“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom”, by Conrad Black

 

1281 pages, Public Affairs, ISBN-13: 978-1586482824

The phrase “warts and all” is said to derive from Oliver Cromwell’s instructions to the painter Sir Peter Lely, when commissioning a painting, to “Paint me as I am, warts and all”…or perhaps it was “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it”. Well, you get the idea, I trust. The reason I bring all this up is because what Conrad Black has done in Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom is written a “warts and all” biography of FDR that shows the man exactly as he was:

The patrician squire resented new money. The self-proclaimed farmer resented modern industrial capitalism. The inept speculator resented not only the successful investors but all those implicated in the culture of unrestricted and unregulated investment. And the political genius resented both his one lack of commercial genius and the people who did possess commercial genius and who he thought were fundamentally at odds with the interests of what would become the vast army of his political followers.

I mean, really, that sounds like a Republican Party attack ad circa 1930-something. But that is just one example of Black giving a description of perhaps the most significant American President of the 20^th Century – warts and all. With that said, I wish that Black had been able to read The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (reviewed on November 12^th, 2019) but, seeing as that book was published in 2007 and Black’s biography released in 2003, that is an impossibility; if he had, then his cheerleading of the New Deal may, perhaps, have been not so strident.

But this championship of Big Government notwithstanding, Black has written one of the most gripping and engaging biographies I have ever read. There really was a great deal to admire about FDR, not least his courageous battle with polio. Within only a few weeks, he went from being a vigorous young man of 39 who, only the year before, had been nominated for the Vice Presidency to being a virtual paraplegic whose future was bleak indeed. But it was in battling this seemingly insurmountable setback that FDR first displayed his stubbornness, his character and his will to succeed against all odds. While he was deceitful with the public regarding the degree to which polio truly affected his health, Black fairly points out he still got the job done (and being duplicitous in politics is virtually mandatory). Strangely, Black is weakest in covering his subject through the Second World War (being much more forgiving his subject’s relations with that monster Stalin than I would have been), with his descriptions of the decisions made and the reasoning behind them being rather stilted, especially compared to his earlier dissections of FDR’s reasoning. Furthermore, leading commanders are shunted aside and their decisions given short shrift; like it or not, FDR was a commander-in-chief during the worst war in history, but we get precious little insight into his internal processes. Pity.

Beyond that, Black’s biography is a fairly straightforward chronological affair: his subject is born, grows, faces and triumphs over adversity and, inevitably, dies. But Black’s writing is crisp and moving and never boring; not once does he bog down in detail – and there is a lot of detail; everything that ever happened to Franklin Delano can be found in this book – nor go off on tangential side treks that have nothing to do with his central subject. And he posits a few, new ways of looking at that other central tenet of the man’s presidency, the New Deal: there were several “new deals”, rolled out at different points of his presidency as he gained power and support in the Congress and the nation at large. Or that, despite being portrayed as a traitor to his class and hostile to business, that all of his policies and programs were geared towards saving capitalism rather than subverting it; indeed, it was the large corporate interests in Germany, Italy and other European countries that backed the fascist movements that conquered the same in the mistaken hope that these strong men could be controlled, while he viewed the Soviet Union’s attempts at building a communist society as equally inimical to a free government controlled by the people (again, I would urge anyone who reads Black’s book to also read Shlaes’ for a more complete and realistic history of the New Deal…or New Deals…or whatever).

Conrad Black has made his name in redeeming unexpected characters, starting with the Québécois leader Maurice Duplessis before tackling American President Richard Nixon; in both cases he approached his subjects from unexpected, often sympathetic, angles, while throwing huge amounts of archival research at the reader. And so he does again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom; for anyone who was already sympathetic towards FDR they will find their faith more than justified, while anyone who looked upon the man from Hyde Park with a gimlet eye will find many things to admire and respect (even if the New Deal was in reality a failure).

“The Wars of the Ancient Greeks & their Invention of Western Military Culture”, by Victor Davis Hanson

 

224 pages, Orion, ISBN-13: 978-0304352227

Victor Davis Hanson is an expert on the period of Greek hoplite warfare, and it shows in The Wars of the Ancient Greeks & their Invention of Western Military Culture, a superb well-illustrated and comprehensive history of the Ancient Greek states from the earliest times to the Hellenic period. This book examines the development of war in ancient Greece through the dark ages after the collapse of Mycenaean civilization and through the Classical period, Hellenic Period and up to the conquest of Greece by Roman Legions. Be warned, however, as Hanson assumes his readers will have at least a basic knowledge of the primary texts of the era as he refers frequently to books such as Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the works of Plutarch, Arian, Polybius and Xenon, amongst others. His overall thesis is that the way in which we fight today is a direct consequence of the Greek method of fighting and contends that the success of the Greeks against Persian armies dictated the development of the Western Way of War down to the present day. The good professor sees the early Hoplite age as a Golden Age of middle-class farmer-militias, going out to defend their land and homes from neighboring and foreign despots, and who were eventually betrayed by the democratic politicians who created a military-industrial complex that was in turn subverted by power-hungry dictators, the principles of which still dominate the world today. The Wars of the Ancient Greeks is an excellent book that does exactly what it says, describing how, from 1400BC through to Alexander the Great and beyond, the Greeks fought and (often) won, and their impact on modern warfare. Many modern parallels are drawn, and the analysis of Alexander is interesting and unusual, flying in the face of popular opinion, but still balanced. An excellent, very informative read.

“Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies’ Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943”, by Michael Gannon

 

492 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN-13: 978-0060178192

In March 1941, Churchill warned that Britain would not be able to hold out for more than four more months at the present rate of shipping losses. Was he correct, dramatizing in order to motivate, fearful of what the future held regardless, and/or unsure of the facts? Statements after the war suggest strongly that he felt that the U-boat peril was not only catastrophic in terms of losses, of course, but also genuinely put the war at risk for Britain. Black May: The Epic Story of the Allies' Defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943 by Michael Gannon is the story of the ultimate Allied victory against the Nazi U-boat Rudeltaktik, or “Wolf Packs”, that did so much damage to their shipping during the war. The title refers to when several pivotal battles with German U-boats played out, with the action of the book focusing on a detailed analysis of the battle of Convoy ONS 5, when some 30 U-boats were vectored to attack this slow convoy of forty-three merchant ships (escorted by only two destroyers, a frigate, and three corvettes), and ended up sinking thirteen merchant ships…but with the loss of seven U-boats and damage to several others.

This was, at the time, the worst result ever for a major U-boat operation and came about because of improved Allied training and tactics to make the most efficient use of the best technology available at the time (which included aircraft patrols with radar, and shipboard HF/DF radio detection, radar, sonar, and hedgehogs). Thus, the convoy battles of May 1943 marked the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic as U-boat losses began to rise sharply while Allied shipping losses dropped. Gannon states that, while the German U-boat command recognized at the end of May 1943 that it had lost the battle of the Atlantic, it had been suffering steady increasing attrition for an extended period of time and that the steadily increasing proficiency (mostly RN/CANR) antisubmarine forces was masked by the increasing numbers of U-boats but shown by the decreasing average ton-boat figures. But there is much more in this book besides the month of May 1943. The book neatly summarizes almost the entire course of Allied anti-U-boat warfare during World War II.