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FDR
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| Part No: | 0812970497 |
| Manufacturer: | Random House Trade Paperbacks |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 4.5 / 5.0 |
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One of today’s premier biographers has written a modern, comprehensive, indeed ultimate book on the epic life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this superlative volume, Jean Edward Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to provide an engrossing narrative of one of America’s greatest presidents. This is a portrait painted in broad strokes and fine details. We see how Roosevelt’s restless energy, fierce intellect, personal magnetism, and ability to project effortless grace permitted him to master countless challenges throughout his life. Smith recounts FDR’s battles with polio and physical disability, and how these experiences helped forge the resolve that FDR used to surmount the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threat of totalitarianism. Here also is FDR’s private life depicted with unprecedented candor and nuance, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, formidable yet ever supportive and tender; his wife, Eleanor, whose counsel and affection were instrumental to FDR’s public and individual achievements; Lucy Mercer, the great romantic love of FDR’s life; and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose adoration of her boss was practically limitless. Smith also tackles head-on and in-depth the numerous failures and miscues of Roosevelt’s public career, including his disastrous attempt to reconstruct the Judiciary; the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans; and Roosevelt’s occasionally self-defeating Executive overreach. Additionally, Smith offers a sensitive and balanced assessment of Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, noting its breakthroughs and shortcomings. Summing up Roosevelt’s legacy, Jean Smith declares that FDR, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. It was Roosevelt who revolutionized the art of campaigning and used the burgeoning mass media to garner public support and allay fears. But more important, Smith gives us the clearest picture yet of how this quintessential Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man’s president. The result is a powerful account that adds fresh perspectives and draws profound conclusions about a man whose story is widely known but far less well understood. Written for the general reader and scholars alike, FDR is a stunning biography in every way worthy of its subject. From the Hardcover edition.
| Disappointed with end notes | 2008-11-18 | 4 / 5 |
| This book fails to include running page references in the section of footnotes, making it awkward and annoying to jump to the note you want to look up.
I don't understand why experienced publishers are still failing to do that, particularly in books like "FDR" where the notes are extensive. And I don't know if the author is clueless about this as well, or whether he signs a contract that prevents any influence on the book design. |
| FDR as FDR | 2008-10-24 | 5 / 5 |
| | Well written bio of a man who was both understood and misunderstood throughout his presidency. Lots of fascinating details. |
| Excellent presidential biography! | 2008-09-24 | 4 / 5 |
| | The book "FDR" by Jean Edward Smith was an excellent biography. At first glance, the book looks intimidating. However, once the reader dives in, it is an excellent read. Mr. Smith's detail to FDR's early and mid life was exceptional. The nature and extent of his relationships to his family and friends provided a roadmap as to his leadership skills and abilities. This explained his presidency to a great extent. The author provides enough details to cover the terms of FDR and the WWII. The only thing that precluded this reviewer from giving this book the fifth star was the lack of depth towards the end of his life. For instance, the story was told through Pearl Harbor to D-Day and Yalta without any coverage between his last inaugural address and his death. Perhaps I expected more than what is available in terms of facts. In sum, FDR by Jean Edward Smith is an excellent read even to the non-historian. |
| A New Deal Saved A Nation | 2008-09-18 | 4 / 5 |
| An intricate look inside the life, family and administration of FDR. What courage it took to be the president of the United States during the late crises of the "Hoovervills", Great Depression, and the beginning of World War II.
Smith covers the whole life of Roosevelt from a young lad till his tragic death while serving president. The New Deal put hundreds of thousands of jobless people to work, conserved forestry, and created Social Security. This book is well written, and very informative inside the personal and public lives of FDR and FR. |
| I confess - I didn't think Jean Edward Smith was capable of writing something like this. Smith's other biographical works (John Marshall, Lucius Clay) were enjoyable but by no means exceptional. As a one-volume "popular" presidential biography his "FDR" stands with McCollough's "Truman" and Donald's "Lincoln" as a modern classic.
Smith does an exceptional job developing and co-mingling two distinct storylines: FDR the man and FDR the politician.
FDR the man, as described by Smith, is a mixture of casual cheerfulness, a boyish teller-of-tales -- and utterly consumed by ambition. He was a man devoted to his mother, deeply inspired and motivated by his cousin Theodore (as a 23-year-old, FDR told fellow law clerks -- in complete earnestness -- that he was planning on becoming president), and ultimately trapped in a loveless marriage and at the head of a dysfunctional family (the five Roosevelt children to reach adulthood were married a total of 19 times).
The most insightful chapter on FDR's personal life deals with his relationship with Lucy Mercer, his winsome, Catholic office secretary during his stint as assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration. Smith argues that FDR was deeply in love with Mercer and that it took the opprobrium of his boss, Josephus Daniels, and the credible threat of divorce from his wife, Eleanor, to break it off. The affair nevertheless essentially ended his marriage and, as Smith claims, motivated a devestated Eleanor to establish a public and private life of her own.
If FDR the man was more human and sympathetic than I was anticipating, FDR the politician was much coarser and less principled than I had assumed. Smith argues convincingly that "[FDR] was the most calculating and hard-nosed politician of his generation." At several points, Smith emphasizes that FDR's two most influential and trusted advisors - Louis Howe and James Farley - were steely-eyed politicos, unencumbered by any ideology and blindly devoted to just one objective: the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency. One cannot help but get the sense that FDR was no different, only self-absorbed.
What Smith does not make clear is how and why FDR developed his plans for massive government intervention and social programs that fell under the umbrella of the New Deal. The president comes across as a man propelled mainly, if not purely, by self-interest and self-aggrandizement. Perhaps FDR developed a deep and abiding sympathy for the indigent people he met when he established his polio camp in rural Warm Springs, Georgia; but if so, Smith fails to convey the intensity and sincerity of that emotion in the same way that he describes FDR's feelings for Lucy Mercer.
FDR's style of administrative leadership, as described by Smith, is also less than flattering. He comes off as czar-like, issuing ukases on the most important and far-reaching issues of war and peace with little to no input or collaboration from anyone. For instance, according to Smith, FDR decided some of the more momentous steps leading up to WWII, such as Lend-Lease, completely on his own and without consultation with his cabinet. Smith also stresses that FDR had little use for his own State Department and purposively kept his secretary of state and the career foreign service out of nearly every major diplomatic issue of his presidency (they were perceived as silk-stocking elitists out-of-touch and in fundamental opposition to the core principles of his administration).
On balance, Smith is incredibly fair in his treatment of FDR; he goes across as one of the truly great American presidents but not without a vulnerable and endearing human dimension. That said, Smith lets FDR off easy on a few of his more glaring shortcomings. He admits that FDR did next to nothing for civil rights over his unprecedented four terms, but Smith defends his actions by noting the president's need of Southern Democrat votes (the same can and has been said about Wilson). The most shocking thing is how the future "chairman of the American establishment," John McCloy, is hung out to dry for two of the indelible stains of the FDR administration: the decision to intern Japanese-Americans in California and the failure to bomb the Nazi concentration camps. In both cases, Smith concedes that FDR had ultimate authority but more pressing issues to worry about and places culpability squarely on McCloy's shoulders.
Finally, I was surprised how positively FDR's 1940 Republican presidential opponent, Wendell Wilkie, is portrayed by Smith. Wilkie is described as a formidable force that genuinely gave FDR a scare in the election and forever earned his respect and admiration for his unwavering support of key Roosevelt initiatives, such as the need to establish a draft and support for Lend Lease, which ultimately secured their passage from a skeptical American public.
In all, this is a superlative one-volume life on a flawed but genuine American giant.
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