Wallace Takes Over

Bruce Bliven had been on the editorial board of the leftward-looking New Republic for 23 years, and the magazine's actual editor for 16 of them. Last week he assumed the title of Editorial Director, waited in his 15th-floor Manhattan office for his successor to show up. The new boss came in three hours late. Said Bliven: "Hello, Henry. Come on in and I'll show you your office." Henry Wallace, politician-at-large, had acquired a lever (circ. 45,000) and a place to stand, and would now try to move the world.

To make that lever longer and stronger, rich young Publisher Michael Straight (his family pays the N.R. deficit) planned conversion to slick paper, color and a new format--to make the butcher-paper New Republic more glamorous.

The N.R. editors usually lunch together in the office library, but to celebrate Editor Wallace's arrival they went to a Waldorf-Astoria banquet room to hear his belligerent declaration of war: "I lay down the challenge of battle to the Republican Party utterly and completely."

This Waldorf-Astoria lunch was a portent of the big-time buildup to come, a publicity campaign sketched out by high-priced public-relations expert Edward L. Bernays. But part of the publicity that followed wasn't in the Bernays blueprint. To reporters. Wallace pooh-poohed Senator Vandenberg's conversion to internationalism, credited it to young (37), able James Reston, national reporter of the New York Times. Next day Reston wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. Said he:

"I gather . . . that I was portrayed as a sort of bush-league Svengali, who hypnotized Senator Vandenberg. ... I suppose I should write Mr. Wallace a little mash note and, coincidentally, congratulate you on having such a remarkable young man on your staff. . . . Honestly, I didn't save the Republic; it must have been some other reporter. ... I have never written any of the Senator's speeches or any part of them. . . .

"I remember going into Mr. Wallace's office one day. ... I said to him: 'What we need in this country is a lobby for the people.' He said that was a good phrase which he might use at some time, which he later did. Does this make me the author of Mr. Wallace's policies, too?"

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