WATCHING DARKNESS FALL

Broad-ranging study of the role of ambassadors in conveying information about the rise of Europe’s totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and early ’40s.

In a useful addition to the literature on the beginning of World War II, McKean, the former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, observes that in Franklin Roosevelt’s time, there was no formally established federal post called “national security adviser.” Instead, to monitor developments in Europe in a time of clear peril to the international order, Roosevelt assembled a body of advisers who shared with him “a set of commonalities, distinct for each man,” and dispatched them as his ambassadors. Some weren’t exactly top of their class, and a few had a complicated relationship with FDR—Joseph Kennedy, for example, who was committed to isolationism even as he served as ambassador to the U.K. The ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long, was, like Roosevelt, a blue blood. Enthusiastic for fascism, Long “was inordinately impressed by Mussolini.” Meanwhile, the ambassador to Germany, born outside the usual moneyed Ivy League pedigree of State Department officials, was willing to be schooled in what the American consul in Berlin considered “the limitless depth of Hitler’s evil.” All of his intelligence channels eventually led Roosevelt away from a certain wariness over international involvement to a certainty that America would be enveloped in a European war, and on the side of Britain and France. For all that, writes McKean, Roosevelt was overly cautious on at least one matter. “Despite the intensifying anti-Jewish persecution in Germany in the 1930s, he refused to condemn the Nazi government,” adding that while Roosevelt surely could have done more to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S., he left policy matters on the subject to Long, “a narrow-minded bigot and anti-Semite.” That Roosevelt was reluctant to act, McKean writes damningly, was his foremost failure as president.

Of considerable interest to students of modern European history and the Roosevelt era.