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Rendezvous With Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America Into the War and Into the World

The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II

The period between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the attack on Pearl Harbor was the turning point of the twentieth century.

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans were eager to isolate themselves from the conflict. Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to help the democracies, but he was hemmed in by congressional and public opposition and frustrated by a lack of information. How could he obtain the intelligence he required when he was trapped in Washington? Distrusting the State Department, he instead sent five men on special diplomatic missions to Europe. Their missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the century’s leading figures— and Roosevelt along with them.

First off the mark was Sumner Welles, a chilly patrician who traveled around Europe in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan — war hero and future spymaster — visited an isolated UK at the president’s behest to determine whether Britain could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that the country was worth backing.

After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, FDR threw a lifeline to Britain in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker who became the whirling dervish at the center of the New Deal, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman — a handsome, ambitious railroad heir — was charged with delivering the aid to London. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent, Wendell Willkie, whose visit to London was a public relations triumph.

Then, in summer 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of Russia. Hopkins returned to Britain to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. Hopkins’s mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to gamble on aiding the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt’s five emissaries are unforgettable characters. Taken together, their missions plot the arc of America’s transformation from a reluctant middle power into a global leader. Drawing on vast archival research, historian Michael Fullilove has rescued these men and their missions and given them back to history. At the center of everything, of course, is FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan.

Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 468
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781594204357
  • Genres
  • history, biography, presidents, politics, war
  • Release date
  • 2013