18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Biography of our greatest 20th-Century President, December 7, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: FDR: A Biography (Hardcover)
When historians are asked to rank our greatest Presidents, three men nearly always fill the top 3 positions: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although FDR, who served from 1933-1945, is by far the most recent of our truly "great" Presidents, he has become an oddly forgotten figure by many Americans, and lesser Presidents such as Harry Truman and John F Kennedy have captured the public's imagination. Yet Roosevelt accomplished far more than any of his successors, and he has the distinction of leading America through two of the worst crises in its' history: the Great Depression and World War Two. In some ways this may account for FDR's strange obscurity in today's politics and historical memory, for like Lincoln and Washington, FDR's achievements are so great that he doesn't seem as "human" as leaders such as Truman, nor as dramatic and tragic as a Kennedy. In this thoroughly engrossing biography, Ted Morgan brings us not the larger-than-life FDR of myth, but a fully human, "warts-and-all" look at our longest-serving Chief Executive. Morgan vividly brings to life the priviliged world that FDR grew up in, and offers marvelous anecdotes and portraits of FDR and the people in his life that brings the man and his era alive in a way that no other FDR biography even approaches. While other historians may offer a more fact-filled and event-oriented approach, many of their books (such as Frank Freidel's biography) are often dry and fail to grasp why FDR was so popular with the public or why he became such a dominant political figure. Morgan includes most of the great events of Roosevelt's life - his fight against polio, the years as Governor of New York, the New Deal, his leadership in World War Two - but he also mentions little details and stories that illustrate the impact he had on ordinary people's lives during the Depression, and shows how even his personal flaws (such as his endless capacity for telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, even if he had no intention of meeting their requests) were actually political strengths. Morgan doesn't shy away from the dark sides of FDR's life and career that many of his other biographers refuse to mention. Among these are his long love affair with Lucy Mercer, which nearly ended his marriage to his distant cousin Eleanor; his involvement in a sordid sex scandal involving using US Navy sailors to catch a homosexual Episcopalian priest, which FDR approved as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then lied about his involvement when the scheme was discovered and came under criticism; his habit of lying, even to his closest friends and advisors; and his general lack of parenting skills with his children. But Morgan also includes the more positive aspects of FDR's personality - the sympathy for the underdog; the genuine concern to help the less-fortunate in our society; the ability to innovate, try out new ideas and programs, and the ability to radiate confidence and optimism to a nation that sorely needed both traits in the dark days of the Depression and World War, all these and more are described by Morgan. If you want a straightforward, chronological account of FDR's Presidency, then there are other books which will offer you the basics of FDR's political career. But if you want to understand FDR as a person and human being, as well as a great political leader, then this book is by far your best choice. For its' ability to offer a portrait of a President that literally gives you the feeling that you "knew" the man personally, Ted Morgan's "FDR" is without peer...an excellent read for any US history or political buff!
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the One, October 16, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: FDR: A Biography (Hardcover)
FDR is a frustrating figure, in my opinion, because he was so big, and so transformative a leader (to pin James MacGregor Burns's taxonomy of leadership onto him) that every other biography of him I have seen has become reduced to simply the author's bias and idiosyncratic interpretation of him. Some little twerp laboring over a PhD thesis for 10 years gives us a whole book on FDR and the Supreme Court, or FDR and public works, or FDR and WW II. Boring.
Which is where this one comes in. I bought it more than 15 years ago, but never really read it until last year. Before then, I was only interested in "proof texting" FDR to basically show what a socialist bad guy he was, a poor comparative reflection of cousin Theodore. In this sense, too-high a view of Theodore dooms FDR to second-best. Then I read Churchill's 6 Vol. history of WW II, and through that lens saw a very compelling FDR, one big enough to "run" Churchill. And Churchill makes it clear in his history why it was utterly impossible for the West to save Eastern and Central Europe from the Russians. Explaining this take on things drops the charges against FDR so long-brought by the John Birchers--that somehow he gave away the world to the communists.
Ted Morgan gets deep into this, but by way of Roosevelt's childhood and familial relations, focusing on Franklin's impossible mother--the root of his famous evasiveness, says Morgan. Then on into minor politics after a little Harvard; a glimpse of some adultery, and then polio. The adultery is interesting, because compared to someone like Bill Clinton, FDR's sounds quite focused, or even traditional--his Lucy Mercer of Pre-Presidency fame stays in the picture, and is in the room with him 4 terms later when he has his stroke after going thru the morning's mail at the resort in Georgia he had purchased (in pale, or maybe non-pale imitation of Teddie's purchase of the badlands ranch--both places of rehabilitation for each Roosevelt).
And although Eleanor may have played house in a cottage behind Franklin's Mom's ancestral property, with a few lesbian friends, she, too is a sympathetic figure, putting up with Franklin, then becoming his functional nurse, and raising their children in the scant time left after working on the ills of the rest of the world. Something like Hillary with more empathy, or substance. How about Hillary minus the switchblade?
Somewhere in all of the polio and then political battle, FDR decided to be great; and this seems to have translated, as the story unfolds through Morgan, into a similar decision to make the United States great, and dominant. Doing this while paralyzed from the waist down, and while taking time to "stick it" to old foes in the New York State government throughout his presidency, induces a kind of involuntary admiration which lets me see how people like Bill Clinton are so drawn to the FDR memory, and how they seek to replay FDR's utter commitment to the moment and the audience. Compared to a Clinton, the multimillionaire Dutchman from upstate New York paradoxically had a lot less to prove, but yet accomplished so much more.
So after a long time admiring Teddy and dumping on Frank, this book makes it clear to me that although an FDR without the preexisting Teddy would not have been possible, FDR very arguably accomplished a great deal more than TR. As recent, more critical biographers of Teddy explain (H.W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic), Teddy sort of fanatacized-out during his third party phase, maybe paralleling Winston Churchill's father's flame-out--an interesting common point which may have given these two leaders in their wartime phase the ability to compromise and survive, when it would be easier to lecture and purify (and get tossed out).
Thus the connection with the mess of the war, and part of the explanation for us coming out on top (in spite of FDR's child like view of India, and some-said-strange courting of Ibn Saud). If these actions were designed to take adavntage not only of Germany's destruction, but also of England's slide, then FDR succeeded. Maybe Churchill would call him another Marlborough, had he been related, due to this balance of power maneuvering. But maybe FDR didn't intend it that way at all, if he was more a tool of providence mingled in with great effort (kind of an Augustinian view of political success).
In summary, I'm not as hacked off as I used to be when I see FDR's face on our dimes, after reading this book. It's OK with me now if stays right there. He puts a better human face on our money than a stylized Mercury-head yanked from mythology. And that's what this author has also done for me.
One thing I'd like to see a future historian look into: Campobello Island, the family's version of the Kennedy compound, is actually in Canadian territorial water (so I'm told). What relationship did this have to the Roosevelt family import fortune of glass and hardware back in the 1700s and 1800s? Was there a tax avoidance or illegality angle, like the Forbes family, the Bronfmans of Canada (See Peter Newman's book "Bronfman Dynasty" on that), and the Kennedys? That would complete the economic substrate of our knowledge of this family, long since passed, it seems, into fashionable senescense. And sure, all families seem to decline; but few leave behind such great men.
Which gets us back to the pack of FDR authors. They're everywhere, some of their books skinny, some quite fat. But this one really stands out. I highly recommend it.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great pre-war biography, November 27, 2003
This review is from: FDR: A Biography (Hardcover)
While this biography may lack sufficient depth in parts, it's an excellent examination of FDR's efforts to bring us into WWII. FDR knew we had to fight and, with extraordinary effort, prepared the US even though many: Father Coughlin (the Rush Limbaugh of his day); General Wood; Charles Lindberg; Henry Ford; and many others were fighting against it.
It also puts to rest the idea that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attach in advance.
For these reasons, I recommend it.
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