Henry Wallace: an even bigger fool than Joe Biden?

He was at least arguably more dangerous. In the course of ripping apart the tiresome agitprop of Oliver Stone’s upcoming Showtime series, The Untold History of the United States, Scott Johnson at Powerline quotes from an article by Ronald Radosh that provides the context on vice president and presidential candidate Henry Wallace that is sorely missing in the cable series:

If Wallace was no radical on domestic issues, he did prove to be Stalin’s dupe in foreign affairs. The liberalism he came to espouse was that of the Popular Front, the call for an alliance between Democrats and American Communists and Socialists as the vehicle through which to advance the agenda of FDR’s expanding welfare state. As early as 1943, Wallace warned of “fascist interests motivated largely by anti-Russian bias” who were trying to “get control of our government.” These views are what endear Wallace to Stone.

So enamored of the Soviet Union was the vice president that in May 1944 he traveled to 22 cities in Soviet Siberia. There, the NKVD played Wallace for a fool. He described the slave labor colony of Magadan, which the Soviet secret police had transformed into a Potemkin village staffed by actors and NKVD personnel, as a “combination TVA and Hudson’s Bay Company."

According to his own testimony, if he had become president, Wallace would have made Harry Dexter White his secretary of the Treasury and given a position in government to Laurence Duggan. Both men were Soviet agents. As a KGB cable found in the Venona archives shows, the Soviets hoped that Duggan would aid them “by using his friendship” with Wallace for “extracting .  .  . interesting information.”

Interesting how we seem to be coming full circle: a revival of FDR’s Provider State, and a shameless defense of Stalinism.