Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry Into World War II

New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Good in very good dust jacket. DJ has no price. Book club mark on rear board. Rear board was weak, restrengthened with glue.. x, [4]279, [11] p. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Waldo Heinrichs is Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the U.S. Diplomatic Tradition. For Franklin D. Roosevelt, the spring of 1941 was a time of uncertainty. Hitler's armies were poised to strike, but no one was sure where the next attack would come, and Churchill and members of Roosevelt's administration were urging him to intervene before it was too late. In this account of the American entry into World War II, the author shows that Roosevelt was not the vacillating, impulsive, and disorganized leader as he is often portrayed, but a cautious, rational man, capable of acting with great determination. From the publisher's website: "As the first comprehensive treatment of the American entry into World War II to appear in over thirty-five years, Waldo Heinrichs' volume places American policy in a global context, covering both the European and Asian diplomatic and military scenes, with Roosevelt at the center. Telling a tale of ever-broadening conflict, this vivid narrative weaves back and forth from the battlefields in the Soviet Union, to the intense policy debates within Roosevelt's administration, to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, to the precarious and delicate negotiations with Japan. Refuting the popular portrayal of Roosevelt as a vacillating, impulsive man who displayed no organizational skills in his decision-making during this period, Heinrichs presents him as a leader who acted with extreme caution and deliberation, who always kept his options open, and who, once Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in July, 1941, acted rapidly and with great determination. This masterful account of a key moment in American history captures the tension faced by Roosevelt, Churchill, Stimson, Hull, and numerous others as they struggled to shape American policy in the climactic nine months before Pearl Harbor."