The discovery that as late as 1947 President Truman was writing anti-Jewish sentiments into a heretofore unknown diary offers a stunning in sight into the relationship between prejudice and public service. The National Archives last week made public the diary, in which the 33rd president wrote about a call he’d received from Secretary Morgenthau about a ship carrying Jews to Palestine. “He’d no business, whatever to call me,” Truman wrote. “The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.”

He then wrote: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.”

That wasn’t the first time, of course, that the man from Independence had put his private prejudices to paper. He filled the very letter in which he proposed to Bess with whole sentences of bile. “Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that Negros ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.” And in a letter to a friend, he wrote about New York, “This town has 8,000,000 people, 7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelitish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” What the diary unveiled last week discloses is Truman’s repugnant jottings carried right up to the start of his presidency, a presidency that turned out to be filled with one heroic act after another with respect to civil rights. He desegretated the Army, he recognized the Jewish State, and he set a national standard for a certain kind of decency that has endured for decades.

What a loss it would have been were Truman to have been judged fit or unfit for high office on the basis of his private prejudices. This lesson has much to offer, moreover, for our current times, when, in one confirmation battle after another, we watch partisans in the Senate seek to destroy one candidate for high office after another on the basis of their private beliefs. Whether, say, they are pro- or antiabortion, whether they are privately put off by homosexual relations, whether they belong to a club that doesn’t admit women, or blacks, or Jews. What Truman reminded us is that the real test of fitness is whether, whatever prejudices he or she harbors, a man or woman is capable of doing what the constitution commands. If he is, he will be saluted even, as Truman was, by those he privately scorned.