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Last week, in the midst of the noisiest uproar Washington had heard in a generation, a convention of Protestant Episcopal bishops meeting in Philadelphia announced: "To conclude that the only way in which the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States can be resolved is by war would be calamitous and . . . unthinkable."
The bishops spoke for all. The world, watching the struggle between America's Byrnes and Russia's Molotov, prayed for peace. That was why the eyes of the world focused on Henry Wallace last week. In a voice that was heard in every capital he proclaimed: Our present foreign policy threatens war.
Was he right? Certainly, if the world depended on the Truman Administration to keep it out of trouble, the world had something to worry about. Harry Truman could not keep himself out of trouble. He was the main cause of Washington's uproar.
"Viva Wallace!" Truman's troubles had begun with his endorsement of Wallace's now famed Madison Square Garden speech (TIME, Sept. 23). The President had collected his wits long enough to repudiate both his own inept words and the speech. But last week newsmen got wind of something else. This was a confidential memorandum on foreign affairs which Wallace had written to the President in July. Someone in Wallace's Commerce Department—doubtless thinking that this was an opportune time to embarrass the President—had given a copy to Columnist Drew Pearson, who intended to publish it. PM's I. F. ("Izzy") Stone somehow got a copy too. Other newspapermen demanded to see it. When the press roar became unbearable, bewildered Presidential Secretary Charlie Ross told Commerce to release the letter, and Commerce did. When Harry Truman heard that the letter would be released he was, according to a friend, in "a state of near-hysteria."
The letter was even more scathing than the speech in its criticism of U.S. policy vis á vis Russia. It charged "a school of military thinking" with advocating a "preventive war" before Russia perfected her own atomic bomb. It denounced the U.S. plan for atomic control as humiliating to the Russians. The letter was a kind of secondary explosion which blew the Secretaries of War and Navy and Bernard Baruch, godfather of the atomic-control plan, clean out of their seats. They arrived at the White House with denials and protests.
Some of the President's janizariat told him, then, that this was too much; he would have to take a stand at last. Wallace must go. But Harry Truman hesitated. Was not Wallace the great friend of organized labor, of leftists, liberals and C.I.O.'s P.A.C.? He had already invited Wallace to the White House; perhaps a heart-to-heart chat would settle matters.
Striding through a crowd of newsmen into Harry Truman's office, a grinning Wallace shouted gaily, "This is the best show I've seen in a long time." For two hours and 20 minutes he remained, talking to the President. Fidgety newsmen, waiting in an antechamber, cracked that he was either: 1) demanding Mr. Truman's resignation, or 2) trying his jujitsu tricks on the President. Then he came out, still smiling.