Harry Truman (42 page)

Secretary of State Byrnes was about to depart for the Paris Peace Conference, where many issues raised at Potsdam a year earlier were coming to a boil. Once more Wallace was trying to alter U.S. foreign policy. This time, my father wrote him a polite note, thanking him for his advice and sending a copy of the letter to Secretary Byrnes. Firmness had been Byrnes’s byword since Dad stiffened his backbone after the Moscow conference, and Dad made it clear he was still behind this policy by joining some 3,000 Washingtonians - including members of Congress, the Chief Justice of the United States, members of the Cabinet, and assorted friends - who saw Secretary Byrnes off at the National Airport. “The country is behind Mr. Byrnes in his effort to get a just peace for the world, a peace founded on the Atlantic Charter and the Charter of the United Nations on which this country squarely stands, now - and from this time forward,” Dad said.

On September 10, Wallace came to the White House for a fifteen-minute appointment with my father, to discuss Department of Commerce affairs. He brought with him a copy of a speech which he told Dad he planned to deliver in New York on September 12. Would he like to look at it? Dad thumbed through it rapidly, while Wallace pointed to pertinent remarks he thought my father would like. The most important of these was the sentence, “I am neither anti-British nor pro-British - neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian.” At numerous points in the speech, Wallace sharply criticized Russian policies and attitudes. Dad got the distinct impression Wallace was moving much closer to the Truman point of view on Russia, and he told him he was delighted to hear him saying these things, and even more pleased to see him taking to the hustings in an election year. The 1946 congressional elections were only two months away, and the Democrats needed all the help they could get.

On the morning of September 12, my father had a press conference. Wallace had released the text of his speech the night before. Reporters asked Dad about a sentence which Wallace had inserted in the speech, after he left the White House. It followed the sentence about being neither pro-British nor anti-Russian. “When President Truman read these words, he said they represented the policy of this administration.”

“That is correct,” Dad said.

This was nothing but the simple truth. But the trouble began when the same reporter asked, “My question is, does that apply just to that paragraph or to the whole speech?”

“I approved the whole speech,” Dad said.

Once more my father had made the mistake of trusting someone. Like the seemingly sweet and honest girl from
American Magazine,
who hoodwinked him into endorsing an attack on the Roosevelt Administration, Henry Wallace had cajoled him into this generous but inaccurate remark.

I am trying to be objective when I say this, and perhaps I am being too hard on my father. When I discussed this bit of history with Matt Connelly, Matt said bluntly: “It was nothing but a double cross. Wallace showed the President one speech and made a different one.”

There is some truth to those words. Listeners that night heard Wallace make a bitter attack on the foreign policy of the Truman Administration. At least four times, he departed from his text to add three or four wildly pro-Russian sentences which brought roars of approval from the crowd. He also dropped most of his qualifying criticisms of the Soviet Union. He did not have the courage to make them before his vociferously pro-Soviet audience, which had been whipped to a frenzy by the extravagant remarks of the speaker who preceded him, Senator Claude Pepper.

A global uproar exploded. Senator Robert A. Taft declared that “the Democratic Party is so divided between Communism and Americanism, that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughingstock of the world.” Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, in Paris with Secretary of State Byrnes, angrily declared that “the Republican Party could only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” The Republican National Committee charged the President had “betrayed Mr. Byrnes and was bidding for the support of the CIO Political Action Committee which favored appeasing the Russians abroad and promoting Communism at home.” Representative Eugene Cox of Georgia telegraphed Dad that the speech was “the worst thing that could have happened to the country.”

Two days later, September 14, my father tried to repair the damage. He issued a statement explaining he only approved the right of the Secretary of Commerce to deliver the speech: “I did not intend to indicate that I approved the speech as constituting a statement of the foreign policy of this country. There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our government. There will be no significant change in that policy without discussion and conference among the President, the Secretary of State and Congressional leaders.”

But Henry Wallace refused to shut up. Obviously enjoying the furor, he announced he planned to make more foreign policy speeches and leaked to Drew Pearson the text of his July 23 letter to Dad. Charlie Ross, in one of his few mistakes of judgment, decided to release the letter to all the reporters, a decision my father angrily countermanded. He did not want to show even the slightest sign of approving the letter’s contents. The release of this confidential letter infuriated Dad. On September 18, he summoned Wallace to the White House for a long conference. In a letter Dad wrote to his mother and sister, before the meeting, he remarked: “I’m still having Wallace trouble [he then wrote over Wallace in tiny print “Henry,” to make sure his mother wouldn’t think he was feuding with his in-laws] and it grows worse as we go along. I think he’ll quit today and I won’t shed any tears. Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making. But when I make a mistake it is a good one.”

After two and a half hours of discussion, Wallace declined to quit. Dad summed up what he had heard in a memorandum the following day:

The most my father could extract from Wallace was a promise to keep quiet as long as the Paris Peace Conference lasted. This agreement lasted only for the time it took Wallace to reach the reporters who were waiting for him in the White House lounge. There he proceeded to start quoting Dad again. “I found the President is confident that we can keep peace with Russia,” he intoned. He added that he would not make any more campaign speeches for the Democratic Party. If he could not talk about foreign policy, he could not talk about anything.

In a letter to his mother, written the following day, my father explained what happened in terms I think are much too charitable for what Wallace did: “Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with. I spent two hours and a half with him . . . arguing with him to make no speeches on foreign policy - or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible - but he wouldn’t. So I asked him to make no more speeches until Byrnes came home. He agreed to that, and he and Charlie Ross and I came to what we thought was a firm commitment that he say nothing beyond the one-sentence statement we agreed he should make. Well, he answered questions and told his gang over at the Commerce all that had taken place in our interview. It was all in the afternoon Washington News yesterday, and I was never so exasperated since Chicago.”

This is what finished Wallace with my father. The following day, Secretary of State Byrnes sent a memorandum to Dad warning him he could not function as Secretary of State if Wallace continued his criticism of our foreign policy. Since Dad was already holding Byrnes’s resignation in his desk drawer - they had agreed to part the previous April and Byrnes was staying only long enough to complete the German peace negotiations - this was not exactly the terrifying threat Byrnes made it seem in his memoirs. It was what Wallace had already said, and his friends were now embellishing, that decided my father. The New York
Herald Tribune
ran a story quoting friends who explained Wallace meant it literally when he told reporters the previous day he could not campaign for the Democratic Party “because I am an honest man.”

The following day my father telephoned Wallace and asked for his resignation. Two hours later Dad called a press conference and told reporters:

A week later Dad told his mother and sister:

Those were brave words, and Dad meant them. At the same time, he could not conceal from himself or from those around him his deep concern about the impact of the Wallace blow-up on the congressional elections. On September 18, in the midst of the turmoil, he wrote a letter to me in which he said: “To be a good President I fear a man can’t be his own mentor. He can’t live the Sermon on the Mount. He must be a Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Caesar, Borgia, Napoleon’s chief minister whose name has escaped me [above this clause he later wrote Talleyrand], a liar, double-crosser and an unctuous religio (Richelieu), a hero and a what-not to be successful. So I probably won’t be, thanks be to God. But I’m having a lot of fun trying the opposite approach. Maybe it will win.”

Alas, the Democrats did not win the 1946 elections. Probably nothing my father could have said or done would have changed the results. But Dad added to his woes by making one of the few serious political mistakes of his life. He accepted the advice of Bob Hannegan, the party’s national chairman and the man who had hitherto displayed good political judgment, that it would be better if the President did not campaign. Polls showed that the combination of the Henry Wallace incident and the continuing drumfire of press criticism had sent Dad’s popularity plummeting. Hannegan seemed to think the less the voters saw of the President, the better it would be for the party. Dad would never have accepted this approach if he had thought real trouble was brewing. But Hannegan combined this advice with a curious (in retrospect) optimism. At a Cabinet meeting on October 18, he reported everything looked rosy, although he admitted to worries about Missouri, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

Bereft of national leadership, Democratic congressmen tried to run on their own, or in some cases on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ghost. A few congressmen actually played recordings of FDR’s voice. My father maintained his silent act, even when he returned home to Independence to vote. We went by special train, but he did not make a single whistle-stop speech. Even in Missouri, where the train stopped three times, he only came out on the rear platform and shook hands with local politicians. At Jefferson City school, children were let out of classes for an hour to meet the train. The kids begged him to make a two-hour speech. But Dad only wagged his finger at them and clamped his hand across his mouth. Sam Rayburn, who rode out to St. Louis with us en route home to Texas, predicted Dad would tear the Republicans apart at the traditional Democratic rally in Independence on November 1. But Dad turned thumbs down on this idea, as well as on the pleas of some Democrats to make an election-eve radio speech.

Mamma Truman, a keen political observer in her own right, may have been expressing her concern, as well as her tart sense of humor, when General Vaughan asked her on election morning if she had voted on the way down to see her son in Independence.

“I certainly did,” she replied, “and I am thinking of voting again on my way home.”

Perhaps Hannegan’s political strategy might have worked - although I personally doubt it - if John L. Lewis had not decided he was bigger than the President of the United States and smarter than any other politician in the country. In the spring of 1946, while my father was struggling to keep the railroads going, he had settled a nationwide coal strike called by Lewis by taking over the mines and forcing the mine owners to give Lewis’s miners what the UMW leader had called at the time the best contract he ever signed. In September and October, Lewis began quarreling with the government administrator who was supervising the mines. The disagreements, Dad said, “were nothing of vital importance - purely details of interpretation of the contract that could have been settled easily by a half-hour discussion.”