Black - Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

Conrad Black is a graduate of Carleton, Laval, and McGill universities in history and law and is the author of two other works of nonfiction, including an authoritative biography of one of French Canadas most successful political leaders. His articles and reviews on various subjects have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Interest, and American Spectator, as well as many British and Canadian publications. Conrad Black was the chairman of the London Daily and Sunday Telegraph from 1987 to 2004, the founding publisher of the National Post of Canada, and, with associates, is the controlling shareholder of Hollinger International, which owns the Chicago Sun-Times and many other newspapers. He has been a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour since 2001. Conrad Black is married to the writer Barbara Amiel Black, has three children from his previous marriage, and divides his time between London, New York, and Toronto.

Praise for

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

However unexpected, this enormous book is also one of the best one-volume biographies of Roosevelt yet.... It tells the remarkable story of Roosevelts life with an engaging eloquence and with largely personal and mostly interesting opinions about the people and events he is describing.... [A] powerful and often moving picture of the life as a whole. It is a worthy and important addition to the vast literature on the most important modern American leader.

Alan Brinkley, The New York Times

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has received mostly glowing reviews from across the political spectrumand with good reason. It is the best biography of Roosevelt by far, notwithstanding the fact that Conrad Black relies almost exclusively on secondary material. He tells Roosevelts story engrossingly, combining historical rigor with a novelists eye for detail and character. A marvelous book about a great president who richly earned the title Conrad Black bestows on him.

The Weekly Standard

Conrad Blacks life of Franklin Roosevelt is a great achievement, and all the more welcome for being more than a little surprising. The book is well-researched, readable and judicious. It deserves to become the standard one-volume life of FDR.

The Economist

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is in fact a rather superb book, eminently fair and very well researched... it deserves a wide audience.... Conrad Blacks study presents in a fair and judicious way this controversial figure. His judgments are positive, not just toward FDR but also toward the American people, who became generous allies and idealistic warriors in the last great crusade for worldwide freedom.

The Washington Times

A monumental and admirable biography... this book is not simply splendid and thorough, marvelously readable and valuable, it is also a sustained and challenging argument. A powerful and impassioned case is being made, in a strong and sinewy language, by a biographer who reveres his subject, relishes the thrust of debate and repeatedly engages his putative critics on the page.... Black has a fine eye for the telling anecdote, however it reflects on his subject.... Blacks book is not just the best Roosevelt biography so far, but also by far the most enjoyable...

The National Interest

Conrad Black is strongest in his portrayal of FDR as war leader [and] excellent in describing the wrangling, misunderstandings, and often genuine hostility that characterized the relationship between Roosevelt and De Gaulle. He shows that FDR was profoundly wrong in searching for a French leader other than De Gaulle to lead the provisional government of France.

James Chace, The New York Review of Books

A deft writer who applies to one of the most influential men of the 20th century what he has learned from a career of sizing up people and their ambitions. The result is a sweeping, occasionally sprawling biography. At 1,280 pages, its a companion for the long hauland an engrossing one, thanks to the storytelling and pungency of its judgments.

Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal

Black has an uncanny grasp of the intricacies of American politics.... His account of how Roosevelt swung the Democratic Convention of 1932, to win the nomination for the presidency, is one of the funniest and cleverest essays in the analysis of American politics ever written, worthy to rank beside the work of Theodore H. White or A.J. Liebling.

Historian John Keegan, London Daily Telegraph

[An] unrivaled biography.... A major social history of the time.... [C]elebrates its long-elusive protagonist... while capturing Roosevelt in all his rich, baffling, and fascinating variety. [Blacks] mastery of surrounding moment and personalities, of a vanished America, is often rendered in such a graceful sweep... that we hardly notice how thoroughly the author commands the material.

Toronto Globe & Mail

Copyright 2003 by Conrad Black.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

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Book Design by Anne DeLozier

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Black, Conrad.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt : champion of freedom / Conrad Black.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-1-61039-213-6

1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 18821945. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

E807.B58 2003

973.917'092dc21

[B]

2003047054

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For

G. Montegu Black, 19402002

and

G. Emmett Cardinal Carter, 19122003

A noble brother and a dear friend, who had both looked forward to this book.

Contents

I wish to thank first George (Lord) Weidenfeld, for inspiring me to write a biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt at all, and my wife, Barbara, for enduring unimaginable inconvenience and boredom throughout the life of this project.

For reading all or important parts of the manuscript, I wish to thank, apart from Barbara Black: Corelli Barnett, Christopher Breiseth, Anthony Beevor, William F. Buckley Jr., Henry A. Grunwald, Simon Heffer, Roger Hertog, Paul Johnson, George Jonas, Sir John Keegan, Henry A. Kissinger, John Lukacs, Robert Morgenthau, Frank Pearl, Andrew Roberts, Arthur Ross, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Brian Stewart, William Vanden Heuvel, George Will, Tom Wolfe, David Woolner, and Ezra Zilkha. I tried to follow virtually every suggestion they made and am deeply indebted to all of them.

Christopher Breiseth, William Vanden Heuvel, and David Woolner were also very helpful in facilitating access to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, as were the personnel of that library and of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.