A day or two later he tried to pretend that he had merely endorsed Wallace’s right to make the speech. This line clearly could not be held. So he tried to retreat to one of mildly rebuking Wallace and getting him to promise that he would make no more foreign policy speeches until Byrnes returned from the foreign ministers’ conference which was currently taking place in Paris. Then Wallace leaked highly prejudicial accounts of the long meeting with Truman which had led to this limited truce. Next, under pressure not only from Byrnes but from Senators Vandenberg and Connally, Truman’s patience cracked, and he dismissed Wallace with an intemperate letter. Then he withdrew the letter and requested the resignation more temperately by telephone. Then he half-hesitated. ‘[Henry] was so nice about it I almost backed out,’ he wrote. But the deed was done, although in about the worst possible way. It was certain that he was much to blame. It looked as though he had only acted under the crack of the whip of his Secretary of State, for whom he no longer had any respect. And, although in his private writings he subsequently indulged in rather routine denunciations of Wallace, there is from the same sources the steady impression that he liked Wallace more than most of his colleagues, and indeed admired several aspects of his rather elusive character.
The whole farce lasted for eight or nine days. Truman was in no private doubt about his own responsibility. ‘Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making,’ he wrote to his mother and sister on September 18th, ‘But when I make a mistake it is a good one’.17 ‘I don’t think I ever spent a more miserable week since Chicago,’6 he added to his wife on the following day.
The second humiliation was that he was allowed to take no part in the Congressional elections. He accepted the strong advice of Robert Hannegan that the less the electors saw or heard of him the better would be the chances of the Democratic candidates. The candidates themselves were almost all of the same view. Some played recordings of Roosevelt’s voice. None requested similar support from the incumbent president. Once he had reluctantly accepted Hannegan’s advice, they would not have got it even had they asked. He journeyed silently across half the continent to vote in Independence. He went by special train but he made no whistle-stop speeches from the rear-platform. Even in his own state, where the train stopped three times, he confined himself to a little hand-shaking with local politicians.18 He held no rally in Independence, he made no election-eve broadcast.
He spent election night in the same train on the way back to Washington. When he awoke to hear the disastrous results he decided that the Democratic Party needed a new National Chairman (Hannegan had foolishly accompanied his crushing advice with a complacent prediction of the outcome if it were taken), and a new streak of steel in his own soul. Henceforward he was going to be more his own man as President.
At union Station in Washington there was no one to meet him except Dean Acheson, then under-secretary at the State Department. His lonely, distinguished presence on that railroad platform was in a curious way symbolic of the transition from the first phase of the Truman presidency. Acheson was certainly not a crony. He was a Connecticut gentleman (the son of a bishop) of acerbic intelligence and patrician presence. He had no great wealth, but his education was that of the core of the Eastern establishment: Groton, Yale, Harvard Law School. He never sought elective office. He probably could not have achieved it, for not merely did he not suffer fools gladly: he extended the definition of fool to cover a fairly high proportion of the human race. In his later years he came to embrace, at any rate for the purpose of argument, some fairly eccentric and even reactionary views, but in his middle years he served Truman, America and the whole western world first as under-secretary and then as Secretary of State with a wisdom and flair which made the calumnies to which he was subjected by some Republican members of Congress a squalid disgrace.
The symbolism of his presence at the station on November 6th was two-fold. First, the fact that he was alone showed that Truman’s fortunes were at a low ebb. Second, the fact that it was he, and that the President was delighted to see him and insisted on taking him back to the White House for a drink, indicated that Truman was coming to feel at home with a wider and different group from the Missouri cronies and very political politicians with whom, hitherto, he had felt he could alone relax; two and a half years before he would have been amazed to have been told that he would rather have seen Acheson than Byrnes. Third, it showed that his fortitude, decisiveness and high public spirit was attracting the loyalty and admiration of men who could help him fashion the next remarkable phase of American foreign policy. General Marshall would soon be back from China. There were some bright spots on the horizon. Maybe the US cavalry would arrive in time to save his presidency.