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and he was Secretary of State and he was empowered so to act. Wallace had written the speech. Instead of taking it over to the State Department and asking the State Department to clear it he didn't do that. That's what I know I would have done If I'd been delivering a speech which even touched on foreign policy. I would have gotten somebody in the State Department to read it with great care and to ask the advice of all hands around as to the wisdom and the correctness of certain statements and the point of view. That's the only way for a Government to behave. You must play in a team.
Wallace didn't do that, and he didn't seem to be impressed with the fact that it was wrong not to have done that. He took it to the President, took the speech to the President, and he read it to him. He read this portion which dealt with foreign policy and with the very items that Byrnes was negotiating about in Europe at the time. He read it over to him twice, he says.
The President was still pretty new, and he was very new to terms of foreign policy, and this was a very smoothly expressed statement, if you remember. It was done very smoothly. It almost wouldn't attract attention, you know--and yet it would to a good newspaperman. But if it was said in a room full of eight or ten people, it would not have sounded very badly, particularly if it was said in a pleasant mellifluous voice. It wouldn't have attracted any attention. The
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