Hours after Harry Truman fired him from the cabinet in September 1946, Henry Wallace issued a statement. He’d been dismissed over a speech implicitly criticizing the president’s hardening anti-Soviet stance. Now, as US and Soviet negotiators wrangled over occupied Germany’s future, he hinted at his own plans: “I, for my part, firmly believe there is nothing more important that I can do than work in the cause of peace.”

So began a two-year political odyssey so disastrous, it came to be rued by almost everyone concerned: Wallace himself; his followers in the short-lived Progressive Party; and, not least, the organization that played the central role in the whole affair — the Communist Party USA.

After leaving the cabinet, Wallace embarked on a nationwide speaking tour and took up a post as the figurehead editor of the New Republic, then the country’s leading organ of Popular Front liberalism. As his presidential ambitions became clear, the Communists’ attitude toward him suddenly changed. The Daily Worker had initially denounced the speech he’d been fired for, labeling it a sinister call for “imperialist intervention.” Now, the paper began to praise him.