FDR in Soft Focus
I went into this book wanting to understand Franklin Roosevelt after watching his enormous footprints on other lives, from TR to president Johnson. I came out unsure whether I was disappointed in FDR or in how Smith chose to write about him. In the end I finished with more questions than answers, especially about Franklin and Eleanor, along with his legacy in the economy and post WW2 world.
The book never really explains what FDR had going for him beyond being in office at the right times. On the New Deal, I was hoping for at least a minimal economic verdict—did it work, how, for whom? Instead we mostly get Roosevelt’s own line: we tried things, and if they didn’t work, we tried something else. That may describe his temperament, nearing 100 years later we should be able to do better than a newspaper treatment.
World War II has the same problem. FDR comes off as “generally presidential” but not especially principled or decisive. There’s no clear statement of what he thought the war was for, and no defining moment where he alone sets the course. Churchill and Stalin seem to shape the conflict; Truman seems to shape the postwar world. The book doesn’t do work to argue otherwise.
In the end, FDR feels here like a predecessor to Kennedy: more flash than substance, with the image echoing down through history. For a three-plus-term president who governed through the Depression and World War II, this is a surprisingly light treatment—thin on military, political, and economic strategy, and oddly silent on his legacy. One star for each term.