In the crucial days following the D-Day invasion (June 6, 1944) Churchill berated the president for promoting a wrongheaded military strategy. get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign.”īy tapping into the vast correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, Dallek discerns a more strained relationship between the leaders than presupposed. “Now, what I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign,” Roosevelt said of his scheme, “and that is something brand new. Billions of dollars worth of war materiel made its way across the Atlantic.
foreign aid to Britain, Roosevelt constructed an elaborate Lend-Lease deal, a political masterpiece that ended any pretense of neutrality. Constrained by Congress from appropriating U.S. With what Labor Secretary Frances Perkins called a “flash of almost clairvoyant knowledge,” Roosevelt determined that what Britain needed, pure and simple, was massive financial assistance to outlast Germany. intervention in World War II became increasingly desperate. Starting in 1940, Churchill’s plea for U.S. I found Dallek’s spirited examination of how Roosevelt interacted with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1945 the most enthralling part of this biography. Concerning the latter, Dallek offers that President Trump’s proposal to “round up” American Muslims in 2016 invoked the “injustice visited on Americans of Japanese descent decades ago and Roosevelt’s expediency in the matter.” Truly reprehensible to Dallek was Roosevelt’s horrific mistake of opening Japanese American internment camps in Western states after Pearl Harbor. While thoroughly admiring of Roosevelt’s savvy World War II commander in chief decisions such as in French Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch), Sicily (Operation Husky), and Italy (Operation Avalanche), Dallek doesn’t flinch from tackling low-water marks such as his lackluster assistance to European Jews being mass slaughtered by Adolf Hitler. The anchor of this book, however, is the White House years. A master synthesizer of primary sources, Dallek, who previously won the Bancroft Prize, brilliantly deliberates on Roosevelt’s Hudson Valley childhood, tenure as assistant secretary of the Navy (1913-1920) and years as a progressive New York governor (1929-1932). But none are as heroically objective and wide-angled as this fine Dallek effort. Roosevelt,” by Robert Dallek (Viking)Īdequate single-volume biographies about FDR abound. “The truth is that Roosevelt had no more idea of how he would restore the country’s prosperity,” Dallek writes about 1933, “than Abraham Lincoln had in trying to persuade the rebellious southern states to remain in the Union.” Roosevelt’s guiding ethos was giant steps aimed at humanizing the U.S. The early New Deal was like a county fair where grand policy ideas were hurled against the national barn to see what stuck. His ballyhooed Hundred Days programs - including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which put unemployed men to work planting trees the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams to create cheap hydroelectricity in the South and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which raised crop prices to help farmers - were off-the-charts experimental. Historian Robert Dallek tells this Farley story at the outset of “Franklin Roosevelt: A Political Life,” his meticulously researched and authoritative biography of our 32nd president, to remind readers that FDR constantly governed on whims, hunches and hail-Mary passes. Sure enough, in the opening line of his famous “Nothing to Fear” inaugural speech, Roosevelt designed March 4 as a “day of national consecration.” And, true to form, throughout his four-term presidency (1933-1945), he delivered radio prayers to God with drumbeat regularity. That Roosevelt’s nostrums were anchored around Providence shocked Farley he didn’t know that the president-elect, a nominal Episcopalian, was very religious. Roosevelt grimly confessed to Farley that no New Deal economic plan would save the cash-strapped nation, only a wellspring of faith in the Almighty God. Pondering all of these Great Depression woes, Roosevelt invited Democratic operator Jim Farley into his train compartment to kibitz about the dark uncertainty. Trust in banks, thousands of which had foreclosed, was almost nonexistent. Thirteen million jobless men were looking for work. And why not? The national malaise and fear were the highest since the Civil War. When he left New York for his presidential inauguration in early March 1933, he insisted on symbolically taking the exact train route to Washington as Abraham Lincoln had in 1861. Roosevelt could be a man of superstition.
Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and author of “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D.
0 kommentar(er)
