ROOSEVELT'S WAR

REVIEW OF ROOSEVELT’S WAR, BY PAUL D. LUNDE, COPYRIGHT 2012. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is the one man around whom the entire story of U. S. involvement in World War II revolves. Late in his second term as president, FDR moved the U. S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet from its home port in San Diego, California to its new location in Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. There it lay, peacefully at anchor, on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, when hundreds of Japanese war planes came looking for it, just before 8 a.m. Paul D. Lunde, author of the new book Roosevelt’s War, tells the story of What Really Happened During World War II, beginning with the story of Franklin Roosevelt himself, born in 1882, and growing up as an only child with wealthy parents who took him with them on annual trips to Europe. FDR mingled little with other children, attending private school and Harvard College, then marrying a distant cousin with her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, giving the bride away on St. Patrick’s Day, 1905. For FDR, cousin “Teddy” Roosevelt was a role model as he, too, began to reveal his dream of also becoming president of the United States. Lunde describes what he calls the three major “bumps” that FDR had to surmount in order to achieve his presidential dream, a dream which took 25 years to accomplish. Early on, things nautical became a hobby that led to a presidential appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy during most of the Wilson administration, which included the World War I era. FDR and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, produced five children before the Great War ended, and she discovered that he had been carrying on a love affair. The affair was terminated and Eleanor agreed to continue their marriage in name only, thus containing the scandal that would have ended FDR’s presidential aspirations. Shortly thereafter, FDR contracted polio, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. FDR managed to largely conceal his disability and stay alive, politically, through the 1920s. Elected governor of the Empire State, New York, in 1928, FDR was positioned to successfully run for president in 1932. Lunde chronicles FDR’s efforts to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s, toward the end of which Adolf Hitler set in motion what quickly became World War II, a war which most of FDR’s countrymen wanted to avoid. World War II began, in Europe, with a non-aggression pact between Germany’s Hitler and Russia’s Stalin, immediately followed by their joint takeover of Poland beginning September 1, 1939. From there until FDR’s death in April of 1945 and then its conclusion under President Harry S. Truman a few months later, Lunde tells the story of the war, first as he experienced it as a child, followed by his years of study since the war. His book, published by iUniverse, is available as an e-book as well as in a traditional paperbound edition. Roosevelt’s War, 588 pages, including Chapter Notes, a Select Bibliography, and an Index.