Praising Roosevelt.(Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom)(Book Review)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom By Conrad Black Public Affairs, 1,360 pages, $39.95

In May 1940, Hitler's armies opened their Blitzkrieg across the western front, a portent of the horrors that were to engulf much of the world for the next five years. When informed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a series of strategic decisions and went to bed, enjoying--as he invariably did--a sound and unperturbed sleep. A man who was under severe and near-constant political and physical duress for the better part of two decades managed to endure and prevail by drawing on an inexhaustible supply of confidence and foresight. According to Conrad Black's admiring, sprawling biography, Roosevelt's greatest achievement was that he was able to instill this same decisive confidence in an economically paralyzed, isolationist nation. Under FDR's guidance the U.S. became the global guarantor of democracy, and indeed of civilization and prosperity.

Black makes many such grandiose claims, and his (at times over detailed) treatment of FDR's achievements establishes the general validity of most boasts. Black presents a nuanced estimation of Roosevelt in domestic and foreign contexts as a charming occupier of the center in American politics, fending off challengers from the Left and from the Right. The result, according to Black, was "one of those rare leaders whose talents are as well deployed and as successful in war as in peace."

This book's imposing size allows for elaborate embroidering of FDR's rise through local New York politics to his command of the Democratic Party, the nation, and the Allies. Many of the thumbnail sketches and pocket histories provided along the way are enjoyably insightful, especially the pictures of Joseph Kennedy and of the Tehran conference. Black can get bogged down in pet interests, though, such as flogging Eleanor Roosevelt's meddling in policy matters, delving into New Deal economic arcana, and analyzing post-1940 French politics. Black highlights Roosevelt's famous ability to maintain a Sphinx-like ambiguity on fractious issues. Roosevelt would delegate difficult disputes to secondaries and warring parties, and intervene only when necessary to ensure political success or the national interest. (One of Black's central claims is that these latter two factors were inextricably linked during Roosevelt's terms.)

Chapters on the New Deal exhaustively re-create the policy debates and financial strategies with which FDR's administration tried to revive an economically and psychologically depressed nation. Black judges the New Deal as "passing but not brilliant economics," but "a masterly ...