Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
Lynne Olson
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 0812982142
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
From the acclaimed author of Citizens of London comes the definitive account of the debate over American intervention in World War II—a bitter, sometimes violent clash of personalities and ideas that divided the nation and ultimately determined the fate of the free world.
At the center of this controversy stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative. While FDR, buffeted by political pressures on all sides, struggled to marshal public support for aid to Winston Churchill’s Britain, Lindbergh saw his heroic reputation besmirched—and his marriage thrown into turmoil—by allegations that he was a Nazi sympathizer.
Spanning the years 1939 to 1941, Those Angry Days vividly re-creates the rancorous internal squabbles that gripped the United States in the period leading up to Pearl Harbor. After Germany vanquished most of Europe, America found itself torn between its traditional isolationism and the urgent need to come to the aid of Britain, the only country still battling Hitler. The conflict over intervention was, as FDR noted, “a dirty fight,” rife with chicanery and intrigue, and Those Angry Days recounts every bruising detail. In Washington, a group of high-ranking military officers, including the Air Force chief of staff, worked to sabotage FDR’s pro-British policies. Roosevelt, meanwhile, authorized FBI wiretaps of Lindbergh and other opponents of intervention. At the same time, a covert British operation, approved by the president, spied on antiwar groups, dug up dirt on congressional isolationists, and planted propaganda in U.S. newspapers.
The stakes could not have been higher. The combatants were larger than life. With the immediacy of a great novel, Those Angry Days brilliantly recalls a time fraught with danger when the future of democracy and America’s role in the world hung in the balance.
Praise for Those Angry Days
“Powerfully [re-creates] this tenebrous era . . . Olson captures in spellbinding detail the key figures in the battle between the Roosevelt administration and the isolationist movement.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Popular history at its most riveting . . . In Those Angry Days, journalist-turned-historian Lynne Olson captures [the] period in a fast-moving, highly readable narrative punctuated by high drama.”—Associated Press
“Filled with fascinating anecdotes and surprising twists . . . With this stirring book, Lynne Olson confirms her status as our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.”—Madeleine K. Albright
“[An] absorbing chronicle . . . [Olson] doesn’t so much revisit a historical period as inhabit it; her scenes flicker as urgently as a newsreel.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Masterfully describes America’s conflicting opinions before Pearl Harbor . . . a comprehensive take on another era of angry divisions.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch
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New Yorker, “and she has repeatedly implied that if the United States manages to keep out of the war, it will be without her approval.” Unlike Lindbergh, Thompson passionately felt that the war was indeed a fight between good and evil and that America had a moral obligation to intercede. “Believe it or not,” she wrote, in a direct slap at the flier, “there are such things in the world as morality, as law, as conscience, as a noble concept of humanity, which once awake, are stronger than all.
A fireside chat on national defense, FDR weighed in with his own denunciation of what he saw as fifth-column activities in the United States. After assuring the American people that he would do everything in his power to keep the country safe, he warned about this powerful strategy for “weakening a nation at its very roots.” He went on: “These dividing forces are undiluted poison. They must not be allowed to spread in the New World as they have in the Old.” Roosevelt had long been preoccupied.
Opposition to Lindbergh’s views. In early June, she made a national radio address on behalf of the White Committee, calling on the government to provide all-out support for the Allies: “I urge the sending of munitions and supplies, food, money, airplanes, ships, and everything that could help them in this struggle against Germany.” Then, in what could easily be viewed as a rebuke to Lindbergh, Mrs. Morrow declared, “There are some things worse than war. There are some things supreme and noble.
That his committee could be of no use unless it had something substantive to work on: “We are doing the best we can, but the trouble is there is nothing before Congress that we can get behind and boost.” To Roosevelt, White cabled in early June: “My correspondence is heaping up unanimously behind the plan to aid the Allies by anything other than war. As an old friend, let me warn you that maybe you will not be able to lead the American people unless you catch up with them. They are going fast.”.
America had not yet provided any substantial aid for Britain. But with the country’s situation growing increasingly desperate, the prime minister finally instructed his ambassador to “go full steam ahead” with the destroyers-bases swap. The deal was clearly far more advantageous for the United States than for Britain, and Churchill, who feared being criticized at home for making a bad bargain, wanted the transaction to be seen as an exchange of gifts. Roosevelt, however, was adamant that it be.