"This Great Endeavor"

(See Cover)

Last week, in the midst of the noisiest uproar Washington had heard in a generation, a convention of Protestant Episcopal bishops meeting in Philadelphia announced: "To conclude that the only way in which the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States can be resolved is by war would be calamitous and . . . unthinkable."

The bishops spoke for all. The world, watching the struggle between America's Byrnes and Russia's Molotov, prayed for peace. That was why the eyes of the world focused on Henry Wallace last week. In a voice that was heard in every capital he proclaimed: Our present foreign policy threatens war.

Was he right? Certainly, if the world depended on the Truman Administration to keep it out of trouble, the world had something to worry about. Harry Truman could not keep himself out of trouble. He was the main cause of Washington's uproar.

"Viva Wallace!" Truman's troubles had begun with his endorsement of Wallace's now famed Madison Square Garden speech (TIME, Sept. 23). The President had collected his wits long enough to repudiate both his own inept words and the speech. But last week newsmen got wind of something else. This was a confidential memorandum on foreign affairs which Wallace had written to the President in July. Someone in Wallace's Commerce Department--doubtless thinking that this was an opportune time to embarrass the President--had given a copy to Columnist Drew Pearson, who intended to publish it. PM's I. F. ("Izzy") Stone somehow got a copy too. Other newspapermen demanded to see it. When the press roar became unbearable, bewildered Presidential Secretary Charlie Ross told Commerce to release the letter, and Commerce did. When Harry Truman heard that the letter would be released he was, according to a friend, in "a state of near-hysteria."

The letter was even more scathing than the speech in its criticism of U.S. policy vis a vis Russia. It charged "a school of military thinking" with advocating a "preventive war" before Russia perfected her own atomic bomb. It denounced the U.S. plan for atomic control as humiliating to the Russians. The letter was a kind of secondary explosion which blew the Secretaries of War and Navy and Bernard Baruch, godfather of the atomic-control plan, clean out of their seats. They arrived at the White House with denials and protests.

Some of the President's janizariat told him, then, that this was too much; he would have to take a stand at last. Wallace must go. But Harry Truman hesitated. Was not Wallace the great friend of organized labor, of leftists, liberals and C.I.O.'s P.A.C.? He had already invited Wallace to the White House; perhaps a heart-to-heart chat would settle matters.

Striding through a crowd of newsmen into Harry Truman's office, a grinning Wallace shouted gaily, "This is the best show I've seen in a long time." For two hours and 20 minutes he remained, talking to the President. Fidgety newsmen, waiting in an antechamber, cracked that he was either: 1) demanding Mr. Truman's resignation, or 2) trying his jujitsu tricks on the President. Then he came out, still smiling.

Was he fired? Not at all. "Everything's lovely." What had happened? He had merely promised that "he would make no public speeches or statements until the 'Foreign Ministers' Conference in Paris is concluded." In the crowd of spectators which had gathered to see what all the excitement was about, someone shouted: "Viva Wallace!" Wallace leaped into his auto, shouted in his best Berlitz-taught Spanish: "Muchas gracias," and rolled away.

"Superhuman Forbearance." Secretary Byrnes was in Paris. Since the opening of the Peace Conference, an amateur statistician of the Quai d'Orsay had estimated Byrnes had uttered some 90,000 words in public. But since Wallace had attacked his policy he had not spoken one. Now he still said nothing.

But Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg talked and there was no mistaking their indignation. Vandenberg, sick of trying to demonstrate national unity in foreign policy when the Administration was so disunited, was thoroughly fed up. Editorialized the Baltimore Sun: "It will be almost impossible to repair [the Wallace-Truman blunder] unless these men show almost superhuman forbearance and stand by the stricken ship of nonpartisan policy." Connally and Vandenberg stood by.

Others spoke. From capitals around the world dispatches poured into Washington. Acting Secretary of State Will Clayton had rushed to the White House four times in three days. Byrnes knew all this. Still he said nothing. Louder than a million words, the overwhelming silence from Jimmy Byrnes echoed across the Atlantic.

Washington Calling. Harry Truman could stand it no longer. The day after he put a temporary gag on Henry Wallace, he called his Secretary of State on the transatlantic phone. The connection was bad. So he walked to the teletype in the White House communications room. In his mind's eye, no doubt, was the pale, birdlike face of Jimmy Byrnes bent over the teletype in the Paris Embassy. Across 3,800 miles the machines and the men began to talk.

Their exact words are not known, but it is known that the Washington machine tried to explain Mr. Truman's actions. The Paris machine asked some pointed questions, and said at length that the U.S. delegation (Byrnes, Vandenberg and Tom Connally) would have to quit Paris and return to Washington unless the President's foreign policy were clarified. The Washington machine thanked the Paris machine for a "cooperative" attitude. Did the Paris machine demand Wallace's head? Not at all. In the silence of the White House and the Paris Embassy the machines signed off.

The exact personal relationship between Harry Truman, the man who is President, and Jimmy Byrnes, the man who might have been, will be detailed by history. One thing is known: the relationship is not the usual one between boss and subordinate.

Mr. Truman called in Charlie Ross and 39-year-old Clark Clifford, his special counsel. He talked & talked--about Wallace. Although he had told the world that the matter was settled, it really was not --as the correspondents abroad and the newspapers at home kept telling him. He went to his bedroom, still pondering. "It was," said one awed intimate, "like Jesus walking in the garden." The next morning he had made up his mind.

At 10:10 the white phone rang on the desk of his Secretary of Commerce. The phone was Henry Wallace's direct line to the White House. Wallace picked it up, listened and raised a startled face. Then he said: "If that is your request, Mr. President, I will gladly resign."

That was Harry Truman's request, the end of Henry Wallace's thirteen stormy years in the Government. Wallace penned a short note. "Dear Harry," he wrote. "As you requested, here is my resignation. I shall continue to fight for peace. I am sure that you approve and will join me in this great endeavor."

Having delivered himself of that, which may have been a taunt, he posed for news photographers. For a man who had once tried to knock out a photographer, he was unusually gracious. He posed for half an hour and even strode across the street to pose sitting on a park bench reading the funny papers.

The Wallace Choice. That was the end of the uproar. In the first after-silence, those two fledgling organizations,--the National Citizens P.A.C. and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (TIME, Sept. 9) looked a little taken aback. It was at their rally that their hero Wallace had made his speech. They had hardly anticipated such a far-reaching result.

From London came an audible sigh. Moscow refrained from comment. Mr. Truman, extracted what comfort he could from the fact that he had acted, in the end, with respectable firmness; he had repaired the damage he had done to Byrnes's prestige. And now Henry Wallace could say what he liked and fight all he wanted for the policy which he espoused.

There were few doubts as to what that policy would be. Among its pointedly implied recommendations: P: The abandonment of the present U.S. military program, which embraces the manufacture of B-29s, B-36s, $13 billion for the War and Navy Departments, bases in Greenland and Okinawa. P: The abandonment of the U.S. atomic-control plan in favor of something more like Russia's counterproposal, which would give Russia atomic power without necessarily subjecting her to international scrutiny. P: The abandonment of U.S. resistance to Russian attempts to "obtain warm-water ports and her own security system in the form of 'friendly' neighboring states."

The U.S., said Wallace, can choose one of two points of view. "The first is that it is not possible to get along with the Russians and therefore war is inevitable. The second is that war with Russia would bring catastrophe to all mankind and therefore we must find a way of living in peace." Wallace chose the second for "our own welfare as well as that of the entire world."

The Alternatives. Were these, in fact, the only alternatives? Certainly there were serious proponents of another point of view, outside the limits of Wallace's peculiar brand of emotional logic. One of these proponents was the U.S. State Department. Byrnes's position is that war is not necessarily inevitable, even if the U.S. fails "to get along with Russia." In Byrnes's words it is the position of "patience as well as firmness." The potential reward is Russian respect for U.S. democracy, freedom of choice for the small nations and in some distant future, perhaps, the collapse of Russia's unnatural totalitarian scheme. This position implies a political conflict which can conceivably be waged and won without recourse to war. The policy risks war--as any international policy does--but the risk is not the same thing as inevitability.

There is also the position held by some pessimistic Americans--and possibly held also by the Kremlin--that war is inevitable no matter what the U.S. does. In that case there is nothing to do but arm for war.

But these other alternatives, one so risky, the other so filled with doom, seemed poor payment to the Western World for the blood, sweat and tears of a war just ended. Henry Wallace has minted a brighter coin. Russian Communism and the free-enterprise system, he said, could live "one with another in a profitable and productive peace." U.S. democracy and Russian Communism could divide the world into spheres of influence and get along. Wallace offered "peace for our time." The coin was bright, but it had a faintly familiar and counterfeit ring.

Out of the Past. In 1940 another American idol had proclaimed: "Cooperation is never impossible when there is sufficient gain on both sides." It had taken some Americans quite a while to find out that Charles Lindbergh was offering them a counterfeit.

Like Lindbergh, Wallace is also an earnest and sincere man and, in a number of respects, also a symbol. Americans rarely know their Secretary of Commerce, but they know Wallace--or think they do. Everybody knows a little bit about him, but very few know the complete man. In the aggregate they admire, respect, hate or ridicule him. Almost all are either puzzled or dismayed by him, and wonder how he ever got to Washington--forgetting that he would probably never have been there except for Franklin Roosevelt's penchant for collecting men of all shades, types, opinions and personalities, including the curious.

Henry Wallace came from Iowa, where he was the editor of Wallace's Farmer, the journal founded by his Republican grandfather. He was friend and spokesman of the men of the soil, the exponent of scientific farming. He was a dreamer, and a scientist who developed a hybrid corn. Franklin Roosevelt made him his Secretary of Agriculture and he went to Washington --a shy, humble man with a cowlick, who once put himself on an exclusive diet of soybeans just to prove a point. He proved that soybeans are not enough.

He was Vice-President four years. But Roosevelt rejected him as a running mate in 1944 in response to furious pressure from Southern Democrats and perhaps some doubts of his own. After all, he had himself given Wallace a furious kicking downstairs in the BEW fight with Jesse Jones. But as a reward for Wallace's campaigning in 1944 he offered him any job he wanted but Secretary of State.

Wallace chose Commerce (in the hope that he could press his plan for full employment).

He neither drank nor smoked. He studied avidly, learned Spanish and Russian. He exercised prodigiously, walking, playing tennis, throwing the boomerang. All of these things are vaguely remembered.

There are other facets of his character not so well known.

His writings are a labyrinth of yearnings and doubts. He once wrote, in Statesmanship and Religion: "The first thing which stands out in the lives of the reformers of the 16th Century is their tremendous earnestness. The only people of this century who seem to have a comparable earnestness are such men as Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler." And in the same book: "Neither socialism nor communism meets the realities of human nature. Both of them have an emotional dryness, a dogmatic thinness which repels me."

He is a man who has read much but is not well read, thought much but is not a thinker, known too many people to have made many real friends. He is a scientist who is governed by his emotions, a believer who has rejected faith. He has sincerity without principle.

He turned his back on principle when he took advantage of bumbling Harry Truman's endorsement of his speech. Even the sympathetic leftist Nation pointed out: "He should have known that Mr. Truman's endorsement turned it [the speech] into a bombshell." He not only should have known, he did.

No Other Decent Course. Was he now turning his back on an even greater principle? Wallace knows as well as anyone the nature of his proposal. He knows the background of postwar U.S.-Russian relations. The U.S. had already tried the friendly hand. But Russia interpreted friendliness as weakness. Russia had used the veto to block virtually every majority ruling which incurred her dislike. Russia had seized 270,000 square miles of territory since 1939. Stalin had reaffirmed Marxism in a speech last February which left no doubts about Russia's intent and convinced many that she is now on a relentless war economy.

In 1940 the man who now offers Americans a choice wrote in a book called The American Choice: "Against Hitler's total warfare we must quickly oppose a total defense. ... If we really believe all we have said and done about the rights of man, and freedom and personal honor in this New World, I can see no other safe or decent course." The fact that Wallace could now see another course was something Wallace has not fully explained.

U.S. Communists whooped with joy. American liberals looked confounded. It might be just as calamitous and unthinkable to conclude, as Wallace did, that the tensions between the U.S. and Russia could be resolved by appeasement. But at least Wallace had laid the issue bare. He would speak again, and again. Out of the Cabinet, and released from his pledge of temporary silence, he spoke over the radio: "The success of any policy rests ultimately upon the confidence and the will of the people. ... I intend to fight for peace."

Henry Wallace will have a strong appeal to Americans who want wishful thinking to do duty for a U.S. foreign policy and to Americans who want to believe that Russia is an "economic democracy." He will be welcomed by church groups, by labor unions, by parent-teacher societies, by leftist organizations of all shades and sizes, and by the myriad special committees which can spring up overnight. He will also be welcomed by isolationists, by Anglophobes and by Russophiles, and by those who believe that the only way to prevent the next war is to woo and win Russia's shy and aching heart.

But all these groups, if they are charmed by Henry's line, will have to forget a massive set of disagreeable facts. They would have to forget the Russian denial of religion, the Russian territorial expansion since World War II, the Russian denial of individual rights in both conquered and satellite countries, the character of the Russian police state, the new Russian five-year plan. They will have to forget, in short, that Russia is a totalitarian state.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.