A long-dead vice president has a lot to teach us

Henry Wallace was vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1941 to 1945 and was on the verge of becoming president. This section of What’s Ahead details why Wallace’s political career represents a serious warning to the Biden administration.

Wallace wanted to pursue a pro-Soviet Union foreign policy. He completely misunderstood the intentions of the murderous Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. He almost won re-nomination at the 1944 Democratic National Convention. If Wallace had succeeded, he, not Harry Truman, would have become president when Roosevelt died just a few months later. In place of Truman’s largely successful resistance, the Soviet Union would have had the equivalent of a blank check for dominance in Europe and Asia. The world would have been much poorer, more miserable and significantly less free if Wallace had occupied the Oval Office.

A very impressive new biography of Wallace by Benn Steil, The World That Was Not: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, also describes Wallace’s independent campaign for the presidency in 1948, which was infested by Soviet agents. Wallace successfully sought Stalin’s approval in advance of a statement he was about to make on Soviet-American relations.

The lesson is that peace is not a policy, but a goal. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is pursuing policies straight out of the Henry Wallace playbook. They seriously endanger our national security and that of the free world.

We avoided a Wallace catastrophe 80 years ago. It would be an immense tragedy for humanity if we were to experience a similar tragedy today.