel was a mistake, that it would destabilize the Middle East, and that Britain’s relationship with the Arab states were more important to British imperial interests than American pressure to accommodate Jewish nationalism.
Bevin’s reaction to the January 7th shootings was therefore not merely the reaction of a foreign secretary to a military incident. It was the reaction of a man who had predicted disaster and was now watching something that confirmed, in his view, the recklessness of the course that American pressure had pushed British and international policy toward.
He wanted a response, a real one. He communicated to Washington that Britain was reviewing its options, that the shooting down of RAF aircraft was not an incident that could be managed with a diplomatic note and Israeli expressions of assets in the region and treaty obligations to Egypt that created a framework within which a more forceful response was legally and politically defensible.
And he wanted to know where America stood. Where America stood was the precise question that Truman had to answer in the hours after the State Department reported communication. Truman’s position was geometrically uncomfortable in the specific way that only the intersection of alliance obligations and genuine moral commitment can produce. He had recognized Israel.
He had done it over the explicit objection of his State Department and his Secretary of Defense. He had done it because he believed, with the particular directness that characterized everything he believed, that the creation of a Jewish state was right and that American recognition of it was the correct expression of American values.
But Britain was America’s most important ally. The relationship between Washington and London in 1949 was not merely diplomatic. It was the foundational relationship of the entire Western alliance structure that was being built against Soviet power. NATO had been signed 9 days before in April 1949. The reconstruction of Europe was dependent on American support and on British partnership.
The Cold War that was defining American foreign policy required a functioning Anglo-American relationship in ways that no other bilateral relationship in the world required. And Bevin was telling him that Israel had committed an act of war against Britain and that Britain was considering its options. Truman’s Secretary of State was Dean Acheson.
Acheson was a man of formidable intelligence and formidable certainty about where American interests lay and how they should be pursued. He was not hostile to Israel in the way Bevin was hostile to Israel, but he was a foreign policy realist who understood alliances and their maintenance with a precision that sometimes put him in tension with the moral framework that Truman brought to the same questions.
Acheson’s assessment of the January 7th situation was that it required immediate and direct engagement on two fronts simultaneously. With the British to understand exactly what they meant by the language they were using and to determine whether the act of war formulation was a real option or a diplomatic pressure play.
And with the Israelis to communicate the full weight of what had happened and what the consequences of continued military operations that created incidents of this kind could produce. Truman authorized both conversations and added a third dimension that was his own. He picked up the phone himself. The direct communication that Truman made to the Israeli government through his personal channels in the days following January 7th has not been fully reconstructed in any public document.
The Truman Presidential Library holds material from this period that has been partially declassified and that gives the shape of what was communicated without the verbatim record that would give its full texture. What the partial record makes clear is that Truman communicated to the Israeli government something that went beyond the normal language of diplomatic concern.
He told them through channels that were personal enough to carry his full authority and formal enough to leave no ambiguity about what was being said that the situation created by the January 7th shootings was placing the entire framework of American support for Israel under a pressure that it could not sustain if the pressure continued.
This was not a threat to withdraw recognition. Truman was not going to unrecognize Israel. He had made that commitment and he was not a man who unmade commitments. But recognition without the full engagement of American diplomatic support, without American protection at the United Nations, without American willingness to manage the British reaction in ways that prevented it from turning into a military confrontation was recognition that meant considerably less than the recognition Israel had received in May 1948.
Truman was telling Israel that the specific form of American support that was keeping the British response in the diplomatic is rather than the military category was support that required Israel to behave in ways that made that support sustainable. And shooting down ERAF aircraft over the Sinai was not behavior that made it sustainable.
He was also telling them something else. That he understood what had happened. That he understood the operational logic of a combat air force that shot at aircraft flying over its battle space without asking for identification first. That he was not imputing bad faith to the Israeli pilots or to the Israeli command, but that understanding what had happened was different from being able to protect Israel from the consequences of what had happened indefinitely and without limit.
The Israeli government received this communication from Truman in the context of its own assessment of what January 7th had produced and what it needed to produce next. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was a man who understood the limits of what was possible with the same precision that he understood what was necessary.
He had spent his entire political life navigating the intersection of ideological commitment and practical constraint. He knew what Israel needed from America. He knew what America’s relationship with Britain required. And he understood with the analytical clarity that characterized his best strategic thinking that the incident of January 7th had created a situation where Israeli military momentum and American diplomatic protection were pulling in opposite directions and that one of them was going to have to give. He chose military
restraint. Not immediately. Not cleanly. The Israeli forces conducting Operation Horev did not stop in the hours after January 7th. But the operational objectives of the campaign were narrowed and the timeline for withdrawal from Egyptian territory was accelerated in ways that were directly connected to the pressure that Truman’s communication had applied.
Ben-Gurion made the calculation that Truman needed him to make. That the ceasefire with Egypt that American diplomacy was working toward was worth more than the additional military gains that continued operations might produce. That the framework of American support was a strategic asset that had a higher value than any tactical military objective in the Sinai.
That the incident of January 7th was a warning about the cost of allowing military operations to continue past the point where American diplomacy could protect their consequences. Truman’s management of the British side of the crisis was conducted with the same directness, but with a different instrument. He could not tell Britain that Israel’s shooting down of ERAF aircraft was acceptable.
It was not acceptable. A British pilot was dead. British aircraft had been destroyed. Britain had every right to be furious and no American president could tell a furious ally that its fury was illegitimate. What Truman could do and did was place the incident in a framework that gave Britain a way to respond that served British interests without requiring Britain to take military action that would produce consequences it could not manage.
The framework was the ceasefire. The Egyptian-Israeli ceasefire that American diplomacy was actively pushing toward was a ceasefire that served British interests in concrete and specific ways. It stopped the Israeli advance into the Sinai, which was the advance that had produced the British reconnaissance mission and the incident that had followed.
It created the conditions for Egyptian military recovery, which was an Egyptian interest that Britain’s treaty relationship required it to support. And it removed the operational context in which incidents like January 7th were possible. Truman’s message to Britain was therefore the ceasefire is coming. American pressure is producing it.
The incident of January 7th is being addressed through the channels that can produce an outcome that serves British interests better than military confrontation with a country that the United States has recognized and that the United Nations has implicitly sanctioned. He was offering Bevin a way out of the act of war language that did not require Britain to back down publicly from the position it had taken.
The ceasefire would make the question of military response moot because the operational situation that had required reconnaissance missions over the Sinai would no longer exist. Bevin was not satisfied. He remained angry and he remained convinced that Israel was a reckless actor whose behavior was going to continue to produce crises that British policy in the Middle East could not absorb.
He said so privately in terms that were considerably more colorful than anything that appeared in the diplomatic record, but he accepted the framework. Britain did not take military action against Israel over the January 7th incident. The act of war language that had appeared in the Foreign Office communication to Washington was not acted upon.
The British military assets in the canal zone remained in the canal zone. The ERAF units in the region did not fly retaliatory missions. The ceasefire between Egypt and Israel was signed on February 24th, 1949, 7 weeks after the incident. It was the first of the armistice agreements that Israel would conclude with its Arab neighbors in 1949.
Agreements that did not end the conflict in any fundamental sense, but that created the military and territorial framework within which the conflict would be managed for the following decades. The specific question of accountability for the January 7th shootings was handled with the careful ambiguity that the situation required.
Israel expressed regret. The word regret in diplomacy does not mean the same thing as the word regret in ordinary language. It means we acknowledge that an incident occurred and we are communicating that acknowledgement in a form that satisfies the minimum requirements of the diplomatic relationship without conceding fault in a way that creates legal or political liability.
Britain received the regret and filed It did not produce a formal finding that Israel had committed an act of war. It did not submit a claim for reparations through whatever international mechanism might have been available for such a claim. It did not pursue the question of accountability through the legal channels that the death of a British pilot technically warranted.
The dead pilot was mourned. His family received whatever they received from the RAF when a pilot was killed. And the incident was placed in the category of things that had happened in a war zone where the rules were not the rules of peacetime and where the consequences of applying peacetime standards to wartime incidents were consequences that nobody involved wanted to produce.
Truman’s management of the incident had made that categorization possible. By moving fast enough on the ceasefire framework and by applying the right pressure in Jerusalem at the right moment, he had prevented the British fury from having the time it needed to harden into a position that military action was the only way to satisfy.
He had also communicated to Ben-Gurion something that would shape the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem for years. That American support for Israel was not unconditional in the operational sense, even if it was unconditional in the foundational sense. That there were actions Israel could take that placed American protection under pressures it could not manage.
And that the test of the alliance was not American willingness to support Israel regardless of what Israel did, but Israeli willingness to operate within the constraints that made American support sustainable. Ben Gurion had heard the message. He had made the calculation it required. And the pattern of Israeli military restraint at the specific moments when American diplomatic protection was most visibly at stake was a pattern that would repeat itself through every subsequent crisis in the relationship with varying degrees
of smoothness and varying degrees of friction for the decades that followed. The full story of what happened between January 7th and February 24th, 1949 has never been told in its complete form in any public account for the reason that such stories usually go untold. The governments involved had no interest in emphasizing that a 7-month-old state had shot down four RAF aircraft and come within a diplomatic hair of triggering a British military response.
Israel had no interest in advertising that it had required American pressure to halt military operations. Britain had no interest in acknowledging that its act of war language had been managed rather than resolved. What the record does show in the fragments that declassification and historical research have produced is that Truman acted faster than the situation gave him comfortable room to act, made commitments to Britain that required Israeli compliance he was not certain he could deliver, and then delivered it through the directness of
personal communication to Ben Gurion that left no room for the kind of managed ambiguity that formal diplomatic channels permit. He kept Britain from going to war with Israel. He kept Israel from continuing operations that would have made British restraint impossible. He produced the ceasefire that made the entire question moot.
And he did all of it while managing simultaneously the recognition that the incident had revealed something true and important about the limits of what American support for Israel could absorb. A lesson that Truman understood was not a comfortable one and that he had never asked to learn. He had recognized Israel in 11 minutes.
He had believed in its right to exist with a conviction that was personal and genuine and not the product of political calculation alone. But believing in a country’s right to exist and managing the specific consequences of that country’s military actions in a world where its existence was still contested and its allies were still arguing about what the rules were, those were different things.
Truman had spent 7 months learning that they were different things. January 7th, 1949 was the day the lesson was most expensive. He managed it. The ceasefire held. And Britain did not go to war with Israel. If you had been Truman that January with the British communication on your desk and the act of war language in front of you and Ben Gurion’s forces still moving in the Sinai and Bevin waiting for your answer, what would you have done? Would you have told Britain that America could not restrain Israel and accepted the
consequences of that admission? Would you have told Israel to stop immediately and accepted the risk that Ben Gurion would refuse? Or would you have threaded it the way Truman threaded it with the ceasefire framework and the personal pressure and the careful management of British fury while Israeli operations wound down? Be honest.

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