Truman was a pretty awesome president.The Zionists where the only people who ever spoke to President Harry S. Truman as though his title as president ment nothing at all. No other visitors in the White House ever pounded on his desk! Nevertheless, in old age the President always looked back on his accomplishmeat in the re-estbilshment of the state of Israel as one of proudest. This is a good example of a president doing what he must do even if all trusted advice is spriting the other way.
At a dinner party in May, 1952, the Israeli Ambassador, Abba Eben presented the President with a wonderful gift, the Truman Village with these words: "We do not have orders or decorations. Our material strength is small and greatly strained. We have no tradition or formality nor chivalry. One thing however, is within the power of Israel to confer. It is the gift of immortality. Those whose names are bound up with Israel's history never become forgotten. We are, therefore, now writing the name of the President upon the map of our country. In a village of farmers near the airport of Lydda at the gateway to Israel, we establish a monument, not of dead stone but of living hope. Thus, when the eyes of men alight on the Truman Village in Israel they will pause in their successive generations to recall the strong chain which, at the middle of the 20th century, drew the stongest and the smallest deocracies together with imperishable lines." Eben recalls, "As I left the rostrum I saw the tough-minded President burying his face in a handkerchief without any effort to restrain his emotion. The next day he sent a letter asking me for a text of my address: 'You spoke so flatteringly about me that for a moment I had the impression I was dead.'"
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