Of the making of books about Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is no end—and nearly all of them are admiring, often to the point of outright adoration. It started with the memoirists, most of whom took the utmost care to paper over Roosevelt’s flaws in their obsequious haste to document their own proximity to the throne. Then came the first generation of similarly disposed biographers, for whom the Great Depression and World War II were living memories and whose own liberalism (for they were all liberal) had been forged in the twin crucibles of those cataclysms.
No surprises there: Such is the predictable cycle of historical evaluation of a colossus. But the judicious revaluation that normally follows the initial wave of uncritical admiration seems never to have taken place in the case of FDR—and now that today’s progressives are weaponizing Roosevelt scholarship in the service of their New Deal-style political agenda, it seems even less likely that such a revaluation will come to pass anytime soon. Even Conrad Black, whom no one has ever mistaken for a stealth liberal, called his mammoth 2003 biography Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. Instead of a primary-source life that dealt forthrightly with FDR’s defects of character and errors of judgment, we got The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Ken Burns’s seven-part PBS paean to Franklin, Theodore, and (of course) the sainted Eleanor, which one must sift meticulously in order to detect any deviation, however minuscule, from the conventional wisdom.
Hence it was with no small interest that I read this latest entry in the Roosevelt sweepstakes, which has already attracted the hostile notice of Geoffrey C. Ward, author of the script for The Roosevelts and an FDR man from way back (his own admiring biography came out in 1989). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ward dismissed 1944 as “broad and lurid,” which led me to wonder whether its author might have dared to break ranks with the faithful. And so he has: 1944 is not the fat pop-history tome of the one-fateful-year genre that it purports to be, but an overstuffed monograph flying under a false flag. Winik would have done far better justice to his book, if not his sales figures, had he chosen instead to call it 1944: The Year FDR Betrayed the Jews.
Not that he tips his hand right away. At first glance, 1944 hews to a plan of action familiar from other books of its kind. It starts with a Defining Moment, the visit to the Sphinx paid by FDR and Winston Churchill during their conference in Cairo: “The ever-charming Roosevelt, squinting in the fading light, gave nothing away. He was in many ways as inscrutable as the Sphinx; at his core, he remained shrouded, unknowable, dispassionate.” Cut to an Allied bombing run over Berlin that took place on the same day: “The air was split with the sounds of doors being ripped off their hinges, windows shattering, and whole structures collapsing, crushed like paper bags.”
You can just about write the rest yourself: Ike and Monty and General Marshall, the long march to D-Day, Hitler’s mounting frenzy, FDR’s fast-declining health, stuffy Thomas Dewey and dear little Fala and not-so-kindly Uncle Joe. The old, old story, in other words, reshuffled and repackaged by a lively storyteller with a nice eye for detail (“Harry Truman recalled how Roosevelt’s voice boomed so loudly he had to hold the phone away from his ear”) but no different in essence from any of its previous iterations.
Above all, 1944 never strays from the predictable in its portrayal of Roosevelt the man. All the stock clichés are trotted out in turn: “By nature he was a dissembler, a schemer, a deceiver. But he also had an unconquerable will and an ingrained sense of immortality. . . . His remained the public face of humanity.” That’s par for the course with Roosevelt biographers: First you whisper that the old boy was a bit on the sneaky side, then you shout that he was so great that it didn’t matter. Which is, needless to say, a perfectly arguable position, but one that leaves out rather more than it should. Of course Roosevelt was a great man—nobody in his right mind questions that—but like most great men, he wasn’t always a good man, and scarcely any of the countless books about him have been written with anything like the cool, comprehending detachment that his complex achievements demand and deserve.
But just when you’re starting to think that you don’t need to bother reading yet another exercise in hagiography lightly sauced with ambiguity, 1944 takes an unexpected swerve. The preface jumps directly from the bombing of Berlin to the gassing of several hundred Dutch and Polish Jews at Auschwitz, a horrific vignette introduced by these two sentences: “Yet there were still those whom the bombers had not yet reached, however desperately they awaited and pleaded for their arrival. Longingly they looked up into the skies and wondered: when will the Allies come?”
The strategic placement of this scene is a tipoff that Winik has something different up his sleeve, though the extent of the difference only becomes clear in the second chapter, when he starts weaving the death camps into his narrative. Before long the Final Solution is not merely an individual strand of the larger story of the last full year of World War II but the dominant theme of the book—with Roosevelt cast in the leading role.
If you aren’t familiar with the terrible tale of the Roosevelt administration’s unwillingness to take decisive action to prevent the mass slaughter of European Jewry, you’re likely to be shocked by much of what you read in 1944. In a nutshell, the State Department was lousy with antisemites, one of whom, Breckinridge Long, was in charge of granting refugee visas during World War II. Collectively disinclined to believe reports from Jewish sources that the Nazis were engaged in genocide and (one suspects) not greatly troubled by the possibility that they might be true, Long and his colleagues resolved to keep Jewish emigration to a minimum, just as they’d done prior to Pearl Harbor. The law was on their side—the annual quota for German immigrants of all kinds was a bit less than 25,000—and Britain was even less willing to shoulder the load.
Incredibly, FDR supported their policy long after incontrovertible proof of Nazi atrocities was made available to him. Well aware of the persistent prevalence of antisemitism among American voters, he was prepared to do no more than allow the Allies to issue a joint declaration condemning German conduct as “bestial.” Nevertheless, the State Department continued to stand in the way of refugee relief, and Roosevelt declined to make any strong public statement on the subject.
Not until January 1944 did he set up a War Refugee Board whose mission was “to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death.” Two months later he declared, “All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland . . . are equally guilty with the executioner.” But he appears to have taken no part in the subsequent War Department debate over whether to bomb Auschwitz to stop the killings. In the end, no such bombing took place, and Winik claims that “There is little doubt that the refusal to directly bomb Auschwitz was the president’s decision or at least reflected his wishes.” Other historians differ on whether FDR was in fact consulted on the matter, or whether bombing would have made a difference; but one thing is sure: It was never even tried.
Readers who know the territory will realize at once that 1944 has little to say about the failure of Roosevelt and the Allies to stop or slow the Final Solution that wasn’t said three decades ago in David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945, in which FDR’s near-total failure to act was indicted with unprecedented bluntness. In essence, what Winik has done is to popularize Wyman’s findings by placing them in a wider context and tarting them up with pop-history chatter. (I can’t think of another ostensibly serious work of history on whose first page the word “hellacious” can be found.) Nor is he willing to go the distance and declare Roosevelt the villain of the piece. Instead, he sugars his pill with the fawning praise that Wyman eschewed: “Roosevelt both embodied and embraced humanity and had an immense capacity to inspire others.”
Yet a bitter pill it most definitely is, and at book’s end, Winik leaves you in no doubt of where he stands:
That it was, and it was also illustrative of the limits of his greatness. Roosevelt’s genius—and his tragedy—was his ruthless pragmatism, his seemingly infallible grasp of the limits of political power. For all the passion with which he would later speak of the horrors of the poverty that he longed to ameliorate, he was at the outset of his career the opposite of what we now call a “conviction politician.” Rarely would he put more than a sliver of his own carefully hoarded power at risk in the service of the ideals that he claimed to espouse. “He was the coldest man I ever met,” Harry Truman said. “He didn’t give a damn personally for me or you or anyone else in the world as far as I could see.” Not that the voters were ever allowed to see this side of his personality: Their FDR was the genial squire with the jaunty grin and the made-for-radio voice whose sudden death made Lyndon Johnson cry out, “God! God! How he could take it for us all!”
All, that is, but the Jews, who were weighed in the balance of his chilly pragmatism, found wanting, and left to die.
Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and critic-at-large of Commentary, is the biographer of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken. His play Satchmo at the Waldorf will be produced this season in Chicago, Colorado Springs, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach.
