Holding no office when he returned home, Stassen announced a run for president before anyone, in 1946. Few took him seriously—until April 9, 1947, when Stassen went to Moscow and inexplicably got himself an in-person interview with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Upon his return to America, Stassen released a transcript of the meeting to the press. It quoted Stalin saying, “The USSR does not propose to” have war with the United States, and “if during war they [the United States and Soviet Union] could cooperate, why can’t they today in peace?”
“The document was sensational,” recorded Jack Redding, the publicist for the Democratic National Committee. “Here was a possible next President of the United States who was able to secure a face-to-face session with the Russian dictator.”
“Among the rank and file of politicians,” Time magazine stated in 1947, “the boys who know the ropes, no one laughs at Harold Stassen.”
Herbert Brownell’s candidate Tom Dewey was still the front-runner. But the quest for the nomination was going to be harder than either man thought. And the ideological landscape was growing increasingly diverse.
“From my point of view, we have a larger problem,” Dewey wrote the Republican congressman from New York, John Taber, looking ahead to the 1948 Republican National Convention. Thus far a Democrat in the White House had been navigating the country through the postwar period. Now it appeared the Republicans would be taking over.
What would be the GOP policy toward the Soviets? Who would shape it?
“We are just beginning to win the cold war,” Dewey wrote Taber. Dewey wanted to rally support for the Marshall Plan among Republicans. He believed that if “we win this cold war and can build a United States of Europe for a strong, free world,” it would be worth the “grief” and the billions in Marshall Plan dollars “many times over.”
“If we should lose the free world,” he wrote ominously, “then isolated and alone, we would have a defense budget alone larger than our entire budget of today. That is, we should have it unless we too surrendered to the onward march of Communism.”
One year before the election, on November 15, 1947, a Republican political operative wrote a scathing memo that landed on Dewey’s desk (the signature on this memo is illegible). The document put into words a fear that was growing among both Democrats and Republicans—that the Soviets would attempt to influence the outcome of the 1948 presidential election. “The Kremlin will make no serious move in the direction of establishing peace in Europe and elsewhere before the 1948 election in the United States has been decided,” the memo read. “In the meantime it will try to influence the result of the 1948 election by every means conceivable.”
The document warned that the election was going to get unprecedentedly ugly. “When one considers, for instance, that including their families there are millions of people who directly and indirectly have spent almost half of their adult lives in drawing support from the payrolls of the Federal government [due to the liberal spending policies and social programs of the New Deal]; when one further realizes the degree of sheer desperation that will surely envelop these millions when faced with the threat of losing their regular income from this source, one need not wonder how vituperative and reckless will be the language and actions of this formidable contingent of Democrats.”
What could make the difference, this writer implied, was Moscow. The Kremlin was sure to prefer the Democrats in the White House: “Not that these men love the Democrats; they only hate the Republicans more or, what is more to the point, the men in the Kremlin are afraid of the Republicans more than they are of the tested Democrats.
“The United States of America is fair game for Moscow and has been for years,” the memo concluded. “And, as far as anyone is willing to see, the year 1948 will be the year in which Soviet Russia will do everything in its power to influence the election here.”
9
“Wall Street and the Military Have Taken Over”
WHILE THE REPUBLICANS JOCKEYED FOR position, Henry Wallace stunned the Democratic Party by declaring his candidacy for president. Wallace was going to run not as a Democrat but as the face of a new and highly controversial third party.
On December 29, 1947, Wallace assembled forty friends in ABC’s radio studio in Chicago. His close advisers and his wife, Ilo, were there; they knew he was going to announce his run. However, Wallace had kept it a secret from all but those closest to him as to which party he would represent. All over the country, Americans heard Wallace’s words, as he made the biggest leap of faith of his lifetime.
“Thousands of people all over the United States have asked me to engage in this great fight,” Wallace said into the ABC microphone. “The people are on the march. We have assembled a Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action.” A vote for Wallace was a vote for peace, the candidate said. He declared himself the candidate of the new Progressive Party—a group that situated itself to the left of the Democrats, as the anti-Truman, antiwar choice for voters. Then he addressed the obvious conflict straight on: Would votes for Wallace, a liberal and a hero for New Deal Democrats, steal votes from Truman and the Democrats, and guarantee a GOP victory?
“The lukewarm liberals sitting on two chairs say, ‘Why throw away your vote?’” Wallace asked
