All over the States and Europe the next day, newspapers carried stories that the Truman administration had suddenly and drastically altered its foreign policy—that the United States would break off close ties with Britain and end its opposition to Soviet expansion. In Paris, where Secretary of State Byrnes was busy negotiating with the Russians, the Wallace speech sparked anger and confusion. Byrnes sent Truman a furious note over the teletype machine, threatening to resign immediately. “You and I spent 15 months building a bipartisan policy . . . ,” Byrnes wrote Truman. “Wallace destroyed it in a day.” Senator Arthur Vandenberg, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was with Byrnes in Paris, and he released a statement criticizing the Truman administration, saying, “We can only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” Humiliated, Truman had to release his own statement that there “has been no change in the established foreign policy of our Government.”
Editorials excoriated the president, and the timing could not have been worse for Truman, as it was just weeks before the 1946 midterm elections. It “grows worse as we go along,” Truman wrote his sister and mother. “Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making.”
On September 18 Wallace met with Truman to discuss the debacle. Truman said that he had been so disturbed by reaction to the speech, he was having sleepless nights. Wallace defended his address.
“The public is profoundly interested in peace,” he said, as he recalled in his diary. “My own mail is running five to one in favor of my speech. Peace is going to be an issue in this campaign [the 1948 election, two years away]. The people are afraid that the ‘get tough with Russia’ policy is leading us to war. You, yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.”
The president was adamant: “I must ask you not to make any more speeches touching on foreign policy. We must present a united front abroad.”
Outside, in the White House press gallery, packs of reporters awaited Wallace, smelling a scoop. “What shall I tell the press when I go out?” Wallace asked Truman. “There are a hundred or more hungry wolves out there.”
Truman summoned his press secretary, Charlie Ross, and together they worded a benign statement that Wallace would refrain from making further speeches on foreign policy.
Less than a week later, a letter Wallace had written to the president in July was leaked to the press. In it, Wallace argued that the Truman administration’s foreign policy could lead to a third world war, and that “there is a school of military thinking” that advocated a “preventive war” against the USSR, before the Soviets had their own bomb.
The Wallace letter was gas on an already smoldering fire. Truman was so upset by it, he sent Wallace a missive, telling him from the gut exactly what he thought. It was so acidic that, when Wallace read it, he called the president.
“You don’t want this thing out [to the press],” he told Truman over the phone.
The president agreed and sent a messenger to retrieve the letter. It was subsequently destroyed; what it said exactly has never been known. Nevertheless, Truman fired Wallace on that day, September 20, 1946, by phone. “I called him and told him he ought to get out,” Truman wrote Bess, who was in Independence at the time. “I believe he’s a real Commy and a dangerous man.”
Later that day, in his regular press conference, Truman said, “I have today asked Mr. Wallace to resign from the Cabinet.”
Reporters were stunned. “There were audible gasps and a stir and a low whistle from one correspondent,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary. When the room cleared, Truman spoke aloud, quoting Julius Caesar: “Well, the die is cast.”
Henry Wallace was a former vice president. He was a hero of New Deal liberalism. He was adored by masses of left-wing voters. He was also a potential candidate for 1948, a man who had the power to tear the Democratic Party apart. His firing caused a sensation. “The Wallace thing is getting worse I believe,” Truman wrote Bess, “and I’m getting worried.”
That fall of 1946, in meetings with the Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Hannegan, the president expressed his concern over the 1946 elections. Truman found no solace when Hannegan asked him not to campaign for any of the Democrats running for Congress. The less voters saw of Truman, Hannegan said coldly, the better. Around this time Truman wrote a philosophical letter to his daughter, Margaret, in Missouri, which included the following observation:
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 Machiavelli . . . a liar, double-crosser . . . 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.
Truman left the White House at 3:30 p.m. on Halloween, bound for Missouri by train, so he could cast his vote in a midterm election he already knew would be devastating to his presidency. Republican congressional candidates nationwide were campaigning effectively with a three-syllable slogan: “Had enough?” Polls showed that Americans had indeed had enough of the Democrats, and that the Wallace mess in particular hurt the party. Truman had come down with a bad cold, and he arrived home in Independence feeling dejected and miserable.
At 9 a.m. on the day of the election, the president, accompanied by his daughter, arrived at Independence’s Memorial Hall. Parting a
