George F. Will’s Feb. 25 op-ed, “FDR fixed his VP mistake. Will Biden?,” was an excellent historical account of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to replace Henry Wallace as vice president for what became his final term. Mr. Will made a convincing case that Mr. Wallace was not fit to be next in line behind an ailing president to usher the nation through the end of World War II and its perilous aftermath.
But Mr. Will utterly failed — by design, perhaps? — to explain how or why that scenario applies today. Are we to simply accept as gospel, presumably based on political chatter that has been startlingly lacking in specifics, that “She, the mistake,” as Mr. Will put it — interesting that he chose not to mention Vice President Harris by name — is similarly unqualified?
Warren Ferster, Washington
George F. Will’s slashing critique of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second vice president, Henry Wallace, my grandfather, was outrageous. In arguing that President Biden needs to replace Vice President Harris, Mr. Will found it necessary to call Wallace “grotesquely unsuited” for the position, and Mr. Will wrote that Wallace had an “infatuation with political evil” and advocated Joseph Stalin’s “blood-soaked tyranny.” He cited adoringly a new book by Benn Steil that cherry-picks a few episodes in Wallace’s life to paint him as a commie stooge.
Mr. Will and Mr. Steil couldn’t care less about Wallace’s service as what historian Arthur Schlesinger called “the best secretary of agriculture the country has ever had” or his four years as Roosevelt’s unprecedentedly active wartime vice president and hugely popular heir to the New Deal. In his exhaustive review, historian Derek Leebaert said Mr. Steil was “truly eccentric” and “harsh”in his writing and that his book had “a lack of perspective,” explaining that Wallace was “no more naive” or “ignorant” about the Soviet Union than FDR himself.
For every right-wing commentator who thinks Wallace was FDR’s greatest mistake, there are others who believe his far greater mistake was replacing Wallace with Truman four years later. A Wallace presidency just might have made the world better — no Cold War, no Jim Crow, equal rights for women, national health insurance — rather than “more dangerous,” in Mr. Will’s words. Indeed, in spilling so much ink to attack the Wallace of eight decades ago, he left no space to explain why he finds Ms. Harris so grotesquely unsuited today.
Henry Scott Wallace, Bethesda
The writer is co-chair of Wallace Global Fund.
