The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II

US: Basic Books, 2002. Paperback. Good. Acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming brings to life the flawed and troubled F DR who struggled to manage WWII. Starting with the leak to the press of Roo sevelt's famous Rainbow Plan, then spiraling back to FDR's inept prewar dip lomacy with Japan, and his various attempts to lure Japan into an attack on the U.S. Fleet in the Pacific, Fleming takes the reader inside the incredi bly fractious struggles and debates that went on in Washington, the nation, and the world as the New Dealers, led by FDR, strove to impose their will on the conduct of the War. Unlike the familiar yet idealized FDR of Doris K earns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, the reader encounters a Roosevelt in remo rseless decline, battered by ideological forces and primitive hatreds which he could not handle-and frequently failed to understand-some of them leadi ng to unimaginable catastrophe. Among FDR's most dismaying policies, Flemin g argues, were an insistence on "unconditional surrender" for Germany (a po licy that perhaps prolonged the war by as many as two years, leaving millio ns more dead) and his often uncritical embrace of and acquiescence to Stali n and the Soviets as an ally. For many Americans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a beloved, heroic, almost mythic figure, if not for the "big government " that was spawned under his New Deal, then certainly for his leadership th rough the War. The New Dealers' War paints a very different portrait of thi s leadership. It is sure to spark debate.