Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCarew examines the middle years of FDR’s presidency. Whereas other scholars have criticized FDR's leadership during these years, Carew considers these Roosevelt's most effective years because the president 'recalibrated the priorities of his administration' to meet challenges from abroad. The historiography of this period is more complex than Carew claims, but he presents a competent, textbook-style study of Roosevelt’s policies from 1938 to 1942, making references to FDR's naval expertise. FDR was determined to avoid Wilson’s mistakes, particularly the lack of preparedness that hampered the US war effort in 1917. Roosevelt worked in these middle years to convince the US public to aid those fighting the Axis and to mobilize the US economy to make the necessary supplies while increasing the strength of the US military. During this time, he also crafted a new US military and defense strategy, one designed to achieve total victory over the enemy. It is this strategy that Carew analyzes. After Pearl Harbor, FDR undertook to lead the allied coalition and ensure a postwar world based on US principles, a task Carew claims FDR completed with the 1943 Casablanca Conference. Carew's connections between the two wars will interest nonspecialists. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. * CHOICE *
In the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Michael G. Carew’s analysis of the conflict’s impact on American thinking a generation later is an insightful and most welcome addition to the literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. -- J. Simon Rofe, SOAS, University of London
Table of ContentsList of Tables Acknowledgments Chapter 1 The Problem of Roosevelt’s Middle Years Chapter 2 Powers and Constraints of Presidential Leadership Chapter 3 Franklin Roosevelt and Naval Strategy Chapter 4 The Legacy of World War I Chapter 5 From Isolation to Neutrality to Rearmament, 1938-1940 Chapter 6 The Shocks of Circumstances, 1940 Chapter 7 Setting the Strategic Direction, 1941 Chapter 8 The Logic of Ends and Means Chapter 9 The Evolution of a Diplomatic-Military Strategy Chapter 10 The Pursuit of the “Inevitable Triumph” Bibliography Index
