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She says that Truman has the same anticommunist bona fides before the 1946 Republican takeover of Congress as Bill Clinton had welfare-reform bona fides before the 1994 one. Namely, none at all.

That may be a little harsh on Harry, especially since he wasn't in the Roosevelt Admin all that long. I suppose we should be thankful though that he was picked in 1944 instead of Henry Wallace again. Just think of it. Roosevelt dies, Wallace becomes president, and every communist thug in the third world has an open friend, ally, and supporter of his revolution sitting in the US White House. They had it almost that good under Roosevelt, but Wallace would have been open about it.

That may be a little harsh on Harry, especially since he wasn't in the Roosevelt Admin all that long.

Roosevelt was limited to 20 hours of work a week for a long time during WWII, and was death warmed over during the '44 campaign (and the Democrats lied like a rug about it; they had to run FDR because they would have lost the presidency with anyone else heading the ticket).
FDR died pretty soon after the '45 inauguration; Truman essentially had two years to decide something was more important that going along with "Uncle Joe."

I suppose we should be thankful though that he was picked in 1944 instead of Henry Wallace again.

There was a tremendous fight over that issue before/during the '44 DNC convention; Texas was dead set on replacing Wallace. But as Ann points out, FDR could have died before Wallace was replaced.

Just think of it. Roosevelt dies, Wallace becomes president, and every communist thug in the third world has an open friend, ally, and supporter of his revolution sitting in the US White House.

. . . a point which Ann makes in the book.

>> "That may be a little harsh on Harry"

What about this quote from her book:
"To review the record, as part of Truman's yeoman work on the Cold War, he cooperated with the Soviets at the Nuremberg Trials, whitewashed their joint aggression with Hitler under the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He looked the other way when the Soviet Union murdered three million Russian prisoners of war returned home by the Allies. On his watch, the Soviet army consolidated its control over nine countries, China became a Communist dictatorship, and tens of millions of people were murdered under Communist tyrannies. Truman defended Communist spy Alger Hiss as a patriot who was framed by Republicans ... He refused to remove members of his administration identified to him by J. Edgar Hoover and others as Communist agents, inluding Harry Dexter White."

Sounds like Harry was a real anticommunist. Yeah sure.