National Affairs: A Progressive’s Progress

After he finally decided that the Communists are not real peace lovers, and broke with the Progressive Party over the Korean war, Henry Wallace has been a man more talked about than talking. Recently, most of the talking has come from Senator Pat McCarran’s subcommittee investigating Communist influence on U.S. China policy. Ex-Communist Louis Budenz told the committee that Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent had been members of the Communist Party and went along with Wallace on his 1944 trip to China to “guide” him along the party line.

Last week, from his South Salem, N.Y. farm, Henry Wallace spoke up. In a letter to Harry Truman, he submitted the long-secret recommendations he had made as a result of that trip, and explained what part Lattimore and Vincent had had in them.

No Part Whatever. Lattimore, he explained, was sent along by the Office of War Information “to handle publicity matters in China.” Vincent, then Chief of the Division of Chinese Affairs, was appointed by the State Department as Wallace’s adviser. Wallace’s recommendations were contained in a message sent from New Delhi, and in a report submitted to President Roosevelt in person on his return. “As to Mr. Lattimore, he had no part whatever” either in the message or the report, wrote Wallace. “He offered me no political advice at any time sufficiently significant to be recalled now . . .

“Mr. Vincent, as the designated representative of the State Department,” wrote Wallace, “was naturally consulted by me when we were traveling together . . . Mr. Vincent joined in the advance discussions of the projected cable [from New Delhi], was present while it was drafted, and concurred in the result.” The cable recommended that China should be separated from the command of the bitterly anti-Chiang General Joseph Stilwell, and that General Albert Wedemeyer be appointed as top military commander in China. “The name and record of General Wedemeyer are enough to indicate that the purport of these recommendations was the opposite of pro-Communist,” noted Wallace.

Some months later this change was made at the plea of Chiang Kai-shek himself. “History suggests that if my recommendations had been followed when made . . . the chances are good the Generalissimo would have been ruling China today.”

In the report to President Roosevelt, there was evidence of a more familiar brand of Wallace thinking. But in this report, wrote Wallace to Truman, “Mr. Vincent took no part . . . The strongest influence on me in preparing this final report . . . was my recollection of the analyses offered by our then Ambassador to China, Clarence E. Gauss, who later occupied one of the Republican places on the Export-Import Bank Board.”

That report contained more misconceptions of the nature of Communism, and criticism of Chiang’s refusal to share those misconceptions. But, his report concluded, “at this time there seems to be no alternative to support of Chiang.”

Slow Trip to Wisdom. Wallace pointed out in his letter to Truman that he had recommended “a coalition,” but not with Communists. “Instead, President Roosevelt is urged to use American political influence to ‘support’ the ‘progressive banking and commercial leaders,’ the ‘large group of Western-trained men,’ and the ‘considerable group of generals and other officers who are neither subservient to the landlords nor afraid of the peasantry.’

“Such were the recommendations, such was the direction of the influence of my trip to the Far East in the spring of 1944,” wrote Wallace. Then he added a statement of a kind rare in the annals of politics; he admitted that he had later made a mistake. “During the years immediately following the end of the war, my thinking about Chinese problems underwent a sharp change.” In those critical days, when Communism might have been checked and Chiang saved, Wallace was urging that the U.S. should not be seen in Chiang’s company and that the Chinese Communists were “different.” Bravely Wallace confessed last week: “Recent events have led me to the conclusion that my judgment in 1944 was the sound judgment.”