Historian Benn Steil reexamines the career of Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president from 1941 to 1945, using newly available Russian archives to reveal how Soviet intelligence manipulated the man who came within a heartbeat of the presidency. Wallace was dropped from the Democratic ticket in 1944, but had Roosevelt died a year earlier, Wallace would have become president - and Steil shows that Soviet agents among Wallace's closest advisers were shaping his views on postwar relations with Moscow. The book traces Wallace's genuine idealism about Soviet-American cooperation and his blindness to the ways this idealism was exploited. Steil reconstructs specific instances where Soviet intelligence influenced Wallace's positions and personnel choices, providing documentary evidence from archives opened after the Cold War's end. The book examines Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign, which Steil shows was significantly shaped by communist influence Wallace either didn't see or refused to acknowledge. For readers interested in Cold War origins, American politics in the 1940s, or how foreign powers seek to influence American democracy, Steil provides detailed history that complicates both heroic and villainous portrayals of Wallace.