 |
|
Title: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
ISBN: 0385519583
Author:
H.W. Brands
Publicate Date: 2008-11-04
Publish: 2008-11-04
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
 |
|
|
|
|
Amazon Lowest New Price: $14.39
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $13.25
Amazon Merchant Price: $23.10
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Customer Review: |
|
1: Excellent audio book
I bought this audio book as a Christmas gift for myself. I've been listening to it as I commute to and from work and am thoroughly enjoying it. The reading is well done and the content is very good.
|
2: Born to Lead
This is an excellent book: scholarly, insightful, entertaining. One can't help but admire the courageous leader who guided us through the Great Depression and the greatest war in history. FDR overcame polio, which gave him an inner strength and a deeper sensitivity to others. He fought hard for the rights of the average guy, though he certainly never was one. Whether during the depths of the depression or the darkest days of the war, Franklin Roosevelt exuded a genuine confidence which helped to reassure the people of the U.S. He was a natural leader.
It's kind of sad that FDR had no close friends--no one he could speak with on intimate terms--not even his wife and children. But it was perhaps this trait that allowed him to focus completely on the task at hand. He loved being President.
H.W.Brands obviously has a great amount of admiration for FDR. My only criticism of the book is that this admiration sometimes borders on worship. FDR wasn't perfect. He had flaws. He would lie, manipulate, and cheat to get his way. Harry Truman once said that one thing he learned about FDR in their short tenure together was that"He lies"--to anyone and everyone if it suited his needs. Brands touches on this a bit, but he never satisfactorily explores this side of FDR. It's an important part of Roosevelt's personality, and it is the main reason why a number of Americans hated him (in my grandparent's house, you weren't even allowed to mention his name).
I was also somewhat disappointed that Brands didn't deal with Eleanor Roosevelt's alleged lesbianism. He quotes from letters of hers and her friends that seem to indicate there was something more than friendship between them, but he offers no commentary.
This is an excellent biography, nonetheless, and H.W.Brands must certainly be ranked among our country's elite historians.
|
3: Traitor to His Class
I purchased this book as a Christmas gift for my husband. He has been reading this gift since that day. His opinion is that it is very informative and interesting and will recommend it to anyone.
|
4: Is it necessary?
I'm not sure if we another book on FDR. No new ground is truly broken here, though it is always enjoyable to read about out greatest president.
|
5: "A politician, not an ideologue"
The literature about Franklin Delano Roosevelt is enormous, rivaling in sheer bulk that on Napoleon, Lincoln and Jesus Christ.
Many of us can remember when any new book about FDR came with a built-in partisan agenda of either fulsome praise or furious denunciation. Many of those books came from people who had known and worked with Roosevelt. Only in fairly recent years have we reached the point where dispassionate historians can have their say, free from the whirring sound of grinding axes.
H. W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, has weighed in with a richly detailed and well-written 824-page biography that rates high marks among the many single-volume treatments still in print. His basic verdict is favorable, but he is careful to note FDR's failings, both personal and political. TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS is neither whitewash nor prosecutorial indictment.
Roosevelt's well-known career trajectory is covered in workmanlike detail: New York state senator and later governor, assistant secretary of the navy, losing candidate for vice president in 1920, polio victim, and finally the only person in American history elected four times to the Presidency. The equally familiar details of his private life are also present: his difficult relationship with a domineering mother, his essentially loveless marriage to his cousin Eleanor (complicated, if more complication were needed, by his affair with Lucy Mercer), his wily political machinations in pursuit of self-advancement, his intense personal loyalty to trusted aides like Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins, and his careful manipulation of wartime relations with Churchill and Stalin, who may have been allies against the Nazis but were also leaders with agendas that did not always jibe with Roosevelt's wishes.
Brands teases out of the historical record ample detail about Roosevelt's well-known tactic of putting two or three people to work on the same problem independently, so he could cherry-pick ideas from each and decide on his own approach. The author also illuminates FDR's ability to give petitioners the impression that he agreed with them while not really making any specific commitments to action. Brands deftly crafts a neutral way to describe this, dubbing FDR "artful" in preserving his "intellectual autonomy." He was, says Brands, "a politician, not an ideologue."
The wide-ranging array of New Deal programs with which he fought against the Depression were, in Brands's phrase "extemporaneous and improvisatory," which seems a fair judgment. Some of them worked and some of them did not --- the most ill-advised being his effort to pack the Supreme Court with justices more in tune with his program after the Court had invalidated a large part of the New Deal as unconstitutional.
Brands also reminds us of Roosevelt's constant need to protect himself against the powerful isolationist bloc in Congress, which opposed his every move toward war preparations right up to the moment of Pearl Harbor. FDR lacked the luxuries of Churchill's "unity government" or Stalin's iron-fisted dictatorship. Even today there are those who still claim that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance but let it happen as a means of getting the U.S. into World War II --- a claim that Brands dismisses as unfounded. He also quotes Roosevelt's candid assessment of the 1945 Yalta agreements with Stalin, a longtime focal point of conservative ire (and charges of treason). Roosevelt reported to Congress that they were "the best I could do," which is pretty close to the verdict commonly accepted today.
When Roosevelt was gearing up to run for the Presidency in 1932, columnist Walter Lippmann famously dismissed him as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." This may well have been accurate --- but Brands, after an exhaustive examination of the record of FDR's 12-year Presidency, concludes that he rose brilliantly to the challenge.
Can it be that history may repeat itself 76 years later? Stay tuned.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
|
|
|
|
|
