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Lynne Olson

Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 Paperback – Illustrated, January 14, 2014

by Lynne Olson (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

From the acclaimed author of Citizens of London comes the definitive account of the debate over American intervention in World War II—a bitter, sometimes violent clash of personalities and ideas that divided the nation and ultimately determined the fate of the free world.

At the center of this controversy stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative. While FDR, buffeted by political pressures on all sides, struggled to marshal public support for aid to Winston Churchill’s Britain, Lindbergh saw his heroic reputation besmirched—and his marriage thrown into turmoil—by allegations that he was a Nazi sympathizer.

Spanning the years 1939 to 1941, Those Angry Days vividly re-creates the rancorous internal squabbles that gripped the United States in the period leading up to Pearl Harbor. After Germany vanquished most of Europe, America found itself torn between its traditional isolationism and the urgent need to come to the aid of Britain, the only country still battling Hitler. The conflict over intervention was, as FDR noted, “a dirty fight,” rife with chicanery and intrigue, and Those Angry Days recounts every bruising detail. In Washington, a group of high-ranking military officers, including the Air Force chief of staff, worked to sabotage FDR’s pro-British policies. Roosevelt, meanwhile, authorized FBI wiretaps of Lindbergh and other opponents of intervention. At the same time, a covert British operation, approved by the president, spied on antiwar groups, dug up dirt on congressional isolationists, and planted propaganda in U.S. newspapers.

The stakes could not have been higher. The combatants were larger than life. With the immediacy of a great novel, Those Angry Days brilliantly recalls a time fraught with danger when the future of democracy and America’s role in the world hung in the balance.

Praise for Those Angry Days

“Powerfully [re-creates] this tenebrous era . . . Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Popular history at its most riveting . . . In Those Angry Days, journalist-turned-historian Lynne Olson captures [the] period in a fast-moving, highly readable narrative punctuated by high drama.”—Associated Press

Print length

576 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

January 14, 2014
Dimensions

5.22 x 1.25 x 7.96 inches
ISBN-10

0812982142
ISBN-13

978-0812982145
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Powerfully [re-creates] this tenebrous era . . . Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement.”—The New York Times Book Review

“In Those Angry Days, journalist-turned-historian Lynne Olson captures [the] period in a fast-moving, highly readable narrative punctuated by high drama. It’s . . . popular history at its most riveting, detailing what the author rightfully characterizes as ‘a brutal, no-holds-barred battle for the soul of the nation.’ It is sure to captivate readers seeking a deeper understanding of how public opinion gradually shifted as America moved from bystander to combatant in the war to preserve democracy.”—Associated Press

“Filled with fascinating anecdotes and surprising twists . . . With this stirring book, Lynne Olson confirms her status as our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”—Madeleine K. Albright

“Olson has shone a dramatic light on the complexities of the issue and skillfully portrayed the protagonists of an almost forgotten crisis in American history.”—Newsweek/The Daily Beast

“[An] absorbing chronicle . . . [Olson] doesn’t so much revisit a historical period as inhabit it; her scenes flicker as urgently as a newsreel. While highlighting Lindbergh and FDR as its stars, Those Angry Days embraces a cast of characters far beyond the book’s title characters.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Masterfully describes America’s conflicting opinions before Pearl Harbor . . . a comprehensive take on another era of angry divisions.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Spanning the years 1939 to 1941, Lynne Olson’s masterful book relives American’s debate over whether to go to war—a bitter clash personified by FDR and Charles Lindbergh.”—Parade

“A fully fleshed-out portrait of the battle between the interventionists and isolationists in the eighteen months leading up to Pearl Harbor . . . a vivid, colorful evocation of a charged era.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Humanizing public events with private strains . . . Olson delivers a fluid rendition of a tempestuous time.”—Booklist

“[Olson] manages to keep her complex, character-filled story on keel as she describes the forces bearing down on FDR’s administration while the world slipped into war. . . . Delicious tales abound.”—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Lynne Olson is the author of Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour; Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England; and Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970, and co-author of two other books. She lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

9781400069743|excerpt

Olson / THOSE ANGRY DAYS

Chapter 1

“A Modern Galahad”

The cab stopped in front of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building and Charles Lindbergh stepped out. He stared for a moment at the Victorian-era museum, with its turrets and multicolored brick facade, then strolled around its perimeter, hoping to find a side door. Seeing none, he returned to the front entrance, considering how to slip past the tourists outside without being recognized.

By now, avoiding public attention was as natural to Lindbergh as breathing. He put his head down, covered his nose with a handkerchief, blew into it—and walked into the museum unnoticed. Once inside, he ducked into the first room on the right, which featured a display of dresses worn by the nation’s First Ladies, and stationed himself by the salmon-pink silk gown that once belonged to Martha Washington. From there he had a perfect view of the Spirit of St. Louis, hanging from the ceiling in the main hall.

It was March 1940, and Europe was at war. Lindbergh was at the epicenter of the struggle over America’s role in the conflict. But for almost an hour that day, he took time out from the frenzy of the present to find refuge in the past. Lost in reverie, the lanky blond aviator gazed at the Spirit of St. Louis, suspended by cables above the tourists staring up at it. He had long felt a mystical closeness to this tiny silver plane. When he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, at the end of the first solo transatlantic flight in history, his first thought had been how to protect it from the hordes of frenzied Frenchmen racing across the field to greet him.

To Lindbergh, the Spirit was “a living creature,” with whom he had shared a transcendent experience and whose loyalty to him was unquestioned. In his mind, they were inseparably linked: he always referred to the plane and himself as “we.” (Indeed, We was the title of the first of two books he wrote about the flight.) More than once in recent years, he dreamed he had crept into the Smithsonian at night, cut the Spirit down, transported it to an airstrip, and taken off. Once aloft—away from his troubled, complicated life—he experienced nothing but joy. He could ride the sky “like a god . . . I could dive at a peak; I could touch a cloud; I could climb far above them all. This hour was mine, free of the earth.”

A supremely rational, practical man by nature, he was unex- pectedly lyrical, even fanciful, when he later described his visit to the Smithsonian in his journal. He noted the kinship he felt with the mannequin representing Martha Washington as they studied the Spirit together: “I rather envied her the constant intimacy with the plane that I once had.”

But then, he wrote, he suddenly noticed two young women staring at him. He was well acquainted with that look. Not quite certain it was him, they soon would come closer to find out. Up to that point, it had been a wonderful visit: just him, Martha, and the Spirit of St. Louis. Determined to preserve the enchantment of the moment, he spun around and walked out.

when the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh touched down at Paris’s Le Bourget airfield on that late spring evening in 1927, there was so much awaiting him, his wife later observed: “Fame—Opportunity—Wealth, and also tragedy & loneliness & frustration. . . . And he so innocent & unaware.” Several decades after the flight, the Lindberghs’ daughter Reeve mused: “Sometimes . . . I wonder whether he would have turned back if he’d known the life he was headed for.”

Although his flight had attracted considerable attention even before he’d taken off, Lindbergh was convinced that any fame that followed would swiftly vanish. Soon after he arrived in France, he presented letters of introduction to Myron Herrick, the U.S. ambassador, unsure whether Herrick even knew who he was. He had no inkling of the remarkable international response to what had been, in essence, a stunt flight—a stunt that the press and public, especially in America, had transformed into something infinitely more.

The New York Evening World, for example, had made the aston- ishing declaration that Lindbergh had performed “the greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race.” The day after the flight, the usually staid New York Times, under the banner headline lindbergh does it!, devoted its entire front page and four more pages inside to stories about the young airman and his triumph.

In hindsight, the reason for the extraordinary reaction was clear: America, nearing the end of a decade marked by cynicism, disillusionment, and political apathy, badly needed a hero. As one historian put it, Lindbergh became “a modern Galahad for a generation which had forsworn Galahads.”

The 1920s in America had been a feverish time, noted for government corruption and graft, a spectacular boom in the stock market, organized crime on an unprecedented scale, a widespread rebellion against convention, the loss of idealism, and an emphasis on enjoying oneself. All this was fodder for the country’s booming mass-circulation tabloid newspapers, which specialized in prodigious coverage of the latest national sensation, be it a murder trial, a heavyweight boxing match, or a dramatic but failed attempt to rescue a man lost in a Kentucky cave. Under heavy competitive pressure, the other, more respectable newspapers more often than not followed the tabloids’ lead, as did the national magazines and a mass media newcomer called radio.

In early 1927, the media, insatiable as ever, had shifted their focus to the $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, a wealthy French-born businessman living in Manhattan, to whoever made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris (or vice versa). Although several airmen had already failed—and died—in the attempt, a new crop of aviators had recently announced plans to enter the competition. Most were well known, with expensive, technologically advanced planes, considerable outside financial backing, and armies of assistants, including staffers whose sole job was to publicize their bosses’ participation. And then there was Charles Lindbergh, an unknown, virtually penniless airmail pilot from Minnesota who managed to scrounge just enough funds from a group of St. Louis businessmen to finance the construction of a stripped-down little plane he named Spirit of St. Louis, in honor of his benefactors.

To aviation experts, Lindbergh’s plan appeared more than quixotic; it seemed suicidal. Never having flown over any large body of water before, he would now try to cross the Atlantic, steering by the stars, a method of navigation relatively unfamiliar to him. He would carry neither parachute nor radio. Even more foolhardy, he planned to make the thirty-three-plus-hour flight alone. No one had ever attempted such a hazardous journey solo; as one wit noted, not even Columbus had sailed by himself. Lloyd’s of London, which issued odds on virtually any enterprise, regardless of its danger, refused to do so for Lindbergh’s venture. “The underwriters believe the risk is too great,” a Lloyd’s spokesman declared.

America has always loved an underdog, especially one as polite, unassuming, self-disciplined, and boyishly handsome as Lindbergh— a stark contrast to the bootleggers, gangsters, playboys, arrogant bankers, dizzy flappers, and corrupt government officials who made up a sizable percentage of the era’s top newsmakers. It was not surprising, then, that when he took off from Long Island’s rain-slick Roosevelt Field in the early morning of May 20, 1927, the entire nation anxiously followed his progress. Newspapers throughout the country printed extra editions, and radio broadcasts issued frequent flash bulletins. During a prizefight at Yankee Stadium, forty thousand people, at the urging of the announcer, rose as one and prayed silently for the young flier. In his May 21 newspaper column, the humorist Will Rogers wrote: “No attempt at jokes today. A slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before.”

When word came that Lindbergh had made it, America went mad. “We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement,” said Charles Evans Hughes, soon to be chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. “Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything.” President Coolidge dispatched an admiral’s flagship to Europe to bring Lindbergh and the Spirit home. In Washington, the president presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Flying Cross. In New York, more than four million people—75 percent of the city’s population—lined its streets to honor Lindbergh in the biggest ticker-tape parade in New York’s history. A few months later, Time magazine named him its first “Man of the Year.”

After his tumultuous homecoming, Lindbergh spent three months touring all forty-eight states in the Spirit. An estimated thirty million people flocked to see this new national idol, labeled a “demigod” by one newspaperman; wherever he appeared, huge crowds fought to get near him. Intensely uncomfortable with the adulation, Lindbergh sought to use his fame to increase public interest in commercial aviation. Instead of accepting the millions of dollars he was offered to endorse products or appear in movies, he became a technical adviser to two start-up airlines—Pan American Airways and TAT, which eventually became Transcontinental and Western Air and ultimately Trans World Airlines (TWA). Working with both to help establish passenger service, he flew all over the country and later the world, surveying possible air routes, testing planes, and playing a key role in creating the first modern airports.

Try as he might, however, this intensely reserved, solitary man was unable to reclaim his privacy and restore equilibrium to his life. His engaging modesty, coupled with his refusal to capitalize financially on his celebrity, only whetted his countrymen’s appetite for more information about him. “In his flight, and even more in his fame, he proved that personal heroism, decency, and dignity were yet possible in the world,” wrote Kenneth S. Davis, a Lindbergh biographer. Americans were in no mood to leave such a paragon alone, and neither was the press.

Wherever he went, he was besieged. Strangers came up to him to shake his hand or pat him on the back, women tried to kiss him, crowds gathered in hotel lobbies and outside restaurants, waiting for him to appear. At a picnic he attended with members of his National Guard unit in St. Louis, he watched with disgust as several young women crept under a restraining rope to grab corncobs he had just chewed on.

The furor only increased when, in May 1929, he married Anne Morrow, the shy, pretty twenty-two-year-old daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. The Lindberghs were stalked everywhere by the public and press, even on their boating honeymoon off the coast of Maine, where they were followed by motor launches filled with reporters and photographers. “Like criminals or illicit lovers, we avoided being seen in the world together,” Anne Lindbergh later wrote, “and had to forgo the everyday pleasures of walking along streets, shopping, sightseeing, eating out at restaurants.”

A loner all his life, Lindbergh was singularly unprepared for all this. The only child of a small-town Minnesota lawyer and his schoolteacher wife, he had lived an isolated, rootless existence since early childhood. When he was four, his father, a stern man with a strong populist bent, was elected to Congress, and for the next ten years, Charles shuttled back and forth between Washington and the family farm near Little Falls, Minnesota.

His parents had an extremely unhappy marriage, punctuated by violent quarrels, and Charles responded by rigidly controlling his emotions and withdrawing into his own solitary world. In school, he had virtually no friends, took part in no sports or extracurricular activities, was silent in class, and did not date. After his flight to Paris, his high school classmates, when questioned by reporters, had few if any memories of him.

As an acquaintance of Lindbergh’s later put it, his historic achievement and its aftermath plunged him “into waters that he did not understand and could not navigate.” He adamantly resisted the idea that he and his wife were public property. While he readily answered queries from reporters about his flights and aviation in general, he curtly turned aside any questions about his personal life and refused to sign autographs or pose for photos. His recalcitrance only fanned the publicity flames. “Because he kept a distance,” Time noted, “the public became more hysterical.”

As a result, the Lindberghs lived under constant siege at their secluded home, set in several acres of woods near Hopewell, New Jersey. Tabloid reporters went through the Lindberghs’ garbage, pilfered their mail, and offered bribes to their servants for tidbits about their private lives. One journalist even applied for a servant’s job with the couple, presenting them with forged references.

Then, on the evening of March 1, 1932, harassment gave way to tragedy: the Lindberghs’ twenty-month-old son, Charles Jr.—known as Charlie—was kidnapped from his nursery while his parents were having dinner downstairs. Two months later, the toddler’s body was found in the woods near the Lindberghs’ home. H. L. Mencken called the kidnapping the biggest story “since the Resurrection,” and the extraordinary media frenzy that followed seemed to prove his point.

The grieving Lindberghs were convinced that the excesses of the press were responsible for their son’s abduction and murder. “If it were not for the publicity that surrounds us, we might still have him,” Anne bitterly wrote in her diary. Even before the tragedy, Lindbergh had come to hate the mass-circulation newspapers, viewing them as “a personification of malice, which deliberately urged on the crazy mob.” That conviction was only strengthened when two news photographers broke into the morgue where his son’s body lay, opened the casket, and took pictures of Charlie’s remains.

The media circus surrounding the kidnapping continued for another four years, with millions of words and photos devoted to the lengthy investigation of the crime, the arrest, trial, and conviction of a German-born carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Hauptmann’s eventual execution in April 1936. For much of that period, the Lindberghs took refuge at the Englewood, New Jersey, estate of Anne’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Morrow.

Five months after Charlie’s death, the couple’s second son, Jon, was born. When Hauptmann was convicted, the Lindberghs received so many letters threatening Jon’s life that armed guards were hired to keep a twenty-four-hour watch outside the Morrow home. Several intruders, including an escaped mental patient, were caught approaching the house at various times.

A few months after the Hauptmann trial, three-year-old Jon, accompanied by a teacher, was on his way home from preschool when the car in which he was riding was forced off the road by another vehicle. Several men holding press cameras jumped out of it and ran toward the car containing Jon, taking flash photos of the terrified little boy as they came near.

After this latest press outrage, Charles Lindbergh decided that he and his family had no alternative but to leave America. “Between the . . . tabloid press and the criminal, a condition exists which is intolerable for us,” he wrote his mother. A few days before his departure, Lindbergh told a close friend that “we Americans are a primitive people. We do not have discipline. Our moral standards are low. . . . It shows in the newspapers, the morbid curiosity over crimes and murder trials. Americans seem to have little respect for law, or the rights of others.” It was not the first time—or the last—that he would equate his personal situation with the current state of American democracy.

The murder of his son, along with the disgraceful behavior of the media, left Lindbergh with a psychological wound that would never heal. Reeve Lindbergh, who was born thirteen years after the death of her eldest brother, recalled that her father never talked about him. The pain, she believed, was too overwhelming. “I can imagine how much this baby must have meant to my father, who had been raised as an only child . . . this Charles, this namesake,” she wrote. “I know that the loss was immeasurable and unspeakable.”

One day, after piloting a small plane through a violent thunderstorm, Lindbergh turned with a smile to his shaken wife, who had been in the plane with him, and said: “You should have faith in me.” Then the smile faded. “I have faith in you,” he said. “I just don’t have any more faith in life.”

Shortly before midnight on December 21, 1935, the Lindberghs were driven to a deserted dock in Manhattan and spirited aboard an American freighter bound for England. Before leaving, Lindbergh gave an interview to a reporter for The New York Times, one of the few news outlets he still respected. The day after the Lindberghs’ departure, the Times, in a story that took up much of the front page, described for its readers how “the man who eight years ago was hailed as an international hero . . . is taking his wife and son to establish, if he can, a secure haven for them in a foreign land.”

In the English countryside, the Lindberghs did indeed find the privacy they craved. For slightly more than two years, they rented Long Barn, a rambling old half-timbered house in Kent owned by Harold Nicolson—a member of Parliament, ex-diplomat, and author, who had written a biography of Anne’s father, Dwight Morrow—and Nicolson’s wife, the novelist Vita Sackville-West. During that time, the Lindberghs’ third son, Land, was born.

In her diary, Anne observed that the years spent at Long Barn were among the happiest of her life. For the most part, the English press and public left the Lindberghs alone. Jon could play in Long Barn’s extensive terraced gardens and roam the meadows beyond without an armed guard shadowing him. Anne and Charles, meanwhile, could take a drive through the countryside with “a wonderful feeling of freedom, [knowing] that we can stop anywhere, that we will not be followed or noticed.”

In the summer of 1938, the Lindberghs moved from Long Barn to an old stone manor house on the tiny, windswept island of Illiec, off the coast of Brittany. “I have never seen a place where I wanted to live so much,” Lindbergh confided to his journal. Considerably more isolated than Kent, Illiec proved to be another refuge for him and his wife.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Illustrated edition (January 14, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812982142
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812982145
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.22 x 1.25 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #443,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,275 in WWII Biographies
- #2,555 in Political Leader Biographies
- #3,628 in World War II History (Books)

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Lynne Olson

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Lynne Olson is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books of history. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has called her “our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”

Lynne’s latest book, Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples From Destruction, will be published by Random House in February 2023. Her earlier books include three New York Times bestsellers: Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against the Nazis; Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, and Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour.

Born in Hawaii, Lynne graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a journalist for ten years, first with the Associated Press as a national feature writer in New York, a foreign correspondent in AP’s Moscow bureau, and a political reporter in Washington. She left the AP to join the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun, where she covered national politics and eventually the White House.

Lynne lives in Washington, DC with her husband, Stanley Cloud, with whom she co-authored two books. Visit Lynne Olson at http://lynneolson.com.

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Anonymous One

Very well put together book about a history making national debate in the U.S.

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2016

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This book deals with the full throated debate that involved the nation prior to its’ entrance into World War II. It deals with a little known group named America First that existed prior to the Second World War. America First, is a term which has only recently become known again in politics as a slogan for the Trump Campaign. However, avid historians, both amateur and professional are familiar with the slogan’s initial iteration in the 1930’s as the name of that group, which started out as an isolationist group that initially, was all about keeping America or the U.S. out of World War II. At its’ center are two towering figures of the 1930’s, Charles Lindberg, the Lone Eagle – the first man who crossed the Atlantic ocean in an airplane, and FDR, president of the United States. Charles Lindberg was on one side, that of the isolationists, which was a strain of politics, beliefs, nativism and inward looking, that has always existed in this country to varying degrees and fervor, and FDR was on the other side which could only be called the internationalist wing of politics, looking, testing the winds of public opinion, and trying to find a way to bring the country to the aid of the embattled anti-Fascist European countries. The arguments over whether to enter the war was surrounded by controversy and the arguments separated families, newspapers, towns, and colleges all throughout America. It even separated the political parties into various factions. They in turn were surrounded by a vivid cast of characters that seems to include everyone who was anyone at the time, and quite a few people who would later in the century go on to become someone.
This includes Father Coughlin and the anti-Semitic people who followed him and listened to his radio program. These people would later become big followers of the America First groups through its’ local chapters, turning it from a simple isolationist group that advocated staying out of WWII into a group which became more known for its’ anti-Semitic rhetoric and the brawls that occurred outside of isolationist rallies. In addition to Charles Lindberg, his wife Anne Morrow Lindberg, her family who were ardent internationalists also appear. Her father had been ambassador to Mexico and her sister was married to an Englishman whose friends included many people who hoped to bring in the U.S. into WWII, on the side of the British. The author of the children’s classic, The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a pilot for the Free French also makes an appearance shortly before his disappearance as does Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Air Force Chief of Staff, Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, Colonel Truman Smith, an anti-Roosevelt critic, who was also an active duty military officer and the top army analyst in Germany for Marshall, and Alfred Wedemeyer, who would rise to become deputy Army Chief of Staff , and the man who created the Victory program of planning for the amount of arms, men, and materiel such as guns, bullets, blankets and food that would be needed to invade Europe. Wedemeyer had attended the prestigious German Staff College, the Kriegsacademie, but he was also an ardent isolationist. Many people who were also ardent interventionists, such as Grenville Clark make an appearance. Clark, a Manhattan attorney, architect of the draft and was a member of the Century Group, a group that was intended to counter balance the America First Group also make an appearance which was full of many people who were then influential, including many newspaper publishers.
Many people who would later become famous also make an appearance, such as Sargent Shriver, who would go on to head the brand new Peace Corps under John F. Kennedy- he later quipped that they thought the Peace Corps would be a failure and didn’t want the bad reputation, and Kingman Brewer who would go on to become the president of Yale and later on ambassador to the Court of Saint James, (Ambassador to the United Kingdom). They had been fervent members of the America First Chapters at their respective colleges. Even appearing are some early feminists such as Helen Reid, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and Time and Life Magazine publisher Henry Luce.
Also making an appearance are a class of people who were some of the biggest movers and shakers of the time, and as a result were very famous then, but are now largely ignored- newspaper publishers. In a time, before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Friendster, Myspace or any other sort of social media, where the media was only radio and newspapers and not social, newspaper publishers had outsized influence on the political life of the country, in a way that would seem strange now. Imagine a time when Kim Kardashian having a column in the daily living pages and people looking to her for advice about whether or not to go to war. Their opinion columns and who they backed for president and what they thought should be done in foreign policy carried far more weight than they do today for reasons which are understandable once you stop and look at them. Today, we have a veritable smorgasbord of cable TV channels, online websites and AM and FM radio.
In the late 1930s media was largely limited to newspapers, and a weekly photography magazine, called LIFE. This combined with the then new media of radio were it where media was concerned.. Hence the appearance of newspaper publishers in Chicago(the Chicago Daily Tribune and the Chicago Daily News), Kentucky (The Louisville Courier Journal), New York ( Daily News, New Yorker, Evening World, Herald Tribune, New York Post, the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and the New York World), Michigan (the Dearborn Independent), the Army and Navy Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs, the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, even the Harvard Crimson, and the appearance of the publisher of LIFE magazine.
People who are also familiar with U.S. politics will also spot familiar figures such as Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee for the 1940 election and long-time Congressman Claude Pepper to name just a few. However also making an appearance because she was a big backer of him and was instrumental in his entering the race is Wilkie’s mistress. His wife, also makes an appearance but only because she is not on the campaign trail, but back at home. In fact, Wilkie’s mistress campaigned with him, a fact that would make modern day politicians green with envy. The chief thing to note is that no newspaper reporter bothered to point out that the woman who was campaigning with Wilkie was his mistress and not his wife. Newspaper reporters had long known about Wilkie’s relationship, but had left it out of their newspapers- another thing which would make modern day politicians green with envy. In short, everyone who was anyone appears in this book.

All of this narration is brought together by the skillful use of the newspaper articles from around the entire country and books of the time because so much of the politics was local American politics, and writers at the time were frequently in the forefront of this momentous debate. The end result is a unique slice of life about a time in this country’s history that has disappeared, a lengthy debate about a momentous decision the country was about to make, shortly before this country stepped onto the international stage. In less skillful hands, this sort of storytelling could and would have become very boring or become overwhelming.

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George Seeley

Comparing apples to oranges and a good deal else

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2020

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One of the comments on the book’s initial inside page states that the book is “deeply researched” and “scrupulously even-handed”.

I agree with the first. But, in saying this I think that the author might well have researched too much. As I will explain, there are too many chapters that lead the reader down side streets, and that have little or nothing to do with Roosevelt or Lindbergh, the projected main characters in the book. And, as far as being “scrupulously even-handed” the book comes up short here, also. There are more than double the amount of pages devoted to FDR’s activities, as well there might be in that he was President during these fateful years, and yet his own character is not really explored to the fullest. The author constantly reminds us that he was the consummate politician and did not want to get out in front of American public opinion in his commitments to England and the war in Europe. But, there was so much more about him that might have broken some new ground here. Nor was there any mention of his family or his personal life. Inexplicably, Eleanor was not even mentioned in the book.

On the other hand, the book never appeared to be “scrupulously even-handed” Sure, the author was critical of both Roosevelt and Lindbergh, but simply never in the same way. Although far less of the book’s 461 pages was devoted to Lindbergh, I felt I learned much more about him. It is true that some of this is because I knew much less about him prior to reading the book. Yet, I also felt that I was given a much deeper insight into why Lindbergh acted as he did. There seemed to be more to learn and understand here.
He became a much more interesting personality.

And, then another compelling difference for me was the number of pages the author devoted to his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She became the third leading character in the book and her story was at times quite poignant. I learned that she came from a wealthy family, was highly educated and became a leading author in her day. Left on her own with the children much of the time, she paid the price of her husband’s fame too much and yet did not have any real input into either his activities or his political views, many of which seemed inadvisably controversial. There was also occasional attention paid to her close relation with her mother and sister, several of her children, and, of course, the kidnaping and murder of their first son, Charles. Remember that in comparison, there was absolutely nothing about Eleanor Roosevelt or any other member of their family. Her name isn’t even listed in the book’s index. It really seems that, under the circumstances, it somehow and in some way should have been Put in a different way, the pages on FDR read more like a history text; those on Lindbergh a compellingly personal biography.

As I said initially, a second critique of the book is that I often felt that the author’s effort suffered too much from too much research. Pre-World War Two America was a controversial time and there were certainly many different participants in the national dialogue, but if an important central theme was to be the different opinions of FDR and Lindbergh, too many side roads were ventured down. On the one hand, I was interested to read about 1940 Republican Presidential nominee, Wendell Wilkie, and come to understand the important role he played , not only as a “dark horse’ Republican presidential nominee in 1940, but otherwise for his signal contributions during both the war & the immediate post-war years. Of equal interest was Phillip Kerr, or Lord Lothian, as he was known in both America and England, the British ambassador to the United States in the years both immediately prior to our entry into the war. The appointment of an English ambassador that was well liked in America was seldom, if ever, normal. News of his untimely death in 1940 was sadly received on both sides of the ocean.

But, there were often too many other stories that crowded the pages. The coverage of other pre-war opponents, even more directly involved in the national dialogue than Lindbergh, often seemed endless.. More than considerable coverage was given to the activities of anti-war organization like America First and pro-war advocates like the Century Group. There was frequent mention of disagreements between members of Congress and the military, the disparity of editorial opinion in the nation’s leading newspapers and even an entire chapter devoted to spying activities by both America, Britain & Germany both prior to and after our entry into the war. Getting back to reading about FDR and especially Lindbergh and his family was most often a welcome change.

In fairness, the subtitle on the book’s cover reads “Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War Two.” There was much to learn here, for certain. But, any suggestion that this was to be a book so primarily about the conflict between FDR and Lindbergh, as the inclusion of their two pictures on the cover appears to project, is not fully accurate, and in fact, a fair bit misleading.

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KN.

Excellent Pinpointed Focus

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2022

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Very good read and well written. It really gives you and idea of what Roosevelt was up against from the loud roar of the American people. I had not known how powerful Lindbergh had become in politics, but, he also did exonerate himself a bit at the end of the story. The book moves at a good pace, it’s long but worth reading. You’ll be able to have a different kind of conversation about Roosevelt, Lindbergh, Hitler and many other things around the time of WWll. It will increase your knowledge and will give you a better view and added dimension to what went on in American before we entered the war.

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Gazzarian

FDR reappraised

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2018

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Lynne Olson has one key message in this immensely readable, well researched and totally credible recounting of a slice of history that's more important than we might have thought. Which is that FDR's pusillanimous inability to exercise leadership, and his tendency to follow rather than shape public opinion, led to confusion and delay in deploying the might of the US to save the free world. Lindbergh, America First and all that are in there as well but they become increasingly peripheral as, especially in the second half of the book, she lacerates FDR, page after page. The brutality of the 1940 election clearly loosened Roosevelt's hand on the wheel of the American juggernaut (it's easy to think that the author believes a Wilkie victory would have been better for the world) but, beyond that, the book is a frightening demonstration of how inchoate the exercise of power can be. As if we needed reminding....

4 people found this helpful

Edward B. Crutchley

The heroics it took to turn American opinion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2013

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This is a thrilling story and a memorable book, even when knowing the outcome beforehand. It interestingly shows quite a few parallels with today and raises many questions about the democratic process. America believed it had been duped into joining WW1 and, despite the efforts of the likes of William Shirer and Ed Murrow, was not about to put as much trust in perfidious Albion again (anyway, its army then was no bigger than Britain's today). There was, justifiably so, the pathological fear of giving the President too much power, an incumbent refusing to take the initiative when he needed to and would certainly have won, and all too often bling followed by inertia. Obstructive Republicans, bar some notable exceptions, took positions quite contrary to what the Gallup polls were showing. Influence peddling was rife; opinion swaying was in the hands of the elite plus a few secretly implanted Brits; an East Coast clique showed its profound differences with the rest of the country; Hollywood was fearful that its Eastern European connections would be perceived as sources of propaganda and stir up anti-Semitic fervour. The book explores in detail the huge effort and heroics it took to turn American opinion, the battles required merely to supply a bunch of rusted WW1 destroyers to keep the Atlantic lanes open in 1940 and then for Lend-Lease. Increasingly, those who were not on board, including Lindbergh, were written off as pro-Nazi. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) invented McCarthyism before the man himself. Even the ACLU banned extremist politics in its ranks. Gradually things started to move, America occupied Iceland in a move that justified the protection of Britain-bound convoys to that point. But in grim reality it took Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war after it before things really got going in order to save Europe. Highly recommended.

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TH UK

What a book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2018

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This book has caused me to fundamentally rethink my understanding of the UK and USA relationship. Special? I think not. I never considered that us Brits were perhaps so unpopular to people in the USA. Quite a long read but very worthwhile. Thank you L. Olson

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Dr. Ian Oliver

What we should know about our History

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2013

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This is an excellent, detailed and well reseached account of America's widespread reluctance to come to the aid of Britain when it was on the verge of defeat and its unwillingness to become involved in another war which many thought was none of their business.

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R.B.Backhouse

America Makes World History

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2013

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A very well researched and fascinating account of one of the most important periods in world history. Without the efforts of a limited number of very patriotic Americans with a realisation of America's destiny, how different the modern world might have been. Leaves one with a strong sense of doubt as to whether Roosevelt should have been reelected for a third term. Lindbergh was not the hero that he was made out to be. The Spirit of St Louis was not the icon that it should have been. Lindbergh had feet of clay.

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Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 Paperback – Illustrated, January 14, 2014

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Buy new:

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