Awraith stares out from the dust jacket of the final volume of Nigel Hamilton's trilogy on Franklin Roosevelt at war. FDR is wrapped in his navy cape at Yalta in February 1945, where he met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to settle the postwar world just two months before his death. Roosevelt must have suspected what the future held, and his dead eyes tell the story.
Mr. Hamilton's “War and Peace” covers the momentous last year and a half of the president's life. It runs from the late-1943 Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin through the triumph of D-Day in June 1944, Yalta, and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed FDR at age 63 on April 12, 1945, as he sat posing for a portrait at his Warm Springs, Ga., retreat.
“War and Peace” is narrative history dense with illuminating detail that puts the reader in the room with Roosevelt as he mixes his vermouth-heavy Martinis for dinner guests, leads fractious strategy meetings, and spends his final hours with his early and late love, Lucy Mercer Rutherford. But Mr. Hamilton has a larger purpose than merely rehearsing the epic of World War II: He is drafting a revisionist brief to counter the version offered by Churchill in his six-volume “The Second World War” and to give FDR due credit for his sly, masterful leadership.
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