Roosevelt and Hopkins
by Robert E. Sherwood
Summary
Robert Sherwood came to this book as an insider rather than a historian working from a distance, a three time Pulitzer winning playwright who had served as one of Franklin Roosevelt's own wartime speechwriters, credited with helping shape the language that became the Arsenal of Democracy line, and Roosevelt and Hopkins draws on private papers Hopkins left behind to reconstruct a partnership Sherwood had watched operate at close range. The book follows Harry Hopkins from his earlier career running the New Deal's largest relief programs, the Works Progress Administration employed eight and a half million people across its eight years and more than three million at its 1938 peak, into the entirely different role he took on once war began.
Sherwood centers the book on an extraordinary domestic arrangement: in May 1940, after a single evening's conversation about the German invasion of the Low Countries, Roosevelt invited Hopkins to stay the night at the White House, and Hopkins ended up living there for three and a half years, closer to the president on a daily basis than any cabinet officer or family member. The book follows Hopkins on the diplomatic missions that arrangement made possible, personal envoy to Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, present at Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta, administering the fifty billion dollar Lend Lease program that kept Britain and the Soviet Union supplied, all while battling a stomach cancer so severe that surgeons had already removed most of his stomach before the war even began.
Sherwood writes with a dramatist's instinct for pace and character even while working from genuine documentary sources, and reading the book means following two men, one a wartime president who needed someone he trusted completely and the other a dying man who gave everything he had left to the job, through the whole arc of American involvement in the Second World War. It suits a reader who wants the alliance diplomacy of the war years told through the working friendship at its actual center rather than through official communiques alone.
Historical Context & Significance
Roosevelt and Hopkins won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Bancroft Prize the same year, honoring a book written by a man already established as one of Broadway's most successful playwrights, with three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama to his name before he ever wrote a page of this one. Harper published the book, subtitled An Intimate History, in 1948.
Hopkins died in January 1946, leaving behind the papers Sherwood drew the story together from and published a little over two years later, and the book became the primary account historians relied on for how the Roosevelt White House actually functioned during the war, an insider's record built from genuine access rather than reconstruction after the fact. Sherwood's own credibility as someone who had worked inside the same administration gave the book an authority that outside historians writing decades later have had to work to match.