Henry Wallace and the Origins of the Cold War, With Benn Steil

LINDSAY:

Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Henry Wallace and the origins of the Cold War.

With me to discuss Henry Wallace, the man who nearly succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as president, and how history might have been changed if he had, is Benn Steil. Benn is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's the author of the new book, The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century.

Benn, thank you for coming on The President's Inbox, and congratulations on the publication of The World That Wasn't. It has gotten rave reviews. Publishers Weekly calls it "vivid and rewarding." The Wall Street Journal Review hails it as the "definitive account," just a sort of response all authors wish for.

STEIL:

Thank you for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:

Now Benn, before we dive into our discussion on Henry Wallace, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of The World That Wasn't. To do so, listeners should go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that. cfr.org/giveaway. There you can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register your entry. The registration for the giveaway will remain open until February 13. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of The World That Wasn't. If you are still searching for a pen to write down this information, don't worry. We have posted the link to the giveaway in the show notes for The President's Inbox on cfr.org.

With all of those logistics out of the way, Benn, let's talk about Henry Wallace, who has been described as, "the most forgotten of forgotten men." Who was he, and why is he important to know about?

STEIL:

Well, he was FDR's first and second term agriculture secretary. He was also commerce secretary from March of 1945 until September of 1946, when President Truman fired him. But he's best known for his time as vice president from 1941 to 1944 during FDR's third term, and in particular for the way in which he was maneuvered off the ticket in 1944. He lost out to Harry Truman in a wild multi-ballot convention in July of 1944.

And the reason why he's such a compelling figure to discuss is not only because he is a fascinating human being, but because he would have become president in April 1945 when FDR died had he managed to keep himself on the ticket the previous July. And we know that a lot of things would've been different. Henry Wallace was very close to the Soviet Union. He did not support the Truman Doctrine. He did not support the policy of containment. He did not support the Marshall Plan. He did not support the creation of NATO. He did not support the creation of West Germany. So history might have been very, very different indeed, and the world we live in today would be very different.

LINDSAY:

I want to come back to all of that, Benn. I want to hear a little bit more about the 1944 convention, but also Wallace's third-party run as the progressive party candidate in 1948. But before we do all of that, let's go back to the beginning. Tell me a little bit about the origins of Henry Wallace.

STEIL:

Henry Wallace was born in 1888, about five miles outside of the town of Orient, Iowa. He made himself compelling as a potential agriculture secretary to FDR in 1932 because he was, in effect, agricultural aristocracy. His grandfather also had created a very important, reputable farm journal called Wallace's Farmer, very influential at the time. Remember, over 40 percent of the American population lived on farms at the time. His father, also a Henry, took over editorship of the journal and became agriculture secretary himself under Harding and Coolidge.

LINDSAY:

So a Republican?

STEIL:

Republican, staunch Republican family. Henry himself remained a Republican until 1936.

LINDSAY:

Henry, our Henry-

STEIL:

Our Henry, the Henry of our narrative. It's always confusing talking about Henry in light of the family. It was only 1936 when he re-registered as a Democrat within FDR's administration. So Wallace was also editor of Wallace's Farmer. He was an influential voice on farming figures.

LINDSAY:

And he was a big fan or proponent of scientific farming.

STEIL:

Absolutely. He was, quite frankly, a genius when it came to the area of scientific farming. At the age of sixteen, he began quite sophisticated experiments on hybridizing corn. This was genetic engineering of corn. And he basically proved that the corn experts in Iowa simply didn't know what they were doing. They didn't know how to judge a corn. What sort of corn was the best corn, what sort of corn would be the most abundant, the best tasting, the most resistant to various types of diseases. And his experiments really revolutionized corn growing not just in the United States, but around the world. The corn we eat today derives primarily from Wallace's experimentation with hybridization.

LINDSAY:

And he created a firm that became quite big in the field.

STEIL:

He did. He did. It struggled in its early years throughout the 1920s, but it was many decades later, sold to DuPont for the princely sum of $9.4 billion. Even in retirement, Henry Wallace was still experimenting with genetic engineering. For example, the chickens we eat today are the result of his experiments to produce chickens that would eat less and lay more eggs. So really a remarkable scientific figure.

LINDSAY:

So how does someone whose first love, or great love, is plants get into politics?

STEIL:

Well, so fast-forward to the 1932 election.

LINDSAY:

This is in the midst of the Great Depression.

STEIL:

In the midst of the Great Depression, of course, FDR is looking for a radical farm policy to basically stop revolution in the farm belt. Farmers are suffering enormously.

LINDSAY:

Commodity prices have crashed.

STEIL:

Have crashed. Have crashed. So during the campaign, he sends his good friend Henry Morgenthau, who eventually became treasury secretary, out to Iowa to speak to agricultural specialists, among whom was Henry Wallace. So Wallace had two visits with FDR during the campaign. And in February of 1933, FDR offered Wallace the post.

LINDSAY:

Even though he's a Republican?

STEIL:

Even though he's a Republican.

LINDSAY:

Bipartisanship in practice.

STEIL:

Well, you know, FDR was primarily concerned with being able to conduct as many radical experiments in economic policy as possible, and Wallace seemed like someone who was going to be exceptionally open-minded in that regard. And indeed, many of his policies during his two terms as agriculture secretary were extremely radical.

LINDSAY:

This is from 1933 to 1940.

STEIL:

To 1940, right. His policies were extremely radical. And even today, there's quite a bit of debate among economists and others as to whether those policies should be considered great or awful.

LINDSAY:

Okay. So how does he end up going from the position of agriculture secretary to vice president? FDR had a vice president, John Nance Garner, a gentleman of some accomplishment. FDR obviously breaks with the American tradition. He's now running for a third term. There's a war in Europe. We really still, in some ways, haven't cleared the Great Depression, but Wallace ends up being FDR's choice. Why?

STEIL:

Right. Well, Garner was never really FDR's choice. Garner was a Texas southern conservative, and Roosevelt felt he needed to put him on the ticket in 1932 in order to solidify his base in the South. By the time-

LINDSAY:

That's FDR being a northerner from New York.

STEIL:

Of course. The Democratic Party was a very awkward coalition at the time.

LINDSAY:

You really get two parties; northern Democrats and southern Democrats.

STEIL:

Completely. And as you know, they had very, very little in common. So Garner was basically forced on FDR. But by the time we get to 1940, FDR makes it clear that if he's going to serve another term, he's going to have to be drafted, and he's going to pick his running mate. The party's not going to pick a running mate for him.

So how does he wind up picking Wallace? There's a lot of mythology about this. I should emphasize that Wallace was neither his first choice nor his second choice. He was determined first and foremost to have an internationalist in the role because FDR understood very clearly that the nation was headed into conflict.

LINDSAY:

What do you mean by internationalists? What did that term mean back in 1940?

STEIL:

At the time, the country was quite radically split in terms of Americans' views on foreign policy, whether we should fundamentally be isolationist in the sense that we should not involve ourselves in foreign conflicts that were none of our business.

LINDSAY:

So this was the original America First movement. It's people like Colonel Lindbergh who argued that U.S. interest didn't lie in what was happening in Europe.

STEIL:

Right. So FDR already knows in 1940 that even if he manages to keep the country out of war, he's going to have to prepare the country for the strong possibility of entering the war. So he's absolutely determined to make sure that whoever's running with him is completely on board.

LINDSAY:

Garner would not have been.

STEIL:

Not in FDR's mind, absolutely not. So his first choice was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and he worked very hard-

LINDSAY:

The Tennesseean?

STEIL:

Yeah. He worked very hard to convince Cordell Hull to take the position. Hull had no interest in a position that had two primary constitutional responsibilities. One was to break tie votes in the Senate, and the second was to sit on presidential death watch. And he had no interest in either of these.

LINDSAY:

And this was a time in American history in which vice presidents did very little, unlike more recently where presidents, some better than others, who tried to deploy their vice presidents with substantive tasks?

STEIL:

This is true. In fact, vice presidents only began serving in the cabinet, I believe, in 1924. So, you know, this was not a particularly esteemed role.

LINDSAY:

The idea of just being the spare didn't appeal to a lot of people.

STEIL:

Exactly. FDR did try to entice Hull onto the ticket by saying that if Hull turned it down, he Roosevelt, might have to tap Henry Wallace, and Cordell Hull was certainly not too fond of the idea of having what he considered to be an irresponsible liberal on the ticket and a heartbeat away from the presidency. But he still turned it down.

FDR's second choice was another southerner, South Carolina Senator Jimmy Byrnes. For religious reasons, which are strange to us today, he was deemed politically unacceptable at the time. And his third choice was Henry Wallace, who was indeed an internationalist. He was seen as a powerful public face for the New Deal at a time when the president could no longer tend to that flock. So he was seen as being useful in that regard. And third, he was from a farm state, and FDR believed that this would help solidify his support in the Midwest. That was actually a big political miscalculation because FDR's Republican opponent, Wendell Willkee, won ten states, seven of which were in the Midwest, including Iowa, Wallace's home state.

So, by the time we get to 1940, Henry Wallace is no longer a popular figure throughout the Midwest. By the time we get to the end of his political career in 1948, he's literally persona non grata in that part of the country.

LINDSAY:

Okay. So let's talk about 1944. You said that FDR wanted Wallace on the ticket in 1940 because he wanted an internationalist. Wallace was an internationalist. He also appealed to progressive elements in the Democratic Party. In 1944, the United States is involved in the war that FDR feared four years earlier would be coming its way. Yet, FDR pushes Wallace off the ticket. Why is that? And then tell me the story about how Wallace almost got on the ticket anyway.

STEIL:

So Wallace was always a very controversial figure within the Democratic Party. Southerners had no time for him whatsoever, but even figures in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party like Harold Ickes, interior secretary for much of FDR's time, had very testy relations with Wallace. Wallace was not a people person. As you know, he presided over the Senate as vice president, but he alienated almost everyone in the Senate. His first act upon becoming vice president was to de-stock the bar that Garner had set up in his office.

LINDSAY:

That is going to lose you support very quickly.

STEIL:

And not only that, but he eliminated the urinal in the corner of the office, which was meant to ensure that there would be no interruptions in the festivities. Among the senators who was extremely unhappy with the new vice president's office was one junior senator from Missouri, Harry Truman.

But by the time we get to 1944, things have changed on many dimensions. In particular, DNC leaders could see from-

LINDSAY:

Democratic National Committee.

STEIL:

I'm sorry, the Democratic National Committee, yes. They could see from FDR's face, which was becoming increasingly gaunt and gray, that he was deteriorating rapidly, and they figured that there was little chance that FDR would actually survive a fourth term. So, whoever was vice president stood a very high probability of becoming President of the United States.

LINDSAY:

Just quickly there Benn, this was known to leaders in the Democratic Party. Was FDR's health more broadly known? Was it covered in newspapers, and then the rest?

STEIL:

No, it was not. And in fact, he was only diagnosed with congestive heart failure by a young cardiologist in March of 1944. FDR himself never asked for the diagnosis, and his cardiologist, Dr. Bruin, never offered it to him. So even FDR did not know exactly what was wrong with him and didn't talk terribly much about his health. DNC leaders tried to avoid the subject of the president's mortality in conversations with him, but they made clear to FDR that Wallace would simply be unacceptable to the party.

LINDSAY:

For domestic reasons, for his views in foreign policy, both?

STEIL:

Foreign policy mainly. Over the course of the 1940s, when of course, the United States was allies of necessity with the Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany-

LINDSAY:

Then led by Joseph Stalin.

STEIL:

Exactly. Wallace was very close to the Soviets, and he was very much out of tune with the mood in Washington.

LINDSAY:

Okay. The phrase "close to the Soviets," I get the sense carries a lot of meaning. What precisely does it mean?

STEIL:

He was not close to the Soviets in the sense that he was interacting with them directly politically at this time. This is going to change down the road. But he makes many public speeches, for example, praising the Soviet commitment to what he called economic democracy and saying that there was much that we could learn from the Soviet Union. For example, their, by Henry Wallace's reckoning, very successful experiments in agricultural collectivization. So he was taking quite-

LINDSAY:

Which look less successful now that we have the full understanding of what happened during Soviet collectivization.

STEIL:

And I would say by the time we get to the 1940s, much of the American public has already heard about many of the problems of collectivization, not least of which was mass starvation. So Wallace was familiar with those things as well, but he was fundamentally convinced the Soviet Union was really run by technocrats who had-

LINDSAY:

A small price to pay for significant product.

STEIL:

For significant economic, and in Henry Wallace's view, social advancement.

So the DNC leaders convince FDR who has no stomach for another fight with his party that Wallace is not going to be successful. But FDR simply refuses to get in a room with Wallace and say, "I'm sorry, buddy, you're gone." It's a very, sort of, amusing part of the story in a dark, sad, sense, reading about the interactions between Wallace and FDR when FDR tries to hint to him that if he puts himself forward, it's not going to be successful. Wallace never quite gets the message or never wants to get-

LINDSAY:

Well, it seems that FDR didn't want to be precise and clear, and Wallace didn't want to hear nuance at all.

STEIL:

Perfect. Yes. That's it. So FDR sent emissaries to make it clear to Wallace that he could not and would not prevail, but Wallace insisted that unless the president told them to his face that he was not wanted, that he was going to presume that he was wanted. So FDR, in classic FDR fashion, actually endorsed four separate people in four separate ways in 1944 and caused complete chaos at the Democratic convention in July.

The first choice of the DNC leaders, which FDR accepted, was Harry Truman. FDR didn't know much about him, but what he knew was perfectly copacetic. He felt he was a man that he could work with, and if it meant that he didn't have to fight with his own party, that was fine.

He also, FDR, had his eye on the postwar and the creation of new institutions like the United Nations, where he was very conscious of the fact that Wilson, President Wilson, had failed in not getting bipartisan support for the League of Nations. He wasn't going to make that mistake. And he-

LINDSAY:

FDR spent a surprising amount of time in the decade after the defeat of the Treaty of Versailles pondering this very question how to do it right, and he carried it with him to his presidency.

STEIL:

Absolutely. He took that very seriously. As you know, two books ago, I had written a historical narrative on Bretton Woods and how clever FDR was in putting the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire with a Republican senator again to bring along Republicans. And so FDR accepted that Henry Wallace was not the sort of man that he could afford to have as a vice president when he's trying to push through these sort of major institutional reforms. So-

LINDSAY:

But FDR's plans almost go awry because of a moment at the convention. I believe it's in Chicago. Tell me that story.

STEIL:

Yeah, so it was a remarkable scene at the convention, which I have depicted at the beginning of the book. There are 35,000 people in this arena that's only supposed to hold 19,000. At the time, nobody knew how all these excess people got in there. As I explained in the book, many, many thousands of them got in with tickets that were not supposed to have been accepted for that evening's events. How they got them, they appear to have been secured by the CIO, the labor union, which was very supportive of Wallace.

So the crowds starts chanting, "We want Wallace. We want Wallace." Now, if you weren't in the hall, and you couldn't see the hall, you might think that that was the delegates who were chanting that, but it wasn't. There were only 1,176 delegates. Most of these chanters were from the peanut gallery. At that moment, Senator Claude Pepper from Florida, otherwise known as Red Pepper for his Soviet sympathies-

LINDSAY:

Would lose his seat, come back as a member of the House of Representatives, and serve to the 1980s.

STEIL:

Yes. Fascinating story. He makes a run for the stage to try to nominate Henry Wallace that evening. The convention Chairman Samuel Jackson, seeing Pepper run towards the stage, bangs his gavel and ends the proceedings for the evening.

Now, many people claim, many people, that if the vote had been held that evening, that Henry Wallace would have won because here were these adoring throngs calling for him. I was always very skeptical of that because I imagined myself as a delegate who might've been undecided, how would I feel about all these people in the peanut gallery rushing onto the floor illegally, against the rules, pushing delegates out of their seats, stealing their state banners, and calling for the election of Henry Wallace? This would probably not make me want to vote for Henry Wallace. In fact, I found an account of a New York Times reporter on the floor, who did in fact write that the delegates were extremely angered by this demonstration. And seven years later, Wallace's 1948 campaign manager, his name was Beanie Baldwin, so this is a staunch Wallace supporter, did an oral history in which he argued that, in fact, Wallace was quite fortunate that the vote wasn't held that night, because the delegates were indeed unhappy.

So this part of the mythology of the convention is wrong. There are many parts of the mythology, as I explained in the book, that are wrong. But the next day, on the first ballot, Henry Wallace is leading, DNC leaders are nervous, but they think they've got this all planned out quite clearly. They encouraged all delegates, particularly those who didn't support Henry Wallace, to vote their conscience in the first ballot. Vote for the hometown boy if you like, whomever you like. But when we get to the second ballot, you got to be behind the president, Harry Truman.

And this played out exactly this way. On the second ballot, Wallace and Truman were running neck and neck for a while, but Truman eventually pulled ahead and the plan of the DNC leaders came to fruition. So Harry Truman became the VP nominee.

LINDSAY:

And would become the president upon FDR's death on April 12, 1945.

Let's talk about the '48 election because Wallace runs as a third-party candidate, progressive candidate. At this point, the United States has seen its relations with the Soviet Union sour. There's much talk about the penetration of communist agents into the U.S. government. Wallace clearly is sympathetic to the Soviet Union to this point. He writes an open letter to Stalin in May of 1948. So tell me a little bit about that election and the argument that Wallace was making.

STEIL:

As I said earlier, Harry Truman put up with having Henry Wallace attacking his foreign policy within the cabinet for a year and a half, until September of 1946 and he finally fires him. Wallace debates for over a year, whether to challenge Truman at the Democratic Convention in '48 or whether to participate in a new third-party venture. The CPUSA, the American Communist Party, gets very interested in this idea of helping to shape a new liberal party. It would eventually be called the Progressive Party that would actually be a front for the CPUSA. And they identified Wallace as the perfect candidate because he was popular with many liberals, but he was far more friendly toward the Soviet Union than any other prominent liberal figure.

So Wallace becomes the progressive party candidate. The CPUSA takes over the machinery of this party. This becomes quite controversial during the campaign. Many people are telling Wallace what's going on, but he makes public speeches saying that he welcomes support from anyone who wants peace.

And then Henry Wallace in the spring of 1948 does something that's really quite remarkable in the history of presidential elections. He figures he can win if he can convince the American public that the Cold War was started and was being fueled by one man, Harry Truman. And if he, Henry Wallace, could replace Harry Truman, the Cold War would end instantly.

So what I discovered among the fascinating documents I found in the Russian archives was that in March of 1948, Henry Wallace made secret contact with the Soviet UN Ambassador, Andrei Gromyko-

LINDSAY:

Would hang around for quite a long time as-

STEIL:

Absolutely, a very famous Soviet diplomat.

So Wallace starts sending documents and messages to Gromyko through the Czech UN Ambassador, Vladimir Hodak. And he eventually has at least three long, detailed private meetings with Gromyko, and he shocks Gromyko at the first meeting. He explains what he wants to do. He needs to reach an agreement with Generalissimus Stalin that the Cold War will end if he, Henry Wallace, is elected, and he wants to go to Moscow to make this agreement. But Wallace explains this is very risky, so it'll have to be arranged in advance. And Gromyko says, "Well, what is it you want to be in this agreement?" And Wallace says, "I really don't care. I don't have any great preferences. The generalissimus himself can name the conditions."

So over the course of the next month and a half, Stalin and Wallace actually go back and forth through intermediaries, producing what became a statement written by Henry Wallace. He called it an open letter. Stalin was a little shrewder than Wallace about the politics of this. He didn't think it was a good idea for Wallace to come to Moscow during a presidential campaign, but he said a statement would be welcome. And then he, Stalin, would endorse that statement.

So on May 11, Wallace presents his open letter to Generalissimus Stalin at Madison Square Garden before 19,000. And as scripted, one week later, Stalin comes out with his endorsement of Wallace's proposals. But this does not work out as Wallace had envisioned. By this time, the American public had really turned staunchly anti-Soviet. And even though Wallace was trying to paint Harry Truman as a warmonger, much of the American public felt that Truman was not in fact being tough enough. So if anything-

LINDSAY:

And the Soviets had taken a number of steps to alarm people in the West, broadly in the United States specifically.

STEIL:

Yes. But Truman had undertaken a number of initiatives in foreign affairs. In particular, the Berlin airlift in the late spring-

LINDSAY:

Occasion by the fact that the Soviets cut off access to West Berlin.

STEIL:

Exactly, which proved to be very popular among the American public. Henry Wallace was attacking the Berlin airlift. He was attacking the Marshall Plan proposal. He was attacking every aspect of Truman's new "get tough" policy that really the American public was coming increasingly to endorse, and this resulted in Wallace's complete wipe out in the election. In the end, he was not the third-party candidate. He was the fourth-party candidate.

LINDSAY:

He got 2.4 percent of the votes and zero-

STEIL:

2.4 percent of the vote, 1.15 million votes, 37 percent of which came from New York City, remarkably. He got barely 1 percent of the vote in his home state, Iowa. And the third-party candidate turned out to be Dixiecrat segregationist, Strom Thurmond, who actually got thirty-nine electoral votes. So this effectively ends Wallace's political career.

In retirement, he undergoes a certain intellectual evolution. He actually winds up, as I explained in the book, endorsing Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. He develops quite warm relations with Richard Nixon. We don't actually know how Wallace voted in 1960. But he becomes much more of a complex character in retirement.

It's quite clear that after the election in '48, he tries initially to position himself as a mediator between the Truman administration and Stalin, but the Soviets don't want to have anything to do with him at that point. I have a document I came across where Stalin says, "Let Wallace screw around as he pleases. We're not dealing with this anymore." And he comes to disown the American Progressive Party, and the Soviets after the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950.

LINDSAY:

He'll eventually die of ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Benn, as you look at the life of Henry Wallace, do you see lessons for us today? And I ask in part because, as you know, there's a line of thinking that argues that if Wallace had become president, we would've avoided the Cold War, peace would've broken out much earlier, global prosperity would've gone up. So I just wonder, after spending all this time peering into the really fascinating life of Henry Wallace, whether you like his politics or not, what are the lessons for us?

STEIL:

Well, this counterfactual history became very popular among young people in the country after filmmaker Oliver Stone in 2012 made what he called a documentary, the Untold History of the United States, in which he argued that if Wallace had kept his rightful place on the ticket, of course he would've become president, and there would've been no Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, the Cold War historian at Yale, explained to me that many of his students took this argument quite seriously. I actually saw an off off-Broadway play in Brooklyn years ago called Convention, which was based on this Oliver Stone legend.

And what comes across very clearly in the Soviet archives is that there most definitely would have been a Cold War, even with Henry Wallace's victory at the convention in '44. And that's because Stalin never valued peace with the United States for peace's sake. He definitely valued the possibility of a passive United States that would allow him to fulfill his territorial expansion ambitions. And Wallace himself came to acknowledge that Stalin's aims were very different from those Wallace thought they were, and that he would almost certainly never have been elected in his own right in 1948.

So Stalin, coveted in Asia: Hokkaido, the entire Korean Peninsula, Manchuria, Northern Iran—where the Soviets had troops stationed during the war. He refused to withdraw them for quite a while until Harry Truman sent a flotilla to the region. Turkey, Greece, and of course, West Germany.

So even though Wallace, if he had become president, would have faced significant resistance to his foreign policy in Congress. They would certainly not have endorsed his ideas, for example, a $50 billion UN fund to reconstruct the victims of Nazi Germany. So that would've been mainly the Soviet Union. So Wallace would've given the Soviet Union, in today's dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of American money. This was not going to get through Congress. But his passivity in the face of what would've been Stalin's expansion in Europe and Asia would have meant that when we did enter into the Cold War in 1948, when Wallace would certainly have been defeated, we would've done so at a major disadvantage.

And as I explained at the outset of our discussion, really post-war history would've been very, very different without the Truman Doctrine, without the Marshall Plan, without NATO, without the European Union, without West Germany. Some people would like to argue, of course, that it would be a better world, a peaceable world, but I simply don't see the evidence of that in the Soviet archives.

LINDSAY:

On that point, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Benn Steil, senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the new book, The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. I should also note that Benn has written two other great books on related topics. One being The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, and The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War. Those books won prizes. I suspect this book will win prizes as well, Benn. Thank you very much for a fascinating discussion.

STEIL:

Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:

Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We love the feedback. The materials mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org.

As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance.

This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.