Before Pearl Harbor, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, America teetered between the desire for isolation and the threat of world war. May 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt—recently reelected to a second term as president—sat in the Oval Office and contemplated two possibilities: the rule of fascism overseas, and a third term. With Hitler's reach extending into Austria, and with the atrocities of World War I still fresh in the American memory, Roosevelt faced the question that would prove one of the most defining in American history: whether to once again go to war in Europe. In The Sphinx, Nicholas Wapshott recounts how an ambitious and resilient Roosevelt—nicknamed "the Sphinx" for his cunning, cryptic rapport with the press—devised and doggedly pursued a strategy to sway the American people to abandon isolationism and take up the mantle of the world's most powerful nation. Chief among Roosevelt’s antagonists was his friend Joseph P. Kennedy, a stock market magnate and the patriarch of what was to become one of the nation's most storied dynasties. Kennedy's financial, political, and personal interests aligned him with a war-weary American public, and he counted among his isolationist allies no less than Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and Henry Ford—prominent businessmen who believed America had no business in conflicts across the Atlantic. The ensuing battle—waged with fiery rhetoric, agile diplomacy, media sabotage, and petty political antics—would land US troops in Europe within three years, secure Roosevelt's legacy, and set a standard for American military strategy for years to come. With millions of lives—and a future paradigm of foreign intervention—hanging in the balance, The Sphinx captures a political giant at the height of his powers and an American identity crisis that continues to this day.
67 Ibid., p. 80. 68 Ibid., pp. 79–80. 69 F. A. Hayek in Commanding Heights, PBS, ... “The Economics of Leon Hirsch Keyserling,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 11, no. 4, Fall 1997, pp. 189–197. 15 Oral history interview with ...
Matthews to William Shirer, 20 March 1968, H. Freeman Matthews Papers; MacArthur II, Foreign Affairs Oral History, p. 15. ... Henry Adams, Witness to Power: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, ...
Carter's approval rating in the polls continued to slide.2 Samuelson thought Carter had wished the bad economic news on himself. If he was to stand any chance of being reelected, the president needed to do something dramatic to break ...
80 Peter S. Goodman, “Shift in Trade Around Globe: To Go It Alone,” New York Times. December 15, 2019. 81 Ian Bremmer, “Worlds Apart,” Time, March 4, 2019, 18. In a 2019 survey by the Center for American Progress, researchers concluded, ...
Veteran journalist Mitgang has written a flavorful account of New York City politics during the 1920s Jazz Age centering around the intersecting careers of the city's popular mayor, Jimmy Walker, and the state's patrician governor, Franklin ...
My agent Kathy Robbins has been a constant source of encouragement and good advice. I am lucky to have had Bernadette Malone Serton as my editor at Sentinel. She was enormously enthusiastic about the idea of this book from the start and ...
... 2003); Manfred F. Boeneke, Gerald Feldman and Elizabeth, eds, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Norman A. Graebner and Edward Bennett, The Versailles Treaty and the ...
Administration policy theoretically barred Ford from receiving government contracts because the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had repeatedly cited the company for violations of the Wagner Act, but Knudsen had overruled Hillman ...
This book looks at how this legacy, both for good and ill, informs the current debates around governmental responses to crises.
David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (New York: Scribner, 1998), 187. 2. Stephen Bodio, A Sportsman's Library: 100 Essential, Engaging, Offbeat, and Occasionally Odd Fishing and Hunting Books for the Adventurous Reader ...