Back in the old days, you had presidents who supported Israel purely for geopolitical reasons (US backed Israel vs Soviet backed Arab League) but were pretty suspicious of "the Jews", to put it bluntly
Nixon and Truman were prime examples of these types of presidents.
Truman is a complicated case. By the standards of his age he was not particularly anti-semitic. He had gone into business with a Jewish partner (his old WWI mate) and was, generally, fairly well-disposed to individual Jews. His prejudices were the common prejudices of his time: atrocious by modern standards, but, actually, not particularly distinguishing him individually from what was then the mainstream. He was no Ford or Lindbergh. Remember, back in the 1920s, when Truman was my age, Jews were generally not accepted in much of the society: not in academia, not in many business circles (and, mind it, he was not a New Yorker either). His diary comments quoted above also come from a particular context: taken out of it they sound quite a bit worse than they were. And, of course, his attitude towards Israel could not be fully based on cold war considerations: back at the time the Soviet Union had not decided whom to support in the Middle East. The new state was ruled by Russian-speaking Marxist-oriented leftists and would seem a natural ally for the USSR (which, mind it, recognised it simultaneously with the US). If anything, he was making a non-obvious choice in the context of the beginning cold war.
Truman's greatness, in fact, has often been in transcending the prejudices and limitations of his upbringing. He came from a southern-identifying family and has made his share of racist comments and observations as well. His mother
hated Lincoln - and he venerated his mother. Nevertheless is was he who integrated the army and made first major steps towards the civil rights reform. He was a man of a very different age, who, in fact, was instrumental in creating modernity as we knew it growing up. But to understand him one still has to understand his age.
Nixon is a rather different case, of course. To begin with, he was almost thirty years younger: a man of a very different age.
