Franklin Delano Roosevelt: (1882-1945)

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When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Roosevelt once again defied prevailing opinion. To the isolationists, the invasion of Russia confirmed the wisdom of keeping America out of the war. America should rejoice, they argued, in watching two hated dictatorships bleed each other to death. Within the government, Roosevelt's military advisers argued that Russia had almost no chance of holding out. Still, Roosevelt insisted on including Russia in the lend-lease agreement. In the first year alone, America sent thousands of trucks, tanks, guns and bombers to Russia, along with enough food to keep Russian soldiers from starving, and enough cotton, blankets, shoes and boots to clothe the entire Russian army. The forbearance of the Russian army, in turn, bought the Allies the precious asset of time--time to mobilize the U.S. economy to produce the vast supply of weapons that was needed to catch up with and eventually surpass the Axis powers.

Roosevelt's critics were certain he would straitjacket the free-enterprise system once America began mobilizing for war. Through his first two terms, business had been driven by an almost primitive hostility to Roosevelt, viewing his support for the welfare state and organized labor as an act of betrayal of his class. Indeed, so angry were many Republican businessmen at Roosevelt that they refused even to say the President's name, referring to him simply as "that man in the White House." Yet, under Roosevelt's wartime leadership, the government entered into the most productive partnership with private enterprise the country had ever seen, bringing top businessmen in to run the production agencies, exempting business from antitrust laws, allowing business to write off the full cost of investments and guaranteeing a substantial profit. The output was staggering. By 1943, American production had not only caught up with Germany's 10-year lead but America was also outproducing all the Axis and the Allied powers combined, contributing nearly 300,000 planes, 100,000 tanks, 2 million trucks and 87,000 warships to the Allied cause. "The figures are all so astronomical," historian Bruce Catton marveled. "It was the equivalent of building two Panama Canals every month, with a fat surplus to boot."

Above all, Roosevelt possessed a magnificent sense of timing. He understood when to invoke the prestige of the presidency and when to hold it in reserve. He picked a first-class military team--General George Marshall, Admiral Ernest King, General Henry Arnold and Admiral William Leahy--and gave its members wide latitude to run the war. Yet at critical junctures he forced action, and almost all those actions had a salutary effect on the war. He personally made the hotly debated decision to invade North Africa; he decided to spend $2 billion on an experimental atom bomb; and he demanded the Allies commit themselves to a postwar structure before the war was over.