https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1982127821?psc=1&th=1&linkCode=gg2&tag=to0322-20
Has anybody seen this book? It's apparently an exploration of "What if
FDR dies in office 1940-44 making Henry Wallace President"
Obviously I know that this subject has been discussed on this
newsgroup for many years - not least in the Mega-Thread "For All
Time". The author claims to have made use of new material from FBI,
Soviet and other archives
I'm basically trying to figure out whether I should either order it or
put in a request for purchase at my local public library...
From the Wall Street Journal Review:
"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)."
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