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 want
s 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 formervice 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.
14
The students debate, 1948
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.
The typical debate featured a visiting speaker who would plead the posted resolution for twenty minutes (sometimes the president had ever so gently to gavel him down when he seriously overran the time he was given). He was followed by three student speakers, one from each party. Inevitably they divided on house resolutions, one or two speakers in favor, one or two opposed. Rising from the floor, members would then direct questions to the speaker and contribute their own comments. (“If we vote in favor of Taft-Hartley we are identifying ourselves with a movement that wants to castrate the labor union movement!” “The speaker clearly hasn’t read the act. Why deny to workers, just because they are union members, the right we have—even as students.”) At the close of the session, often after heated debate, came the vote on the resolution.
The union’s executive committee met early in January to make up a schedule for the spring semester and decide whom to invite and what resolutions to debate.
Tom Scott had twice argued in the Spectator that the Communist Party U.S.A. should be treated as simply another American political party, not as a subversive organization. In a guest column written for the Spectator, he argued that the Bill of Rights and the protocols of democratic practice required the recognition of the Communist Party “at every level, as a voluntary organization, promoting its own positions, set forth by its own officials and candidates.”
It didn’t surprise the executive committee members, seated around a table at Hamilton Hall in a classroom used for seminars, when Tom Scott, cigarette in hand, proposed inviting Gus Hall, president of the Communist Party, to address the Political Union. Harry Bontecou, as vice president of the Conservatives, objected forcefully. “The Communist Party U.S.A. is not an independent party. It’s an agent of the Soviet Union. If it were independent, we’d go along.”
Scott replied fervently that there was no firm evidence of any such link. “And if it’s an open question—’Is the CPUSA independent or isn’t it?’—the business of a politically interested body like ours—after all, that is what we are, the Columbia Political Union—is to—inquire.” The format of union proceedings provided “ideal auspices” for open discussion. And who was better equipped to stand up to such questioning than Gus Hall? “Let him have his say. Is that a pro-Communist position, to permit somebody to speak?”
Bontecou argued his position tenaciously. “That which is known should not be approached as if it were unknown.” It was known, he insisted, that the Communist Party was a Moscow-run operation.
After a half hour, Ed Tucker, the president, suggested an alternative. “Why don’t we schedule a debate on the question ‘Resolved, That the Political Union should invite Gus Hall, the head of the Communist Party of America, to address the Political Union’?”
Scott asked for a five-minute adjournment to consult with his colleagues. He and his lieutenants went into an adjacent room. Harry turned to Chris Russo, seated on his left. They spoke in quiet voices, out of hearing of the president at the other end of the table. Russo was Conservative Party president.
“What do you think?”
“We’d obviously lose. All they have to do is bring up the First Amendment and stroke that violin good and hard—and we lose the house.”
“So?” Lionel Spitz, the party parliamentarian leaned over, “We can still get the important things said. What’s important is to bear down on the Wallace movement, stress its subordination to the party line.”
“We don’t have the votes in the executive committee to block the debate. So let’s think about the guest speaker. Maybe invite one of the senators or congressmen supporting the Mundt-Nixon Bill outlawing the Communist Party.” Spitz listed a few names: Senators Pat McCarran—Howard McGrath—James Eastland—Herbert O’Conor—”
“What about going with a faculty speaker? Willmoore Sherrill would be great,” Harry said.
His associates agreed. “Let’s hold out for that. We had two Progressive speakers last fall, and one of them was Emerson—”the reference was to an ardent Progressive from the law school faculty.
Conservative Party president Russo called out to Tucker at the end of the long table: “We’ll go along with the resolution,” he said—“provided we get to name the speaker.”
The Progressive cadre returned. Scott sat down, lit another cigarette, and announced in grumpy tones, “We’ll
go along with the resolution.” Confronted by the Conservative claim to precedence in naming the speaker, Scott froze. Nothing doing. The wrangling went on into deadlock. Tucker called for a lunch break and an opportunity for the principal antagonists—the Progressives and the Conservatives—to caucus.
“Here’s an idea you can take with you to lunch,” Tucker said. “Cancel the visiting speaker. Let the whole evening be handled by student speakers.” An hour later, returned from the break, the parties agreed. Scott would speak first, Bontecou next.
The debate was scheduled for March 18, 1948. On March 10, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, son of the republic’s founding father and the voice of Czech resistance to operational Communist control, was found dead, three floors down from the apartment he occupied in the Foreign Ministry Building.
That was the end of such resistance as the traditionalist liberals had been able to maintain against the colossus of postwar Soviet power. Masaryk was dead! Who was left to lead opposition to Communist control?
The coalition government was dissolved. The Communist Party now exercised undisputed power. The purge of the opposition began. The “Czech coup” had taken place: Czechoslovakia was now behind the Iron Curtain. Ten years after the Nazis had asserted claim to the Czech Sudetenland and, a few months later, to the entire Czech Republic.
Sentiment at Columbia was preponderantly critical of the fake suicide, but opinion was not undivided. Scott issued a press release from the offices of the Young Progressives urging a calm view of the Czech drama. He warned against jumping to “warmongering conclusions.” He asked whether anyone could presume to pass conclusive judgment on the Czech development without first investigating the charges, “widely circulated in Europe,” that Masaryk had been found in collusion with neofascist elements to engage in repressive counterrevolutionary activity. There was heated talk in Congress. Outraged members dismissed as transparently unpersuasive the hollow Soviet claim that Masaryk’s defenestration had been his own doing.
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