A Progressive's Progress

(2 of 2)

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."