The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE glare of the Wallace explosion cast a brief but searching light, on basic weaknesses of the Truman administration. For the whole affair was the product, not of an irrepressible policy conflict which Truman and Wallace wanted to bring before the people, but of latent differences which they both wanted to smooth over and defer. The blowup was detonated exclusively by Presidential ineptitude.

When Roosevelt died, friends of Wallace urged him to leave the Cabinet and assume the role of Wendell Willkie or William Jennings Bryan — that is, to put pressure on the Administration by building up independent support of his own. Wallace declined to do this, packed his Department of Commerce with conservatives, and consistently eulogized Truman in his public speeches as a worthy inheritor of the Roosevelt mantle.

He had no intention of breaking with the Administration; and Truman, who badly needs support from the left, had no intention of letting him go. Yet a series of blunders unsurpassed in recent American history succeeded in jeopardizing the international position of the United States and in gravely impairing the chances of the Democratic Party in the coming election.

Washington’s first conclusion is that the American people might as well face the facts about Truman. Not only is he himself a man of mediocre and limited capacity, but, after considerable hiring and firing, he has managed to surround himself in the White House with his intellectual equals. Nostalgia for the New Dealers now springs up in the most unexpected quarters — even among the businessmen in the lobbies of the Willard or the Mayflower.

In the days of Roosevelt, the White House circle spent most of its time and energy, by day and by night, in thinking about pressing national issues; the New Dealers thrived on jawbreakers. Today the men in the White House hate and fear complicated problems. They seek constantly to push trouble out of their minds; and the President wants people around him who relax him, not people who disturb or worry him.

The “Glad Boys”

The result has been the rise to dominance of the “don’t let’s do anything — it will all blow over” school, headed by John Snyder, George Allen, Clark Clifford, Harry Vaughan, and the other Truman cronies. They console the President by telling him that everything will come out all right; and their tireless optimism enables him to maintain the air of brisk jauntiness which he wore through the most ghastly days of the Wallace crisis. Even John Steelman, the most intelligent member of the inner circle, has adopted the silver-lining philosophy. His statement on the strike situation was: “It will all blow over in two or three months of good production.”

Robert Hannegan, with his pertinacious and annoying belief that problems occasionally have to be faced, has pretty much lost the President’s ear; and Cabinet members who raise basic questions, like Schwellenbach and (in the past) Wallace, simply make him unhappy. Of Roosevelt’s anonymous assistants, only the astute and able David K. Niles is left; and he is consulted today only on problems of racial and religious minorities.

White House staff work is therefore at a dangerously low level. Truman simply did not grasp the implications of Wallace’s speech (any more than he grasped those of Churchill’s Fulton speech some months earlier); and once he had fumbled the ball, none of his team was able to save him even by falling down on it. Washington observers with historical curiosity have skipped over Harding and Grant and gone back to Franklin Pierce in order to find a President who, they believe, can match Truman for sheer technical incompetence.

The Wallace argument

Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech was a hasty, imprecise, and ambiguous job. It did much less justice to Wallace’s position than the letter of July 23. This was the document which Wallace and White House Secretary Charles Ross released to the press because Drew Pearson had obtained a copy, evidently from State Department sources, and was going to print it anyway.

The Wallace letter deserves careful reading as a serious and reasoned statement of the anti-Byrnes position. Its contention is that Soviet policy is the expression of legitimate misgivings about security, based upon the historical experience of capitalist hostility. These misgivings will be increased by a policy of toughness, Wallace argues, but they can be allayed by a wholehearted policy of assuring Soviet security.

One curious fact about this letter is that it is a cogent statement of the point of view with which such men as Dean Acheson and Ben Cohen and probably Byrnes himself entered into the business of negotiating with the Russians. Bitter experience over a long period has now persuaded the State Department policy-makers that their original — and Wallace’s current — analysis leaves out of account the mainspring of Soviet policy. That mainspring is the Marxist diagnosis of monopoly capitalism, which has laid down for the Kremlin in unequivocal terms the inevitable tendencies in capitalist states toward imperialism abroad and fascism at home.

According to current State Department views, Soviet policy is based squarely upon the Soviet interpretation of the nature of the capitalist economy; no action on our part short of transforming the nature of our economy is considered likely to dispel Russian suspicions with any speed. But a policy of firmness may deter Russian expansionism and create a period of peace during which the capitalist democracies can have a chance to demonstrate their lack of aggressive intentions toward the U.S.S.R.

Wallace’s proposal that we meet Russian fears by reducing our own armed strength is therefore considered fantastic in quarters which have had close and detailed dealings with the Russians. Such a move, these quarters feel, would be interpreted as the confusion and weakness of decadent capitalist democracy.

In any case, the experience of such policies in this century has been that, though designed to strengthen the moderates in the appeased nations, they actually strengthen the extremists and thereby invite further aggression. Interrogations have recently revealed how badly betrayed the anti-war German felt after Munich. It is argued today that the Wallace policy would supply potent arguments in discussions at the Kremlin, not to the Litvinovs, but to the Molotovs.

The support for the Wallace position within the government increases directly in proportion to the distance from concrete dealings with the Russians. Many people in the State Department who a year ago would have agreed with Wallace’s position, today do not, but it should be remembered that many other government officials, like many men of good will throughout the country, have not had the same chastening experience.

Wallace and the left

Leftists of all varieties, anti-Communist or Communist, from Walter Reuther to William Z. Foster, have long felt the need of breaking with the Truman administration. Wallace’s resignation may well give the final push to this tendency: but this does not mean that Wallace will become the undisputed leader of a united left.

He is assured at present of the backing of the proRussian left. The organizations which sponsored his New York speech (and hissed the mild anti-Communist passages in it) were the National Citizens Political Action Committee and the Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.

Both groups promptly rallied behind Wallace after the blowup and issued statements denouncing the Byrnes-Vandenberg “war policy.” The Communist Party, after its initial petulance over Wallace’s slaps on the wrist, reversed its line and has now come out strongly for him.

But it remains a question as to how much of the American left is persuaded of the infallibility of Soviet policy, or even of its moral superiority to that of the United States. Mr. Ickes, who stoutly denies any Communist tendencies in his organization, the ICCASP, felt constrained to pronounce the Wallace speech “unfortunate” at the same time that his executive committee was lauding it to the skies; and many other liberals have been much less indulgent than Ickes in their attitude toward party lines. While NCPAC continues to harbor Communists and fellow travelers, CIO-PAC in certain areas, such as Massachusetts, is strongly anti-Communist.

Displaced liberals

But the free liberals are at the moment homeless. They do not share Wallace’s confidence that Soviet expansionism would stop if the United States dismantled its armed forces and handed over the atomic bomb; but they don’t like the Byrnes policy very much either. It seems niggling, negative, and needlessly provocative on petty issues, quite without the affirmative democratic impulse they believe to be the only answer to Communism.

In this uneasy middle ground are many old New Dealers, apparently including such diverse figures as Mrs. Roosevelt, Sumner Welles, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., many labor leaders, many writers and intellectuals, but they lack money, organization, and leadership. Except for the inadequate representation in certain sections of the CIO-PAC and in the Union for Democratic Action, these people are isolated and unhappy.

Justice William O. Douglas is reported to share this general position on foreign policy; and his indefatigable political fuglemen, now readying the perennial Douglas boom, are regarding the current liberal dilemma with special interest. Indeed, many in Washington who have not been among Douglas’s more ardent admirers are today, in view of the confused Wallace performance and of the extreme poverty of liberal leadership, turning in his direction.

The omnipotent Senate

The feebleness of the executive, so thoroughly exposed by recent events, is considered likely to tempt the Congress into new aggressions when it reconvenes. The Senate has not for years exerted so much power over national policy. Truman and Byrnes are both former Senators and are both schooled in habits of political deference to that body; and Connally and Vandenberg have without substantial protest insinuated themselves into central roles in what used to be the executive responsibility of making our foreign policy.

This encroachment has had the distressing effect, as Walter Lippmann has pointed out, of converting peace discussions at Paris into a form of Senatorial wrangling. It has further bestowed upon Senator Vandenberg a virtual veto over the foreign policy of an Administration he does not represent, since his participation is essential for the “bipartisan” foreign policy which has become President Truman’s Frankenstein monster.

The two centers of power in Washington today are the Senate and the service chiefs. Observers anticipate an increase of tension between these power aggregates, with the executive branch caught impotent and pathetic in the middle. Among some of the more cynical Democrats, indeed, there is visible disposition to hope for the election of some strong Republican, like Senator Taft, in order to restore the executive to its former place of respect and grandeur. No one had ever anticipated that Throttlebottom would become President.

The effect of Nuremberg

Washington viewed the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials with no great conviction that a serious contribution had been made to avert the next war. The effort to establish international law on the question of aggressive warfare seemed much brighter when the United Nations were more united. Now that the long months of the Trial have been accompanied by a steady deterioration of international relations, people are beginning to feel that world law must be the expression of a world community, and a world community does not yet exist by itself.

The Nuremberg experiment is not considered likely to deter either the United States or the U.S.S.R. from war, because both nations, alike in their infinite faith in their own virtue, have already begun to create the case against the other as the aggressor. In more pessimistic circles the Trial is regarded as a likely precedent by which the victor in the next war, should it come, will be able to consolidate his victory by destroying the ruling talent in the nation which loses.

Regret was felt at the acquittal of the banker and the diplomat. No one cares about the propagandist. It was difficult indeed to establish Schacht’s guilt, but the effect of his release will be bad, and the consequence will probably be to discourage prosecutions of bankers and industrialists in the American and British zones. The Soviet dissent shrewdly seized upon the opportunity to accuse the United States of protecting monopolists and financiers.

And so the Trial came to its end with people in Washington somewhat less interested in Jackson’s effort at Nuremberg than in his return to the bench in the same row with Justices Black and Douglas.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The Wallace incident released in Washington the accumulating doubts and anxieties over the Truman administration. This ordinarily manic city is in an acutely depressive state, and it is likely that its fears are now as exaggerated as were its hopes when Truman took over.

But it is clear that Truman himself has no capacity for inspiring that devotion and enthusiasm among government officials which his predecessor could draw upon so confidently. It is further clear that, with the elimination of Ickes, Bowles, and Wallace, and with the promotion of Vinson, the men left who can do so are few in number and relatively unimportant in position.