Roosevelts Secret War

Author : Joseph E. Persico
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0375761268
Total Pages : 594 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Roosevelt's Secret War written by Joseph E. Persico and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2002-10-22 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations. Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations: -FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor -A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office -Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia -Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret -An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with a direct pipeline into Hitler's councils Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told--before the Holocaust--about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question Did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? By temperament and character, no American president was better suited for secret warfare than FDR. He manipulated, compartmentalized, dissembled, and misled, demonstrating a spymaster's talent for intrigue. He once remarked, "I never let my right hand know what my left hand does." Not only did Roosevelt create America's first central intelligence agency, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, but he ran spy rings directly from the Oval Office, enlisting well-placed socialite friends. FDR was also spied against. Roosevelt's Secret War presents evidence that the Soviet Union had a source inside the Roosevelt White House; that British agents fed FDR total fabrications to draw the United States into war; and that Roosevelt, by yielding to Churchill's demand that British scientists be allowed to work on the Manhattan Project, enabled the secrets of the bomb to be stolen. And these are only a few of the scores of revelations in this constantly surprising story of Roosevelt's hidden role in World War II.

Author : Joseph E. Persico
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645438
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Roosevelt's Centurions written by Joseph E. Persico and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “FDR’s centurions were my heroes and guides. Now Joe Persico has written the best account of those leaders I've ever read.”—Colin L. Powell All American presidents are commanders in chief by law. Few perform as such in practice. In Roosevelt’s Centurions, distinguished historian Joseph E. Persico reveals how, during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the levers of wartime power like no president since Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Declaring himself “Dr. Win-the-War,” FDR assumed the role of strategist in chief, and, though surrounded by star-studded generals and admirals, he made clear who was running the war. FDR was a hands-on war leader, involving himself in everything from choosing bomber targets to planning naval convoys to the design of landing craft. Persico explores whether his strategic decisions, including his insistence on the Axis powers’ unconditional surrender, helped end or may have prolonged the war. Taking us inside the Allied war councils, the author reveals how the president brokered strategy with contentious allies, particularly the iron-willed Winston Churchill; rallied morale on the home front; and handpicked a team of proud, sometimes prickly warriors who, he believed, could fight a global war. Persico’s history offers indelible portraits of the outsize figures who roused the “sleeping giant” that defeated the Axis war machine: the dutiful yet independent-minded George C. Marshall, charged with rebuilding an army whose troops trained with broomsticks for rifles, eggs for hand grenades; Dwight Eisenhower, an unassuming Kansan elevated from obscurity to command of the greatest fighting force ever assembled; the vainglorious Douglas MacArthur; and the bizarre battlefield genius George S. Patton. Here too are less widely celebrated military leaders whose contributions were just as critical: the irascible, dictatorial navy chief, Ernest King; the acerbic army advisor in China, “Vinegar” Joe Stilwell; and Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who zealously preached the gospel of modern air power. The Roosevelt who emerges from these pages is a wartime chess master guiding America’s armed forces to a victory that was anything but foreordained. What are the qualities we look for in a commander in chief? In an era of renewed conflict, when Americans are again confronting the questions that FDR faced—about the nature and exercise of global power—Roosevelt’s Centurions is a timely and revealing examination of what it takes to be a wartime leader in a freewheeling, complicated, and tumultuous democracy.

Author : Stewart Richardson
Publisher : Richardson & Steirman
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secret History of World War II written by Stewart Richardson and published by Richardson & Steirman. This book was released on 1986 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : James Bradley
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316039667
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Imperial Cruise written by James Bradley and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name. In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt's mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul. In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he though would secure America's westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America's hands for a century.

Author : Irwin Gellman
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421431378
Total Pages : 538 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Secret Affairs written by Irwin Gellman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1995. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, but he concealed the extent of his disability from a public that was never permitted to see him in a wheelchair. FDR's Secretary of State was old and frail, debilitated by a highly contagious and usually fatal disease that was as closely guarded a state secret as his wife's Jewish ancestry. The undersecretary was a pompous and aloof man who married three times but, when intoxicated, preferred sex with railroad porters, shoeshine boys, and cabdrivers. These three legendary figures—Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles—not only concealed such secrets for more than a decade but did so while directing United States foreign policy during some of the most perilous events in the nation's history. Irwin Gellman brings to light startling new information about the intrigues, deceptions, and behind-the-scenes power struggles that influenced America's role in World War II and left their mark on world events, for good or ill, in the half-century that followed. Gellman had unprecedented access to previously unavailable documents, including Hull's confidential medical records, unpublished manuscripts of Drew Pearson and R. Walton Moore, and Sumner Welles's FBI file. Gellman concludes that while Roosevelt, Hull, and Welles usually agreed on foreign policy matters, the events that molded each man's character remained a mystery to the others. Their failure to cope with their secret affairs—to subordinate their personal concerns to the higher good of the nation—eventually destroyed much of what they hoped would be their legacy. Roosevelt never explained his objectives to his vice president, Harry Truman, or to anyone else. Hull never groomed a successor, and Welles kept his foreign assignations as classified as his sexual orientation. Gellman tells the dramatic story of how three Americans—despite private demons and bitter animosities—could work together to lead their nation to victory against fascism. —William T. Walker, Presidential Studies Quarterly

Author : David B. Woolner
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465096514
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last 100 Days written by David B. Woolner and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing portrait of the end of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life and presidency, shedding new light on how he made his momentous final policy decisions The first hundred days of FDR's presidency are justly famous, often viewed as a period of political action without equal in American history. Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the last hundred might very well surpass them in drama and consequence. Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR called on every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue what mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, and the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. We see a president shorn of the usual distractions of office, a man whose sense of personal responsibility for the American people bore heavily upon him. As Woolner argues, even in declining health FDR displayed remarkable political talent and foresight as he focused his energies on shaping the peace to come.

Author : George H. Nash
Publisher : Hoover Press
ISBN 13 : 0817912363
Total Pages : 816 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freedom Betrayed written by George H. Nash and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herbert Hoover's "magnum opus"—at last published nearly fifty years after its completion—offers a revisionist reexamination of World War II and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the "lost statesmanship" of Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover offers his frank evaluation of Roosevelt's foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and policies during the war, as well as an examination of the war's consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at war's end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists.

Author : William J. Mann
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062383353
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Wars of the Roosevelts written by William J. Mann and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author presents a provocative, thoroughly modern revisionist biographical history of one of America’s greatest and most influential families—the Roosevelts—exposing heretofore unknown family secrets and detailing complex family rivalries with his signature cinematic flair. Drawing on previously hidden historical documents and interviews with the long-silent "illegitimate" branch of the family, William J. Mann paints an elegant, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking group portrait of this legendary family. Mann argues that the Roosevelts’ rise to power and prestige was actually driven by a series of intense personal contest that at times devolved into blood sport. His compelling and eye-opening masterwork is the story of a family at war with itself, of social Darwinism at its most ruthless—in which the strong devoured the weak and repudiated the inconvenient. Mann focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt, who, he argues, experienced this brutality firsthand, witnessing her Uncle Theodore cruelly destroy her father, Elliott—his brother and bitter rival—for political expediency. Mann presents a fascinating alternate picture of Eleanor, contending that this "worshipful niece" in fact bore a grudge against TR for the rest of her life, and dares to tell the truth about her intimate relationships without obfuscations, explanations, or labels. Mann also brings into focus Eleanor’s cousins, TR’s children, whose stories propelled the family rivalry but have never before been fully chronicled, as well as her illegitimate half-brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann, who inherited his family’s ambition and skill without their name and privilege. Growing up in poverty just miles from his wealthy relatives, Elliott Mann embodied the American Dream, rising to middle-class prosperity and enjoying one of the very few happy, long-term marriages in the Roosevelt saga. For the first time, The Wars of the Roosevelts also includes the stories of Elliott’s daughter and grandchildren, and never-before-seen photographs from their archives. Deeply psychological and finely rendered, illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs, The Wars of the Roosevelts illuminates not only the enviable strengths but also the profound shame of this remarkable and influential family.

Author : M. Stanton Evans
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 143914768X
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stalin's Secret Agents written by M. Stanton Evans and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primary source examination of the infiltration of Stalin's Soviet intelligence network by members of the American government during World War II reveals the dictator's dubious partnerships with such top-level figures as Vice President Henry Wallace andchief advisor Harry Hopkins.

Author : Jon Meacham
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812972821
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Franklin and Winston written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-10-12 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history’s towering leaders Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and a unique one—a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together (113 days during the war) and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes, and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca, and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children. Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. In their own time both men were underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet both magnificently rose to the central challenges of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister, who rallied his nation in its darkest hour, standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s affections—which was the way Roosevelt wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides—and Winston Churchill. Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. Franklin and Winston is also the story of their marriages and their families, two clans caught up in the most sweeping global conflict in history. Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’ s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint company—shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle. Hitler brought them together; later in the war, they drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their alliance, the pull of affection was always there. Charting the personal drama behind the discussions of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.