And historically not quite accurate.
The problem with Stone's bias here is that impacts the truth significantly. He glossed over FDR's pitfalls, yet hammered Truman with his own. It was uneven in that regard. Truman had faults, but his faults were no more graver than FDR's. Moreover, I found it very interesting he essentially dismissed FDR's involvement in creating the atomic bomb and yet leveled some pretty tough charges on Truman for using it.
It's clear, from Stone's perspective, that Truman was a man ill-equipped to follow FDR's legacy and that Henry A Wallace was the rightful man to take his place. So much nuance was made to leave FDR blameless in this - and even today, many leftists blame this moment for the Democratic Party's shift to the right. Okay. Maybe true in the sense Truman was a moderate who absolutely stood more in opposition to the Soviets than Wallace ever would. But at the end of the day, FDR was president, and the most powerful Democrat in the country. He was the one who didn't put up a fight to keep Wallace on the ticket. All FDR would have had to do was give the party an ultimatum: Wallace remains as my Veep or I retire.
The party knew only one candidate was capable of winning that election and it was FDR. They would have buckled to his demands to keep the White House and then prayed like hell FDR didn't die.
But FDR only gave marginal push back to the demands.
The way Stone represents things is that the neoliberals of the party essentially did a modern day coup on Roosevelt.
But FDR also had a hand in it. Not just at the convention, but his previous handling of Wallace in the past. Wallace had been FDR's economic coordinator, but was removed from the spot by FDR because of how poorly he was doing the job.
The idealization of Wallace by Stone is also problematic because it doesn't jibe with the facts. Wallace was politically far-left, for sure, but he was also a very eccentric man, whose views were quite eccentric for the times. He was big into astrology, and there was some concern he had been compromised by the Soviets due to his overall naivety on US-Soviet issues.
Except Stone doesn't even go into any of that. Instead, he paints a picture of a man who was wronged and the Democratic Party purposely did him in so they could nominate the neoliberal Truman to get more war and weaken the New Deal.
Had Wallace become president, Stone's assertion is possibly true: he might not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. But I think that is where he and FDR differed. FDR was tactical, smart and tough. He made the very difficult decisions one would need to make to win a war. That is something Truman brought with him, as well. Wallace? I don't think he had the mental fortitude to make those decisions.
And it's also possible that Wallace's apathy toward the Soviets, and their significant hope of dominating much of Europe, would have led to an even worse end result as the end game very well could have resulted in a hot war with the Soviets had there been appeasement from the US' end.
Of course, Wallace likely also would have lost reelection in 1948. The hope, in this reality, is that Wallace's opponent would have been Dewey, who was a far more moderate Republican, and not, say, General MacArthur.
Either way, the problem with being subjective like Stone, when doing history, is that your own beliefs come out. You can't look at things rationally. It's why I would be no good at making a historical documentary because I have too many views myself.
But I can't get over Stone's treatment of Truman. Truman was a good president. In many ways, he was likely more influential on racial issues than even FDR, despite being president for a much shorter period of time.
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