The War Within World War II

Historian Thomas Fleming brings to life the flawed and troubled FDR who struggled to manage WWII. Starting with the leak to the press of Roosevelt's famous Rainbow Plan, then spiralling back to FDR's inept prewar diplomacy with Japan, and his various attempts to lure Japan into an attack on the US Fleet in the Pacific, Fleming takes the reader inside the incredibly fractious struggles and debates that went on in Washington, the nation and the world as FDR strove to impose his will on the conduct of the War. Unlike the idealized FDR of Doris Kearns Goodwin's "No Ordinary Time", here the reader encounters a Roosevelt in remorseless decline, battered by ideological forces and primitive hatreds which he could not handle - and frequently failed to understand - some of them leading to unimaginable catastrophe. Among FDR's most dismaying policies, Fleming argues, were an insistence on "unconditional surrender" for Germany (a policy that perhaps prolonged the war by as many as two years, leaving millions more dead) and his often uncritical embrace of and acquiescence to Stalin and the Soviets as an ally. For many people Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an almost mythical figure. "The War Within World War II" paints a very different portrait of this leadership. It is sure to spark debate.