More Top Picks Best Toilets With Strong Flush
player ready...FDR: The War President, 1940-1943
By Kenneth S. Davis
Random House, 928 pages, $39.95
According to some who knew Franklin Roosevelt well, Kenneth S. Davis writes, the president — far from being “simple and direct” — was “complicated and devious . . . his volubility a means not of true communication, but of concealment, diversion, dissemblement.” Yet even though Davis opens “FDR: The War President, 1940-1943” with a lengthy stroll through the presidential psyche, the since-deceased Davis is not over-reliant on mind-reading skills.
In his fifth volume on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Davis begins with the president’s early jousting with isolationist forces and his administration’s concoction of the lend-lease program of war aid for an embattled Britain.
From there, Davis proceeds to the forging of the “Grand Alliance” between America and Great Britain; Pearl Harbor; the dark and bloody times of early World War II; the invasion of North Africa and the first glimmerings of D-Day. Sharing FDR’s stage are such figures as George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin.
Davis’ Roosevelt is charming, genial, talkative, notably patient. He is a man of distinct and somewhat fatalistic faith, a president capable of defying his military establishment’s judgment in favor of his own.
But he is also capable of turning off his famous empathy as if he were switching off one of his own radio fireside chats. He has a “temperamental addiction to the blurred, the anomalous, the ambiguous” — a trait that manifests itself in relationships with incongruous personalities and in programs so broadly and badly defined that they create administrative chaos. Davis’ Roosevelt likes to keep his options open; he dislikes closed doors and paths that cannot be taken.
The author sees FDR’s war production policies as selling American society into the hands of big business for the rest of the century, and he seriously faults Roosevelt’s relatively low-key reaction to the Holocaust.
Still, Davis is convinced that “Roosevelt was the greatest American president of the 20th Century and one of the three or four greatest in all American history” — and many would concur with that.