Covering the longest-serving US president (1933–45) in one volume is a formidable task, one for which Robert Dallek is well equipped. A political historian with five decades of writings on the echelons of power behind him, Dallek has crafted a lively, reader- friendly narrative perfect for the Roosevelt neophyte, one that is far from essential for those well versed in the field. Dallek’s challenge is finding something new to say about Roosevelt. Straight out of the gate there is a stumble, as Dallek presents the book’s central argument: ‘Roosevelt, like his cousin Theodore, was an instinctively brilliant politician … I believe that my emphasis on his political judgment goes far to set my book apart from other biographies.’ Most Roosevelt biographers, however, stress Roosevelt’s political artistry. It would be difficult to avoid. A more interesting point comes later in the introduction, as Dallek stresses that he will examine Roosevelt’s health towards the end of his life, emphasising that he became ill earlier than claimed. There are shades here of Dallek’s previous work on John F. Kennedy (An Unfinished Life, 2003), which made an original contribution to the historical literature by exploring in exhaustive detail the various illness and medications that Kennedy dealt with across the course of his life. Examining Roosevelt in a similar way, particularly in the crucial years from 1942 to 1945, provides much needed insight on the conduct of World War II and the origins of the Cold War.

Mostly, Dallek hits the same beats as other Roosevelt biographers. No matter how many times the story gets told, however, it continues to fascinate. Born into New York aristocracy in 1882, Roosevelt grew up surrounded by wealth and power. Determined to follow in the political footsteps, if not the party affiliation, of his distant cousin Theodore (president from 1901 to 1909), he rose rapidly and in 1920 became the Democratic nominee for vice-president. While that race was lost to the Republicans, the future looked bright. Then, disaster struck. While holidaying with his family, he contracted polio which rendered him unable to walk properly; he relied on metal calipers, a wheelchair, and sheer bravado to be erect.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, 1920 (Wikimedia Commons)Roosevelt refused to bow out of politics and won the governorship of New York on the eve of the Great Depression. As the country plunged into crisis, and with Herbert Hoover failing to provide leadership from the White House, Roosevelt was able to make a successful bid for the Democratic nomination for president, breaking with generations of tradition by flying to the convention to accept his party’s banner in person, exemplifying an energetic, forward-looking leadership. Winning an electoral college landslide against the hapless Hoover (who maintained a sullen silence throughout Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933), this scion of New York privilege promised a ‘New Deal’ for the American people, radically transforming the economy through government programs that laid the foundation for the welfare state. In doing so, he attracted criticism from the right and the left, with the former accusing him of dictatorial tendencies, and the latter accusing him of not going far enough with social change. Dallek deftly draws out these fights, showing how FDR’s middle ground prevented a possible revolution and essentially saved democracy in the United States.

The outbreak of World War II presented a difficult challenge for Roosevelt. Convinced that he was the only one who could lead the United States, he won an unprecedented third term in 1940, as well as trying to nudge a significant proportion of isolationists both in Congress and the wider American society to allow aid to be given to the embattled Allies. Dallek’s accounts of these fights make for gripping reading, although readers of his Bancroft Prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (1979) will hear echoes of that work in these pages. The attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 brought the United States decisively into the war, establishing it by the end as a superpower.

These were also complicated years when considering Roosevelt’s historical reputation. His decision to run for a third and then a fourth term brought accusations of dictatorship. The relationship with his estranged wife, Eleanor, was tense, as she had established herself as a formidable public figure in her own right. More problematically, his internment of Japanese-Americans during the war years was a grotesque violation of the constitutional rights of people who were American citizens. Like many Roosevelt biographers, Dallek moves quickly past this part of Roosevelt’s time in office, preferring to focus on equally troubling questions like Roosevelt’s health. While still sound when he ran for the presidency in 1940, it was obvious by his tilt in 1944 that he was dying. Playing upon the themes that dominated his earlier work on John F. Kennedy, Dallek here argues that Roosevelt was probably much sicker, and earlier, than historians have commonly accepted. The cardiologist report in March of 1944 paints a grim picture of: ‘A sixty-two-year-old-man in declining health with symptoms of significantly elevated blood pressure … classic signs of long-standing hypertension; an enlarged heart; congestive heart failure; an ashen countenance and blue lips … as well as pulmonary disease; acute bronchitis…and severe anemia.’

Franklin D. Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, 1932 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons)

This was Roosevelt’s condition only months before Yalta, the conference with Churchill and Stalin that formed the blueprint for the postwar world order. It remains debatable if the end of one global conflict and the start of another in the form of the Cold War would have been different if Roosevelt had lived. His death on 12 April 1945 (just weeks into his fourth term) marked the end of an era. Robert Dallek has written a lively, fast-moving narrative ideal for those yet to be exposed to the life of one of America’s great presidents. In a time of international turbulence and economic dislocation, the lessons of the Roosevelt presidency still have relevancy today.