Customer Reviews

FDR: The American Experience - The Juggler, 1940 - 1945 [VHS]

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As the last of the 4-tape series on FDR, this video is really well done. It captures the rapidity of the fourth term, which not everyone realizes lasted less than six months. The detachment of FDR's final months is captured here, mostly by what the presentation excludes. Nothing here about General Marshall, or Alger Hiss, or Harry Hopkins (just one sideways reference to him in the 3rd Video). McCullough's intention, it seems, is to draw FDR back to his childhood roots, to focus on his ancestral home, and also to cycle back to Lucy Mercer and FDR's final betrayal of Eleanor--assisted by daughter Anna. Which is proof of his manipulative power (hard to imagine, by comparison, Bill Clinton talking Chelsea into brokering a rendevous with Monica).

So the breathless pace of the last term is attenuated into these connections with FDR's timeless traits, but the pace of it is worth recalling: Get reelected, fly off for a 14,000 mile trip to Yalta to confer with Churchill and Stalin, then home to report to Congress, run down to Warm Springs, and die. Die and let Harry Truman finish off Hitler and then Japan, with MacArthur in charge of Japan, and McCloy running Germany.

The closing choice of scene, with Churchill laying a wreath on FDR's Hyde Park grave in 1946, is very moving, as is the closing Churchill quote likening FDR to a bottle of champagne (skillfully culled from so much Churchillian verbosity on the topic of FDR).

More depth can be found in other resources, but for a nice reminder, this is really very good.