Quotes from Debi Unger

Czechoslovak government and the pro-Nazi leaders of the country's Sudeten German minority, Hitler demanded that the German population be given "self-determination," that is, autonomy within the Czechoslovak republic. The British and French governments feared that these demands, following close on the German annexation of Austria, would be a first step in Hitler's eventual dismembering of Czechoslovakia and its absorption into a greater Reich.

It was at this point that Truman once again sought Marshall's help. With his enthusiastic support, in July 1947 the president had succeeded in inducing Congress to pass the National Security Act, creating a new Department of Defense to replace the separate War and Navy Departments that had coexisted—and squabbled—since the early days of the republic.

By the eve of World War II the Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—had grown to almost half a million and had won broad international admiration for creating egalitarian agricultural communities and flourishing modern towns and cities in an impoverished land long neglected under Turkish sovereignty.

This is a world-wide struggle between freedom and tyranny," he told a California audience, "between the self-rule of many as opposed to the dictatorship of the ruthless few.

the House voted 203 to 202 in favor of the bill. Some sixty-nine Democrats had defected, but twenty-one Republicans had voted yes. On August 18 FDR signed into law the bill extending selectees' obligations to eighteen months of military service.

Congress decided to finish the already drawn-out process of investigating

The non-Jewish Arab population of mandate Palestine, initially twice the size of the Yishuv, supported by Muslims throughout the Middle East, strongly resisted the Jewish intrusion into what they perceived as their nation.

the political fallout of cold, hunger, lawlessness, and despair had grown ominous.

On the issue of statehood, however, the committee held back. Having encountered adamant and militant Arab protests in the course of its investigation, it recommended against either a Jewish or Arab state, proposing instead an eventual binational entity where both groups could express their legitimate national aspirations.

And what was the purpose of all these dubious and conspiratorial actions? It was "to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and impair our will to resist."33

In short, favoring the Jews would offend the Arabs and their millions of Muslim supporters and create dangerous risks and turmoil in a part of the world where the United States had a substantial stake.

Calling themselves the "United Nations," in Washington twenty-six countries at war with one or all of the Axis nations—including the United States, Britain and its dominions, China, the European governments-in-exile, and the Soviet Union—pledged to fight and defeat "the . . . forces of conquest

In the twentieth century the American Jewish community, with more than four million members by the late 1930s, was the largest in the world,

No, gentlemen, you don't take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don't like.

teaching college and high school students about the causes of past wars so they might learn to avoid the mistakes made by their predecessors.

Seventeen billion dollars, after the many billions of the war itself, seemed outrageous to many frugal Republicans. Marshall defended the size and timing of the requested appropriation.

Truman deeply sympathized with the plight of Europe's displaced Jews.