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heard it, and then Wallace went on and read some more of the speech. He read another part of the speech, and then he came back and read this part over, and he said to the President, “Well, now, is this all right? May I deliver this? Does this meet with your approval, and is it in line with your policy?”
The President said, “Yes, that's all right.”
Now, the President was inexperienced, and Henry Wallace ought to have known it. I mean, he ought to have made allowances for the fact that the President was still a new President, and that he could easily be led to say, “All right,” and that he, Wallace, had not cleared the thing with the State Department which had a major interest, naturally. Whether you agreed with them or whether you didn't agree with them, I don't think you had any right to go and sit up on a platform and make the speech without having their previous agreement.
Now, I once asked Wallace about that some time afterward, and he laughed and said, “Oh, they understood it. They knew what it was.” By this I understood him to mean that he had asked the opinion of somebody, some subordinate in the State Department, about saying these things, and been told “That's fine, go ahead, bully.”
But that's unofficial approval. You can always find somebody in the State Department who agrees with you, you know. Some Ambassador will agree with you about what
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