To awaken his country from its isolationist slumber, Roosevelt began a long, urgent, eloquent campaign of popular education, warning that unchecked aggression abroad would ultimately endanger the U.S. itself. "Let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy," he said. The debate in 1940-41 between isolationists and interventionists was the most passionate political argument of my lifetime. It came to an abrupt end when Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

As war leader, F.D.R. picked an extraordinary team of generals and admirals. In partnership with Churchill, he presided over the vital strategic decisions. And also, in the footsteps of Wilson, he was determined that victory should produce a framework for lasting world peace.

He saw the war as bringing about historic changes — the rise of Russia and China, for example, and the end of Western colonialism. He tried to persuade the British to give India its independence and tried to stop the French from repossessing Indochina. In the Four Freedoms and, with Churchill, in the Atlantic Charter, he proclaimed war aims in words that continue to express the world's aspirations today.

Remembering America's reversion to isolationism after World War I, he set out to involve the U.S. in postwar structures while the war was still on and the country still in an internationalist frame of mind. "Anybody who thinks that isolationism is dead in this country is crazy," he said privately. "As soon as this war is over, it may well be stronger than ever."

In a series of conferences in 1944, he committed the country to international mechanisms in a variety of fields — finance and trade, relief and reconstruction, food and agriculture, civil aviation. Most of all, he saw the United Nations, in the words of the diplomat Charles E. Bohlen, as "the only device that could keep the U.S. from slipping back into isolationism." He arranged for the U.N.'s founding conference to take place in San Francisco before the war was over (though it turned out to be after his own death in April 1945 at the age of 63).

The great riddle for the peace was the Soviet Union. Perhaps Roosevelt, as some argue, should have conditioned aid to Russia during the war on pledges of postwar good behavior. But the fate of the second front in the west depended on the Red Army's holding down Nazi divisions in the east, and neither Roosevelt nor Churchill wanted to delay Stalin's military offensives — or to drive him to make a separate peace with Hitler.

With the war approaching its end, the two democratic leaders met Stalin at Yalta. Some say that this meeting brought about the division of Europe. In fact, far from endorsing Soviet control of Eastern Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill secured from Stalin pledges of "the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people." Stalin had to break the Yalta agreements to achieve his ends — which would seem to prove the agreements were more in the Western than the Soviet interest. In fact, Eastern Europe today is what the Yalta Declarations mandated in 1945.

Take a look at our present world. It is manifestly not Adolf Hitler's world. His Thousand-Year Reich turned out to have a brief and bloody run of a dozen years. It is manifestly not Joseph Stalin's world. That ghastly world self-destructed before our eyes. Nor is it Winston Churchill's world. Empire and its glories have long since vanished into history.

The world we live in today is Franklin Roosevelt's world. Of the figures who for good or evil dominated the planet 60 years ago, he would be least surprised by the shape of things at the millennium. And confident as he was of the power and vitality of democracy, he would welcome the challenges posed by the century to come.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said Isaiah Berlin, was one of the few statesmen in any century "who seemed to have no fear at all of the future."

Pulitzer prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author of The Age of Roosevelt. He is currently at work on his memoirs

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