War and Peace

December 1, 2018

Following Mantle of Command and Commander in Chief, this work concludes award-winning biographer Hamilton's account of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at war, strategizing for D-day, then war's end as he battles mortal disease while planning for the war's end and what lay beyond. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2019
The final installment of the biographer's significant study of Franklin Roosevelt's sine qua non leadership in World War II. It seems safe to say that, following his Commander in Chief: FDR'S Battle with Churchill, 1943 (2016), Hamilton is not Winston Churchill's greatest admirer. As this volume recounts frequently and at length, Churchill often attempted to assert British leadership of the tripartite alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, especially by pressing not for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe but instead for a push up through Italy, "an alternative Mediterranean strategy" that had the virtue, for Churchill, of taking place in a theater that was largely in the British sphere to begin with. Churchill's strategy endangered one of D-Day's lesser-known effects: The Western Allies' pledge to open a second front in continental Europe would in turn produce a deepening of the war in the East--so Stalin promised, at any rate, while nursing a private bitterness that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the fight. Meanwhile, Germany exploited the weaknesses that emerged by floating hints of making a separate peace, with Joseph Goebbels noting in his diary that "Americans have only a secondary interest in the war in Europe and are only inspired by the war against Japan." Even so, and against the odds, the Allies held together, an achievement that Hamilton credits to FDR's unwavering leadership even in the face of Churchill's maneuvering--and even though FDR, by the author's account, knew that he was dying and still pressed on. The fact that those German offers were floated in March 1945, however--no secret from Hitler but a deliberate strategy--increased the Soviet mistrust of the Western powers and, Hamilton suggests, may have "presaged the Cold War" that followed the defeat of the Axis powers. Of considerable interest to students of presidential and American military history, though likely to court criticism from the Churchill camp.

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April 8, 2019
Hamilton (Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle with Churchill) closes out his trilogy focusing on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in WWII with this thorough and deliberate recounting of the final months of Roosevelt’s life, during which he suffered through increasingly poor health while leading the U.S. toward the end of the war. Hamilton aims “not only to chart with fresh clarity how dire was his affliction, but how exactly it affected his decisions and once masterly performance as commander in chief of the Western Allies.” Hamilton shows how Roosevelt “held the feet of the British to the D-Day fire” during the 1943 Tehran meetings, when Churchill began to doubt the war strategy prior to meeting with Stalin. Returning from that success, Roosevelt’s health took a turn for the worse; what first seemed to be a bout of flu was more serious cardiac complications. While ill, he won an unprecedented fourth term as president, rekindled an affair with Lucy Rutherfurd, and met again with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta to plan for a postwar world order, including the founding of the United Nations. The depth of coverage of these 17 months may be more than some readers desire, but it vividly recreates FDR’s decline and makes his accomplishments all the more impressive. Like its predecessors in the trilogy, this volume will reward readers of WWII and presidential history. Illus.

Starred review from May 15, 2019
Concluding his three-volume study of FDR's WWII leadership (Mantle of Command, 2014; Commander in Chief, 2016), Hamilton examines the president's influence on the climax of the conflict. Asserting that historians have neglected FDR's point of view, he reconstructs it from thorough integration of eyewitness evidence of seemingly everyone who interacted with Roosevelt. Beginning with FDR's 1943 journey to Iran, Hamilton lauds his subject for insisting, against strenuous British objections, that D-Day be launched in early 1944. If details about how his selection of Eisenhower as commander at Normandy illustrate FDR-in-charge, his leadership skills markedly eroded when his health drastically declined in late 1943, leading to his death in 1945. That he decided to stand for election in 1944, despite medical advice that he would not survive another presidential term, poses the question, Why did he? An answer, Hamilton suggests, lies in the reappearance in FDR's life of Lucy Rutherford, a former flame whose renewed friendship seems to have provided emotional support. Generally approving FDR's war decisions in his remaining months, Hamilton ably presents a work that meets any interest in FDR's wartime role and the establishment of what he hoped would preserve the peace?the UN.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)