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Summary
Summary
FDR: The War President opens as Roosevelt has been re-elected to a third term and the United States is drifting toward a war that has already engulfed Europe. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, statesman, and politician, must navigate a delicate balance between helping those in Europe--while remaining mindful of the forces of isolation both in the Congress and the country--and protecting the gains of the New Deal, upon which he has spent so much of his prestige and power.
Kenneth S. Davis draws vivid depictions of the lives, characters, and temperaments of the military and political personalities so paramount to the history of the time: Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, and Hitler; Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur; Admiral Darlan, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles Lindbergh, William Allen White, Joseph Kennedy, Averell Harriman, Harry Tru-man, Robert Murphy, Sidney Hillman, William Knud-sen, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Henry Stimson, A. Philip Randolph, Wendell Willkie, and Henry Wallace.
The portrait of Henry Hopkins, who interacted with many of these personalities on behalf of Roosevelt, is woven into this history as the complex, interconnected relationship it was. Hopkins burnished the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt and eased the way for their interactions with Stalin.
Another set of characters central to Roosevelt's life and finely drawn by the author includes Eleanor Roo-sevelt, Sara Roosevelt, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Princess Martha of Norway, and Daisy Suckley.
Integral to this history as well are the Argentina Conference, the Atlantic Charter and the beginnings of the United Nations, the Moscow Conference, lend-lease, the story of the building of the atomic bomb, Hitler's Final Solution and how Roosevelt and the State Department reacted to it, Pearl Harbor and war with Japan, the planning of Torch, and the murder of Admiral Darlan. All these stories intersect with the economic and social problems facing Roosevelt at home as the United States mobilizes for war.
The lessons and concerns of 1940-1943 as dissected in this book are still relevant to the problems and concerns of our own time. A recurrent theme is technology: Do people control technology, or does technology control people?
Kenneth Davis had the rare gift of writing history that reads with the immediacy of a novel; and though the outcome of this history is well known, the events and people depicted here keep the reader focused on an enthralling suspense story.
Author Notes
A biographer of Eisenhower , Lindbergh , and Adlai Stevenson as well as a novelist, Kenneth S. Davis was awarded the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize for FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny , which was also a nominee for the National Book Award. In addition, his next two volumes on FDR were both chosen as among the ten best books of the year by The New York Times .
A graduate of Kansas State University, with a master of science degree from the University of Wisconsin and an honorary doctorate of letters from Assumption College, Davis was a journalism instructor at New York University, a war correspondent attached to General Eisenhower's headquarters, special assistant to Milton Eisenhower, the president of Kansas State University, a member of the State Department's UNESCO relations staff, editor of The Newberry Library Bulletin in Chicago, adjunct professor of English at Clark University, and an adjunct professor of history at both Kansas University and Kansas State University. Kenneth S. Davis died in June 1999.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Davis, who died in June 1999, was in his usual excellent form with this last book in his critically acclaimed, five-volume portrait of the man many consider our greatest 20th-century president. We can probably blame Davis's untimely end for an untimely conclusion to this volume, which wraps up its narrative in December 1942 (a year and a half before D-Day) rather than with FDR's death in April 1945, shortly before the close of the war. That excusable flaw aside, his account is brilliant and engrossing in its vibrant and carefully researched portraits of Roosevelt as war politician, diplomat and commander-in-chief. Davis skillfully narrates Roosevelt's subtle diplomacy (both domestic and foreign) before Pearl Harbor, when the president did an end run around isolationists by orchestrating what Davis describes as a "guided drift toward war." Later, Davis lets readers sit beside the commander-in-chief as he directs the movement of ships and men that resulted in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway (May and June 1942, respectively), the long siege at Guadalcanal (August through December 1942) and the success of the invasion of French North Africa (Operation Torch) in November of '42. The narrative is similarly adept in its profiles of FDR's closest wartime associatesDMorgenthau, Stimson and Hopkins among them. In the end, however, one inevitably leaves this splendid book wishing for more and for a proper conclusion, and wishing as well that Davis had been granted the time to give it to us. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Davis, a distinguished biographer, died in 1999, but fortunately he was able to complete the fifth volume of his masterful biography of the second of the two Presidents Roosevelt. Following FDR: Into the Storm: 1937^-1940 (1993), Davis begins this installment of his detailed account of FDR's life and extraordinarily long administration (the opening chapter here sees Roosevelt having just been elected to an unprecedented third term at the point when Great Britain was fighting alone in the war against an increasingly aggressive Germany and Roosevelt was hoping to come to the aid of his important and endangered ally. Davis employs an immediate, you-are-there approach, almost novelistic in its intimacy, to establish not only the grave issues of the day, but also the personalities of the major players in FDR's family and government. Davis exercises great perception in establishing the elusiveness of Roosevelt's personality and its effect on his relationships, particularly with women, as well as on his decisions concerning important policies facing him as chief executive. The narrative expands into a large but compelling drama as Davis tracks the events that pulled the U.S. into the war and FDR's role as commander-in-chief up to up to 1943. Davis sees Roosevelt as the greatest U.S. president of the twentieth century and one of the top three or four in all of U.S. history, but that does not keep him from a sobering analysis of FDR's response to the Holocaust. These four volumes constitute an indispensible addition to the Roosevelt bookshelf. ^-Brad Hooper
Kirkus Review
The fifth volume in Daviss study (FDR: The New Deal, 1995, etc.) covers only two of the presidents exhausting final yearsfrom election night 1940 to New Years Day 1943. Americas effort to supply war matériel to the Allies is the dominant story line here. Before Pearl Harbor, the president had to proceed cautiously. Most Americans opposed involvement in the war, and powerful public figures (such as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy) stood ready to denounce any steps that appeared to be bringing the US into what was considered a European conflict. After Pearl Harbor, isolationism disappeared overnight, and the pressing issue became the allocation of men and machinery: Britain continued to need supplies, while Russia required planes and guns after the German invasion of 1941. Ships and manpower were needed in the Pacific to repulse the widespread Japanese assaults. When England waffled on Operation Sledgehammer (the planned 1942 invasion of Western Europe), George Marshall tried to commit US forces to first winning the war in the Pacific. But FDR overruled Marshall, soothed Stalin with more planes, and committed American troops to Operation Torch (the 1942 invasion of North Africa). Davis writes fluidly and well, but he struggles somewhat when he strays from historical narrative: his occasional psychological observations of FDR, Churchill, and Eisenhower are unconvincing, and his bizarre reconstruction of the Eastern Front as a kind of Freudian battle between emotions (Germany) and logic (Russia) seems simplistic. Even more disappointing, the people in FDRs personal life (Eleanor, devoted secretary Missy Lehand, and old flame Lucy Mercer) make only brief appearances. Overall, a meticulously detailed, smoothly told biography.
Library Journal Review
Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest president of the 20th century, has attracted the interest of some of the nation's best biographers: Frank Freidel, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., James MacGregor Burns, Geoffrey Ward, and Davis. Unfortunately, Davis's death in 1999 makes this fourth volume in a planned five-volume series the final one. Nonetheless, exhaustive research and rich details of a political figure Davis obviously admired turns the volume and incomplete series into a classic. There's as much information about FDR's advisers as there is about the president himself, and the treatment of Harry Hopkins, the person closest to FDR during the years covered, is particularly good. Readers can add this epic four-volume biography to the shelf of notable FDR lives: Patrick Maney's one-volume biography, The Roosevelt Presence (Macmillan, 1993); James MacGregor Burns's detailed two-volume biography, The Lion and the Fox (1956. o.p.) and The Soldier of Freedom (1970. o.p.); and Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time (LJ 9/15/94), which covers part of the same period. Each of these unique works is worthy of FDR's stature, and Davis's latest volume is a welcome addition. Highly recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/00.]DWilliam D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
BOOK ONE A Guided Drift Toward War Overture: Themes, Issues, Recapitulations "We are facing difficult days in this country, but I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years." Roosevelt had spoken these words at midnight of the night before (it was now Wednesday morning, November 6, 1940) to a jubilant crowd of Hyde Park neighbors gathered on the wide Big House lawn--a crowd that had come in torchlight parade to celebrate with him his election to an unprecedented third term as President of the United States, defeating Republican challenger Wendell Willkie--and the promise thus made, despite being rendered strangely tentative and even dubious by the prefatory "I think," was evidently intended by him to soothe, to reassure. It failed to do so, however, for everyone who listened to it or read it in the papers. There were critical and well-informed minds in which the promise raised questions of identity that, viewed in terms of the future now rising as black clouds out of Europe, out of Asia, to cast gloom over the Republic, were both difficult to answer and profoundly disturbing. Was this "Franklin Roosevelt" whom his listeners had "known a great many years" actually and wholly the Roosevelt upon whom now depended so much of the fate of America and, indeed, the world? Or was the "real" Franklin Roosevelt a man different in important ways, and perhaps contradictory ways, from his Hyde Park friends' perception of him? In either case, but especially in the latter, to what extent and in what ways would his remaining "just the same" be a boon for mankind, to what extent and in what ways a misfortune, in the "difficult days" to come? II The man popularly perceived, the man whose face at midnight had been cooled by a mild springlike breeze as it was imbued by ruddy torchlight, was a big, warm, friendly, compassionate man with an acute sense of justice and a strong commitment to it. Through all the fifty-seven years of his life (he would be fifty-eight this coming January 30) he had been a lover of simple country living. He disliked cities, though his most solid political support came from urban areas, and had in the past, in public speech, more than hinted a belief that virtue, discouraged by the frenetic artificiality of crowded streets, could come to its full flowering only amid green growing things in such landscapes as the one he saw this morning out his bedroom window. For though the green growth was now in autumn retreat at Hyde Park, the hardwoods leafless, the evergreens nearly black, the fields and meadows gray and brown and swept by chill winds under a darkly lowering sky (the weather, he noted, had greatly changed since midnight)--though this was so, and though the present melancholy of it was felt, the window-framed landscape of wide fields and wild-wooded hills was yet seen through memory's eyes as a greenly living one. Through it, nourishing and ordering it, flowed the great theme-river of his life, the mighty Hudson, upon whose wide bosom he had spent many of his happiest youthful hours in sailboat and iceboat and from whose bank he and his devoted friend Louis Howe had launched the model sailboats they designed and built together during his long convalescence, as a middle-aged man, from near fatal illness. It now presented itself to his vision, beyond a fringe of treetop, as more lake than stream. A small inland sea. And it was in fact both an active arm of the sea and an active contributor of water to the sea, for it was one of the longest estuaries on earth, as Roosevelt had learned as a boy. Already, as it made its slow curve around Crum Elbow, it sometimes tasted faintly of the salt of the sea that flowed into it, if meagerly, at high tide, and into which soon it must die. Such facts greatly interested, and were known to interest, the man whom his neighbors had long known. He collected them avidly and, his admiring neighbors would have said, they now richly furnished a mind remarkable for its capacity. Many of these neighbors knew, as we know, that his collecting of facts, like his collecting of stamps, old books, naval prints, and the like, had been a major part of the psychological strategy he had employed, to sustain his morale, in the long hard war he had waged--much of it in this house, in this very room--against the crippling effects of the polio that had struck him down in 1921, when he was thirty-nine. It was a war he had declared in the innermost recesses of his being, and to everyone around him, while he was yet wholly bedridden, unable even to sit erect. With an iron determination whose grimness he masked with smiling outward confidence, even gaiety, he had set out to conquer and destroy his affliction. He would walk again! He would walk unaided, without leg braces or crutches or canes! Alas, he never did. He became more mobile, less helpless physically, than had seemed possible to his doctors at the outset of his war, but no amount of willpower or arduous physical effort (he expended prodigious quantities of both) could regrow destroyed nerve tissue. In 1928, when his return to active political life forced him to suspend his recovery regimen after seven years of harsh effort, his legs yet remained nearly fleshless, hardly more than sticks of bone draped in wrinkled skin, and were almost totally unresponsive to his will. His public "walking" and "standing," in 1928 as in 1940, were difficult and often painful balancing acts on what were in effect stilts (steel rods locked around hips, knees, ankles), possible only if he leaned heavily on canes or had beside him a strong man whose arm he could grip. Nevertheless, his struggle had been far from fruitless. During it, as his neighbors knew, he had manifest and further developed an almost incredible fortitude, patience, and emotional self-control--a self-mastery that was part and parcel of his mastery of other people. Discerned by some of the more acute of those who observed him with close attention, though from a distance, was the fact that his very disability had become in his way of handling it a source, an instrument, a protector and preserver of personal power. As regards this last, it prevented risk-engendering importunities that he could not have avoided, save at the further and possibly greater political risk of giving offense, had he been able to move freely about and therefore compelled to mingle casually with other people on occasions and grounds not of his choosing. The compulsion was now all the other way: people must come to him, and they must come always, to some extent, at least, with formality--that is, in accordance with formal rules whereby they were placed at an initial disadvantage insofar as their dealings with him were of an adversarial nature. This was true even in situations where his actual need for their support was considerably greater than theirs for his. For since they came as invited guests into his house, or by his permission into his office or onto other ground ruled by him, they came perforce under felt obligations and must assume in some degree, willy-nilly, a supplicatory attitude. By the manner of his welcome or greeting he could and did set the tone of every personal encounter and, having done so, could and did dominate the discussion. Similar in effect, but different psychologically, was the way in which his physical handicap became per se a source and instrument of governing power. Conjoined or (more precisely) fused with the self-mastery he had gained through his struggle to overcome it, his perceived handicap, in part by weakening in other people their inward resistance to his will, actually increased his persuasiveness and enhanced his ability to command through sheer force of personality. It commonly made these others want at the outset to please, emulate, and, if at all possible, agree with this man who demonstrated so much courage, strength of character, and optimistic confidence--so much liking and concern for them personally, such sweetness of disposition--under pressures that would have crushed an ordinary mortal into chronic depression and resentful dependency. Moreover there was a natural assumption on the part of people in general, an assumption abundantly encouraged by his careful management of his public image, that he had earned through his prolonged and terrible ordeal a compassionate living wisdom remarkable for its width and depth. He was therefore commonly deemed more likely to be right than his opponents were on issues concerning which the common view was not well informed. He might be so even on issues of which his own factual knowledge was meager: his "intuition" was famous, was encouraged by him so to be--an ability, as it seemed, to dispense with logical process as he plunged with lightning swiftness into the heart of a difficult problem and discovered there its solution--and though it was presumed that he had been born with this uncanny ability, it was further presumed that prolonged anguish and arduous struggle had sharpened and strengthened it. Excerpted from FDR: The War President, 1940-1943: A History by Kenneth S. Davis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
