Wallace's Revisionism

In a rambling talk to 25 foreign journalists visiting his office last March, Alabama Governor George Wallace expressed some of his views on international affairs. Said he: "I think we were fighting the wrong people, maybe, in World War II, and I say that with all due regard to the Soviet, ah, person here."

From Wallace, a World War II Army Air Forces flight engineer who had ten missions over Japan, that was quite a bombshell. He felt that if the U.S. had done more to cultivate the friendship of Germany and Japan after World War I instead of being antagonistic, "there wouldn't have been any Hitler." The Japanese, he declared, were "provoked to a certain extent by people, by interests in this country that helped to bring about Pearl Harbor." Without the war against the Axis powers, there would be today a "good buffer in the East against the Soviet and Chinese expansion plans."

Last week the Washington Post, which got a tape of the meeting, published some quotes, and Wallace rushed to amend the record, by coincidence on the 30th anniversary of V-E day. In World War II, he said, the U.S. was "fighting the right people, but our diplomacy led us to fight people who should have been our friends." That revision made Wallace's original statement sound more reasonable, but his remarks will add to the worry in the liberal and moderate wings of the Democratic Party, which are already alarmed by his steady rise in the presidential polls.

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