The Redhunter (15 page)

Former vice president Henry Agard Wallace had not enjoyed the hour—the half hour. (Could it have been only fifteen minutes?)
Before that afternoon, Henry Wallace hadn’t set foot in the Oval Office for months!
Secretary Wallace, just to begin with, wasn’t used to being treated that way. FDR had simply ignored him. That was one thing:
Wallace had known it would be that way when he was tapped for vice president back in 1940—Wallace with his Midwest agricultural
following could add a little strength to the Democratic ticket. He had already served FDR, as secretary of agriculture, and
he had a broad populist appeal. So it hadn’t surprised him when, on taking office, there wasn’t much to do: His name on the
ticket was what FDR wanted from him, nothing else. That kind of thing just
happens
to vice presidents. The historical literature is full of it, he had often consoled himself—get elected vice president and
history runs out on you.

There are exceptions, of course. He looked up at the bookcase. His eyes focused on the volume on Teddy Roosevelt by Henry
F. Pringle. But of course What’s-his-name, the anarchist, had shot President McKinley, and Teddy woke up to find himself president.
Nobody
had shot FDR between 1940 and 1944. Now Harry Truman was president. One thing to be ignored as vice president, quite another
to be ignored as a member of a Cabinet serving a president.

Henry Wallace looked up absentmindedly when young Trevor came in. Trevor always came by before leaving the office, just in
case the secretary of commerce had any afterthoughts about work undone, which, in fact, he never did. Mr. Wallace never left
work undone; it was not his fashion.

No, the secretary motioned with his hand—”Nothing more, thank you, Trevor.” Just that, and a routinely spoken good night.
Henry Wallace wanted to stay in his office. He wanted to brood a bit.

As he proceeded to do, for a full half hour. He decided at last to share his misery over the presidential session with Carl.
Granted, by doing so he’d be letting a third party in on what had happened in the Oval Office. Theoretically, at least, nobody—as
of this moment—knew about what had happened. Wallace had been alone with the president, and the president had said he planned
to tell
nobody
about their meeting.

But, really, there was no such thing as guaranteed privacy at such a stratospheric political altitude. Drew Pearson, that
pestilential political gossip columnist, nationally syndicated, would probably publish an account tomorrow of what had happened,
president to commerce secretary. The hell with it. He’d call Carl, tell him everything. He would feel better, sharing this
with his friend.

He picked up the telephone. The duty officer at the switchboard responded. “Yes, Mr. Secretary?”

“Ring Mr. Pforzheimer.”

A minute later Carl was on the line.

“Carl, I want you to know about it. I met with the president this afternoon. He summoned me. That’s what it was—a
summons.
Usually his appointments lady chats it up with my secretary—‘Is that a convenient time for the secretary’ kind of thing.”

“How was it this time?” Carl asked.

“The gal just told my gal the president would see me at three forty-five.”

“Did he … talk about the speech?”

“Carl. Did he talk about the speech?
He chewed my ass about the
speech.
About
your
speech. He didn’t want to hear the other point of view. Just didn’t want to
listen.
”

“That’s the kind of attitude that makes for world wars, Henry.” Carl had been instructed to address Henry Wallace as Henry,
even back when Wallace was vice president.

“I
know
that. And on top of everything else, I don’t even know that he
read
the whole speech. Probably he just saw the American Legion-type headlines. Those people go crazy if you say anything about
the Communists, except to denounce them. You can’t even say they fought well at Stalingrad. You wouldn’t think it was subversive
to say—which is really all we
did
say—that it pays to
consider
the Soviet point of view. Which obviously it does. Stalin lost fifteen million dead; the whole country is gutted. They set
out in 1917 to attempt a really dazzling thing, change the whole nature of modern materialist society—I don’t need to tell
you
.”

“Of course, Henry.”

“But Carl, it’s pretty bad. Harry Truman is a
very
direct guy. He’s been president what, a year and a half? And he’s become cock of the walk. With FDR it was never that way.
FDR was, well, naturally the boss, as though he had grown up sitting at the head of the table.
This
is very different. When Truman sits in that chair he’s the guy who was just an hour before elected president of his high
school class and he wants you to know it.”

“That’s how small men behave, Henry. It would have been different with … well, with you sitting there.”

Wallace didn’t like it when friends brought up his humiliation in 1944, when FDR dumped him in Chicago—ditched him as vice
president. But right now he didn’t mind Carl’s bringing it up. He let himself say it out loud.

“Yes. It
would
have been different, Carl. What he doesn’t realize—what so few people realize—is that post-Hiroshima we have to think the
whole thing over again, the international order. It’s what the Russians
also
really think, or at least that’s my idea—
our
idea—about it. That’s what we have to take advantage of, fresh thought, and that’s what we said—hinted at—in the speech.
And it’s not possible to do that unless we try to understand
why
they behave as they do.”

“I’m sorry you got hit so hard. Prophet-without-honor business—”

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I guess it’s true that I’m sorry history turned out just as it did. Imagine. FDR died on
April twelfth. If he had died
one
year earlier, I’d have turned the whole thing around—”

“And on top of that, shortened the world war, I’d guess.”

“
And
shortened the war. Well,” Wallace stopped himself. “I’m not sure exactly how we’d have shortened the war, though maybe I
could have persuaded Stalin to move sooner against Japan. … ”

“You’ve got a feel for history, Henry. And this is a critical time. Did the president say anything that sounded, well, sounded
like an ultimatum? He didn’t say you weren’t to give any more speeches, did he?”

“Carl, you don’t know Harry Truman at close quarters. He doesn’t
say
things like that. He says things like,
What you said yesterday was so stupid I know you will never say anything like that again because nobody says such stupid things
twice
… You call that an ultimatum?”

“Well,” said Carl, “it does
sound
a little … threatening. If he—acted. If he—replaced you, you wouldn’t just go back to—”Carl laughed derisively at the mere
thought of it—”farming, would you, Henry? With every peace-loving American behind you?”

Henry Wallace drew a deep breath. “I haven’t thought that far ahead, Carl. But I’ll tell you this, goddamnit, I’m not going
to retire to Iowa and let the Democratic Party lead the country back into another war. Over my dead body!”

“Mustn’t talk that way, Mr. Secretary.” Carl was now the solicitous father, consoling the wounded son. “As long as you’re
around, the right things will get said.”

“Well, I appreciate that. And I don’t want you to think you’re to blame for anything. Everything in that speech needed to
be said, and I don’t know any student of foreign affairs who can pull things together the way you can, no one, and I read
them all. Did you see
Life
on Togliatti in Italy? I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it to prime minister by 1948. Head of the Communist Party and prime
minister of Italy. Imagine!”

“I know you have a world view on these things, Henry. You’re quiet, and you’re retiring by nature. But nobody ever doubted
your genuine
curiosity about how the world really
is.
You figured out how the world really
is
—”Carl allowed himself a little admiring chuckle—“in the agricultural world. Thanks to you we have a revolution in hybrid-corn
growing.”

Wallace corrected him. “In hybrid-corn
breeding,
Carl.”

“Well, they’ll never take that away from you. Uh. Henry, what tack do you want to take for the speech in Fort Wayne?” He laughed
sympathetically. “Want to talk about the history of corn growing?—corn breeding?”

Wallace paused.

Carl waited.

“Let me think about that. That’s three weeks away. I know how fast you can put together a first-rate speech—”

“A speech that catches the presidential eye!”

Now Henry Wallace laughed. He didn’t laugh very often. He felt better.

“Thanks, Carl. I’ll be in touch.”

Two days later, Valysha Ordoff, first secretary of the Kremlin’s U.S. Intelligence Division, brought the long, decoded message
to the foreign office. Dmitri Bibikoff read it and picked up the telephone. He was put through to Foreign Minister Molotov.

“President Truman gave Henry Wallace hell for the Wednesday speech. Carl thinks he will probably be fired. Truman wants to
appease the militants. He very much wants to be reelected in 1948.”

“You are keeping a close eye on Carl?”

“A
very
close eye, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Very close eye.”

“If Wallace is fired, Carl is no longer very useful to us, is he?”

“Permit me to correct you, comrade.”

“You are telling me that the confidant and speechwriter for a
former
vice president, a
former
secretary of commerce can continue to be useful to us?”

“Perhaps—”Dmitri spoke the words as if letting out smoke from a choice cigar; slowly, sensually,—”perhaps he can be useful
to us as the confidant and speechwriter for a candidate for president of the United States.”

Molotov paused.

Dmitri knew better than to go any further, to stay on the line and chat now, or gossip, or speculate. Not with Molotov. “More
on the subject when there is more to report.” He signed off. The conversation was over.

Molotov put down the phone. He thought for a moment.

Should he take the news to Stalin? Better not. He might find in it a crazy reason to purge Dmitri.

At the end of December 1947 Henry Wallace announced by radio from Chicago that he would run for president. The Progressive
Citizens of America immediately disclosed its plans: The political organization that for two years had promoted socialist
domestic programs and a pro-Soviet foreign policy would forthwith dissolve and reincorporate as a national political party—the
Progressive Party. It would schedule a national convention in Philadelphia in July for the purpose of naming its own national
candidates.

On his return to Washington from Chicago, candidate Wallace spoke to a crowded press conference and gave his political agenda.
The primary aim of his program, Wallace stressed, was the search for a diplomatic solution to differences between East and
West. A photograph of Henry Wallace at his press conference appeared in the Columbia
Spectator.
Seated at the far end of the second row of journalists facing Wallace was Tom Scott, president of Columbia’s Young Progressives
Organization. Identified among others, seated to the candidate’s left, was Professor Pierre Enfils of Johns Hopkins.

As chairman of the Progressive Party of the Columbia Political Union, Scott was very active. The campus hummed with political
life, led—in organizational energy and scheduled activities—by the Young Progressives. They were unencumbered by such dissipations
of political purpose that trace to factional strife. The Young Progressives
were united—for Henry Wallace. Campus Democrats, by contrast, were restless under the national leadership of incumbent president
Harry Truman, who had polled only 20 percent support from Columbia’s student Democrats asked whom they would favor as the
presidential candidate in 1948. The Republicans were braced for hard primary campaigns ahead, waged by Senator Robert Taft,
the Republican leader in the Senate, beloved of orthodox Republicans; New York state governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had run
for president against FDR in 1944, popular with moderate Republicans and with the Time Life publishing empire; and former
governor of Minnesota Harold Stassen, with a huge following among young Republicans and GOP Midwestern populists.

The Columbia Political Union’s nine hundred members were enrolled in three parties—Progressive, Liberal, and Conservative.
At Miller Theatre partisans collided at their weekly meetings, debating the disputes of the day. They quarreled over the recently
proposed bill that would criminalize membership in any organization committed to the overthrow of the government. They debated
Senator Taft’s proposed reforms in labor law, the projected Taft-Hartley Act. They argued over how much authority should be
given to the United Nations, now formally ensconced in Manhattan.