The American Vice Presidency (55 page)

The race was closer than the Democrats had expected in the popular vote, but Roosevelt and Wallace won decisively in the electoral college. The American voters were determined not to change horses in the middle of the stream of a cataclysmic world war.

As vice president, Wallace spent his first months speaking in support of FDR’s lend-lease deal with Britain and presiding over the debate on it in the Senate before it was passed by Congress and signed by the president
in mid-March 1941. In July, Roosevelt made good on his earlier magazine musing about making the vice president “useful” by appointing Wallace as chairman of the new Economic Defense Board, to be “a policy and advisory agency.” It was to deal with all manner of international economic matters relating to American involvement as a noncombatant in the European war and what might come after its end. It was the first such stipulated executive role for a vice president, and Wallace eagerly grasped it. After Roosevelt and Winston Churchill joined in the Atlantic Charter, FDR also put Wallace at the head of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) to oversee the speedy dispatch of armaments to the British. These moves made him the most engaged vice president in history.

In October 1941, Wallace became one of the few Americans privy to the nation’s greatest military secret. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, met with the president and vice president and informed them of the conclusions of separate American and British scientific experts that it was possible to build an atomic bomb of indescribable destructive force and that the Nazis were also pursuing it. The only immediate decision was FDR’s instruction that if such a weapon were to be built, only he would decide whether to do so and when to use it.
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In late November, Roosevelt ordered that the research go forward, and he appointed the Top Policy Committee, which included Wallace, to oversee it.

On December 7, 1941, when Wallace was in New York engaging in public preachings of the need to step up war preparations while thinking beyond to peacetime, the news broke of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He flew back to Washington and went directly to the White House for night-long talks with Roosevelt and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. When FDR called on Congress to declare war on Japan for the “date which will live in infamy,” Wallace emerged as a major spokesman for the administration, particularly in rallying public support behind the war effort.

About five weeks later, however, shortly after the influential James Reston of the
New York Times
had written that Wallace was “not only Vice President but ‘Assistant President,’ ” Roosevelt suddenly summoned Wallace and Donald M. Nelson, executive director of the SPAB under Wallace, to the Oval Office. He told them he was creating still another superagency, the War Production Board under a single chairman, and he would be … 
Nelson, not Wallace! After a shocked Nelson left, Wallace neither asked nor was told why he had not been selected, inquiring only whether FDR wanted him to remain on the board as a member, and he was told yes.
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Wallace also retained his chairmanship of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), responsible for the financing and purchasing of wartime raw materials from foreign sources and for postwar planning.

Though not a bureaucrat at heart, Wallace found himself entangled in a series of bureaucratic fights, the worst of which were with FDR’s secretary of commerce, Jesse Jones, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull over BEW affairs. Wallace particularly castigated Jones on the grounds that he had failed to stockpile certain vital materials. When Jones fired back, calling Wallace’s allegations “hysterical” and “filled with malice and misstatements,” Roosevelt asked James Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization, to referee the fight.

Wallace finally wrote Roosevelt a firm letter calling on the president to appoint a commission to investigate the situation and either fire him or give him the power he needed to do his job as BEW chief. FDR, fed up with the feud, abolished the BEW and put its functions under a new agency with a new director. Jones crowed at the outcome and later wrote, “Mr. Wallace was out of a war job. He was once more just the Vice President with little to do but wait for the president to die, which fortunately did not occur while Henry was Vice President.”
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The liberal columnist I. F. Stone, taking Wallace’s side, wrote that Roosevelt “now, smugly even-handed, equally rebukes the loyal and the disloyal, the lieutenant who risked his political future for the war effort and the lieutenant who sabotaged it. Justice itself could not be more blind.”
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The whole row naturally raised questions about Wallace’s political future. He lost his prime wartime staff job but had been elected to the vice presidency and could not be fired from it. But as the end of FDR’s third term loomed ahead and as the war’s end was not in sight, the question of whether Roosevelt would seek a fourth term was now under wide discussion. By the end of August 1943, Wallace himself assumed that Roosevelt would indeed run again and believed he was still in the president’s good graces. But when he got advice from friends to start lining up support from party leaders and potential 1944 convention delegates, he declined as not his style.

A Gallup Poll in March gave Wallace the highest favorable rating of potential FDR running mates in 1944. But within the Roosevelt inner circle and among the party’s political bosses, there were conversations about removing Wallace from the line of presidential succession in the approaching election. They all knew of the toll that the war had taken on the health of the already invalided FDR and were aware that in nominating the next candidate for vice president they might well be choosing the next president. Ed Flynn, the New York Democratic boss, told Roosevelt that Wallace was now perceived as “the candidate of the radicals” and that the challenge was to find the Democrat “who would hurt him least.”
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Roosevelt, however, in a preconvention meeting with Wallace, assured him he was his choice to be his running mate again and, at Wallace’s pointed request, would be willing to say that if he, FDR, were a delegate to the convention he would vote for Wallace. The next day, FDR finally announced his intention to seek a fourth term but made no mention of his running mate. Meanwhile, the national party chairman, Bob Hannegan, also approached Wallace, urging him to step aside, but was told, “I will not withdraw as long as the president prefers me.”
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Roosevelt also told him, Wallace wrote later, that the president’s political advisers thought Wallace would hurt the ticket, to which the vice president replied, “If you think so, I will withdraw at once.” FDR said it was “mighty sweet” of him to offer, but he would not consider accepting it. The meeting ended with the two men shaking hands and the president saying only, “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.” But as Wallace was heading for the Oval Office door, Roosevelt strangely added, again according to Wallace, “Even though they do beat you out at Chicago, we will have a job for you in world economic affairs.”
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That night, six days before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Flynn, Hannegan, national party treasurer Ed Pauley, Postmaster General Frank Walker, and Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago had dinner with Roosevelt at the White House. Further details of this political coup against the sitting vice president will be found in the next chapter, but it suffices to say here that not only Wallace’s personal fate but also the course of American presidential politics and history was at stake in the outcome.

Roosevelt sent another letter to the convention on July 14, not made public until its opening. After acknowledging the likely rumors floating
around, he wrote, “I am wholly willing to give you my own personal thought in regard to the selection of a candidate for vice president.… The easiest way of putting it is this: I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as vice president, for eight years earlier while he was secretary of agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention.” But then the president tellingly added, “At the same time, I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the Convention. Obviously the Convention must do the deciding. And it should—and I am sure it will—give great consideration to the pros and cons of its choice.”
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Four years earlier, he had not hesitated to dictate his choice of Wallace in no uncertain terms. Now he was openly inviting the convention to ignore his transparently worded “endorsement.” Wallace himself later observed that Roosevelt could not have been “a well man” in full command of his faculties at the time or he would have told the vice president “clean and straight” that he didn’t want him on the ticket, especially since Wallace had offered to withdraw.
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But he chose to take at face value the statement’s part about the president’s personal preference for him.

Wallace, now in Chicago to second Roosevelt’s renomination, vowed, “I am in this fight to the finish.”
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In his seconding speech for FDR’s renomination, he triggered a demonstration for himself from the labor-packed galleries, saying the only question to be answered at the convention was whether the party believed “wholeheartedly in the liberal policies for which Roosevelt has always stood.”
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By implication he was urging his own continuation as FDR’s most liberal ally, and his speech electrified the crowd. Maybe his foes in the party were wrong, and he could be nominated after all.

The roll call of the states for presidential nomination gave FDR an easy, though not unanimous, first-ballot victory. Roosevelt, now at a naval base in San Diego, accepted the nomination in a talk piped into the convention hall, saying that although he wanted to retire he felt could not do so with the nation still at war. He said he would not campaign “in the usual sense” and would press on to win the war and secure the peace. A long and well-planned demonstration for him ensued on the floor, but as it was dying down, the Chicago Stadium suddenly erupted in calls of “We Want Wallace! We Want Wallace!”
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Hannegan, fearing a stampede, demanded and finally succeeded in getting the convention chairman to gavel through an adjournment until the next morning. Through the night, the anti-Wallace political bosses worked key state delegations, and the next day Chicago police, on orders from Mayor Kelly, clamped down on admission to the hall. Nevertheless, on the first ballot for vice president Wallace led, but significantly short of a majority. On the second ballot the party bosses loyal to FDR started squeezing, and their choice, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, was put over the top with a late rush of delegates from Flynn’s New York.

The defeated Wallace had made a remarkably strong run, to the point that Grace Tully, as she said later, heard FDR say he was astonished the Iowan had drawn such powerful support on the first two ballots and would have insisted on him had he thought he could be nominated. But unlike 1940, when FDR had the luxury of focusing on politics and fought for Wallace, in 1944 he was consumed by the war, aging and in decline, and vulnerable to the entreaties of his political lieutenants.

Roosevelt’s deception of Wallace ended the vice president’s chances for a second term. He was now down but not out. On the night of the nominations, Roosevelt sent him a telegram that read, “You made a grand fight and I am very proud of you.” Then it added, “Tell Ilo not to plan to leave Washington next January.”
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What he meant would not immediately become clear, and Wallace publicly dismissed Roosevelt’s duplicity with perplexity. He observed later that it was a lot of trouble to go to: “All he needed to do was call me in and say, ‘I don’t want you to run.’ ”
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In late August, Roosevelt invited Wallace to the White House and followed up on his vague telegram reference. He told his guest he wanted him to remain in his expected fourth administration and could have any cabinet post except the State Department, because he could not ask his old friend Cordell Hull to step aside. FDR had told Wallace earlier that he intended to get rid of Jesse H. Jones, his arrogant commerce secretary, whom FDR derisively called “Jesus H. Jones.” So Wallace, long a bitter foe of Jones, suggested, “Well, if you are going to get rid of Jesse, why not let me have secretary of commerce, with RFC [the Reconstruction Finance Corporation] … thrown in? There would be poetic justice in that.” The deal was struck.
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That fall, Wallace campaigned diligently for Roosevelt’s reelection, focusing on the Farm Belt, as he no doubt would have done had he been
campaigning for his own reelection. He traveled with little or no staff, in a demonstration of his pride and independence.

Only a couple of days after the end of Wallace’s term as vice president did Roosevelt fire Jones and clear the way for the Iowan’s appointment as secretary of commerce. He was not destined, however, to have a satisfying tenure in it. Upon the death of Roosevelt in April, the elevation of Truman to the Oval Office, and the end of the European war in May 1945, Wallace’s views on conciliation with the Russians toward a postwar peace put him in conflict with the Truman administration’s hard-nosed foreign policy. After a Wallace speech led Truman to forbid him to speak out further on the subject, the president finally demanded his resignation, and Wallace returned to private life.

Increasingly focused on seeking a less confrontational posture with the Soviet Union during the developing Cold War, Wallace ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket but won only 2.4 percent of the vote in the upset Truman victory over the Republican Thomas E. Dewey. In retirement, Wallace continued his controversial foreign policy views toward the Soviet Union, as well as his longtime genetic experimentation on corn and other crops, and was an early critic of the American involvement in Vietnam.