It is a virtual given that Russia will try to manipulate the United States’ 2024 general election. Moscow persists in its brutal effort to conquer Ukraine, and one of the two main candidates—former President Donald Trump—has promised to cut American support for the country, while the other, President Joe Biden, is trying to increase it. Russia, then, has every incentive to tilt the contest toward Trump.
The 2024 election will not be the first one Moscow has meddled in. According to a 1,000-page 2020 report by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, Russia mounted a systematic effort to ensure an election victory for Trump in 2016. The report did not find that Trump’s campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with Russia, yet it documented extensive covert contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin operatives. The Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, for example, discussed election strategy and shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer.
In the wake of the report, Democrats and Republicans sparred over whether the web of contacts constituted “collusion” between candidate Trump and Russia. But whether or not the Trump campaign’s coordination effort met that threshold, an earlier U.S. presidential candidate’s efforts most certainly did. That story has not, until recently, been told.
In 1948, Henry Wallace, the former agriculture secretary, commerce secretary, and vice president under President Franklin Roosevelt, bolted from the Democratic Party, took leadership of a new Progressive Party, and challenged President Harry Truman in the general election. He set out to tar Truman as a warmonger, to undermine his foreign policy, and to convince the American public that the nascent Cold War in Asia and Europe might be ended instantly by a Wallace victory. That meant working secretly with Soviet officials—including the Kremlin dictator himself, Joseph Stalin, from whom Wallace took direction.
Wallace had long been enamored of Soviet “economic democracy” and had insisted that Stalin’s aggressive expansionism was driven wholly by a legitimate fear of Anglo-American “imperialism.” For years, Wallace had pined for an audience with the generalissimo, through which he could establish himself as a statesman of peace. As vice president in March 1944, he asked Roosevelt to send him to Moscow, but the closest he was permitted to venture was Siberia. In June 1946, as Truman’s commerce secretary, he sent a trade mission to Moscow, hoping to go himself later that year as the head of a delegation to consummate a deal. But the mission was a failure. The Soviets wanted only unconditional loans to buy U.S. goods—loans that the State Department would not approve in the absence of better U.S. trade access in Eastern Europe.
In Moscow in November 1946, two months after Truman fired Wallace as commerce secretary, the Associated Press journalist Eddy Gilmore—who would shortly win a Pulitzer for his interview with Stalin—told a young Soviet foreign intelligence officer masked as a cultural information officer, “strictly off the record,” that Wallace wished to visit Russia. But the Foreign Ministry saw no political benefit in soliciting Wallace, now only a private citizen, and Wallace saw no benefit in going as a tourist, having to beg for photo ops.
Yet even as Soviet interest in Wallace rose with the prospect of his running for president, neither side would make a move—until 1948. In the spring of that year, Wallace, now a declared presidential candidate, secretly approached the newly appointed Czech ambassador to the UN, Vladimir Houdek, asking for his help in making contact with Houdek’s Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko. Wallace had met Gromyko several times over the years, publicly and privately, and would have........