No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Summary
No Ordinary Time follows Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through the Second World War, from spring 1940, as the Phoney War in Europe ended and real fighting began, through Roosevelt's death in April 1945, tracing both the couple's own complicated marriage and partnership and their separate roles running the wartime White House and shaping the home front behind it.
Goodwin built the book from interviews with 86 people who had known the Roosevelts personally, following Franklin managing global strategy and Allied coordination alongside Eleanor's independent public role, advocating for civil rights and for women's place in the wartime workforce, often pushing her husband's administration further than he wanted to go on his own. The home front of the subtitle means more than factories and rationing: Goodwin follows how the war reorganized the White House itself, filling it with military planners and visiting Allied leaders and setting a wartime schedule the Roosevelts could not fully control even in their own residence. The book's title comes from Eleanor's own words at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, where she told delegates the country faced no ordinary time, and Goodwin treats the marriage itself, its real distance alongside its genuine partnership, as central to understanding how the Roosevelt White House actually functioned under wartime pressure.
Reading the book means following a long, richly peopled narrative, 759 pages that move between the war's headline decisions and the private, domestic texture of daily life inside the Roosevelt White House. It suits a reader who wants the presidency and the marriage behind it told together, rather than a purely military or diplomatic history of the war years.
Historical Context & Significance
Published by Simon & Schuster in 1994, the book won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History; that year's finalists were James Goodman's Stories of Scottsboro and Merrill D. Peterson's Lincoln in American Memory.
Goodwin served as a White House Fellow under Lyndon Johnson in 1967, after an article proposing how to remove Johnson from office nearly cost her the fellowship before Johnson brought her onto his own staff working on antipoverty policy instead. She later taught government at Harvard for a decade and had already published Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream in 1977 and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys in 1987 before this book, which remains her only Pulitzer win; the director Alan J. Pakula had begun developing a film adaptation before his death in 1998.