F.D.R. in Wartime

ROOSEVELT: THE SOLDIER OF FREEDOM by James MacGregor Burns. 722 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $10.

This book concludes a two-part biography begun 14 years ago with the publication of Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, a brilliant, admiring portrait of F.D.R. The first book focused sharply on the peculiar combination of idealism, political instinct and guile that allowed F.D.R. to bend events to his will in the exciting days of the various New Deals. The Soldier of Freedom necessarily takes a broader world view with far less penetrating results. Huge chunks of the book turn out to be rewrites of World War II history. Roosevelt is wheeled on and off the world stage; he never really dominates it. Although he presided over the mightiest military forces ever assembled, the skills that Roosevelt refined so remarkably in the domestic arena of the 1930s were not quite enough to let him control the conduct of a global war.

In 1941, the international balance was full of imponderables and uncertainties. But, Burns writes, "Roosevelt did not perceive them in this kind of systematic, categorized frame. He still preferred to deal with situations piecemeal, plucking the day's problem out of the tangle of events." Roosevelt's weaknesses in international dealings showed most obviously later, in his attempts to handle Joseph Stalin—but they were evident almost from the beginning. Convinced that the fall of Britain would be a disaster for the U.S., he seemed uncertain about what he could or should do to prevent it. Burns describes F.D.R. making up his mind bit by bit, never getting too far ahead of most of his own constituents; indeed, the White House was desperately scanning public-opinion polls long before that practice became a norm of presidential behavior under Lyndon Johnson. "I am waiting to be pushed into the situation," Roosevelt confided to Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1941.

Perhaps the President's main failing lay in the buoyant optimism that had served a discouraged U.S. so well in the depressed 1930s. Always he had "confidence in his ability to persuade people face to face." In 1941, he would have liked to arrange a Pacific rendezvous with Japan's Premier Fumimaro Konoye, failing to comprehend (as Burns puts it) "that there were few misunderstandings between the two countries, only differences." Later, with the U.S. formally at war in Europe as well as Asia, he failed to perceive that the same observation would have applied just as well to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.