Joseph Lelyveld (1937–2024)

This detailed account of the final months of Franklin Roosevelt's life, beginning with the Tehran Conference in the fall of 1943, is extraordinarily informative and a pleasure to read. The author is a fine stylist and provides not only a good overview of the 1944 election campaign (such as it was) and the diplomacy of WWII, but minute examination of FDR's health, psychology, postwar plans, manner of handling people and of governance, and personal relationships. The book is neither hagiography nor a Peglerian hatchet job; although the author sees through many of Roosevelt's techniques in handling people who were, or whom he needed to make, allies, and at times takes a dim view of them, almost all of the eyewitness accounts upon which he relies were members of his administration or family, and thus, at bottom, if frank, rarely if ever totally hostile. True, the book is lengthy, but I learned many new things and I was sorry to see it end.… (meer)