FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: A Rendezvous with Destiny

by Frank Freidel ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 1990

Freidel (American History/Harvard & Univ. of Washington) condenses the vast amount of information available in his four-volume (1952-1973) biography of the young FDR into a one-volume complete biography more easily accessible to the general reader, and chronicles the older FDR as well. Eleanor Roosevelt once said of her husband that he was a 19th-century figure like Disraeli or Victorian England's Tory aristocrats--so sure of himself that he could dare to undertake reforms. Freidel emphasizes this aspect of FDR's character, the ""genteel reformer"" who could have lolled around his Hudson River estate but chose to take up with populists who were socially miles apart from his own breed. Freidel is obviously enamored of his subject, though he can occasionally point a Finger at a weakness (such as FDR's penchant for romantic exaggeration--e.g., though he was editor for only a semester of the Harvard Crimson, he liked to describe himself as a former newspaperman). Readers of Freidel's multivolume work will find themselves frustrated at times by lapses here in the narrative (in chronicling FDR's New York gubernatorial campaign in 1928, for instance, Freidel never mentions the name of FDR's opponent), but these can be forgiven as an expression of Freidel's haste to get to the meat of the man's career: his 12-plus years in the White House. Here, he finds FDR's genius to rest in a combination of political instinct and natural charm that sought to combat the Depression by a new form of ""economic regulation through a concert of major interests""--agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. FDR's political instincts seemed to falter only with his miscalculation in the court-packing scheme, which Freidel handles in an objective manner. As for FDR's ""second front,"" the war effort, Freidel sees him as a moderate leader, seeking not US aggrandizement, but a truly secure world order. One of the most informative, balanced, and involving of the many biographies available about our longest-tenured President.

Pub Date: March 6, 1990

ISBN: 0316292613

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION