Watching darkness fall FDR, his ambassadors, and the rise of Adolf Hitler

Review by Booklist Review

Franklin Roosevelt's first priority upon assuming office in 1932 centered on the dire state of the collapsing American economy. But he soon found himself confronted with another crisis as Europe began its descent into war. Roosevelt needed competent ambassadors who could relay accurate and truthful assessments of the plans and intentions of key nations. He posted four quite diverse ambassadors to Europe: William Bullitt to Moscow, William Dodd to Berlin, Breckenridge Long to Rome, and Joseph Kennedy to London. David McKean (Tommy the Cork, 2003) points out that these were distinctively unalike men, each gifted with exceptional ambitions, but Roosevelt chose them carefully for each one's unique characters. Each of these diplomats had to confront powerful personalities such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Churchill. They also had to manage a cadre of U.S. foreign service officers who had become complacent, directionless, and too much interested in careerism and the glamorous social whirl of world capitals. McKean narrates the successes and failures of each and their critical roles in helping FDR prepare the nation and the world for the imminent conflagration of World War II. Includes bibliography.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

McKean (Suspected of Independence), the former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, delivers a perceptive group biography of four American diplomats as they witnessed--and struggled to handle--the rise of fascism in Europe from 1933 to 1941. Drawing on diaries, letters, and meeting records, McKean reveals how much President Franklin Roosevelt relied on information collected on the ground by his ambassadors in France (William Bullitt), Germany (William Dodd), Great Britain (Joseph P. Kennedy), and Italy (Breckinridge Long). Dodd, a former history professor, was the first to warn about the dangers of Hitler and "the depraved" officials around him. Bullitt, who had been the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before arriving in France, is credited with saving Paris from being bombed by the Germans in June 1940. Meanwhile, Long greatly admired Mussolini and urged the U.S. to stay out of the war in Europe, and Kennedy supported appeasement and sought ways to deepen the economic ties between Germany and the U.S. McKean illuminates the differences in his subjects' backgrounds and temperaments, and lucidly documents Hitler's relentless militarization and aggression and FDR's struggles to convince a reluctant American public--and Congress--to come to the aid of its European allies. This is a lively, immersive history of a pivotal time. (Nov.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

The newest political history by American diplomat McKean (Tommy the Cork) analyzes Franklin D. Roosevelt's interactions with U.S. envoys to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1941. Although Roosevelt was more interested in domestic concerns at the time, he was also deeply skeptical and largely dismissive of State Department appointees, McKean argues, as evinced by the president's in-person interactions and correspondence with emissaries such as William Bullitt, Breckinridge Long, William Dodd, and Joseph Kennedy. The author also paints vignettes of Roosevelt's confidant Harry Hopkins (chief advisor for both domestic and foreign affairs), the president's private secretary Missy LeHand, and George Messersmith (consul general to Germany and later ambassador to Austria). Readers gain insight into the antisemitism that McKean says characterized upper-class society and often blinded prominent people to the dangers of Nazism. The author excels in recognizing that diplomatic translators can shade meanings, so he identifies interpreters in particular meetings and the countries that supplied them. VERDICT Felicitously written with an insider's sensibility for international affairs, McKean's investigation, comparing favorably with David Mayers's similarly themed FDR's Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis, will delight both specialists and generalists.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Broad-ranging study of the role of ambassadors in conveying information about the rise of Europe's totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and early '40s. In a useful addition to the literature on the beginning of World War II, McKean, the former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, observes that in Franklin Roosevelt's time, there was no formally established federal post called "national security adviser." Instead, to monitor developments in Europe in a time of clear peril to the international order, Roosevelt assembled a body of advisers who shared with him "a set of commonalities, distinct for each man," and dispatched them as his ambassadors. Some weren't exactly top of their class, and a few had a complicated relationship with FDR--Joseph Kennedy, for example, who was committed to isolationism even as he served as ambassador to the U.K. The ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long, was, like Roosevelt, a blue blood. Enthusiastic for fascism, Long "was inordinately impressed by Mussolini." Meanwhile, the ambassador to Germany, born outside the usual moneyed Ivy League pedigree of State Department officials, was willing to be schooled in what the American consul in Berlin considered "the limitless depth of Hitler's evil." All of his intelligence channels eventually led Roosevelt away from a certain wariness over international involvement to a certainty that America would be enveloped in a European war, and on the side of Britain and France. For all that, writes McKean, Roosevelt was overly cautious on at least one matter. "Despite the intensifying anti-Jewish persecution in Germany in the 1930s, he refused to condemn the Nazi government," adding that while Roosevelt surely could have done more to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S., he left policy matters on the subject to Long, "a narrow-minded bigot and anti-Semite." That Roosevelt was reluctant to act, McKean writes damningly, was his foremost failure as president. Of considerable interest to students of modern European history and the Roosevelt era. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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