Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 by Roger Daniels

Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945 Reviews

• 
  Edgar Raines

  Roger Daniels' _Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945_, is not an easy read, but it is essential for understanding the American war effort from the perspective of the Oval Office. I found it very rewarding in three ways. First, Daniels says he has no way of reading Roosevelt's mind; an approach I applaud. Historians who take the opposite view on this question, often, I fear, tell us more what is on their minds than Roosevelt's. Daniels tells us what Roosevelt said, year by year, often with extensive quotation from speeches, messages to Congress, and, at times, the memoirs of those who worked closely with him, followed by the author's analysis. Second, he is relentlessly focused on policies and politics, not the president's relations with his wife, Missy Le Hand, or Lucy Rutherford. (I think we have been living through the People Magazination (if I can coin a phrase) of scholarly biography in the United States, but then I am not a gender historian.) Third, Daniels I think, makes four large contributions to our understanding of Roosevelt and the war effort.
  
  First, Daniels concentrates on Roosevelt's 1939 reorganization of the Executive Office of the President. Most historians either ignore this reform or mention it as simply a bit of administrative detail. In Daniels view, Roosevelt, viewing a European war ever more likely, used the reorganization to strengthen his control over U.S. foreign policy and in the event of war to become a functional commander-in-chief. At the same time, he issued secret orders transferring the Joint Army-Navy Board (forerunner of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and the Joint Army-Navy Munitions Board to the Executive Office of the President.
  
  Second, he demonstrates that Roosevelt all along wanted to invade North Africa virtually from the beginning of U.S. participation in the war. But Daniels also makes clear that he knowingly presided over the shift of much of the Army's and Navy's combat power to the West Coast, Hawaii, Australia, and the line of communications between Australia and the United States West Coast in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Mark Stoler has argued that launching the Guadalcanal campaign was virtually in defiance of the President's strategy. In my view Guadalcanal was an economy of force measure that allowed the U.S. to place minimal garrisons along the line of communication. Marshall could support it because it promised to lessen the pull of U.S. forces to the Pacific. Neither he nor anyone else in Washington (or Wellington for that matter) envisioned the grueling six-month campaign that followed. Daniels does not address this issue specifically, but his general treatment of the question tends to undermine Stoler's argument.
  
  Third, he argues that Roosevelt did not replace "Doctor New Deal" with "Doctor Win the War." "Doctor New Deal" retired to a back room away from the public eye where he could concentrate on plans for the post-war world. From time to time Roosevelt would announce post war plans but not emphasize that this was the work of "Doctor New Deal," although I suspect that many Republicans in the House and Senate suspected that the good doctor was still hard at work.
  
  Fourth, he shows the wide range of policies that Roosevelt was personally involved in and how much wider his span of control was than Churchill's. Churchill concentrated on grand strategy and defense leaving other aspects of the government to be handled by his cabinet colleagues. Roosevelt was personally involved in decisions on manpower utilization and industrial mobilization to name only two contentious areas of wartime policy.
  
  One of Roosevelt's advisors commented a few years after the war that at the time he saw all the flaws and miscues of some of the wartime agencies but afterwards, looking back, he had to admire the President's long-term vision and his ability to create organizations to carry out that vision. He said that Roosevelt was sort of a genius in that sense. After reading Daniels' book I would have to agree.
  
• 
  Mark

  One of the decisions that a biographer faces in writing a multi-volume study of his or her subject is that of where to divide the narrative. This seemingly prosaic decision in reality plays an enormous role in shaping how that life is interpreted, even within a narrative that is written as a contiguous work. Choosing 1939 as the dividing point for Franklin Roosevelt's life, as Roger Daniels does for his study, emphasizes the sense of his presidency as distinguishable in its distinct focus on domestic policy in the first half and foreign affairs in the second. Even if it isn't a radical decision, it is certainly an understandable one.
  
  Daniels emphasizes this pivot in other ways. The most notable is his examination early in this book on Roosevelt's reorganization of the presidency in 1939. What most historians have addressed in passing Daniels features as part of his provocative assertion of Roosevelt as not just a master politician but as a gifted administrator. Here he argues that the reorganization, which gave the president more central control over the executive branch, was done in part in anticipation of involvement in the burgeoning wars in Asia and Europe. Had Daniels concluded his previous volume with the reorganization may have made it seem as a coda for his efforts in the New Deal to reshape the role of the federal government in domestic affairs, and gives a different gloss on its consequences.
  
  The Second World War looms understandably large in this volume, and Daniels devotes the majority of its pages to discussing the events leading up to America's intervention and how Roosevelt waged the war. Though subsumed by the events, domestic politics are not excluded, however, nor are politics ignored. Daniels sees Roosevelt's growing involvement in the war in Europe as in line with American sentiments at that time, with never less than 2/3 of Americans endorsing his support for Great Britain and his increasingly confrontational pose with Germany. Yet in Daniels's view the isolationists in Congress who challenged his policies were not unrepresentative of public opinion, either, and Roosevelt had to factor their opposition into his efforts.
  
  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, of course, dramatically shifted this dynamic. Here Daniels avoids the lure that has distracted too many of Roosevelt's biographers of subsuming his biography into a general narrative of the war. Instead he keeps his focus on his subject, describing what Roosevelt did throughout the war to lead America to victory. While leaving operational plans to the military (a sharp contrast with his counterparts in both Britain and Germany), he did intervene routinely in making strategic decisions in North African and in Europe. This made his reluctance to do so in the Pacific conspicuous, as Roosevelt never fully resolved the dissent between General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz as to which route to take to defeat Japan. To his credit Daniels does not take sides either, preferring to illuminate both the military and diplomatic factors involved which made such a choice virtually impossible,
  
  In writing this volume, Daniels provides readers with a rarity: a complete, multi-volume survey of Franklin Roosevelt's career and his achievements. For all those who have attempted such a task only one author has succeeded in doing what Daniels has accomplished, and for all of its merits James MacGregor Burns's own two-volume study (the second volume of which came out nearly half a century ago) is getting increasingly long in the tooth. Readers seeking such a detailed work should turn instead to Daniels's perceptive study of Roosevelt, as it is likely to stand unequaled for some time in the thoroughness of its analysis of his life and achievements.
• 
  David Lucander

  This huge book is history for historians, academic in every meaning of the work - comprehensively researched, extraordinarily detailed, and sometimes a little boring. The book is Daniels' labor of love, a retirement project that just happened to turn into two volumes. The author does a good job proving his thesis: FDR used words to nudge the public (and congress) towards his objectives. To accomplish this, Daniels used pretty much every document available at the FDR archives. Both volumes are definitely something that should be on the shelf of any academic who works in the field of U.S. History, but I don't think it's the kind of book that a casual history reader or FDR buff is going to love getting in to.
  
  I wish that the book was more ambitious and had a more compelling thesis, as well as a punchy intro/epilogue where Daniels' voice could really come out. It also would have been neat to get more insight about FDR's meeting with A. Philip Randolph and his evolution on civil rights, the various conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor, and the ways he was involved in military tactics like the D-Day invasion.
  
  Going 4.5 stars for research, 2 stars for readability.
  
  I read both volumes, am cross-posting sections of this review under each titles.