Will Biden fix his VP mistake?
Today’s subject is potentially the most consequential mistake of Joe Biden’s irresponsibly prolonged public life. She, the mistake, will not, however, be mentioned again:
In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced his vice president, Texan John Nance Garner, with his agriculture secretary, Iowan Henry Wallace. If FDR, who died April 12, 1945, had died a year earlier, the postwar era would have been even more dangerous than it was and we might live in an even worse world.
Roosevelt in 1940 was in his 59th year, a paraplegic with signs of physical decline and ominous prospects regarding longevity. Yet he put Wallace on the precipice of the presidency, for which Wallace was grotesquely unsuited. This story is told in historian Benn Steil’s new biography “The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century,” which should be rea right now.
Wallace was a jumble of weird attributes that made him difficult to decipher, and he disguised his long infatuation with political evil. He was a scientist, an agronomist smitten by an abstraction, humanity, but more fond of plants than of actual people. Wallace, who called himself “a practical mystic,” became enthralled by a charlatan guru to whom Wallace wrote embarrassingly effusive letters in which he called himself Galahad and spoke of “Karmic duty” and the “Holy Chalice.”
Wallace’s maunderings about “changing the human heart” and ending “selfishness” made him seem like a harmless naif rather than what he was: an apologist for, and advocate of accommodating, the blood-soaked tyranny Joseph Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union and later exported to Eastern Europe.
On a four-week 1944 tour organized by Andrei Vyshinsky (prosecutor in the 19361938 show trials of Stalin’s Great Purge), Wallace and his Soviet handlers traveled through Siberia’s vast prison/forced-labor complex.
The ideologically blinkered Wallace saw this as (in Steil’s words) a “testament to Soviet economic, social, and artistic accomplishment.” Wallace celebrated Siberian high wages and salubrious working conditions (supposedly an eight-hour workday and pay equivalent to that of a high-ranking Red Army officer) “that had brought the miners” — prisoners all — “into the Far East.”
Rapturous, Wallace said, “They know how to laugh and play and sing.” Were they singing, those people plodding, under armed guards, to 14 hours of forced labor, while Wallace’s car waited for the column to pass? “No Potemkin landmass the size of the one Wallace traversed,” writes Steil, “can fool one unwilling to be fooled.” Wallace’s “perception merely projected predisposition.”
Steil, who has studied Soviet-era archives, says members of what Wallace complacently called the “extreme liberal group” in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration included Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, John Abt and Nathan Witt. All of whom, Steil writes, “would go on to cultivate long-standing secret ties to the Communist Party or Soviet intelligence.”
FDR replaced Wallace with Harry S. Truman as his 1944 running mate. Shortly before dying the following year, Roosevelt made Wallace commerce secretary. Steil writes that Wallace’s “manipulation by Soviet assets within the Commerce Department” was followed by “his back-channel collusion with Stalin to undermine official U.S. foreign policy.”
President Truman belatedly fired Wallace in 1946 for his pro-soviet pronouncements; then Wallace ran against Truman in 1948 as the candidate of the thoroughly communist-infiltrated Progressive Party. In the 1950s, when Wallace no longer mattered, he had second thoughts about Stalinism.
Wallace was neither the first nor the last running mate selected for short-term political advantages — in his case, the farm states — without responsible considerations of presidential suitability. (Abraham Lincoln’s second vice president, Andrew Johnson, was drunk at the 1865 inauguration and, drunk or sober, was an especially virulent white supremacist.) In 1940, with the world ablaze, Wallace’s disreputable sympathies and strange ideas should have been disqualifying. But even a 1940 running mate whose shortcomings were merely banal — say, having no pertinent talent — would have been shockingly reckless.
FDR’S 1944 replacement for his 1940 mistake was a Missouri senator who, as president, launched the Berlin airlift, implemented the Marshall Plan, oversaw the creation of NATO, and resisted communist aggression in Greece, Turkey and Korea. Wallace denounced all such anti-soviet measures.
A lesson of Steil’s timely, riveting biography is: Playing roulette with presidential successions is risky, even if, as Otto von Bismarck supposedly said, a special providence looks after fools, drunks and the United States. Perhaps a special providence prolonged FDR’S life during the four years Wallace was a heartbeat — or a cerebral hemorrhage — away from the presidency. Today, however, auxiliary precautions are advisable, in case providence is negligent sometime before 2029.