The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Blazoned in huge black letters across the front page of the December 4,1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune was the headline: F.D.R.'S WAR PLANS!..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Always fiercely contested on matters of domestic policy, Franklin Roosevelt faced even more opposition when it came to international relations. His first two terms in office coincided with the rise of a powerful isolationist movement that urged the government not to involve itself in foreign entanglements. That movement, coupled with strongly anti-British sentiment that owed much to America's large Irish and German populations, hampered Roosevelt's efforts to set the nation on the side of England when it became apparent in the late 1930s that a European war loomed.

To placate his opposition, Thomas Fleming charges in The New Dealers' War, Roosevelt promised "that he would never send American soldiers to fight beyond America's shores." Yet, Fleming continues, on December 4, 1941, the Chicago Tribune revealed the existence of elaborate war plans involving the landing of an American force 5 million strong in Europe by 1943. The revelation gave isolationists fits, of course, but their criticism was effectively silenced three days later when a Japanese force attacked Hawaii. In declaring war on Japan and its allies, Roosevelt's New Deal administration imposed what Fleming considers to have been an unreasonable demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. That demand, he believes, compromised internal resistance to the enemy regimes. Its prosecution also legitimized the use of what Fleming calls "hateful tactics" such as the bombing of civilian targets and the use of nuclear weapons.

Fleming's revisionist study will be of greatest interest to those already inclined to the view that Franklin Roosevelt tricked his country into fighting Fascism. Other readers may take issue with his ad hominem, ideological arguments. Either way, his provocative thesis is sure to promote debate. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Fleming, who previously endeavored to rehabilitate the villainous Aaron Burr in Duel, now attempts even more absurd revisionism. Franklin Roosevelt has been lauded by most historians most brilliantly by Eric Larrabee in his book Commander in Chief (1987) as a shrewd political and military strategist who conducted both aspects of WWII with great guile, wit and efficiency. Fleming, however, portrays FDR as an inefficient and oafish warmonger spoiling for battle amid world political, economic and social tensions he did not understand. Fleming revives the well-worn canard that FDR wanted, needed and invited the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Then he quibbles with the notions of "unconditional surrender" and "total war" imposed on the Axis powers, speculating that some compromise should have been reached. Fleming fails to see what Roosevelt and Churchill (who called him "the most skilled strategist of all") clearly did that Hitler and his allies represented not just standard political and military aggression but a new dark age. Fleming implies that Stalin posed an even larger threat to culture and history, but that the left-wingers of Roosevelt's New Deal government were not disposed to see his evil. In truth, Roosevelt had few illusions when it came to the Soviets. Realizing their potential to be either formidable foes or formidable friends, he chose the latter at the same time reminding the sometimes disapproving Churchill that one occasionally needed to fight fire with fire. Photos not seen by PW. (May 1) Forecast: The controversy that will undoubtedly ensue on this book's publication should drive sales up.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465024645
• ISBN-13: 978-0465024643
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #309,634 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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123 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blatant Truth Telling, May 13, 2001

By	David J. Forsmark "Book Reviewer" (Flushing, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

... First, Fleming not only does NOT join the conspiracy buffs (which, by the way, include the prestigious John Toland) who say that FDR planned Pearl Harbor, Fleming actually DEBUNKS those theories somewhat.

Fleming interviews the captain of an obsolete warship who was sent out on what the captain describes as a "suicide mission" by Presidential order to try to provoke an incident with the Japanese. He was saved by the Pearl Harbor raid because he was called back to port. If FDR knew the Pearl Harbor raid was coming, there would have no point to doing this. Fleming shows that the racist attitudes toward the Japanese-- don't forget, our Liberal ICON FDR is the ONLY American president in this century to round people up solely because of their race imprison them-- meant that no one in the American chain of command believed that the Japanese were capable of such a raid. (Don't forget, Billy Mitchell was court martialed for saying it would happen.)

On the subject of FDR's health, even the FDR worshippers will tell you that the Democrat party bosses insisted on Truman because they knew FDR was dying, and were afraid of being stuck with Henry Wallace as their 1948 nominee. The pro-FDR crowd make this deception of the American electorate proof of FDR's brillance. Fleming merely says that the people had a right to know, and that perhaps FDR was starting to believe his own press clippings when he thought that the country would not survive without his election.

Fleming also exposes the fact that McCarthy was not the first to say that people who opposed them politically were sympathetic to America's enemies. FDR tried to jail some of his opponents, and was slaughered in the 1942 election when his hubris led him to say that Republicans and those who were not pro-war before Pearl Harbor were fascists.

Fleming is the first in a long time to discuss how the leaking of the Rainbow Five war plans in December of 1941 affected Hitler to declare war on the US. These plans were considered a huge factor at the time, but the incident was forgotten in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. However, German documents reveal that the fact that Amercian newspapers reported that the US was planning a ten million man army to invade Europe led Hitler to declare war on the US while it was still reeling from Pearl Harbor rather than wait for a build up.

Here is where Fleming engages in some speculation. No one KNOWS who leaked Rainbow Five. But in interviewing General Wedemeyer who WROTE it, Fleming does the Sherlock Holmes routine of eliminating all the other suspects leaving only FDR as a logical choice. Fleming plays fair here by showing his method and letting us draw our own conclusion.

This book will undoubtedly give Doris Kearns Goodwin a heart attack. Though even in her worshipful book "No Ordinary Time" she admits much of the facts that Fleming lays out, her spin is that all of this deception was "leadership" and it showed FDR's brilliance. Fleming thinks that 50 years after the fact, it might be time to cut through the war time propaganda and take a clear eyed look at FDR. It was certainly controversial at the time-- so much so that FDR barely hung on to power within his own party and lost it in the Congress for the last term of his presidency. But as Fleming points out, when Roosevelt died, and especially after a brilliant bureaucrat added his name to the day's casualty list, talking about all this became thought of as bad form.

It is forgotten in the haze of wartime propaganda, Norman Rockwell paintings, and Hollywood movies, that this country was as politically divided during WWII as it is today, and that there were legitimate arguments against the say FDR conducted his policies-- both domestic AND foreign. A 1944 poll showed that if the war ended before the election, FDR would get only 30% of the vote!

The biggest of these, and the one that really justifies the title of the book, is the policy of Unconditional Surrender. While it was well sold to the American public (and to school textbook writers) this policy undoubtedly lengthened the war, and caused hundred of thousands of extra Allied casualties. The driving force behind the policy was the vision of the New Dealers for a worldwide order, which could live with a Soviet empire, but NOT a British Empire, or a democratic industrialized Germany. The New Dealers' plan was to divide Germany into seven little demilitarized agrarian states, in a Carthigian sort of eternal subjugation. That, of course, was just fine with Stalin.

Luckily, Truman became president before this kind of insanity could take place, or Stalin would have been the next dictator to roll his tanks down the Champs Elyses. But lots of people died for this policy before Truman nixed it-- including, Fleming shows, a bevy of German Resistance leaders who, as Churchill later admitted, were betrayed by the Allies, and who rank as some of the 20th Century's greatest heroes.

If this book is "revisionist" than it is revisionist in the finest tradition-- challenging the consensus opinion. It is NOT, however, revistionist in the postmodern, truth is what you make of it, sense that defiles the study of history, rather than enlightening it.

"The New Dealers' War" is a great book by one of our very finest historians-- who, by the way, did not try to "rehabilitate the villanous Aaron Burr," but showed the WHOLE person of Burr, not just the cartoon, and who illuminated Jefferson and Hamilton's slanderous role in pushing Burr in the unfortunate roar he chose. Instead of ad hominem, this book should-- and will-- provoke legitimate discussion. Good!

86 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'Memory isn't history' ... but this sure is, June 2, 2001

By	Andrew S. Rogers (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This summer, millions of American filmgoers will see, in the new 'Pearl Harbor' movie, a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt so hagiographic that even many of his supporters are embarrassed. For anyone willing to expend a little effort to find a more accurate portrait of That Man in the White House, I hugely recommend this huge book.

Fleming's philosophy, explained early on, is that 'memory is not history.' Although many Americans -- particularly members of the so-called 'greatest generation' and their children -- still have fond memories of FDR, rank him among history's great leaders in war and peace, and defend his memory and legacy, Fleming argues that these rose-colored memories are not substitutes for fact. FDR was not a demigod. He was a man: a fallible man, a devious man, an arrogant and ambitious man, a political man in both the best and worst senses of that term, and -- for the last years of his life -- a very seriously ill man.

FDR, Fleming argues, embodied both sides of 'the profound dichotomy in American life,' the tension between the idealism of the Declaration of Independence and the myth of the Founding, and 'the often brutal realism' and hard-edged practicality that Americans have shown in times of crisis and opportunity like the settling of the frontier. Fleming argues Roosevelt manipulated both sides of the dichotomy to maneuver America into the war on the side of the Allies. The New Dealers in his administration supported him in this, hoping to make the war a crusade for a 'New Deal for the World,' the way the First World War was a crusade for democracy.

Once America was in the war, Roosevelt vacillated between the two poles of the 'profound dichotomy.' On the one hand, he publicly declared that 'Dr New Deal' had been replaced by 'Dr Win-The-War' as the physician who could cure the nations' ills, and sometimes seemed to have viewed the New Deal more as an electoral ploy than an ideological commitment (After one Roosevelt decision, New Dealer Harry Hopkins tellingly fumed, 'The New Deal has once again been sacrificed to the war effort.' Hopkins wanted the war to serve his ideological goals, not come ahead of them.)

On the other hand, Roosevelt clung with grim tenacity to his 'unconditional surrender' formula, despite anguished pleas from his military commanders, Winston Churchill, the anti-Hitler German resistance, and even the Pope that all he was doing was fueling the Nazis' propaganda machine, undermining any hope of an effective resistance, and guaranteeing millions of additional casualties.

Fleming traces the administration's internal battles between the New Dealers and the pragmatists -- battles that climaxed, in his view, in the 1944 jettisoning of Henry Wallace from the Democrats' vice-presidential nomination, the fight over the Allied terror-bombing of German and Japanese civilians (The Allies 'must exceed the Nazis in fury, ruthlessness, and efficiency,' Hopkins wrote.) culminating in the decision to use the atomic bomb, and Roosevelt's consistent, naïve belief that the Soviet Union could become a trustworthy post-war ally, if only he could 'get at' Stalin with his famous charm. He was reinforced in his belief by ideologically motivated naifs like Henry Wallace and, as the Venona transcripts later proved, Soviet agents in the inner circles of American government. Fleming argues that here, too, Europe paid the price for the New Dealers' blinkered view of history and politics.

If Fleming has a hero in this book, it is clearly Missouri Senator Harry Truman. No fan of Roosevelt, Truman and his Senate Committee investigated the administration's handling of the war effort and sharply criticized the New Dealers for their ideologically based running of the war effort. Of course, Truman would soon find himself tangled in the New Dealers' web, forced as president to cope with the consequences of the New Dealers' war.

Despite its heft, I found this an exciting and surprisingly fast read (the type is fairly large, and there is a lot of leading between the lines, so you shouldn't be intimidated by the size). I found myself saddened that I had finished the book -- a rare experience in non-fiction reading. Many 'greatest generation'-ers, plus left-liberals and other partisans of Big Government, will not enjoy seeing their most sacred cow gored so effectively. But this excellent book is a valuable (and much needed) antidote to the waves of pro-FDR idolatry we've been subjected to for more than half a century, and an important reminder of the memories we've suppressed in our nostalgic remembrings of the 'Good War.'

Very, very highly recommended.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting View of a Crucial Time, July 3, 2006

By	Kurt Harding "bon vivant" (Boerne TX) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Before reading The New Dealer's War, I read most of the reviews here, both negative and positive so that I might have a better idea of what to expect from the book. What I didn't find is the knee-jerk anti-Roosevelt bias that many of this book's detractors ascribe to the author. Some of those reviewers seem to be the type of FDR cheerleaders who automatically deny any suggestion that their hero could have possibly known about Japanese intentions vis-a-vis Pearl Harbor in advance, but who are so partisan that they would eagerly assert that the current president was aware in advance of the 9-11 attacks. In fact, history shows that FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack and future historians may well discover that Bush knew in advance of Al-Qaida's plans as well.
Just because we have representative government in the US doesn't mean that our leaders in both major parties are above scheming, conniving, and lying in order to steer events a certain direction. Hitler did it crudely and transparently in Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia several times before discarding all diplomatic niceities and blatantly showing the world his true intentions. As a statesman, FDR understood the challenge that Hitler and the Japanese posed to freedom, and used every political skill he had to drag a reluctant and recalcitrant public into the war that he knew we would have to fight sooner or later anyhow.
Anyway, The New Dealer's War is not at all just about our entry into the war, so the commentary of the most stridently negative reviews leads me to believe that many of those reviewers did not actually read the book, but only skimmed it for any tidbit which might reinforce a pre-conceived negative view.
There are factional struggles between groups of advisers in every administration as competing factions vie for the president's approval of their policy proposals. What this book is about is about the internecine struggles within the Roosevelt administration, not about how FDR got us into the war. What makes the story compelling is that these struggles were taking part at a crucial juncture in US and world history and that their outcome would determine the postwar course of both the US and the world.
Remember that in the 1930s and 1940s, the sugarcoated view of the Soviet system, promoted in the US by Stalinist lackeys such as Walter Duranty, appealed to a great many people. Many New Dealers were zealous advocates of a command economy and tried very hard to steer a seemingly sympathetic Roosevelt their way. But there was also a group of advisers in the Roosevelt administration tied to business, and to businessmen a command economy is anathema. Thus the struggle between the idealists to the left of FDR and the pragmatists to his right. Fleming shows how FDR, as a shrewd politician, played both sides off against one another and was able to keep the focus of his later years on the important goal of winning the war. There were political victories and tragic mistakes, Fleming gives Roosevelt his due when it is deserved and points out his errors and flaws when he needs to.
The bottom line is, don't take any of these reviews as gospel. First read this thoroughly researched, well-written, and interesting view of a crucial time then decide for yourself what is proven or plausible and what is not.