Authors: Gore Vidal
Hands chopped at the air as he listed what his Administration had done for the people. What the Republicans had
not
done or stopped him from doing. He blamed the Eightieth Congress for obstruction. The people had won a great war and enjoyed great prosperity during sixteen years of Democratic rule while the Republican Party had done its best to halt any measure that might serve the people at large. The language was crisp, folksy: the accent that of the hillbilly populist majority of a still rural nation.
It became clear to Peter that the campaign would not be so much against the vapid Dewey but against the Republican Party in the Congress, who said they wanted civil rights but then had done nothing when he called upon them to act.
Truman was now working the audience and himself into a frenzy, at whose peak he dropped his bombshell, near atomic in its effect. “I am, therefore, calling this Congress back into session July twenty-sixth. On the twenty-sixth of July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day, I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis—which they are saying they are for in their platform.” He rose to a rhetorical crescendo as he listed other measures which “they
say
they are for.” Each got its cheers from the audience. Then he shouted, “Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind the Republican platform, we ought to get some action from
a short session of the Eightieth Congress. They can do this job in fifteen days, if they want to do it. Then they will still have time to go out and run for office.”
At the end, Truman waved to the cheering audience; then turned away from the lights. He shook the hand nearest him, which belonged to Sam Rayburn. At that exact moment, a dazed pigeon, mistaking Rayburn’s bald head for a solid rock to rest on, settled upon the statesman’s head. Grimly, Rayburn brushed the bird off. Truman exited, laughing.
“Turnip Day,” said Harold Griffiths, after consultation with another journalist, “is a Missouri jingle; ‘On the twenty-sixth of July sow your turnips wet or dry.’ ”
“He sowed them tonight.” Peter was looking forward to a copy of the largely improvised speech.
He was fairly certain that at no significant point had Truman mentioned the name of Roosevelt. He was now himself, unshadowed, alone; of course he must still fight and win his Turnip Wars.
The brick house in N Street was like all its neighbors in that corner of recently gentrified Georgetown. In front of the house, a large magnolia grew out of the cobbled sidewalk; at the newly painted dark green front door, a guard kept watch over what little traffic there was coming and going. Since Peter was expected, the guard ushered him into a hallway, where he was greeted by the lady of the house, a harassed young woman whom he recognized from large Washington parties where she formed a part of the permanent chorus to great events.
As befitted a member in good standing of the whispering gallery, she whispered even in her own house. “He’s very tired, Mr. Sanford. But he does want to see you. He’s in the study.” She opened a door and
motioned for Peter to enter a dark book-lined room, as gloomy as the dark autumn day itself.
At a desk, in front of a window looking onto a garden gone to seed, Henry Wallace, haggard and unshaven, necktie askew, was busy typing on a portable machine. He still had his dedicated admirers who would, in a few days, vote for him as president, the Progressive Party candidate for the sole legitimate heir to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“Mr. Sanford.” Wallace shook Peter’s hand. He was taller than Peter had expected; solidly built, with shaggy hair somewhat grayer than it looked in photographs. “Sit down.” Peter sat on a horsehair sofa, Wallace opposite him. “I’ve got too much to say, as you must have noticed.”
“I know. I’m grateful,” Peter added to his own surprise. He seldom betrayed any partisanship when it came to interviewing, or merely inspecting, national leaders.
“Are you?” Wallace’s smile was weak. “Well, it’s about over.” He looked at his watch. “I have thirty minutes.”
“I’ll just listen, if you don’t mind. This is for after the election, anyway. A sort of final impression. You look, if I may say so, mortally tired.”
“I am. The South was quite an experience for me. I’m pretty well used to controversy. But not so used to having eggs lobbed in my direction. Harry Truman’s smear brigade has been working overtime.” He reached over to the desk; picked up a sheet of paper. “Latest Gallup poll says that fifty-one percent of the American people think the Progressive Party is run by communists.”
“It isn’t?”
“Have you ever met an American communist who could run a shoe store? Of course, the few communists there are in the country are voting for me because they want peace between us and the Soviet while Truman wants confrontation, or worse. Now I’m not one to psychoanalyze public figures, but a half-blind mother’s boy is apt to have all sorts of complexes about trying to act like the way he thinks a tough boy would. When I was in the Cabinet, he always used to brag about how he had really
told
someone off but then you’d ask that someone
what happened and you’d find Harry had been his usual affable, quick-to-please-the-customer self.”
“But he did write you that tough letter, asking you to resign as secretary of commerce.”
Wallace nodded. “That was truly out of character. Unless the rumors are true that he does a lot of letter-writing at night when he’s drinking and then, if he remembers the next day, he prowls around the White House looking for stamps; very hard to find stamps there, since the secretaries lock their desks. But if he does find a stamp he’ll mail the letter the next morning on his regular walk. I think that may have happened in my case. It was a … a low letter.”
“Profane?”
“No. More … Oh, full of phrases like ‘one hundred percent pacifists,’ ‘parlor pinks,’ and ‘soprano-voiced men of the Art Club,’ whatever that is, whoever they are. It was bar-room drunk’s sort of language. Anyway, when I got it, I rang him and I told him pretty firmly that this was not proper presidential behavior and neither of us must ever let the public see his handiwork. That was my mistake, I suppose.” Wallace shook his head wearily. “He agreed—he always agrees—and he asked me if I’d return the letter if he sent me a messenger. I said I would and I did. I also gave Harry a three-line note of resignation and that was that. He’s been really bad luck for this country.”
“More than Roosevelt?”
Wallace looked surprised. “I thought
The American Idea
was pro–New Deal.”
“But then came Dr. Win-the-War.”
Wallace nodded. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I fell out over that, as you know. While all the donkeys in the press and Congress were braying about the American century, I was talking about the age of the common man. The President—when I say
the
President I only mean Roosevelt—was divided on the subject. But he and I were agreed that there was no difference between us and the Soviets that couldn’t be worked out peacefully. Truman’s simply not up to the job. He plays to the jingoes. To the haters. To …”
Wallace picked another piece of paper off the desk. “J. Edgar Hoover believes that one out of one thousand one hundred and eighty-four
Americans is a communist. I wonder who did the counting for him? Anyway, I should doubt one in ten thousand has any idea what communism is. But since Harry has given us all these loyalty oaths and star chamber hearings where due process of law is chucked out the window, Hoover now sees his Federal Bureau of Investigation as another Gestapo with himself as Himmler. Well, I promise you that FDR, for all his faults, would not have got us onto the road to what can only turn out to be a fascist state.”
“But he did give us Harry Truman.”
“Yes. History will worry about that one, I suppose. The feeling against me was so strong that he …” Wallace stared out the window at a brick wall covered in dead ivy. He seemed to have lost his train of thought. “You know,” he said at last, “I had a very strange impression when we first really met. In 1932. At Warm Springs. He was looking for a secretary of agriculture and I was looking to be secretary of agriculture like my father before me.” He laughed. “I read how mystical, woolly-headed I am. Yet I am the first scientist to be a member of a president’s Cabinet. I’m a plant geneticist. I’m responsible for hybrid corn and, if I may boast in the Republican manner, I edited
Wallace’s Farmer
. I’ve met many a payroll and I built from nothing a multimillion-dollar business, while FDR couldn’t balance a checkbook. Fortunately, this didn’t stop him from being a political genius, unlike me.
“You know, he used to filibuster when he was sizing people up. So when we were down in Georgia, supposed to be discussing agriculture, he started in on this long story of a treasure hunt that he’d had an interest in on some island off Nova Scotia. Well, he went on and on, probably the only subject—buried treasure—of absolutely no interest to me, and I kept wondering, what is this man all about? Was he preparing me with a parable? Perhaps he was, because the first thing he wanted to do was cut my department’s budget. I guess that was his buried treasure. He truly wanted a balanced budget. Never got one, of course.” Wallace shut his eyes; rocked back and forth slowly.
Then, just as Peter was convinced that he had gone to sleep, he opened his eyes. “At the end, he was not himself anymore. There was something wrong with his circulation. You could tell the way what
seemed like parts of his brain would suddenly light up while others would just go dark. The choice of Truman came out of … I’ve talked to doctors, authorities on circulation …” Wallace stopped: his own blood not flowing to the Roosevelt area of his brain?
“People thought FDR was arrogant, cold, indifferent to people. I suppose he was all those things up to a point. Certainly he felt that he had to dominate everyone. Felt he had to know more about everything than you did. I always knew, each day, the price of cotton in a dozen markets. But he’d still call me and say, ‘I bet you don’t know the latest price of cotton on the New York Exchange.’ But I always knew. Drove him crazy.”
“Why do you think he felt he had to replace you in 1944? With Truman of all people.”
Wallace shrugged. “The South mainly. ‘Go back to Russia, nigger-lover,’ they were yelling at me just yesterday in Virginia. I’ve never seen human hate in the raw like that. But once you see it, you can understand how someone like Hitler can exploit it for his own purposes. Then there was my supposedly mystical bent. The letters that some journalists got copies of to my guru. A joke between me and a theosophist friend. I’m fascinated by theosophy, by Buddhism. Yet I was also probably the only believing Christian in the Administration. But, somehow, there’s the idea that if one is curious about such things one must be mentally unstable. When the story first broke, FDR handled it very well. ‘He’s not a mystic,’ he said. ‘He’s a philosopher.’ Thank God the press has no idea what a philosopher is, because that could sound pretty bad to a lot of people. Finally, he just let me go and took Harry Truman aboard, figuring that as a four-eyed sissy he would be for peace, not realizing that sissies are driven to appear tough. Harry’s got to get us into a war to show how tough he is. Then there was Winston Churchill.…”
Wallace shut his eyes; began to rock. “I never hit it off with him. He worshiped that empire of theirs, never suspecting that FDR had every intention of folding it along with the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese colonies.” Wallace opened his eyes. “You know, Harry’s been secretly financing the French in Indochina, one of the first places that
FDR intended to boot them out of. Well, Churchill and I were at a dinner and he proposed that after the war the British and the Americans share a common nationality. I could see how this was a good deal for the residents of those offshore islands but a bad one for us. I was, I hope, polite. I pointed out that this Anglo-Saxondom would be considered elitist by those excluded, not to mention all those Americans who come from different racial stock. ‘Of course it’s elitist,’ he said in that cheery lisp of his, ‘because we
are
the superior stock. Always have been.’ I said that I disagreed. Later FDR told me that Churchill told him that he needed a new vice president.”
“The President was just stringing Churchill along?”
Wallace nodded. “As he did everyone.” He smiled. “Last time I really talked to FDR was after the election of 1944, just before he went off to Yalta. We were almost always on pretty good terms. Particularly on one of his good days. Well, this was one. I was waiting for him downstairs in the Map Room. A young naval officer, very nervous, was pushing his wheelchair. I stood up. The President was cheery. We started to talk, then something went wrong with the brakes on the wheelchair. The young man lost control of the chair, which started going faster and faster, with the boy trying desperately to slow it down, to stop it. The President was looking very alarmed at this point. Then the boy aimed the chair—and the President—into an open closet full of filing cases, where the chair came to a full halt. The President’s face ended up in a drawer. I rushed over to help. The boy was in a state of shock. Unable to be moved, the President then took charge of the wheels of his chair and slowly backed himself out of the closet. By then he was delighted. “I must say, Henry, I’ve heard about presidents being got rid of by assassination but this is the first time an attempt has ever been made to simply file a president.”
Wallace laughed; as did Peter. The dour mood lifted. Then the door to the study opened, and a radio crew appeared. Peter wished the candidate luck. He was rewarded with an absent smile.
The secretary of state–in-waiting, John Foster Dulles, was in mellow mood after dinner at Laurel House. “Essentially we will continue along the same lines that Dean Acheson and I have laid down. After all, our foreign policy has been bipartisan since President Roosevelt died. I must say I have generally worked well with Dean and I’m sure we’ll go on working together if the law doesn’t take up too much of his time. Poor man. Every time he starts to make a little money, he’s called back to the White House.”