Franklin Roosevelt's Sunday morning began as most of his Sundays began: with a cigarette and the Sunday papers in bed. He wasn't a regular churchgoer, confining his attendance mainly to special occasions: weddings, funerals, his three inaugurations. In his youth and young adulthood he had often spent Sundays on the golf course, but his golfing days were long over, to his lasting regret. This Sunday morning--the first Sunday of December 1941--he read about himself in the papers. The New York Times gave him the top head, explaining how he had sent a personal appeal for peace to the Japanese emperor. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post, which provided similar coverage, included the substance of his appeal, as he had directed the State Department to release only the fact of his having approached the emperor. This way he got credit for his efforts on behalf of peace without having to acknowledge how hopeless those efforts were. The papers put the burden of warmongering on Japan; the government in Tokyo declared that its "patience" with the Western powers was at an end. Heavy movements of Japanese troops in occupied Indochina--movements about which Roosevelt had quietly released corroborating information--suggested an imminent thrust against Thailand or Malaya.

Sharing the headlines with the prospect of war in the Pacific was the reality of war in the Atlantic and Europe. The German offensive against the Soviet Union, begun the previous June, seemed to have stalled just short of Moscow. Temperatures of twenty below zero were punishing the German attackers, searing their flesh and freezing their crankcases. The Germans were forced to find shelter from the cold; the front apparently had locked into place for the winter. On the Atlantic, the British had just sunk a German commerce raider, or so they claimed. The report from the war zone was sketchy and unconfirmed. The admiralty in London volunteered that its cruiser Dorsetshire had declined to look for survivors, as it feared German submarines in the area.

Roosevelt supposed he'd get the details from Winston Churchill. The president and the prime minister shared a love of the sea, and Churchill, since assuming his current office eighteen months ago, had made a point of apprising Roosevelt of aspects of the naval war kept secret from others outside the British government. Churchill and Roosevelt wrote each other several times a week; they spoke by telephone less often but still regularly.

An inside account of the war was the least the prime minister could provide, as Roosevelt was furnishing Churchill and the British the arms and equipment that kept their struggle against Germany alive. Until now Roosevelt had left the actual fighting to the British, but he made certain they got what they needed to remain in the battle.

The situation might change at any moment, though, the Sunday papers implied. The Navy Department--which was to say, Roosevelt--had just ordered the seizure of Finnish vessels in American ports, on the ground that Finland had become a de facto member of the Axis alliance. Navy secretary Frank Knox, reporting to Congress on the war readiness of the American fleet, assured the legislators that it was "second to none." Yet it still wasn't strong enough, Knox said. "The international situation is such that we must arm as rapidly as possible to meet our naval defense requirements simultaneously in both oceans against any possible combination of powers concerting against us."

Roosevelt read these remarks with satisfaction. The president had long prided himself on clever appointments, but no appointment had tickled him...

 

"H.W. Brands is a master at finding the essence of an important American life, telling its story grippingly and showing us why it is important to our own generation.  With Traitor to His Class, he has surpassed even his own high standard.  This judicious and compelling work is the first major one-volume biography written by an historian too young to have lived in Franklin Roosevelt's time.  It deserves a wide audience, especially among those younger Americans who need to be told why we all owe so much to FDR."

 

"This is a rare book, indeed, shedding new light and brilliant insight upon an elusive subject we thought we knew well.  In this elegant, all-encompassing portrayal, master historian H. W. Brands shows us a leader who got the big issues right and, in doing so, forever changed the expectations of the world.  Traitor to His Class will quickly emerge as the finest one-volume biography of FDR."

 

"We live in the world Franklin Roosevelt created, and we can never know enough about him. In this illuminating portrait of the man who proved far more radical than his upbringing would have ever suggested, H. W. Brands has painted FDR in bright and brilliant colors."

 

"H.W. Brands has accomplished a remarkable feat in this terrific work. As if he were creating characters in a novel, he has brought to vivid life the central figures in his story--FDR, Eleanor, Sara Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the inner circle in the White House--while at the same time providing a fresh understanding of the rich historical context for their thoughts and actions at every step along the way."

 

"H.W. Brands's wonderful new biography of Roosevelt...shows the precision and attention to detail that one would expect from a scholar and, at the same time, reads like a novel...it is rich in insights and fresh perspectives that will appeal to the expert and the general reader alike. This may well be the best general biography of Franklin Roosevelt we will see for many years to come."

 

"Very much worth reading."

 

"Impressive...Roosevelt was prepared to be radical to meet dangerous circumstances. Yet his instincts and the outcomes of many of his policies were often conservative. As a radical, he saved the old order--and advanced Ameriacn power more than any president since Jefferson...Courage, charm, resourceful cunning and a hidden hardness enabled him to save American capitalism, though, as he said himself, it was Dr. Win-the-War, not Dr. New Deal, that ended the Depression. Mr. Brands is masterly in describing the patience with which FDR brought the country to understand the danger of fascism."

 

"The longest-serving president in U.S. history, Roosevelt was arguably the most inscrutable. He kept no diary, wrote no autobiography and unburdened himself to no one. Even his wife had no idea what was on his mind...Brands explains in detail how this ambitious Hudson Valley patrician, the coddled son of an elderly father and dominating mother, managed to defy his family and social class and become the most reform-minded president in U.S. history."

 

H. W. BRANDS is the Dickson Allen Anderson Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of Andrew Jackson, Lone Star Nation, and The Age of Gold, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography for The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. He lives in Austin,...

Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands
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