Michael Mandelbaum is assistant professor of government and research associate of the Program for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. lenge to Truman's campaign for election in 1948. Some of what Wallace was saying then makes arresting reading now. He saw that the European colonial empires were doomed and warned against trying to prop them up. He cautioned, too, against offering support to unpopular govemmegts solely because they promised to resist the spread of Communism.

Wallace took particular issue with Truman's approach to the Soviet Union, urging patience and gestures of reconciliation in dealing with America's erstwhile ally, rather than the unyielding attitude the Truman Administration adopted. Walton regards Wallace as an early proponent of what later came to be known as detente. He did call for conceding Eastern Eu rope as a sphere of Soviet influence‐a concession that succeeding Administrations have tacitly made. And he foresaw that atomic weapons would likely make a third World War a catastrophe without precedent, and thus had to be avoided at all costs.

But he also believed that an expanding volume of trade between the two nations, wide contacts among their citizens, and their joint participation in international organizations would pave the way to good relations between them. The détente of the 1960's and 1970's, however, has been grounded in a common recognition of the need’ to prevent political rivalry from exploding into warfare, and in a mutual interest in placing some limits upon the nuclear armaments of the two rival

Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, 1944.

powers. No Soviet leader has shown any real inclination to throw his country's borders wide open to foreign visitors or their business. Neither has the United States nor the Soviet Union given the United Nations an important role in their foreign policies.

Walton tells the story of Henry Wallace's contest with Harry Truman clearly, if not always gracefully. And he tells it with some passion. He does not try to hide his sympathy for Wallace. Indeed, he intersperses the narrative with his own views on the psychological wellsprings of the foreign policy of the United States, the causes of this country's failures in Vietnam, and the “herd instincts” of American liberals, among other matters. He argues that Wallace's 1948 Presidential candidacy received unfair coverage from the press, and was viciously smeared by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which falsely accused him of being under the control of the Communist Party of the United States. On the controversial relationship between the candidate and the Communists, Walton insists that whatever the role of Party members in the apparatus of the campaign, Wallace was always his own man and never had any fondness for Leninist principles of political and economic organization. Indeed, Walton says, Wallace was a steadfast Christian who called himself a capitalist and liked to point out that he was the only Presidential candidate in 1948 who had