Books we're reading

The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, by Thomas J Fleming (Basic Books, 2001)

This unabashed revisionist work looks at Franklin Roosevelt’s long presidency and makes the case that he was interested in delivering a New Deal to the world. In pursuit of this, the author makes the stunning charges that the president lured Japan into war, and intentionally prolonged the war in Europe in order to utterly destroy the German nation.

While the thesis is surely debatable, the book is monumental in presenting the internal dialogue of Washington in the years it was emerging as the most important capital in the world.

Though the book was published prior to 9/11 and probably mostly written before the presidency of George Bush, the parallels are striking. In light of the famous 1998 document, Project for a New American Century, which called for a new Pearl Harbour, this revisionist and possibly more correct version of events in the Pacific, leaves a chill. Though it stops short of claiming Pearl Harbour was staged by Roosevelt, it does illustrate how the administration established a nearly total oil embargo on Japan, harassed Japanese shipping, made threatening moves in China, and then left the whole fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbour, all the while passing internal memos around regarding the dire need to have Japan (or Germany) take a shot at them in order to swing American public opinion around from 80% opposed to war, to a majority in favour. It worked.