Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
by James MacGregor Burns
Summary
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom covers the last five years of Franklin Roosevelt's life, 1940 to 1945, the years in which the president of the Depression became the commander in chief of a world war, and it completes the two volume study James MacGregor Burns had begun in Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. Burns was a political scientist at Williams College, not a conventional biographer, and his question is a political scientist's question: how did leadership actually work in Roosevelt's hands? The book follows FDR through the third term campaign, Lend Lease and the undeclared Atlantic war, Pearl Harbor, the building of the grand alliance with Churchill and Stalin, the conferences at Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta, and the daily grind of running a war economy, a fractious cabinet, and a country at once, ending with the death at Warm Springs weeks before the victory. Burns admires his subject and refuses to be blinded by him. His Roosevelt is a master improviser who won the war and deferred every hard question he could, on civil rights, on the refugees of the Holocaust, on the shape of the peace, and the book weighs the deferrals honestly. The title's argument is that Roosevelt fought as a soldier of freedom while not always governing as one. It won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 1971 National Book Award in History and Biography, and Burns carried what he learned from Roosevelt into Leadership, the 1978 book that founded the modern academic study of the subject. As one volume history of America's war presidency, it has never really been replaced.
Historical Context & Significance
Burns wrote the book at the end of the 1960s, with another president conducting another war, and readers in 1970 could not miss the contrast between Roosevelt's leadership and the crisis of confidence around Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's. The double award in 1971 recognized a work that treated wartime Washington with scholarly distance while the participants were still alive to object. Burns had himself served in the Pacific as a combat historian, and his FDR volumes became the foundation of the leadership studies field he later created, the place where his famous distinction between transactional and transforming leaders was first worked out on a living example. Historians still assign the volume as the best single account of the home front presidency.