AH: After the End of the Beginning

[oldgringo2001]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Why have every World with Wallace becoming President be a disaster? Why not let Wallace become President and let Stalin choke on a fishbone? Then you'd have a New Deal President back by a powerful Harry Truman in the Senate. Frankly, the US's turn to the right in its post FDR foreign policy didn't bring down the USSR. It was decades of the USSR's internal corruption that flattened them. The USA beat the USSR by outlasting them with a better system.

I really don't know much about Wallace. I've never read a biography of him. I do know at least one was published recently. But I do know he let FDR maneuver him out of the vice presidency, and that does not exactly mark him out as a savvy political leader. If Stalin chokes on a fishbone or Beria poisons him a little earlier, Mao is still around and we still “lose” China, maybe even a little earlier than we did because Wallace would have cut off aid to Chiang sooner. And Wallace, unlike Truman, might really listen to Slizard and at least warn the Japanese about the atomic bomb, giving them special incentive to attack lone B-29s. And he would tell the Russians about it. That wouldn't make any difference at all to the Russians; whoever runs the Soviet Union after Stalin is going to want to get the bomb, and is going to have the same priceless intelligence they had in OTL. But Wallace is going to look like a stooge when the Soviets start acting, well, like the Soviets. He's going to give the Republican right-wing an even bigger hammer to demolish what remains of the New Deal.

If the there wasn't a nasty Soviet Union and a nasty, capable Mao, Henry Wallace might have made a fine President. But then, Neville Chamberlain would have been remembered as a good Prime Minister if it wasn't for Hitler.