A chronicle of the US and its leaders during the period when modern America was created. It narrates the interrelationships between the inner workings of the Roosevelt White House and the destiny of the US, painting a portrait that fills in a historical gap in the story of America under Roosevelt.
I’ve always loved history, especially U.S. history, and, as a White House official for President Clinton, I saw it made up close. As a historian, I have focused in particular on America’s role in the world ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when I came to recognize that President Kennedy was right: “Domestic policy can hurt you, but foreign policy can kill you.” Over the last quarter-century, I’ve concentrated my work on America’s efforts to lead the West and promote freedom around the world. I read voraciously, write a column on foreign policy for leading outlets, and discuss global affairs often on TV and radio.
I love this book, which is warm and beautifully written, because it tells the story of the most vital and consequential political partnership of the last century. Roosevelt and Churchill, both heroes of mine, saved freedom by steering the Allies to victory in World War II over the mighty, ravenous, bloodthirsty, and seemingly invincible Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
This book brings Roosevelt and Churchill to life, showcasing their astounding brilliance and strength, along with their very human pettiness, impatience, and skullduggery, as they work in close concert with one another, press one another, and, when necessary, even work around one another. It’s a marvelous story and a gripping read.
The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in…
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
Robert Klara provides so much detail and insight that it’s like he was on Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral train, crouched down in the seat behind the new president, Harry S. Truman!
I was super impressed by Klara’s research and ability to capture the conversations and historical nuances of one of the most important train rides of the twentieth century.
In April 1945, the funeral train carrying the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt embarked on a three-day, thousand-mile odyssey through nine states before reaching the president's home where he was buried. Many who would recall the journey later would agree it was a foolhardy idea to start with - putting every important elected figure in Washington on a single train during the biggest war in history. For the American people, of course, the funeral train was just that - the train bearing the body of deceased FDR. It passed with darkened windows; few gave thought to what might be happening…
I consider FDR the greatest of all presidents for leading America with distinction in the domestic crisis of the Great Depression and the foreign crisis of World War 2 and creating the modern presidency that survives today in the essential form he established. I have written books on Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan during fifty years as a US history professor in UK universities. I always intended to write a book about how FDR reinvented the presidency that these Republicans inherited, something I finally did in ‘retirement’. My five chosen books explain the challenging times he faced and the leadership skills he displayed in meeting them.
This remarkable volume offers a selection from the millions of letters that ordinary men and women sent FDR in response to his radio Fireside Chats. Roosevelt used these talks to explain his policies to the American people, many of whom wrote him in return (for the cost of a 3-cent postage stamp) to communicate their thoughts about his presidency and the state of the nation during the depression and war years. Their letters reveal the multiple images that Americans had of FDR: friend, neighbor, trusted leader, protector—or, far less often, violator of the Constitution, enemy of sound economics, warmonger. They provide a timely reminder for our own times of the presidency’s capacity for civic education and the importance of dialogue between leaders and citizens.
America's Conversation with FDR For readers of The Greatest Generation, an extraordinary window on the '30s and '40s By the time FDR took his oath of office on March 4, 1933, Americans had been in the depths of the Great Depression for four years. One week later, the President gave the first of what would be thirty-one Fireside Chats.
MacArthur Award-winning historian Lawrence W. Levine and independent scholar Cornelia Levine have combed through the millions of letters that flooded the White House in response to the Chats. Grateful, infuriated, proud, scolding, the letters, collected here and combined with the Levines'…
I have been intrigued by Eleanor Roosevelt since I was a little girl in Sedalia, Missouri, and my mother read me Eleanor's "My Day" columns in the Kansas City Star. Mother would look up and say, "I'm sure she is better than he is," referring, of course, to Eleanor being better than Franklin. My family was rock-ribbed Republican and disapproved of Franklin's policies. I wondered then—and still do—why my mother and other women of her era had so much reverence for Eleanor. I have been looking for the answer ever since.
Endeavors to tell in one volume the story of an American icon, integrating her personal and public lives. This work offers an introduction to her many public roles—as a journalist, First Lady from 1933-1945, delegate to the United Nations (1945-1952), political leader, media personality—as well as her multifaceted personal life.
The New York Times bestseller from prizewinning author David Michaelis presents a “stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.
In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin…
Ever since I was a child, the rumors surrounding my grandfather’s mysterious birth and upbringing have fascinated me! Left at a police station on Christmas Eve, 1923, he grew up in a New York orphanage. When he was of age, the nuns handed him a large sum of money and told him his father was FDR and his mother was a servant of the Roosevelt’s. Was it true? Was it fiction? My family has spent collective decades combing through papers in search of answers. I finally decided to take the pieces of the story we knew and knit them together with fiction to create my first novel, A Roosevelt Smile.
Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor's third-born, must have read his older brother's book and thought, "That’s not all!"
Always sensitive to his surroundings, Elliott knew things were not right between his parents. He felt the turbulence of Eleanor's "Griselda" moods, recounting an incident that drove her to fire all of their servants after mounting distrust. Where older brother James would write of catching fish with their father on a boat trip, Elliott divulged the sting of witnessing Missy LeHand on his father's lap during that same trip. Elliott also mentioned household staff members including Frances and Millie, who come to the forefront in my own novel.
Personalities of the man who became the thirty-second President of the United States an d the woman who, after his death, earned her place as the First Lady of the Western world.
I have been shocked in recent years by the bitter partisanship in America, and by how our politics have turned into a sort of sports grudge match – my team versus yours, no matter what – with very little interest in seeking the truth or working for the national good. So when I discovered a number of years ago that Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt built an alliance with Republicans that led the country to victory in World War II, I immediately set out to understand how such an extraordinary bipartisan alliance could take place – and whether America might do such a thing again. Uniting Americaprovides an answer.
Bill Donovan, recognized as a hero for rescuing his fellow soldiers at the front in World War I, was a rising star in the Republican Party, becoming assistant attorney general under Republican President Calvin Coolidge.
But in mid-1941, when many Republicans were condemning President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a warmonger, Donovan broke with them and supported FDR, urging him to create an intelligence agency to prepare the United States for a war against fascism.
In his insightful Wild Bill Donovan, Douglas Waller recounts Donovan’s bold decision to ally himself with FDR, rejecting partisan politics and instead prioritizing the defense of American democracy. FDR eventually named Donovan director of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime spy agency that was a forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency.
“Entertaining history…Donovan was a combination of bold innovator and imprudent rule bender, which made him not only a remarkable wartime leader but also an extraordinary figure in American history” (The New York Times Book Review).
He was one of America’s most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, “Wild Bill” Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country’s first national intelligence agency) and the father of today’s CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on…
While a graduate student and then an army interpreter in Germany, I listened to reminiscences from both Third Reich military veterans and former French resistance fighters. Their tales picked up where my father's stories of pre-war European life always ended, and my fascination with this history knew no bounds. On occasion I would conceal my American identity and mentally play the spy as I traversed Europe solo.A dozen years later upon the death of my father, I learned from my mother his great secret: he had concealed his wartime life as an American spy inside the Reich. His private journals telling of bravery and intrigue inspire each of my novels.
If you love reading the history of World War II espionage, Persico brings to life behind-the-scenes maneuvers that took America from an unwieldy group of intelligence-gathering organizations to the formidable Office of Strategic Services under Wild Bill Donovan.While examining all theaters of World War II rather than just the Third Reich, the author provides excellent insights into the specific challenges encountered in Hitler's realm. I particularly enjoyed learning how Roosevelt balanced the information coming from many sources and integrated that knowledge into an intelligent plan of action.
Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations.
Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations: -FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor -A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office -Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia -Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret -An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with…
Following my PhD at King’s College, Cambridge I was invited by the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London to serve as an Honorary Research Fellow. This enabled me to focus fully on 15 years of research into previously untapped archives and interviews with more than twenty-five politicians and jurists active in the process of the African human rights charter. By coincidence, thirty-five years or so ago, in an earlier incarnation, I was also responsible for editing the first public debt prospectus for the African Development Bank in Abidjan.
The author’s perspective on human rights and the process would not be something I would endorse, but it is, nonetheless, to date, the best book on the details of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it wound its way through the United Nations.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999
Born of a shared revulsion against the horrors of the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has become the single most important statement of international ethics. It was inspired by and reflects the full scope of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous four freedoms: "the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear." Written by a UN commission led by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted in 1948, the Declaration has become the moral backbone of more than two hundred human rights…
Moshik Temkin is a historian of the United States and the World and has taught about leadership and history at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Harvard University in Massachusetts, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and other institutions around the world. He is the author ofThe Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trialand is writing a book on leadership in history for PublicAffairscalled Warriors, Rebels, and Saints: On Leaders and Leadership in History.
This groundbreaking and wonderfully written study of two “protest” leaders during the Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States shows us what happens when truly hard times hit ordinary people, and what sort of leaders they then turn to. Brinkley brilliantly chronicles the rise of Louisiana politician Huey Long, the “Kingfish”, from obscurity in the poor Jim Crow south to becoming, by the time he was assassinated in 1935, the most significant political threat to the popular President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Long’s calls for wealth redistribution, contempt for traditional elites, and disregard for democratic institutions, make him an important historical example of so-called populist leadership, and of the power and appeal of populism in times of crisis.
The study of two great demagogues in American history--Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clay, piney-woods country of nothern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. Award-winning historian Alan Brinkely describes their modest origins and their parallel rise together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era.
