Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

Rating:
Summary: The Rescuer of Liberty and Capitalism
Review: Franklin Delano Roosevelt was clearly one of the most important figures of the 20th century. How important was he? According to Conrad Black in his biography "Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom", Roosevelt was not only one of the men responsible for making the world safe for democracy; but, he was also the sole person responsible for making the United States safe for capitalism. In seeing America through two major crises, Lord Black places Roosevelt in a pantheon of American presidents whose only other inhabitants are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

While I myself would also include Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan in that group; Lord Black is not mistaken in his appreciation for Franklin Roosevelt's significance. He presents Roosevelt differently than his other admirers have done and, of course, vastly different from his detractors.

The conventional wisdom on Roosevelt is that he was a patrician underachiever who got religion after being stricken by polio. It was in his convalescence, so the story goes, that Roosevelt found the focus, humility, and perseverence that he sorely lacked before he took ill. Lord Black considers this to be hogwash. He instead paints Roosevelt as a man who always wanted to be president. Lord Black claims that, up until his contraction of polio, Roosevelt was consciously following in his distant cousin's, Teddy Roosevelt, footsteps.

Being afflicted with such a terrible disease as polio may have made lesser men crumble under the tragedy, especially a man like Roosevelt who never previously had faced a serious challenge. Lord Black says that Roosevelt came through his fight with polio in much the same fashion that he would bring the country through the depression and war several years later, by evincing an optimistic, can-do attitude.

It was this optimism that more than anything else pulled the country out of its tailspin and got it back to work. Lord Black doesn't explicitly say so, but his implication is that the New Deal may have been mediocre economics, but it was excellent psychology. The New Deal program of the 1930s was more successful in preventing gloom and despair from permanently settling over the country than it was in actually getting people back to work in the private sector. It wasn't until the re-armament program that Roosevelt initiated late in his second term that the private sector began seriously cutting into the unemployment numbers.

Lord Black's treatment of Roosevelt's life up through 1940 is a first-class biographical assessment. It's in writing about Roosevelt after he wins his third term where Lord Black becomes bogged down in history instead of biography. Starting with America's involvement in World War II, Lord Black pays too much attention to peripheral issues and events. At this point "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" turns into too much of a general history of World War II than a biography of the American president who saw the country through it.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the biography occurs during this section though. Franklin Roosevelt was a man who was outlived by all but a handful of his most important contemporaries. Of the four alliance leaders who were in charge of their countries at the start of their state's involvement in the war, Roosevelt was the first to die. He also was outlasted by the French resistance leader and future French president, Charles de Gaulle. Because he passed on so much sooner than his contemporaries, Roosevelt was subject to much posthumous posturing by his former allies mostly at his expense. Roosevelt did not have a chance to leave any organized written account of his actions and so was left to the whims of historians and colleagues to present them how they saw fit.

Human nature being what it is, Lord Black claims that, in their memoirs and statements for posterity, most of Roosevelt's contemporaries (even the ones who openly admired him, like Sir Winston Churchill) often lessened the importance of his contributions or made him out to be a dupe in order to either make themselves appear more important than they actually were (De Gaulle) or to cover for some of their own strategic defects (Churchill). While it is mostly done by assembling the various pieces of Roosevelt's actions and private statements into a coherent vision, Lord Black does a very effective job of presenting what would have been Roosevelt's vision for a post-war Europe and world in light of Soviet (read: Josef Stalin) intransigence in acting like a responsible world power and peacekeeper.

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt" is about as thorough of a single volume biography as you are likely to find on such an important figure as Franklin Roosevelt. While it relies a little too much on psychology from a distance, Lord Black's biography of President Roosevelt is a major accomplishment which sheds much needed light on the man who, to a great extent, crafted the peaceful, liberalizing, and democratizing world in which we live.

Rating:
Summary: Black: Champion of FDR
Review: Here in his native Canada Conrad Black is famous - or notorious - for being a foaming-at-the-mouth right wing fanatic whose voice is much bigger than his wallet. Like Donald Trump he loves the limelight. So it came as a bit of a surprise to find him defending, indeed praising, FDR in this bulky book. But then I said Conrad Black loves attention, right?

I happen to think his heart is in the right place this time, whatever his personal motives. After all, FDR saved not just democracy but capitalism itself. The idea that FDR did well out of his bargain with Stalin might shock some conservatives. But there is really nothing really wrong with this one either: What else could he or anyone else have done with Stalin's Red Army, which after all got to Berlin first? No Russian leader in his right mind - let alone a monster like Stalin - would have left Eastern Europe without a fight, which is why Tsar Alexander paid for his mistake with his life. FDR was wise to leave Uncle Joe alone for the time being, as Black makes clear.

Not a bad book after all.

Rating:
Summary: a surprisingly strong work
Review: I am just purusing this book, going through the informative index to see how the author handles matters. And I must say I am positively amazed that this FDR bio was written by Conrad Black, the Canadian version of Robert Murdoch--Black is admittedly now in trouble for financial shenanigans at Hollinger International, the conglomerate in which he is chairman of the board.

Two big points that Black makes (that economists have always missed) that are groundbreaking for our time:

1. If one counts the workers building bridges, roads, as well as the Civilian Conservation Corps workers, etc. the unemployment rate in the late 1930s shows the New Deal put America back to work and created last superstructures that laid the groundwork for the post-WWII years. Black directly takes on the "war solved the depression" argument in a way that I have long said, but have never read in any bio of FDR.

Black shows, for example, that the true unemployment rate in 1940 was actually hovering around 6%. He recognizes implicitly calling the building of roads and bridges, or reforestation, etc. "make work" is to denigrate work in general. To put it another way: Is it make work on an office building built on speculation, as is done so often in our own time, for example? We never say "make work" there, which should let us see the rightward bias in our culture and political discourse. What was built in the 1930s under the New Deal are structures that last to this day and are looked upon with pride for all Americans, which is anything other than a "waste," which is implied in the phrase "make work."

2. FDR and Yalta: With Chruchill having convinced FDR and Eisenhower not to meet the Russians in Eastern Europe (Churchill detested the entire idea of a second front and was at best lukewarm about landing at Normandy in 1944), the Russians had gotten to Berlin before the Americans and British. This is why at Yalta FDR kept saying he needed more time to maneuver with Stalin and kept many things open for further discussion. When one looks at Yalta with the perspective that Black brings, one sees FDR to the end was a highly capable and strong leader.

One more note for Churchill fans: Take a look at Anthony Eden's memoirs published in Churchill's lifetime (I believe) where he exposes Churchill's deal with Stalin in 1944 that if Stalin left British interests in Greece and India alone, Stalin could keep Eastern Europe. Ironically, Stalin stuck to that bargain even as Churchill was talking about "Iron Curtains."

Conrad Black's book is one I am hoping to get for the holidays as a gift or using a gift certificate to purchase. His book deserves attention no matter where his current troubles lead.

Rating:
Summary: A balanced and favorable account
Review: I don't know of a better one-volume biography of FDR. Geoffrey Ward's two volumes, Before the Trumpet, and A First-Class Temperament are better written and more carefully researched, but they only take his life to 1928. This book relies on secondary sources mostly, and its footnoting is unhelpful--the footnotes just tell what secondary source the author got the information from. I have not read the multi-volume works of Frank Friedel and Kenneth Davis, but they are referred to a lot in the footnotes to this book and no doubt are more carefully researched. Yet I thought reading this worthwhile, and its overall assessment of FDR's accomplishments rings very true. George Will and Bill Buckley, Jr., and Henry Kissinger supplied blurbs for the jacket, which more hidebound Republicans, clinging to GOP attitudes during Roosevelt's Administrations would not, I presume, do. Black's assessment of FDR's performance at Teheran and Yalta ably refutes some of the old Republican canards re same, and make for good reading. All in all, I thought the time spent reading this nice big book was well spent. There are a few errors, and I mention two: on page 233 Black refers to Senator Harry Flood Byrd as a Virginia favorite son candidate at the 1932 Democratic National Conventio--but at the time Byrd was not yet a Senator; and on page 792 Black says Admiral Darlan's funeral in Algiers on Dec 26, 1942, was attended by the "Cardinal-Primate" of Africa, but there was no Cardinal in Africa in 1942, much less a Cardinal-Primate. The book does have a good 25-page bibliography.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written. Makes a Strong Case for Roosevelt's Greatness
Review: I give this book the highest recommendation for anyone with an interest in Roosevelt, American History, or World History. I have been reading about history and decided to read about Roosevelt, since he was a great president. I compared reviews and decided on this big book and am glad that I did. Black is talanted with his writing and very amusing at times, which was refreshing considering that this is a very long and thorough book. Roosevelt emerged to me as both a charming person and a shrewd president for good causes, like bringing America out of isolation to save the world from Hitler. His skills and legacies make modern politicians look like preschoolers.

Black writes that Roosevelt is not as admirable of a person as his admirers think because he was egoistic, could be difficult, and was very shrewd and dominating with his power. Roosevelt was a Machiavellian figure in some ways. Yet Black says that Roosevelt was far more admirable for what he did for America and the world than even his admirers may realize. Here Black unfolds the details (and there are many details) that show Roosevelt's greatness.

This review below that I found on the Internet stuck with me as best reflecting my own thoughts, and it carries more expertise than my humble review can offer:

"FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT Champion of Freedom. By Conrad Black. Reviewed by Alan Brinkley, New York Times. Friday, November 28, 2003.

"It will come as something of a surprise to those familiar with Conrad Black as the powerful and energetic head of a large newspaper publishing empire that he has also managed to write an ambitious biography of Franklin Roosevelt, nearly 1,300 pages long.

"It may also come as a surprise to those who know of the generally conservative politics of Lord Black (who resigned last week as chief executive of his company, Hollinger International, but not as its chairman, during a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation) that he reveres Roosevelt as the greatest American of the 20th century, perhaps of any century, and the most important international leader of modern times.

"However unexpected, this enormous book is also one of the best one-volume biographies of Roosevelt yet. It is not particularly original, has no important new revelations or interpretations and is based mostly on secondary sources (and rather old ones at that). But it tells the remarkable story of Roosevelt's life with an engaging eloquence and with largely personal and mostly interesting opinions about the people and events he is describing. Black's enormous admiration for Roosevelt is based on many things. He reveres what he calls Roosevelt's great courage and enormous skill in moving the United States away from neutrality and first toward active support of Britain and China in the early years of World War II and then toward full intervention. He admires Roosevelt's skill in managing the war effort and his deftness in handling the diplomacy that accompanied it.

"He sees Roosevelt, even more than Churchill, as the architect of a postwar world that for half a century worked significantly better than the prewar world of catastrophic conflicts and economic disasters. Roosevelt, he argues, helped legitimize democracy in the eyes of the world and created alliances and relationships that maintained a general peace through the rest of the 20th century. Churchill, once the war was essentially won, became a futile defender of the dying British empire.

"Roosevelt, in the last months before his death, was promoting a very different vision of world order based on international organizations and national self-determination (even if with great power supervision). Of the major political leaders of the age of World War II, Black writes, "Roosevelt was the only one with a strategic vision that was substantially vindicated in the 50 years following the Second World War."

"Black is also a stalwart defender of the New Deal. His defense is not simply the selective approval that many conservatives give to the way it saved capitalism and ensured the primacy of free markets. Black admires it all: Social Security, the Wagner Act, farm subsidies, securities regulation, wage and price legislation, even Roosevelt's almost incendiary oratory in 1936 welcoming hatred of the forces of power and greed.

"He expresses gingerly criticism of Roosevelt's reluctance to move aggressively to combat segregation, of his support of Japanese-American internment and his relatively modest response to the Holocaust, and of his occasional poor judgment in the people he trusted. (He is particularly contemptuous of Henry A. Wallace, but no more so than of conservative figures like Breckinridge Long, the genteel anti-Semite who obstructed the granting of American visas to European Jews in the late 1930s.)

"Despite these and other reservations, Black never departs from his overall judgment of Roosevelt, perhaps best illustrated in his use of a quotation from Churchill as a chapter title: "He Is the Greatest Man I Have Ever Known."

"While Black may not be the best chronicler of any single aspect of Roosevelt's life, and while he may offer little that scholars don't already know, he has created a powerful and often moving picture of the life as a whole. Truly great men inspire many exceptional biographies, and this is not the first or last for Roosevelt. But it is a worthy and important addition to the vast literature on the most important modern American leader."

Rating:
Summary: This Book Drives Me Crazy
Review: I usually do not have a problem writing book reviews but I have edited and re-written my review 6 times. Here is the problem.

The author Conrad Black has a reputation in his home town (and mine) of Toronto according to our local newspaper accounts of talking too much.... and I guess this book proves the point - 1360 pages. The Pope's is 1000 pages. Mandela's biography is 600 pages as is Hemmingway's bio by James R Mellow. So this is longer than both together. Quite astonishing really when one thinks about it.

The book has its positives. But it is just too long and I guess an ego thing, a really big ego thing, for the author. Maybe if you are doing Roosevelt research it is okay but it is being sold as a mass market book which it is not.

Jack in Toronto

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly Flattering History
Review: I've admired Roosevelt for a long time and wanted to read a definitive biography based on more modern research sources and methodologies. This book fit the bill very handsomely. Roosevelt towers over the 20th century and, it now seems very clear, will be remembered as its greatest American president.

The book also explains, unintentionally, why Bill Clinton thought he could get away with his personal dalliances. We now demand such a high level of personal conduct from our presidents that we've traded it for cut-rate intellect and sheer stubbornness as a proxy for charter.

Urbane, charming, and utlimately a great flip-flopper, Roosevelt taught three generations how American politics is done best, and his lessons are still worthy today.

Rating:
Summary: Praised Book on the Champion of Freedom - FDR
Review: In "The Time 100 - the Most Important People of the Century," Franklin Delano Roosevelt is ranked the runner-up most important person of the century - second only to Albert Einstein. Roosevelt is a giant of world history.

On the back cover of this fine book by Conrad Black are these comments about this book by CONSERVATIVE intellectuals I generally admire:

George F. Will: "Conrad Black skillfully assembles powerful arguments to support strong and sometimes surprising judgements. This spirited defense of Roosevelt as a savior of America's enterprise system, and geopolitical realist, is a delight to read."

John Lukacs: "Conrad Black's FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT is extraordinary. It is something different from the dim and flickering lamp of academic retrospect. A new - and generous - light is poured on its subject: an illumination directed by a conviction of Roosevelt's place in the history of an entire century."

William F. Buckley Jr.: "An enormous accomplishment, a learned volume on FDR by a vital critical mind, which will absorb critics and the reading public."

Henry Kissinger: "No Biography of Roosevelt is more thoughtful and readable. None is as comprehensive."

I really enjoyed Conrad Black's writing style, which adds life to the words with his own colorful descriptors. This is the best single-volume biography of FDR. He presents an accurate and living picture of Roosevelt in his presidency and not a dry summary of the events. For example, I chuckled when Black says that FDR correctly judged Hitler to be the real concern while Mussolini was, in comparison, a buffoon.

My own criticism of the book is that it skips over the human suffering of the period. The Great Depression was devestating. I suggest the book "The Grapes of Wrath" or any of the many documentaries on the Great Depression.

Read this book and you will get to know and appreciate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You may not agree with some things, but you will at least understand FDR in the context of the times.

The world was in depression. America was in the Great Depression and heading to what would have been, without Roosevelt's intervention, a complete collapse of America's economic system. Capitalism and democracy fell out of favor around the world. Hitler and other dictators came to power around the world, and radicals gained followers in America. This climaxed in the clash of World War II.

The world we live today in is not a world of Hitler's Third Reich and fascism. It is not a world of Stalinism. It is not a world of colonial empires. It is not a world of radical laissez-faire capitalism. It is a world of Roosevelt's pragmatic ideas for a more stable economy and international security.

Roosevelt was a great president for everyone, and his ideas today seem very pragmatic and sensible. It is refreshing that several notable conservatives have had the guts to praise this book for what it is - a very good book about a great president.

Rating:
Summary: A Needed update
Review: It is high time a new biography of FDR be printed, and why not have it be written by a Canadian. This excellent, lengthy, biography deals with FDR in all his greatness. The authors main point is the FDR saved the world, capitalism and America. FDR made many firsts. He was the first president in a wheel chair. He was the most traveled president up to that time(Coolidge, president from 1924-1928 had never even left the United States). FDR was deeply involved in building the atom bomb, which he wanted to use against Germany. FDR's Wife Eleanor was to become an icon for feminism and women's rights as well as a champion of minorities. FDR was the first president to serve four terms. And he beat the depression and won a World War(although he didn't live to see its conclusion). This book more then does him justice. It is important to learn of the internationalism of FDR in this time of terror. FDR was the ultimate activist in foreign policy, pushing America relentlessly towards war. He actively supported England, the special relationship, and ensured war with Japan due to an oil embargo. Although accused of looking the other way to warnings of pearl harbor, FDR was quick to arrange a token revenge mission, ordering Doolittle to bomb Tokyo and ditch his planes in China.

This book rightly claims that FDR, next to Lincoln, was the great savior of the nation. The title evokes the 'Four Freedoms' of Rockwell; freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. An excellent account and a necessary update on this greatest of American presidents.

Rating:
Summary: Charm and Cunning
Review: Leadership -- what it is, how it works -- gets much attention these days, not least the presidential kind. And the theme of leadership is at the heart of Conrad Black's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

Mr. Black, otherwise known as Lord Black of Crossharbour, is the controversial press baron whose transatlantic newspaper empire, now facing financial scrutiny, is itself news. He is also a deft writer who applies to one of the most influential men of the 20th century what he has learned from a career of sizing up people and their ambitions.

The result is a sweeping, occasionally sprawling biography. At 1,280 pages, it's a companion for the long haul -- and an engrossing one, thanks to the storytelling and the pungency of its judgments. Lord Black draws on FDR's papers and archives, various memoirs and the work of Roosevelt scholars ranging from Geoffrey Ward and Kenneth Davis to Doris Kearns Goodwin and, of course, Arthur Schlesinger.

But Lord Black also has recourse to sources not usually available to working-stiff historians -- such as Queen Elizabeth II, who told him about a childhood visit to Hyde Park and a wild car ride: "The President pointed out the sights, waved his cigarette holder about, turned the wheel, and operated the accelerator and brake all with his hands. He was conversing more than watching the road and drove at great speed. . . . I thought we would go right off the road."

In 1920 people even talked about a dream ticket of Herbert Hoover (to be drafted as a Democrat) and Franklin Roosevelt. And indeed that year, at age 38, FDR was the vice-presidential candidate, but without Hoover -- and on the losing ticket. But he was on the road to the White House.

At age 39, it all seemed over. Polio had made him an invalid. Rehabilitation consumed him, testing, in Lord Black's phrase, his "never-ending perseverance." He was never again really able to walk. While Roosevelt would later excoriate the 1920s as "nine crazy years of the ticker," he was part of it -- his ventures including a New York-Chicago blimp service, a coffee substitute and vending machines that said "thank you."

All such activity was incidental, though, to his real ambition -- a return to public life, which he attained as governor of New York and then, in 1932, at the bottom of the Depression, as president. Jim Powell's recent "FDR's Folly" has reignited the debate over the New Deal by arguing that it aggravated the Depression rather than helping to end it. Lord Black will have none of that.

He believes that Roosevelt's optimistic activism and personal confidence restored the nation's confidence -- and saved it from threats across the political spectrum: By moving left to attack such vague enemies as "economic royalists" and "entrenched greed," FDR helped preserve the capitalist system at a time when its survival could not be taken for granted. He was, in Lord Black's narrative, a conservative reformer masquerading as a radical. He once said -- correctly, in Lord Black's view -- that "I am the best friend the profit system ever had."

Roosevelt also saw an even greater crisis looming. He knew Germany well and recognized, earlier than most, the threat that Hitler posed. FDR's challenge was to move American public opinion away from isolationism and then, with Churchill, to shape a winning wartime coalition.

In the face of such crises, Roosevelt sought to practice what he called "continuous leadership." He radiated confidence. He incisively read both people and public opinion -- only rarely missing, as in his efforts to pack the Supreme Court. He wielded his immense charm as a weapon (something he learned, no doubt, in managing his intrusive mother). He was steely-calm in a crisis. "If you have spent six months on your back trying to move one toe," he explained, "nothing seems difficult."

His ability to communicate -- on the platform and over the new medium of radio -- was crucial to the strength of his leadership. Practical qualities mattered, too: He had no trouble sleeping -- and, when awakened with bad news, going right back to sleep. (As for the famous quote attributed to Justice Holmes -- that FDR had "a second class intellect but a first class temperament" -- Lord Black argues that, if Holmes said such a thing, he meant Theodore, not Franklin.)

What brought it all together was immense ambition. Al Smith, whom Roosevelt twice nominated for president, later said that he "was the kindest man . . . but don't get in his way." Lord Black almost celebrates Roosevelt's "preternatural cunning" and "deviousness," including his ability to say with apparent sincerity what people wanted to hear, whether he believed it or not.

In Lord Black's view, FDR's "academic admirers" -- by presenting him as "a kindly sentimentalist" -- ended up making him "a better man but lesser statesman than he was." In fact, he says, Roosevelt applied "his ruthlessness and often amoral political genius to almost wholly desirable ends," becoming "a greater statesman than even his most vocal supporters have generally appreciated."

There are some minor oddities in the narrative. John Maynard Keynes, for example, was certainly a distinguished economist but not "the distinguished Oxford economist" -- he was Cambridge through and through. And some quotations appear more than once. But the big story never falters, right up to the end. Lord Black writes movingly of Roosevelt's sad last months and final frail hours, which contrast so sharply with the buoyant certitude he had so long projected: the head tossed back, the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, the wave, the smile.

And behind the confidence? "You alone know I was a bit 'cast down' these past weeks," Roosevelt wrote a favored cousin in 1935. Few ever saw the soul-searching, the doubts, the anxieties, of this remarkable man. Yet in Lord Black's story those shadows flicker darkly around the edges of the light he cast on his world and on our nation's history.