Overview

From the acclaimed economist-historian and author of The Marshall Plan comes a dramatic and powerful new perspective on the political career of Henry Wallace--a perspective that will forever change how we view the making of US and Soviet foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War.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, as a result of which Harry Truman became president on 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 of political biography and narrative history that will upend how we see the making of the early Cold War.

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9781797172224

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"Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, winner of the New York Historical Society's Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History and the American Academy of Diplomacy's Douglas Dillon Award. His previous book, the prizewinning Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, was called ""a triumph of economic and diplomatic history"" by the Financial Times, ""a superb history"" by The Wall Street Journal, and ""the gold standard on its subject"" by The New York Times. He lives in New York with his two boys. Stephen Graybill was recently in HBO's Big Little Lies, opposite Shailene Woodley, Reese Witherspoon, and Nicole Kidman; in Framed, opposite Jordi Vilasuso; in the second season of Game Shakers; and opposite Denise Richards in the feature film Altitude. He has been seen in HBO's The Wire, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order, Six Degrees, All My Children, As The World Turns, and The Girl's Guide to Depravity. On stage he's appeared with Primary Stages, Drama Dept, NY Theater Workshop, F*It Club (world premieres by Kate Gersten, Mark Schultz, Lucy Boyle, and Nick Jones), Studio 42, Shakespeare Theatre DC, and Woodshed Collective in their acclaimed immersive theater production of The Tenant. He has worked on over fifty audiobooks, was awarded the Readers Choice Award of ""Narrator of the Year,"" and his narrations have fans saying he's ""even better than reading the story."" He won a Gold Clio Award and a Silver Effie for his work in the award-winning commercial in Vaseline lotion's ""Sea of Skin"" Campaign (BBH), and his work in promos has included Brian Williams's NBC Nightly News with Edward Snowden. Stephen has produced and written a number of films independently: LA Awake directed by Spencer Grammer and starring Natalie Dreyfuss, On The Hook, Spring Training, and Easter Island. He's written a number of biopics, on topics ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to World War II. He has founded, developed, and financed the producer of a number of other projects as well."

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