Having guided the nation through the worst economic crisis in its history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt by 1939 was turning his attention to a world on the brink of war. The second part of Roger Daniels's biography focuses on FDR's growing mastery in foreign affairs. Relying on FDR's own words to the American people and eyewitness accounts of the man and his accomplishments, Daniels reveals a chief executive orchestrating an immense wartime effort. Roosevelt had effective command of military and diplomatic information and unprecedented power over strategic military and diplomatic affairs. He simultaneously created an arsenal of democracy that armed the Allies while inventing the United Nations intended to ensure a lasting postwar peace. FDR achieved these aims while expanding general prosperity, limiting inflation, and continuing liberal reform despite an increasingly conservative and often hostile Congress. Although fate robbed him of the chance to see the victory he had never doubted, events in 1944 assured him that the victory he had done so much to bring about would not be long delayed. A compelling reconsideration of Roosevelt the president and campaigner, The War Years, 1939-1945 provides new views and vivid insights about a towering figure--and six years that changed the world.
Hill theorizes that the diplomatic community opened the European theater to a full-scale war on Germany because Hitler's pressure on his Japanese allies caused the Pearl Harbor attack.
Since the original publication of this classic book in 1979, Roosevelt's foreign policy has come under attack on three main points: Was Roosevelt responsible for the confrontation with Japan that led to the attack at Pearl Harbor? Did Roosevelt "give away" Eastern Europe to Stalin and the U.S.S.R. at Yalta? And, most significantly, did Roosevelt abandon Europe's Jews to the Holocaust, making no direct effort to aid them? In a new Afterword to his definitive history, Dallek vigorously and brilliantly defends Roosevelt's policy. He emphasizes how Roosevelt operated as a master politician in maintaining a national consensus for his foreign policy throughout his presidency and how he brilliantly achieved his policy and military goals.
This important text offers a clear, concise and affordable narrative and analytical history of American foreign policy since the Spanish-American War. The book narrates events and policies but goes further to emphasize the international setting and constraints within which American policy-makers had to operate, the domestic pressures on those policy-makers, and the ideologies, preferences, and personal idiosyncrasies of the leaders themselves.
Born in rural western Pennsylvania, Harold LeClair Ickes (1874-1952), son of a gambler, womanizer, drunk father and of a strictly reared Presbyterian mother, grew up desperately poor and desperately ambitious. He became a Chicago newsman during its gilded era, a key figure in the Progressive Party, and in FDR’s cabinet became America’s longest serving and most influential Interior Secretary. As Interior Secretary, he helped change the face of America, forging that department into the most powerful tool for the protection of our lands. He was also a major force in reshaping the character and quality of American society, often seeming to speak ex cathedra as the conscience of FDR’s administration. Opinionated, vigorously outspoken, as impassioned defending minorities as defending our wild places, Ickes, who happily styled himself “the Old Curmudgeon,” was arguably the most controversial and most beloved figure in the New Deal. When Ickes wrote his first column in the New Republic, the editors of the magazine introduced him on May 2, 1949 as “old enough to be called an Elder Statesman, but he is too salty for that label. He himself has cheerfully accepted the epithet of Curmudgeon, which likewise is insufficient to his case. A more accurate description would be that he is America’s most venerable progressive and one of the stoutest fighters, at any age, for justice and good government.” Righteous Pilgrim was a non-fiction National Book Award finalist in 1990, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography in 1991 and was a finalist for theNational Book Critics Circle Award. “an outstanding biography that is also a major work of social history spanning the first half of the 20th century... [Ickes was] a courageous public servant who in Righteous Pilgrim receives long overdue recognition.” — Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times “highly successful... Written in a delightful conversational style that disguises the impressive scholarly research that went into its preparation, this is an appreciative biography of a man who was so temperamental, thin-skinned and bluntly outspoken that he acknowledged these traits himself... This thoughtful, readable, and yet gripping book is so persuasive it may well force a more positive reassessment of the New Deal... Righteous Pilgrim is likely to be one of the most significant histories of the Progressive and New Deal reform impulse to appear in a decade.” — Howard R. Lamar,Washington Post “[an] elegant and exhaustive new biography of Ickes... Using primary sources (such as the diary Ickes religiously maintained through most of his life) with great sensitivity, [Watkins] provides an astonishingly intimate portrait of a public man... Watkins, editor of The Wilderness Society magazine Wilderness, is a wonderfully skillful writer... As Watkins powerfully demonstrates in this rewarding and illuminating work, Ickes had no shortage of ego — but his real fuel was conviction, burning at an octane hardly ever seen in Washington any more.” — Ronald Brownstein, Los Angeles Times “[an] engaging, monumental biography” — Publishers Weekly “Researched with amazing thoroughness and organized with a sure hand, this will undoubtedly prove to be the definitive work on Harold L. Ickes... Watkins portrays the currents of political maneuvering that swirled and eddied about Ickes with admirable clarity. A complex, fascinating, and convincing portrait.” — Kirkus Reviews “[a] worthy, well-written biography.“ — Clayton R. Koppes, Reviews in American History “Harold Ickes was one of the most interesting political figures of the first half of the twentieth century, and T. H. Watkins vividly sets forth both the complexities of his personality and personal life and the remarkable scope of his achievements.” — Frank Freidel “A superbly written story of the preeminent Progressive of this century. I couldn’t put it down.” — Stewart L. Udall “Righteous Pilgrim is one of those rare and wonderful biographies that are at once incisive portraiture and important social history.” — Wallace Stegner “Harold Ickes stomps across the pages of T. H. Watkins’s biography as one of the most arresting and essential figures of the American twentieth century.” — Frederick Turner “At last, a biography worthy of its extraordinary subject — vivid, impassioned, larger-than-life.” — Geoffrey C. Ward
This “uncommonly astute study” examines the early development of the US-UK military alliance that would eventually lead to victory in WWII (Paul Miles, author of FDR’s Admiral). On December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft sank the American gunboat Panay outside Nanjing, China. Although the Japanese apologized, President Roosevelt set Captain Royal Ingersoll to London to begin conversations with the British admiralty about Japanese aggression in the Far East. While few Americans remember the Panay Incident, it was the start of what would become the “Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. In The Origins of the Grand Alliance, William T. Johnsen provides the first comprehensive analysis of Anglo-American military collaboration before the Second World War. He sets the stage by examining Anglo-French and Anglo-American coalition military planning from 1900 through World War I and the interwar years. Johnsen also considers the formulation of policy and grand strategy, operational planning, and the creation of the command structure and channels of communication. He addresses vitally important logistical and materiel issues, particularly the difficulties of war production. Drawn from extensive sources and private papers held in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, Johnsen’s exhaustively researched study casts new light on the twentieth century’s most significant alliance.
This volume examines crucial moments in the rhetoric of the Cold War, beginning with an exploration of American neutrality and the debate over entering World War II. Other topics include the long-distance debate carried on over international radio between Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt; understanding and interpreting World War II propaganda; domestic radio following the war and the use of Abraham Lincoln narratives as vehicles for American propaganda; the influence of foreign policy agents Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and George Kennan; and the rhetoric of former presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Ultimately, this volume offers a broad-based look at the rhetoric framing the Cold War and in doing so offers insight into the political climate of today.
In The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? David Ray Griffin traces the trajectory of the American Empire from its founding through to the end of the 20th century. A prequel to Griffin's Bush and Cheney, this book demonstrates with many examples the falsity of the claim for American exceptionalism, a secular version of the old idea that America has been divinely founded and guided. "Supported by extensive research, Griffin thoroughly debunks the myth of an American Empire as a benign, exceptionalist, divinely ordained historical agent. Instead of Manifest Destiny, what reality- based Griffin charters is the ‘malign’ ways of US foreign policy since the 19th century; a trajectory founded by slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples and then imperially expanded, non-stop. ‘Malign’ happens to be a term currently very much in vogue across the Beltway—but always to designate US competitors Russia and China. Griffin consistently challenges Beltway gospel, demonstrating that if the US had not entered WWI, there may have been no WWII. He unmasks the lies surrounding the true story of the Pearl Harbor attacks. He asks: If the US was really guided by God, how could it ‘choose’ to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that ‘the atomic bombs were not necessary to end the war?’ Griffin also shows how the Cold War was actually conceptualized several years before the 1950 National Security Council paper 68 (NSC- 68). He revisits the origins of irrational hatred of Iran; the demonization of Cuba; the lies surrounding the Vietnam debacle; the false flags across Europe via Operation Gladio; the destruction of Yugoslavia; the decades-long evisceration of Iraq; and the ramifications of the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. This sharp, concise history of the American Empire ultimately demonstrates, in Griffin’s analysis, the ‘fraud’ of endorsing self- praising American Exceptionalism. A must read.” —Pepe Escobar, Asia Times/Hong Kong;
