No. I Pin-Up Boy

Early last week Henry Wallace held a press conference in his Manhattan headquarters. He acted like a man on a Benzedrine binge. Newsmen had never seen him so elated. Everything that had happened to him lately, he bubbled, had been good news for him. And now Henry had just learned that California's Independent Progressive Party, formed to support Wallace, had qualified for the ballot (with 295,951 valid petition signatures). In California, left-winger Robert Kenny, leader of the "Democrats for Wallace," cried: "I now feel like that fabled man in the French Revolution who said, 'There goes the mob. I am the leader. I must follow them.' '

Having spilled his political news, Henry went on talking, so swiftly that reporters had difficulty in following him. They got enough to make headlines out of one sensational charge: that Laurence Steinhardt, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, had provoked Communist-action there by lending himself to a "rightist coup." When the reporters pressed him for details, Wallace suddenly remembered, that he "had to catch a train."

"I'm Not Buying Them." The reaction to this unfounded, undocumented accusation was sharp and swift. Ambassador Steinhardt, who had been away from his post when the crisis began, cabled: "Henry Wallace appears to have been well briefed by his Communist associates." The State Department gave the official lie to Wallace. Said the New York Times: "We have a new standard for measuring just how valuable a contribution Mr. Wallace's presidential candidacy is now making to the ideology of international Communism."

After that, the President had no choice but to repudiate Candidate Wallace even if it meant losing some left-wing votes for Candidate Truman. Ten hours after his appearance before Congress, the President let Wallace have it. At a Saint Patrick's Day dinner in Manhattan, the President cut the last thin thread between him and the man he had fired from his Cabinet. Said Harry Truman: "I do not want and 1 will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat. These are the days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too high a price for me. I'm not buying them."

Four Sentences; Two Columns. Henry replied in two radio speeches that sounded more than ever like the gospel from Moscow. Typical quotes: "The word 'Communism' is a much greater menace than the Communists. . . Adolf Hitler made good political use of this red-baiting weapon, but. . .his first attack was made on western democracies, not Russia. . . . It is not Russia, but American democracy which is the intended victim of the first attack."

These words made Henry Wallace the most quoted American in the Russian press last week. Moscow's papers gave only four sentences to the President's message to Congress (see above). Wallace's rebuttal got two columns. One Nancy Norman, a U.S. ballet dancer, back in London after a six-weeks' visit to Moscow, said that Wallace was "Russia's No. 1 foreign pin-up boy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.