Henry Wallace is a mindless drone who will do nothing but serve the interests of the Soviet Union. No matter what happens he will never change his mind on the subject and he can never be influenced or forced into even the slightest anti-Soviet action by those around him.
The fact that he
asked the KGB to finance him and wanted to appoint Soviet intelligence assets as Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasure isn't a good look.
In the spirit of previous worst cliché threads what are the worst cold war clichés
Soviet coup then invasion
Soviets act like idiots
The western left acts as a fifth column
the US wins and spreads democracy and freedom (tm).
Worst clichés?
- That the Soviets would attack first/invade, in and of itself. No one ever reasoned on the huge, undescribable trauma that was WWII for the Soviet Union and its leaders, old man who had lived through it, often losing friends and relatives to war, genocide, hunger, illness and internal political repression.
- That the Soviets would find willing agents and complicits in the West in the socialist-communist Left. I actually think they'd precisely be among the few to try some form of resistance in the unlikely scenario of a Soviet occupation!
- That America would win hands on a nukeless military confrontation, due to its vastly superior military and logistical machine, eminent control of seas and airspace. Were things to deteriorate to the point of a shooting conflict (unlikely, but frighteningly not impossible), nothing short of the massive us of nuclear weapons would defeat the Red Army.
- That in case of war Eastern Europeans would rebel en masse, with entire armies turning their weapons against the Russkies and embracing the American liberators. For how much the Soviet yoke was resented, and for how much today certain European countries like to picture themselves as oppressed democrats of a lifetime under the iron heel of Moscow and its Communist henchmen, the memory of WWII was still alive enough that no one wanted even to entertain the notion of having armed Germans around in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is often overlooked. Rebellion came, after a fashion, in peacetime: as soon as the Soviets showed themselves unable/unready to do the dirty work of repression or support anymore their puppet regimes, the Warsaw Pact came down crashing.
The Soviets attacking first out of the blue is the one thing here I wonder about. IIRC the Soviets definitely seriously considered a preemptive strategic nuclear exchange several times (Able Archer for sure, maybe Cuban Missile Crisis, and I think other times have come to light). It seems logical to me to think that anyone who would consider jumping straight to the top of the escalation ladder wouldn't consider any lower rungs to be above consideration (I speak thinking of a conventional invasion of Germany and the other relevant NATO states). What they needed was a sufficient feeling of being in a corner and feeling that was an option that could benefit them. That wasn't likely, but I think it was far from impossible. The Soviets were a very paranoid power and they frequently drew inaccurate conclusions from their data since they viewed it through the tint of their own propaganda (which a lot of them had grown up with, particularly by the time Andropov came to power).
I agree that a lot of the portrayals of the NATO left as a Soviet fifth column are overdone, and the genre isn't particularly balanced in terms of scenarios where the Soviets win.
However, there is little doubt in my mind that NATO would be greeted as liberators in the Soviet satellite states (most people there were intellectually advanced enough to understand NATO was not the second coming of the Third Reich).