The President’s drinking, widespread stories notwithstanding, was moderate. Some mornings on deck, he might squint at the sky and comment that it must be noon somewhere in the world, and ask for a bourbon. On occasion he would show the effects of several drinks, expressing himself, as Clifford later wrote, “in language less restrained and more colorful than he would otherwise use,” and especially if he had had a particularly vexing week. But he could also nurse a single drink through a whole evening of talk and poker.
“The Williamsburg, being a commissioned vessel, was not supposed to serve liquor,” recalled MacDonald, but as Commander in Chief it was, “of course,” Truman’s prerogative to drink on board if he so wished. “I made no issue of that…. Old Grandad was his favorite.”
When, at Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, they hit cold winds, rain, and fog, Truman ordered a change in plans. They turned and headed south to Bermuda, which, he knew, had been Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, and where finally, in ideal weather, he enjoyed a few days of peace and uninterrupted sunshine. “This is a paradise you dream about but hardly ever see,” he wrote to Margaret on August 23.
But in Hampton Roads on the return to Washington, they sailed straight into a storm. The 244-foot Williamsburg, built in 1930 as a private yacht and purchased by the Navy at the outset of the war, had never been a particularly good seagoing vessel, even after several hundred tons of pig iron were put down in the bilges to improve stability. Now the ship “did all sorts of antics,” as Truman would tell his mother. Violently ill, he took to his bed. “The furniture was taking headers in every direction,” he told Bess, “and it was necessary to stay in bed to keep your legs on.” His stateroom was a shambles. “Papers, books, chairs, clothing, yours, Margaret’s, and Mamma’s pictures mixed up with Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, luggage, pillows. Looked as if it never would be in shape again….”
The summer heat of Washington held, and again he was alone in the great white jail, as he had begun calling the White House. Some of the servants had been telling him how the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had appeared over the years. Truman became convinced the house was haunted:
Night before last [he reported to Bess] I went to bed at nine o’clock after shutting my doors. At four o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there. Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked into your room and Margie’s. Still no one. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped up and looked and no one there! Damn place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.
More and more he disliked living there. Better it be made a museum, he thought, and give the President a rent allowance. That way, he told Bess, they could move back to the apartment on Connecticut Avenue, an idea he knew she would welcome.
“You better lock your door and prop up some chairs and next time you hear knocks, don’t answer,” Margaret advised him. “It’ll probably be A. Jackson in person.”
The little oak-paneled elevator that had carried him to the second floor the afternoon of Franklin Roosevelt’s death was being replaced with new equipment. (The old elevator, dating from Theodore Roosevelt’s day, had moved too slowly for Truman and on one occasion broke down, leaving him stranded between floors. He had to ring a gong and wait for the workmen to hurry to the basement and jiggle the apparatus back into motion.) New chandeliers were being installed, his bathtub fitted with a glass shower stall. But he had little faith in the old house.
The stock market was falling. A maritime strike that had begun on the West Coast was rapidly spreading. Next thing, he thought, the White House roof would cave in.
“I’m in the middle no matter what happens,” he wrote mournfully the second week of September, on the eve of the Wallace fiasco.
At a press conference in his office the afternoon of Thursday, September 12, the President was asked by a reporter to comment on a speech scheduled to be given by the Secretary of Commerce at a political rally in New York at Madison Square Garden that evening, copies of which had already been distributed to the press. Truman said he couldn’t answer questions about a speech that had not yet been delivered, at which Charlie Ross and others of the staff standing by appeared to breathe a sigh of relief. “If the President had only stopped there!” Ross later wrote.
The reporter, William Mylander of the Cowles newspapers, pressed on, saying Secretary Wallace referred in the speech to the President himself, which was why he had asked. There was laughter and Truman good-naturedly said that being the case perhaps he should hear the question.
Mylander, who held a copy of the speech in his hand, said it contained a sentence asserting that the President had “read these words” and that they represented administration policy.
That was correct, said Truman.
Was he endorsing a particular paragraph or the whole speech?
He had approved the whole speech, Truman said breezily. Reporters looked at one another.
“Mr. President,” asked Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “do you regard Wallace’s speech a departure from Byrnes’ policy…”
“I do not,” Truman snapped back, before Brandt could finish his sentence.
“…toward Russia?”
“They are exactly in line,” said Truman, in a manner implying the question was frivolous, and that he wished reporters would ask something harder.
In truth, he hadn’t read all the speech—or hadn’t been paying attention when Wallace went over it with him—and had given it no thought since. The President, noted Charlie Ross in his diary, had now been “betrayed by his own amiability.”
According to Wallace’s diary account, he and Truman had run through the speech together “page by page,” and Truman agreed with everything in it. “He didn’t have a single change to suggest,” Wallace wrote. Clark Clifford, too, would remember Wallace reading through the speech for the President. But Truman, in his own diary, said he had been able to give Wallace only ten or fifteen minutes, most of which had been taken up with other matters. He had tried to skim through it, Truman wrote, assuming that Wallace was cooperating in all phases of administration policy, including foreign policy. “One paragraph caught my eye. It said that we held no special friendship for Russia, Britain or any other country, that we wanted to see all the world at peace on an equal basis. I said that is, of course, what we want.” It was on the basis of this single paragraph only, according to Truman, that he gave his approval, “trusting to Henry to play square with me.” In private conversation with Charlie Ross, he also admitted that he had looked at only parts of the speech, relying on Wallace’s assurance that the rest was all right.
And most of the speech was indeed “in line” with administration policy. Wallace urged support for the United Nations, called for increased international trade and international control of atomic weapons. But he also condemned British “imperialism” and appeared to be advocating American and Russian spheres of interest in the world, a concept strongly opposed by Byrnes. The United States, Wallace said, had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America….” Any “Get Tough” policy was foolhardy. “‘Get Tough’ never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world power,” Wallace said. “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”
At Madison Square Garden, departing from his prepared text, Wallace told an audience of twenty thousand—an audience, in part, vociferously pro-Soviet—“I realize that the danger of war is much less from Communism than it is from imperialism….”
As James Reston wrote in The New York Times the following day, Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace had said and his own policy, or that of his Secretary of State in Par
is, who, reportedly, was outraged. An angry Arthur Vandenberg declared there could be only one Secretary of State at a time.
Saturday morning, the 14th, his immediate staff gathered about his desk, Truman openly berated himself for having made so grave a “blunder.” At a press conference that afternoon, he read a carefully prepared statement, and this time no questions were permitted. There had been “a natural misunderstanding,” Truman said. His answer to Mr. Mylander’s question had not conveyed the thought intended. It had been his wish only to express approval of Secretary Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, Truman insisted, not approval of the speech itself.
Having stumbled into trouble, he was clumsily and obviously fabricating in a desperate effort to get himself out and get Byrnes “off the hook” in Paris. “There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our country,” he also said, which was true but did no good. “The criticism continued to mount,” wrote Ross, who had helped prepare the statement.
Dispatches from Paris…indicated that Byrnes and his delegation felt that something more needed to be done. And, indeed, they were right. The question still remained whether Wallace was to be allowed to go on attacking in public the foreign policy line laid down by Byrnes at Paris. The press secretary’s seat became warmer and warmer. I could only reply to questions that the President and Byrnes were not in communication.
The “Wallace episode” boiled on for days. As Wallace continued to tell reporters that he stood by his speech, Truman kept to a light schedule, saying nothing further for attribution.
Then Ross, too, blundered badly. Hearing that columnist Drew Pearson had obtained a long private letter written by Wallace to Truman two months earlier—a letter apparently “leaked” to Pearson by someone in the State Department—Ross, without approval from Truman, agreed with Wallace that the letter should be released to the press, in order to deny Pearson the limelight. When Ross informed the President of what he had done, Truman told him to call Wallace at once and stop release of the letter. But by then it was too late, the letter was out.
Dated July 23, it consisted of twelve single-spaced typed pages more critical even of administration policy than Wallace’s speech had been. Forcefully advocating a new approach to the Soviet Union, Wallace charged, among other things, that certain unnamed members of the U.S. military command advocated a “preventive war” before Russia had time to develop an atomic bomb.
“I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble and it grows worse as we go along,” Truman confided plaintively to his mother on Wednesday, September 18. Wallace was expected momentarily at the White House. “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.”
To Wallace, too, Truman said he had only himself to blame for most of what had happened. He had not known so many sleepless nights since the convention at Chicago.
They talked alone in the Oval Office, Wallace giving no sign that he intended to quit. His mail, Wallace said, was running five to one in favor of his New York speech. “The people are afraid that the ‘get-tough-with-Russia’ policy is leading us to war,” Wallace told him. “You yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.” He advised Truman to be far to the left when Congress was not in session, then move to the right when Congress returned. That was the Roosevelt technique, Wallace said. Roosevelt had never let his right hand know what his left hand was up to. “Henry told me during our conversation that as President I couldn’t play square,” Truman would report to Bess, “…that anything was justified so long as we stayed in power.” If Truman would only lean more in his direction, Wallace said, it could mean victory for the Democrats in Congress in November. Truman told him he thought the Congress would go Republican in any event.
He asked Wallace to stop making foreign policy speeches—“or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible.” But Wallace would not agree.
Still Truman refused to fire him. Indeed, he hardly dared offend him. As the last surviving New Dealer in the Cabinet, Wallace was too important symbolically—as Wallace knew, and as Wallace knew Truman knew. For countless liberal Democrats Wallace remained the rightful heir to the Roosevelt succession, while Truman was only a usurper. For Truman to have an open break with Wallace, anything like the Ickes affair, could be politically disastrous. The only agreement reached at last, after two and a half hours of talk, was that Wallace would say no more on foreign policy at least until Byrnes came home.
In the lobby afterward, when reporters asked if everything had been straightened out, Wallace replied, “Everything’s lovely.”
“Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with,” Truman informed his mother. In his diary, he was more explicit. Wallace was unsound intellectually and “100 percent” pacifist.
He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic bomb secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a “dreamer” like that…. The Reds, phonies and “parlor pinks” seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.
I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin. They can see no wrong in Russia’s four-and-a-half million armed force, in Russia’s loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria. They can see no wrong in Russia’s living off the occupied countries to support the military occupation.
At the Pentagon, at Truman’s request, Secretaries Patterson and Forrestal issued a joint statement denying they knew of any responsible Army or Navy officer who had ever advocated or even suggested a policy or plan of attacking Russia.
From Paris, Byrnes sent Truman a long, reasoned message asking to be relieved at once:
When the administration is divided on its own foreign policy, it cannot hope to convince the world that the American people have a foreign policy…. I do not want to ask you to do anything that would force Mr. Wallace out of the Cabinet. However, I do not think any man who professes any loyalty to you would so seriously impair your prestige and the prestige of the government with the nations of the world…. You and I spent 15 months building a bipartisan policy. We did a fine job convincing the world that it was a permanent policy upon which the world could rely. Wallace destroyed it in a day.
At 9:30, the morning of Friday, September 20, Truman called Wallace on the phone and fired him, and, as Truman confided to Bess, Wallace was “so nice about it I almost backed out.” Then he added, “I just don’t understand the man and he doesn’t either.”
Further, Wallace offered to return an angry, longhand letter—“not abusive, but…on a low level,” as Wallace described it—that Truman had sent him the night before. “You don’t want this thing out,” Wallace told Truman and Truman gratefully agreed. He was very happy to take it back. Later, Wallace crossed the street from his office and posed for photographers sitting peacefully on a park bench reading the comic papers.
When at a crowded, hurriedly called press conference in his office Truman made the announcement, there were audible gasps from reporters and one long, low whistle. Once the room was cleared, Truman sat down at his desk and turning to Ross, who was standing nearby, said, “Well, the die is cast.”
He had shown, Ross told him, that he would rather be right than President. “I would rather be anything than President,” Truman said.
“No man in his right mind would want to come here [to the White House] of his own accord,” he had written earlier to Margaret. Now, wishing as always to shine untarnished in her eyes, he tried to excuse his handling of the Wallace affair by saying he had no gift for duplicity. To be a good President, he told her, one had to be a combination Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Cesare Borgia, and Talleyrand, “a liar, double-crosser and unctuous religio (Richelieu), hero and whatnot,” and he didn’t have the stomach for it, “thanks be to God.”
He was mulling history and his own life more and more. On September 26, anniversary of the start of the Argonne offensive of
1918, reflecting on the intervening years, he wrote in his diary as follows, referring to himself only as “a serviceman of my acquaintance.” The rage that filled his earlier rail strike “speech” was absent now, replaced by a kind of melancholy and disappointment, and an underlying resolve to face whatever he must:
Sept. 26, 1918, a few minutes before 4 A.M. a serviceman of my acquaintance was standing behind a battery of French 75’s at a little town called Neuville to the right of the Argonne Forest. A barrage was to be fired by all the guns on the Allied front from Belgium to the Swiss border.
At 4 A.M. that barrage started, at 5 A.M. the infantry in front of my acquaintance’s battery went over. At 8 A.M. the artillery including the 75 battery referred to moved forward. That forward movement did not stop until Nov. 11, 1918.
My acquaintance came home, was banqueted and treated as returned soldiers are usually treated by the home people immediately after the tension of war is relieved.
The home people forgot the war. Two years later, turned out the Administration which had successfully conducted our part of the war and turned the clock back.
They began to talk of disarmament. They did disarm themselves, to the point of helplessness. They became fat and rich, special privilege ran the country—ran it to a fall. In 1932 a great leader came forward and rescued the country from chaos and restored the confidence of the people in their government and their institutions.