Nations supported by FDR, the resurgent British Empire supported by Churchill, Stalin’s Soviet Empire, oddly objected to not at all by President Roosevelt, though strenuously objected to by Churchill, at least most of the time.

For some reason, though the British Empire raised the New Dealers’ hackles, Stalin’s land grab almost never did. How does one explain it? In Lehrman’s treatment of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, a light bulb went off in my mind. Morgenthau was the eponym for the Morgenthau Plan by which post-war Germany would be deindustrialized and returned to it “pastoral” stage in the 19th century. For a brief period in 1944 the crackpot plan was thought plausible, even by the President. Who was behind it? Well, Harry Dexter White was an energetic force,the Obama people viewed their Progressives until recently. Maybe the Communists of the New Deal were not all that dangerous to our national security. At least some of them were not, but there were the Rosenbergs and of course Alger Hiss, whom the Nation magazine still pines for.

Lehrman is particularly good on this aspect of the war, but he is very informative on other aspects too. His research is overwhelming and he writes elegantly. One final point, his treatment of FDR in the Age of Trump is worth contemplating. Roosevelt was the first of the modern presidents as Trump is the first of the post-modern presidents. Roosevelt was a great campaigner, who ran an unwieldy government seemingly according to his own whim. He did things his way independent