Steil Benn - The World That Wasn't Henry Wallace And The Fate Of The American Century - Hardcover

Binding: Hardcover
Description: From the acclaimed economist - historian and author of The Marshall Plan a timely riveting (The Washington Post) new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace one that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War. Henry Wallace is the most important and certainly the most fascinating almost - president in American history. As FDR's third - term vice president and a hero to many progressives he lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in a wild open convention resulting in Harry Truman becoming president upon FDR's death. Books films and even plays have since portrayed the circumstances surrounding Wallace's defeat as corrupt and the results catastrophic. Filmmaker Oliver Stone among others has claimed that Wallace's loss ushered in four decades of devastating and unnecessary Cold War. Now based on striking new finds from Russian FBI and other archives Benn Steil's The World That Wasn t paints a decidedly less heroic portrait of the man of the events surrounding his fall and of the world that might have been under his presidency. Though a brilliant geneticist Henry Wallace was a self - obsessed political figure blind to the manipulations of aides many of whom were Soviet agents and assets. From 1933 to 1949, Wallace undertook a series of remarkable interventions abroad each aimed at remaking the world order according to his evolving spiritual blueprint. As agriculture secretary he fell under the spell of Russian mystics and used the cover of a plant - gathering mission to aid their doomed effort to forge a new theocratic state in Central Asia. As vice president he toured a Potemkin Siberian continent guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book together with an American NKGB journalist source hailing the region's renaissance under Bolshevik leadership. In China the Soviets uncovered his private efforts to coax concessions to Moscow from Chiang Kai - shek fueling their ambitions to dominate Manchuria. Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government's foreign policy allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that he began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin's aims and conduct. Meticulously researched and deftly written The World That Wasn t is a spellbinding work that shows how American history and world history could have turned out very differently if just a few things had gone the other way (The Wall Street Journal).
Title: The World That Wasn't Henry Wallace And The Fate Of The American Century
Author(s): Steil Benn
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Barcode: 9781982127824
Pages: 704 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 1/9/2024
Category: History Of The Americas