FDR: The War President, 1940-1943: A History [Hardcover]

Kenneth S. Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 28, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The fifth volume of Kenneth S. Davis's magisterial, much-praised biography follows FDR from his re-election to an unprecedented third term in November 1940 through New Year's Eve, 1942, when he screened a brand-new film, Casablanca, at the White House. During the intervening 25 months, President Roosevelt prepared a reluctant nation for the war that he knew was coming, then struggled to maintain the government's commitment to his New Deal social programs, as well as the conflict overseas. Like its predecessors, this installment combines shrewd, intimate psychological insights into Roosevelt's character with a sweeping historical narrative of world events and a superbly detailed account of Washington political maneuvers--all three laid out in grave, elegant prose. Perhaps Davis's most notable achievement lies in tracing the links between FDR's personality and his leadership style: the unexpected benefits of his maddening indecisiveness, his ability to use even his crippling physical handicap to political advantage, the way in which the adult president cemented personal and professional ties with the evasive charm that he developed in adolescence to defend himself against a smothering mother. Admirers of serious yet accessible biography can regret only that the author's death in 1999 means that there will be no concluding volume to this magnificent series, which has shed so much light on one of the more complex men ever to inhabit the White House. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (November 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679415424
• ISBN-13: 978-0679415428
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #170,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #19 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( R ) > Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fifth volume in a magical FDR biography, January 20, 2001

By 

Candace Scott (Lake Arrowhead, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FDR: The War President, 1940-1943: A History (Hardcover)

I've purchased and enjoyed the four preceding Kenneth Davis studies on Franklin Roosevelt and this volume continues a masterful biographical effort. Davis' books are extremely detailed and if you have a peripheral interest in Roosevelt, he would probably not be the historian of choice. The minutiae he provides is a delight Roosevelt fans who love the slightest tid-bit on their hero. His research methods are sober, industrious and trustworthy, his FDR-bias generally masked.

The strength of this study is the focus upon FDR's masterful manner of maneuvering an isolationist power into war. The chapters on Lend-Lease, while not providing any new information, still make for riveting reading. The Churchill-FDR political and military partnership is also explored in depth, with Churchill justly taking some heavy criticism for some of his decisions and meddlesome efforts into the Allied offense against Hitler.

The only criticism is that Davis does not focus sufficiently on FDR as a human being and the vast importance of Eleanor Roosevelt is somewhat obsfucated. I would have liked to have seen some exploration into Eleanor's relationships with Lorena Hickock and Earl Miller, and a greater emphasis on FDR's relationship with Missy LeHand, his secretary.

Still, Davis' effort is an excellent continuation on his epic Roosevelt biography. I can't wait for the concluding volume.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not quite the greatest, April 15, 2001

By 

John Barry Kenyon - See all my reviews

This review is from: FDR: The War President, 1940-1943: A History (Hardcover)

It was a pleasure to read Kenneth Davis' excellently written, fifth volume of his FDR biography. Starting with the re-election in 1940, Davis takes us through events until the end of 1942. His warm relationship with Churchill is convincingly drawn as is his rather naive perspective on Stalin. His oddities, such as a leaning towards Vichy France in the early days, are not disguised. FDR's brokering of the debate in the US between those who wanted a frontal assault on Fortress Europe and those who preferred a more cautious approach is described in brilliant detail. The president's refusal to do much constructive about the Holocaust is explained by Davis as caution rather than personal anti-semitism. In retrospect, we can see that FDR's achievement was to transform a recession hit US into the arsenal of democracy. More's the pity we shall not get volume six as the author died in 1999 before he had time to write it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good -- if cranky -- biography of FDR, June 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: FDR: The War President, 1940-1943: A History (Hardcover)

Kenneth Davis (b. 1912) dedicated the last thirty years to his multi-volume biography of FDR. The current volume takes the story up to 1943 and there will be no concluding account, due to the author's death in 1999.

Davis, a skeptical admirer of the elusive FDR, has axes to grind. It is a pet thesis of his throughout the biography that humankind's technical wizardry has run far ahead of his social skills and that the result has been disaster. Humanity creates weaponry (e.g. nuclear weapons), the destructive potential of which exceed its political maturation. This is an historical cliche. Fortunately, such jejune "analysis" does not interfere with the narration: it is just the author's hobby horse.

Davis also believes that the great bane of the 20th century was the growth in private corporate power. He is, in this sense, a real New Dealer. His railings against Big Business would not be out of place at a Ralph Nader rally. He is skeptical of the great industrialists, such as Henry Kaiser, whose organizational skills are often credited with helping to win the war of production. For Davis, the capitalists simply feathered their nests and then extended their stranglehold on the economy into the postwar world. This, too, is pretty much a cliche and one that Davis does little to document.

The author does a good job at catching the president's shifty character and political opportunism. Observers sometimes wondered if there was a real FDR, or if he was all just sleight of hand. Davis also revels in the personal gossip that accompanied FDR's presidency, the most entertaining we ever had except for, perhaps, that of Bill Clinton.

The author grinds a few other axes, as well, in his analysis of Roosevelt's war presidency. He is convinced that the USA could, and should, have intervened earlier in the war. That it did not resulted, he claims, in the extended tragedy of 1939-45. This is unfair. Roosevelt was well-aware of the dangers posed by the Axis. However, he was also well-aware of the fiasco of Woodrow Wilson's postwar leadership and the corrosive skepticism of the public toward European politics. FDR tried, in the famous "Quarantine Speech," to move America toward some sort of collective security -- and the result was a political firestorm. As president of a democracy, FDR held no brief to shoehorn the United States into a war not wanted by its own people. (The subsequent lesson of LBJ should convince us of that.)

But, the Holocaust is the issue on which Davis really gets ahead of his evidence. He is adamant that FDR should have done something about it -- but has no idea what. In fact, the murder of the Jews was a tragedy that the United States was helpless to prevent or even mitigate. Consider, for instance, that nearly half the murdered Jews were killed by roving German killer squads in the vastness of the wartime USSR. What, precisely, could FDR do about that? There are many other such examples. The heart, understandably, cries out against the horror of the crime -- but a cri de coeur is not analysis. Until 1943, the allies were losing the European war. They were not in a position to do much of anything.

Davis has some rare harsh words for George Marshall, whom he accuses at one point of duplicity. Marshall's towering reputation, however, survives intact. Davis is, likewise, hard on Henry Stimson, whose integrity he doubts -- but doesn't tell us why.

The book is extensively detailed and reads well. Some editing would have useful as it simply meanders too much. This, however, may be a function of the writer's death, which may have robbed him of the full editing process.

There is more verve in this extended biography than in the late Frank Freidel's rather wooden account of FDR. There is, as well, less hagiography than in Schlesinger's mutli-volume account of the New Deal. FDR is, perhaps, our most fascinating president and certainly far and away the greatest of the twentieth-century. He is,in fact, the ONLY great one of the past hundred years. And, this is a good account.

Finally, Eleanor recedes somewhat into the shadows here, and that is all to the good. Compassionate, she was. But, FDR was in charge, not Eleanor. She is an icon of the feminist movement and this leads current histories to over-rate her influence. She was an attractive nag -- but not Roosevelt's conscience. He, and he alone, was the soul of the New Deal. The same was true of the war years. Harry Hopkins was the real alter ego. Davis gets this exactly right.