Diplomat's diaries are made public
James Grover McDonald, who died 30 years ago, was a native of Ohio.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- Diplomat James Grover McDonald passed through the history of the 20th century like a privileged bit player. He met with Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt and was intimately involved in the birth of Israel as Harry S. Truman's first envoy to the fledgling nation -- faithfully recording his encounters in a massive cache of private diaries.
McDonald's detailed accounts remained hidden for decades, unavailable to diplomatic historians until this week, when the U.S. Holocaust Museum made the diaries public under an arrangement with his daughter.
In thousands of typed, onionskin pages, McDonald described a lost world of diplomacy in which foreign officers traveled by train and ocean liner and discussed the state of mankind over high tea.
He raised the mistreatment of Jews with an unyielding Hitler, tried to secure Vatican help for refugees from the papal secretary of state who later became Pope Pius XII and joined Israeli leaders at a 1948 orchestral performance by conductor Leonard Bernstein while air raid sirens wailed in the distance.
Offering insight
Museum officials say the diaries offer fresh insight into the rise of the Nazi state and the conflicted policy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward dispossessed Jews and the creation of Israel. The McDonald diaries, said museum historian Severin Hochberg, are "a treasure trove that reinforces much of what we know with new detail."
Diplomatic historians said they would welcome a new source of information on world events of the 1930s and 1940s. But they expressed doubt that McDonald's perspective would alter much of what is known about the era.
"We already have a lot of detail from most of the key participants from that time," said Neil Betten, a Florida State University historian who is an expert in 1940s U.S. diplomacy. "Still, even someone on the periphery can add to our understanding."
McDonald's daughter, Barbara Stewart, said she was pleased the museum would become a home for her father's diaries, which until last year commandeered an entire bookcase in her Virginia home. McDonald, who died in 1964, had hoped to write his memoirs, she said, but never found a publisher.
Born in 1886 in Ohio, McDonald grew up in Indiana and attended Indiana University and Harvard, later teaching at Harvard and founding the influential Foreign Policy Association in 1919. An abiding interest in the affairs of German Jews led to his appointment in 1933 as High Commissioner on Refugees for the League of Nations, the forerunner of the U.N.
In that post, McDonald traveled the world trying to persuade governments to aid refugees caught in the gathering storm that led to World War II.