Nominally a Republican growing up, McGovern began to admire Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II, even though he supported Roosevelt's opponent Thomas Dewey in the 1944 presidential election. At Northwestern, his exposure to the work of China scholars John King Fairbank and Owen Lattimore had convinced him that unrest in Southeast Asia was homegrown and that U.S. foreign policy toward Asia was counterproductive. Discouraged by the onset of the Cold War, and never thinking well of incumbent president Harry S. Truman, in the 1948 presidential election McGovern was attracted to the campaign of former vice president and secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace. He wrote columns supporting Wallace in the "Mitchell Daily Republic" and attended the Wallace Progressive Party's first national convention as a delegate. There he became disturbed by aspects of the convention atmosphere, decades later referring to "a certain rigidity and fanaticism on the part of a few of the strategists." But he remained a public supporter of Wallace and the Progressive Party afterward. As Wallace was kept off the ballot in Illinois where McGovern was now registered, McGovern did not vote in the general election.