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NONFICTION
A Blundering Churchill, a Farsighted Roosevelt
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WAR AND PEACE
FDR’s Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945
By Nigel Hamilton
Admittedly, it is a pretty geeky parlor game, maybe one that has faded with time. But for years in many households, it provoked endless dinnertime debate. In the annals of the 20th century, who was the greater, more significant historical figure: Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill?
The case for Churchill is powerful. He rallied Britain against Hitler’s hordes when the rest of Europe had fallen. While the United States remained on the sidelines and the Soviet Union embraced its devil’s-bargain alliance with Nazi Germany, Churchill virtually single-handedly defied the Third Reich in the face of existential threat: He was personally at risk, along with his countrymen, amid the cascade of bombs raining down on London during the Blitz.
But count Nigel Hamilton in Roosevelt’s camp — not just in his camp but perhaps his most passionate and eloquent champion. In “War and Peace,” his latest book on the American wartime leader, Hamilton presents a farsighted Roosevelt riding to the rescue of freedom, then setting the stage for a new world order to come. Churchill is depicted as a military dunderhead who let ego and imperial ambition get in the way of sensible strategy. Courageous? Yes. A stirring orator? Absolutely. But if not restrained by Roosevelt, Churchill, in Hamilton’s view, might easily have lost World War II for the Allies.
“War and Peace” is the third and final volume in Hamilton’s “F.D.R. at War” trilogy and certainly as gripping and powerfully argued as the first two, “The Mantle of Command” and “Commander in Chief.” Hamilton, as the historian Evan Thomas once observed, ended up producing the extended memoir that Roosevelt himself never got to write. Throughout Hamilton’s three books, Roosevelt is the wise and clever sage fending off myopic cabinet secretaries, generals, admirals and colleagues to steer the Allies to victory and the world to a better future.
Hamilton, a British-born historian and naturalized American at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is known for a well-regarded multivolume biography of Bernard Montgomery, the British field marshal during World War II, as well as more controversial books on Bill Clinton’s presidency and John F. Kennedy’s salacious personal life. He set out to write a single stand-alone book on Roosevelt, only to have it evolve into a decade-long project that required three titles to complete, with the goal, as he put it, “to set the record of this man’s contribution to the history of humanity straight.”
Hamilton’s disdain for Churchill will surprise no one who has read the first two installments. Unlike more sentimental accounts of the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill, like Jon Meacham’s engaging best seller “Franklin and Winston,” Hamilton’s trilogy presents the American as more exasperated than enamored when it came to his London partner, leery of the prime minister’s latest schemes and intrigues and constantly maneuvering to keep the war heading in the right direction.
In “War and Peace,” as in the first two books, Hamilton condemns “Winston’s erratic course,” his “sheer amateurishness,” his “new madness,” his “autocratic and often wild behavior” and his “homicidal meddling” in military matters. “Time and again,” he writes, “Churchill had been infamously wrong on strategy.” The wrongheaded Churchill obsessively continued pressing for military action in the Mediterranean and Balkans while resisting the cross-channel D-Day invasion that even the Nazis foresaw would decide the fate of the war. “Whitewashed by generations of subsequent historians, this was the great tragedy of the war in late 1943,” Hamilton writes.
In Hamilton’s view, his three volumes are a long-overdue correction to the mythmaking in Churchill’s own six-volume account of the war. After all, Churchill famously said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Hamilton seems intent on rewriting it. “I deeply admired” Churchill, he informs readers, noting without elaboration that as a college student he “proudly stayed for a weekend at Chartwell, his home in Kent, before he died.” But, Hamilton adds, “I do not think it unfair to his memory, 65 years later, to correct the record regarding his version.”
Hamilton’s Roosevelt, by contrast, was an all-knowing demigod, at once judicious and cunning, so visionary that he devoted much of his energy in the final chapters of the war to what would follow. Roosevelt did not live to see the United Nations that was his brainchild but, Hamilton argues, fairly enough, that no one did more to create a global structure that might forestall a third world war.
Since Roosevelt left no lasting record of his life and thoughts following his untimely death in Warm Springs, Ga., in April 1945 at age 63, Hamilton relies on those left by others, including insightful diaries by Mackenzie King, the Zelig-like Canadian prime minister who always seemed to be on hand at key moments, and Henry L. Stimson, the Republican secretary of war who at times resisted Roosevelt’s judgments only to come around to recognize the virtues of the president’s approach.
As “War and Peace” opens, Roosevelt has entered the twilight of his presidency, no longer the commanding figure of the first two books, heading inexorably toward an early grave, aided and abetted by a doctor and aides who considered him too necessary to America and the world to let him ease offstage to tend to his failing health. Though his faculties were fading, Roosevelt remained the driving force behind the strategy for winning the war and winning the peace. “Without F.D.R.’s extraordinary military leadership after Pearl Harbor,” Hamilton writes, “the course of World War II might well have turned out differently — and I would probably not be here, writing about it.”
The centerpiece of Roosevelt’s strategy, of course, was Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion, which Roosevelt advocated relentlessly despite doubts, arguments and even sabotage by Churchill. The prime minister, aware that the sun was setting on the empire on which the sun never set, suggested almost every other option. He pressed for more Allied focus on Italy, as well as landings in Greece and the Aegean. He was consumed inexplicably with the island of Rhodes. He fixated on the bloody battle of Anzio. Roosevelt batted away one Churchill effort to derail the D-Day invasion after another, single-mindedly determined to seize the beaches of Normandy.
Hamilton’s case for Roosevelt is a compelling one. Even in decline, the president had a vision that eluded others, including his closest partner. Yet if the author’s antipathy for Churchill’s strategic miscalculations is buttressed by prodigious research, it nonetheless seems to sweep aside too easily the profound importance of his singular resolve, grit and determination to defeat Hitler — not to mention his cleareyed view of Stalin and the looming Soviet threat that Roosevelt, ever confident of his own powers of persuasion, mistakenly thought he could manage.
To Hamilton, Churchill’s inspiration was no match for Roosevelt’s sagacity, his stirring speeches no substitute for the American’s strategic brilliance. Roosevelt was the architect and engineer who translated Churchill’s grandiloquence into a plan for victory. The Allies did fight on the beaches, as Churchill once memorably vowed, but it fell to Franklin Roosevelt to make sure they were the right beaches.
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times, is the author, most recently, of “Obama: The Call of History.”
WAR AND PEACE
FDR’s Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945
By Nigel Hamilton
Illustrated. 578 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30.
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