Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt served as president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945, the only person elected to the office four times. His New Deal expanded federal action in response to the Great Depression, while his administration gradually supported the Allies before entering the Second World War after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt led wartime mobilisation and diplomacy but also authorised the internment of Japanese Americans and maintained compromises on racial segregation.

Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance include Roosevelt as a major historical presence in the approach to and conduct of the war. Philip Roth’s alternate-history novel The Plot Against America imagines him losing the 1940 election, making his absence central to the story. Fiction often concentrates on his political confidence and concealed disability while debating the secrecy surrounding his health and wartime decisions.

In Jeff Shaara’s To Wake the Giant, as Japan expands its war in China and turns towards Southeast Asia, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull use economic pressure while attempting to avoid a premature conflict. In Kate Quinn’s The Diamond Eye, her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt develops amid press scrutiny, political performance and a fictional threat designed to turn the celebrated soldier into a target. Other novels featuring Franklin D. Roosevelt include John Rhodes’s Triumph and Tragedy, Ken Follett’s Winter of the World, Lee Jackson’s The Giant Awakens, Wilbur Smith’s Crossfire, and Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age.

In non-fiction, Franklin D. Roosevelt is discussed in Stephen R. Platt’s The Raider and Giles Milton’s The Stalin Affair. In Stephen R. Platt’s The Raider, Carlson served in Nicaragua, observed Chinese Communist forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War and reported directly to Franklin D. Roosevelt.