But this book conjectures what might have happened if Wallace instead of Truman had been the choice of the Democratic party in 1944 and had succeeded Roosevelt, an unlikely president from 1945 to 1949. Wallace joined a third-party movement in 1948 and campaigned for the presidency. A naive idealist, he was cruelly taken in and humiliated by communists and others and received not a single electoral vote. He withdrew from public life after the election. In 1950 he broke with his party and supported the Korean War. He died in 1965 at 77.