Even Wallace was shocked when, on May 17, Stalin responded. Wallace’s ideas were in “need of improvement,” Stalin said in a statement published around the globe. But they provided “a serious step forward,” a “concrete program for the peaceful settlement of differences.” Over the radio from San Francisco, a teary-eyed Henry Wallace declared himself “overwhelmed” by Stalin’s statement. “I am humbled and grateful to be an instrument in this crisis,” he said. “If I have done anything to further the cause of peace in the world, I shall have felt my whole campaign a tremendous success.”
On May 18, the day after Stalin’s response was made public, an FBI investigator informed bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover that Wallace’s letter to Stalin “may be a possible violation of the Lane Act . . . an old statute passed around 1795 which prohibits a citizen in the United States from communicating with a foreign country concerning a matter bearing on diplomatic relations.”* Hoover referred the matter to the attorney general that same day. Could Wallace have opened himself up to criminal prosecution?
No one was more suspicious and angry about Wallace’s open letter to Stalin than the president. “We aren’t dealing with Stalin through Wallace,” Truman snapped.
12
“For Better or Worse, the 1948 Fight Has Started”
ON THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 1948, a few minutes before 10 p.m., Washington’s Union Station swelled with crowds who came to catch a glimpse of President Truman and his entourage. Truman was set for a cross-country trip the old-fashioned way: aboard a sixteen-car train, on the back of which was the Ferdinand Magellan, the 285,000-pound bulletproof luxury railcar that had been built for FDR a few years earlier. The Ferdinand Magellan would be home to the Truman family—Harry, Bess, and Margaret—for the next two weeks.
Truman was headed off on a speaking tour. The impetus for the trip was a memorandum written by the Democratic National Committee’s publicist Jack Redding some months earlier, which outlined the idea of a national tour that would bring Truman into communities where Americans could experience the magic of the presidency and Truman’s own personal charisma. It would be a trial run for the national campaign, which was set to kick off on Labor Day weekend. “If people see him in person,” Redding’s memo read, “they’ll vote for him. His personality, his smile, his manner of approach, his sincerity all come through perfectly. People will trust him. Trusting him, they’ll vote for him.”
Soon after this memo was written, Truman received an invitation to deliver a commencement speech at the University of California at Berkeley. Campaign staff jumped on it as the perfect opportunity. The speech would allow the president to label the journey west “nonpolitical,” meaning it could be paid for out of the president’s discretionary travel fund. Truman was such an underdog, the Democratic National Committee was broke. Campaign donors had abandoned him. Why fund a lost cause? There was nothing nonpolitical about the president’s tour, however. “The pretense that this is a ‘non-political trip’ disappeared almost as soon as the wheels of his 16-car special train started turning,” one columnist aboard the train commented.
A dining car became a bullpen office space for the working staff, while another was transformed into a press car, with rows of desks lining either side and facing out the windows. The Army Signal Corps built a state-of-the-art communications setup aboard another train car, with radio and cryptographic equipment, so the president could be in contact with the White House at all times. At stops, telephone wires could be hooked into the communications room to receive calls, and Truman had his own telephone in the Ferdinand Magellan.
Teams of reporters boarded the train, carrying suitcases and typewriters and fingering smoldering cigarettes. The Democratic National Committee furnished two cases of liquor for the traveling press corps, to butter them up—one of scotch, one of bourbon. On the first night of the trip, columnist Richard Strout thumped out his lead while sitting in the press car: “Rolling across the United States with the biggest collection of news, radio, and cameramen in history, the Truman special train is a traveling question mark . . . For better or worse, the 1948 fight has started.”
Truman was experimenting with impromptu speeches, a new strategy he had first tried out two months earlier in a White House talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He had delivered “one of those deadly dull speeches” for which he had become known, recalled one person there that night, but after, “he began an entirely different, extemporaneous and off-the-record speech of his own, in his own vocabulary, out of his own humor and his own heart.” David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, heard the president speak that night. He wrote in his diary, “Why wasn’t that on the record? That is what the whole country should hear.”
Which is exactly what Truman aimed to do: Let the whole country hear him talk, off the cuff. Extemporaneous speeches were dangerous, however. Any gaffe would hit the newspapers as far off as London and Moscow, and embarrass the president to no end. In fact, that is exactly what the journalists on Truman’s California trip expected would happen. “A large number of reporters went along,” remembered Oscar Chapman, a political adviser and speechwriter on the train. “They were expecting to see a complete flop and they wanted to write about it.”
Truman would not disappoint them.
On June 5 in Omaha, Truman marched out onto a speaker’s platform at the Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum, and looked out on a vast sea of empty seats. A scheduling error resulted in a near empty arena. (The error was made by Eddie McKim, one of Truman’s poker buddies, an insurance man who lived in Omaha.) Life magazine published photos of the president speaking at a huge
