Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Author: Conrad Black
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 1329
Release: 2012-03-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1610392132

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands astride American history like a colossus, having pulled the nation out of the Great Depression and led it to victory in the Second World War. Elected to four terms as president, he transformed an inward-looking country into the greatest superpower the world had ever known. Only Abraham Lincoln did more to save America from destruction. But FDR is such a large figure that historians tend to take him as part of the landscape, focusing on smaller aspects of his achievements or carping about where he ought to have done things differently. Few have tried to assess the totality of FDR's life and career. Conrad Black rises to the challenge. In this magisterial biography, Black makes the case that FDR was the most important person of the twentieth century, transforming his nation and the world through his unparalleled skill as a domestic politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary -- all of which he accomplished despite a physical infirmity that could easily have ended his public life at age thirty-nine. Black also takes on the great critics of FDR, especially those who accuse him of betraying the West at Yalta. Black opens a new chapter in our understanding of this great man, whose example is even more inspiring as a new generation embarks on its own rendezvous with destiny.

The Myth of Judicial Activism

The Myth of Judicial Activism
Author: Kermit Roosevelt
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0300129564

Constitutional scholar Kermit Roosevelt uses plain language and compelling examples to explain how the Constitution can be both a constant and an organic document, and takes a balanced look at controversial decisions through a compelling new lens of constitutional interpretation.

The FDR Years

The FDR Years
Author: William Edward Leuchtenburg
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780231082990

A renowned historian recounts how President Roosevelt inspired the country and changed forever the political, social, economic, and even the physical landscape of the United States--Cover.

Rendezvous with Destiny

Rendezvous with Destiny
Author: Michael Fullilove
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2013-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101617829

The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.

His Final Battle

His Final Battle
Author: Joseph Lelyveld
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 034580659X

A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg In March 1944, as World War II raged and America’s next presidential election loomed, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Driven by a belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end, Roosevelt concealed his failing health and sought a fourth term—a term that he knew he might not live to complete. With unparalleled insight and deep compassion, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joseph Lelyveld delves into Roosevelt’s thoughts, preoccupations, and motives during his last sixteen months, which saw the highly secretive Manhattan Project, the roar of D-Day, the landmark Yalta Conference and FDR’s hopes for a new world order—all as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax. His Final Battle delivers an extraordinary portrait of this famously inscrutable man, who was full of contradictions but a consummate leader to the very last.

The Roosevelt Presence

The Roosevelt Presence
Author: Patrick J. Maney
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1998-09-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780520216372

Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only 20th-century president consistently ranked by historians with the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln. His leadership in the dark hours of the Depression and the Second World War has endowed him in the eyes of many with an aura of greatness. This book reexamines Roosevelt's life and legacy--for good and for ill. 16 illustrations.

New Deal Or Raw Deal?

New Deal Or Raw Deal?
Author: Burton W. Folsom
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009-11-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1416592377

ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America so desperately needed from the Great Depression. Folsom takes a critical, revisionist look at Roosevelt's presidency, his economic policies, and his personal life. Elected in 1932 on a buoyant tide of promises to balance the increasingly uncontrollable national budget and reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate, the charismatic thirty-second president not only neglected to pursue those goals, he made dramatic changes to federal programming that directly contradicted his campaign promises. Price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism were all hidden inside the alphabet soup of his popular New Deal, putting a financial strain on the already suffering lower classes and discouraging the upper classes from taking business risks that potentially could have jostled national cash flow from dormancy.

The Roosevelt Myth

The Roosevelt Myth
Author: John Thomas Flynn
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1956
Genre: United States
ISBN: 161016346X

The Sailor

The Sailor
Author: David F. Schmitz
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813180457

In The Sailor, David F. Schmitz presents a comprehensive reassessment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's foreign policymaking. Most historians have cast FDR as a leader who resisted an established international strategy and who was forced to react quickly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, launching the nation into World War II. Drawing on a wealth of primary documents as well as the latest secondary sources, Schmitz challenges this view, demonstrating that Roosevelt was both consistent and calculating in guiding the direction of American foreign policy throughout his presidency. Schmitz illuminates how the policies FDR pursued in response to the crises of the 1930s transformed Americans' thinking about their place in the world. He shows how the president developed an interlocking set of ideas that prompted a debate between isolationism and preparedness, guided the United States into World War II, and mobilized support for the war while establishing a sense of responsibility for the postwar world. The critical moment came in the period between Roosevelt's reelection in 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attack, when he set out his view of the US as the arsenal of democracy, proclaimed his war goals centered on protection of the four freedoms, secured passage of the Lend-Lease Act, and announced the principles of the Atlantic Charter. This long-overdue book presents a definitive new perspective on Roosevelt's diplomacy and the emergence of the United States as a world power. Schmitz's work offers an important correction to existing studies and establishes FDR as arguably the most significant and successful foreign policymaker in the nation's history.

Cowboy Presidents

Cowboy Presidents
Author: David A. Smith
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0806169699

For an element so firmly fixed in American culture, the frontier myth is surprisingly flexible. How else to explain its having taken two such different guises in the twentieth century—the progressive, forward-looking politics of Rough Rider president Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative, old-fashioned character and Cold War politics of Ronald Reagan? This is the conundrum at the heart of Cowboy Presidents, which explores the deployment and consequent transformation of the frontier myth by four U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Behind the shape-shifting of this myth, historian David A. Smith finds major events in American and world history that have made various aspects of the “Old West” frontier more relevant, and more useful, for promoting radically different political ideologies and agendas. And these divergent adaptations of frontier symbolism have altered the frontier myth. Theodore Roosevelt, with his vigorous pursuit of an activist federal government, helped establish a version of the frontier myth that today would be considered liberal. But then, Smith shows, a series of events from the Lyndon Johnson through Jimmy Carter presidencies—including Vietnam, race riots, and stagflation—seemed to give the lie to the progressive frontier myth. In the wake of these crises, Smith’s analysis reveals, the entire structure and popular representation of frontier symbols and images in American politics shifted dramatically from left to right, and from liberal to conservative, with profound implications for the history of American thought and presidential politics. The now popular idea that “frontier American” leaders and politicians are naturally Republicans with conservative ideals flows directly from the Reagan era. Cowboy Presidents gives us a new, clarifying perspective on how Americans shape and understand their national identity and sense of purpose; at the same time, reflecting on the essential mutability of a quintessentially national myth, the book suggests that the next iteration of the frontier myth may well be on the horizon.