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No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II Kindle Edition
With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateJune 30, 2008
- File size41170 KB
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“The thing always to remember,” she said, is that “you must do the thing you think you cannot do.”938 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.”781 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Roosevelt’s inability to get rid of anybody, even the hopelessly incompetent, was a chief source of the disorderliness of his administration, of his double-dealing and his tendency to procrastinate.684 Kindle readers highlighted this
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“Engrossing . . . No Ordinary Time is no ordinary book. . . . An ambitiously conceived and imaginatively executed participant’s eye view of the United States in the war years. . . . The sheer abundance of colorful biographical anecdotes and the cumulative weight of telling detail sustain an atmosphere of immediacy and leave a lastingly vivid impression.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“The Roosevelt marriage is endlessly gripping because it was so consequential. . . . The reader feels like a resident in the White House.” (The Boston Globe)
“A tale rendered nearly seamless by Goodwin’s skills as a reporter and writer, and by the immense entanglement of her subjects’ private and public lives. How their talents, insecurities, and demons impacted on the country and the world will be much better understood with the publication of this remarkable book.” (Chicago Sun-Times)
“A thoroughly terrific and important work, a valuable addition to Roosevelt literature. . . . Goodwin has deftly reminded us just how extraordinary FDR and Eleanor were in ‘no ordinary times.’” (San Francisco Chronicle)
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work for President Johnson inspired her career as a presidential historian. Her first book was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. She earned the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, in part the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, about the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Her last book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times was the inspiration for the History Channel docuseries on Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, which she executive produced.
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"THE DECISIVE HOUR HAS COME"
On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs inert beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep.
The evening of May 9, 1940, was one of these nights. At 11 p.m., as Roosevelt sat in his comfortable study on the second floor of the White House, the long-apprehended phone call had come. Resting against the high back of his favorite red leather chair, a precise reproduction of one Thomas Jefferson had designed for work, the president listened as his ambassador to Belgium, John Cudahy, told him that Hitler's armies were simultaneously attacking Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. The period of relative calm -- the "phony war" that had settled over Europe since the German attack on Poland in September of 1939 -- was over.
For days, rumors of a planned Nazi invasion had spread through the capitals of Western Europe. Now, listening to Ambassador Cudahy's frantic report that German planes were in the air over the Low Countries and France, Roosevelt knew that the all-out war he feared had finally begun. In a single night, the tacit agreement that, for eight months, had kept the belligerents from attacking each other's territory had been shattered.
As he summoned his military aide and appointments secretary, General Edwin "Pa" Watson, on this spring evening of the last year of his second term, Franklin Roosevelt looked younger than his fifty-eight years. Though his hair was threaded with gray, the skin on his handsome face was clear, and the blue eyes, beneath his pince-nez glasses, were those of a man at the peak of his vitality. His chest was so broad, his neck so thick, that when seated he appeared larger than he was. Only when he was moved from his chair would the eye be drawn to the withered legs, paralyzed by polio almost two decades earlier.
At 12:40 a.m., the president's press secretary, Stephen Early, arrived to monitor incoming messages. Bombs had begun to fall on Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying thousands of homes. In dozens of old European neighborhoods, fires illuminated the night sky. Stunned Belgians stood in their nightclothes in the streets of Brussels, watching bursts of anti-aircraft fire as military cars and motorcycles dashed through the streets. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Guy de Liederkirche, was Brussels' first child to die. His body would later be carried to his school for a memorial service with his classmates. On every radio station throughout Belgium, broadcasts summoned all soldiers to join their units at once.
In Amsterdam the roads leading out of the city were crowded with people and automobiles as residents fled in fear of the bombing. Bombs were also falling at Dunkirk, Calais, and Metz in France, and at Chilham, near Canterbury, in England. The initial reports were confusing -- border clashes had begun, parachute troops were being dropped to seize Dutch and Belgian airports, the government of Luxembourg had already fled to France, and there was some reason to believe the Germans were also landing troops by sea.
After speaking again to Ambassador Cudahy and scanning the incoming news reports, Roosevelt called his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and ordered him to freeze all assets held by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg before the market opened in the morning, to keep any resources of the invaded countries from falling into German hands.
The official German explanation for the sweeping invasion of the neutral lowlands was given by Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Germany, he claimed, had received "proof" that the Allies were engineering an imminent attack through the Low Countries into the German Ruhr district. In a belligerent tone, von Ribbentrop said the time had come for settling the final account with the French and British leaders. Just before midnight, Adolf Hitler, having boarded a special train to the front, had issued the fateful order to his troops: "The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1000 years."
There was little that could be done that night -- phone calls to Paris and Brussels could rarely be completed, and the Hague wire was barely working -- but, as one State Department official said, "in times of crisis the key men should be at hand and the public should know it." Finally, at 2:40 a.m., Roosevelt decided to go to bed. After shifting his body to his armless wheel chair, he rolled through a door near his desk into his bedroom.
As usual when the president's day came to an end, he called for his valet, Irvin McDuffie, to lift him into his bed. McDuffie, a Southern Negro, born the same year as his boss, had been a barber by trade when Roosevelt met him in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1927. Roosevelt quickly developed a liking for the talkative man and offered him the job of valet. Now he and his wife lived in a room on the third floor of the White House. In recent months, McDuffie's hard drinking had become a problem: on several occasions Eleanor had found him so drunk that "he couldn't help Franklin to bed." Fearing that her husband might be abandoned at a bad time, Eleanor urged him to fire McDuffie, but the president was unable to bring himself to let his old friend go, even though he shared Eleanor's fear.
McDuffie was at his post in the early hours of May 10 when the president called for help. He lifted the president from his wheelchair onto the narrow bed, reminiscent of the kind used in a boy's boarding school, straightened his legs to their full length, and then undressed him and put on his pajamas. Beside the bed was a white-painted table; on its top, a jumble of pencils, notepaper, a glass of water, a package of cigarettes, a couple of phones, a bottle of nose drops. On the floor beside the table stood a small basket -- the Eleanor basket -- in which the first lady regularly left memoranda, communications, and reports for the president to read -- a sort of private post office between husband and wife. In the corner sat an old-fashioned rocking chair, and next to it a heavy wardrobe filled with the president's clothes. On the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace was an assortment of family photos and a collection of miniature pigs. "Like every room in any Roosevelt house," historian Arthur Schlesinger has written, "the presidential bedroom was hopelessly Victorian -- old-fashioned and indiscriminate in its furnishings, cluttered in its decor, ugly and comfortable."
Outside Roosevelt's door, which he refused to lock at night as previous presidents had done, Secret Service men patrolled the corridor, alerting the guardroom to the slightest hint of movement. The refusal to lock his door was related to the president's dread of fire, which surpassed his fear of assassination or of anything else. The fear seems to have been rooted in his childhood, when, as a small boy, he had seen his young aunt, Laura, race down the stairs, screaming, her body and clothes aflame from an accident with an alcohol lamp. Her life was ended at nineteen. The fear grew when he became a paraplegic, to the point where, for hours at a time, he would practice dropping from his bed or chair to the floor and then crawling to the door so that he could escape from a fire on his own. "We assured him he would never be alone," his eldest son, Jimmy, recalled, "but he could not be sure, and furthermore found the idea depressing that he could not be left alone, as if he were an infant."
Roosevelt's nightly rituals tell us something about his deepest feelings -- the desire for freedom, the quest for movement, and the significance, despite all his attempts to downplay it, of the paralysis in his life. In 1940, Roosevelt had been president of the United States for seven years, but he had been paralyzed from the waist down for nearly three times that long. Before he was stricken at thirty-nine, Roosevelt was a man who flourished on activity. He had served in the New York legislature for two years, been assistant secretary of the navy for seven years, and his party's candidate for vice-president in 1920. He loved to swim and to sail, to play tennis and golf; to run in the woods and ride horseback in the fields. To his daughter, Anna, he was always "very active physically," "a wonderful playmate who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you and do a lot of things," while Jimmy saw him quite simply as "the handsomest, strongest, most glamorous, vigorous physical father in the world."
All that vigor and athleticism ended in August 1921 at Campobello, his family's summer home in New Brunswick, Canada, when he returned home from swimming in the pond with his children and felt too tired even to remove his wet bathing suit. The morning after his swim, his temperature was 102 degrees and he had trouble moving his left leg. By afternoon, the power to move his right leg was also gone, and soon he was paralyzed from the waist down. The paralysis had set in so swiftly that no one understood at first that it was polio. But once the diagnosis was made, the battle was joined. For years he fought to walk on his own power, practicing for hours at a time, drenched with sweat, as he tried unsuccessfully to move one leg in ...
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Product details
- ASIN : B002HJV79U
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (June 30, 2008)
- Publication date : June 30, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 41170 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 769 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1476750572
- Best Sellers Rank: #95,359 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Depression History of the U.S.
- #75 in Biographies of US Presidents
- #159 in WWII Biographies
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About the author
![Doris Kearns Goodwin](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/918hx1TSatL._SY600_.jpg)
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN’s interest in leadership began more than half a century ago as a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for LBJ in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to her bestselling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Goodwin earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals, the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, the New York Times bestselling chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, the writer Richard N. Goodwin. More at www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com @DorisKGoodwin
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Customers find the book informative, interesting, and well-researched. They also describe the content as engaging, regal, and terrific. Readers praise the writing quality as beautiful, readable, and talented. They appreciate the great insights into the personalities and characters of both the President and First Lady. Opinions are mixed on the length, with some finding it quite long while others say it's a bit long.
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Customers find the book very informative, compelling, and nuanced. They also appreciate the splendid research and organization. Readers also mention that the book is inspiring, well-researched, and written. Overall, they describe it as a wonderful combination of political, military, and social history.
"...This is my first book by Kearns but she is truly one of the great historians and the great writers of our era...." Read more
"...This book is so richly detailed and nuanced that one could ignore (at their great loss) all the psychological intrigue and simply focus on the most..." Read more
"...She is a terrific historical researcher and writer...." Read more
"...Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War Two, provides the reader with deep insight into the inner workings of the White house at one of the..." Read more
Customers find the writing quality of the book beautiful, richly detailed, and nuanced. They also say the author does a terrific job chronicling the events of the times, revealing the extremely complex, rich, and controversial main figures.
"...The writing is magnificent, and somehow Goodwin manages to bring us up close and personal with the Roosevelts while simultaneously coloring in all..." Read more
"...This book is so richly detailed and nuanced that one could ignore (at their great loss) all the psychological intrigue and simply focus on the most..." Read more
"...I thought that she did a terrific job chronicling the events of the times, revealing the interactions of the Roosevelt family along with FDR and..." Read more
"...The narrator of the spoken version was wonderful...." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book great, fascinating, and relatable. They also appreciate the sympathetic portrayal of the unusual marriage and partnership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Readers also say the book illuminates the presidential role and the wife of President. They mention that the book brings the greatness, humanity, and frailty of Roosevelt to life.
"...I think that Goodwin did a wonderful job in depicting the Presidents personality and his unique way of going about things...." Read more
"...The narrator of the spoken version was wonderful. He managed multiple characters adeptly and Eleanor and Franklin so well that I felt we knew each..." Read more
"...The account of FDR's death is so vivid that I could imagine the scramble at the cottages in Warm Springs, the passage of the funeral train back to..." Read more
"...FDR got it; Eleanor didn't. Also, this book reveals the very human side of its protagonists, especially the very strange relationship between the..." Read more
Customers find the book engaging, informative, and educational. They also say it's interesting to hear the backdrop to many historical moments.
"...Most importantly, the book is warm and humane throughout, always entertaining, and very easy to like and enjoy...." Read more
"Another explosion of intellect, detail, and wonder by Doris Kearns Goodwin...." Read more
"...But the way it was written just kept one's interest throughout...." Read more
"...Just a great experience and definitely sparked great discussion fo hours!" Read more
Customers find the book provides a great perspective on the lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. They also appreciate the clear presentation of the personal and professional aspects. Readers also mention that it's great to be taken behind the scenes to see why certain decisions were made during WWII.
"...I felt that this was a clearly presented view of the personal and professional lives of the couple, presented without judgment or bias...." Read more
"This is an incredibly detailed view into the life of Franklin and Eleanor...." Read more
"...Goodwin clearly admires her subjects, but does a nice job of keeping a balanced perspective about their character traits and their actions...." Read more
"...I liked the fact that Goodwin gives you a realistic view of the historical figures in this period...." Read more
Customers find the book hard to put down and easy to stay with. They also say it's enjoyable.
"...This book is not an easy read necessarily but it is easy to stay with & is throughly enjoyable...." Read more
"...the personal lives of these two remarkable people, it is a book that is hard to put down...." Read more
"I'm reading it, hard to put down." Read more
"Wonderful book that is hard to put down. Ms Goodwin makes the reader feel like you’re witnessing history take place ...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the length of the book. Some mention it's quite long but well written, while others say it'll be hard to put down.
"Two words come to mind. Good and long. I did skip over a lot of it...." Read more
"...Yes, it's long, but so well written and so full of fascinating information about two exceptional people...." Read more
"...It is a lengthy book, and despite the damage I just dried it out and kept reading about these amazing people, particularly Eleanor...." Read more
"...The book is long, but worth the effort. Coincidently, my reading coincides with the PBS special about the Roosevelts on Sept. 14. I can't wait." Read more
Customers are mixed about the readability of the book. Some mention it's a non-boring effort and fantastic, while others say it'll take a long time to read and is hard to get started.
"...It’s a long book. But it’s not repetitive...." Read more
"...This is a dense read part of the time, but it contains so many illustrations of how these two flawed people worked together and separately that it..." Read more
"...Utterly fascinating, never boring, highly readable. I did not want it to end...." Read more
"...This book is not an easy read necessarily but it is easy to stay with & is throughly enjoyable...." Read more
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The writing is magnificent, and somehow Goodwin manages to bring us up close and personal with the Roosevelts while simultaneously coloring in all of the contextual detail of a world at war. It is really quite fascinating to think of the sheer scale at which world leaders were forced to think at the time. The petty disputes we seem to be obsessed with today quickly recede into irrelevance by comparison.
Several things struck me quite intensely. The first is the discovery of just how divided the US was on the brink of entering the war. It is easy, and perhaps tempting, to believe that our politics have never been more divided than they are today, but that is not an entirely accurate assessment.
While that may or may not be reassuring to anyone, it is a source of optimism if you follow the story through. Wherever you sit on the political spectrum today, the story of Wendell Wilke’s support for conscription and for the support of Great Britain, which he had to assume would cost him the election, was truly indicative of one of those great moments in American history when a single powerful individual put the interests of his country and his conscience above his or her own.
The second thing that struck me was a reminder of just how fragile history is. While we tend to look back in time through the perception that history was somehow fated, it never is. A change in direction one degree one way or the other and history would have followed a completely different path. And, more often than not, the path that it did follow was not of any one person’s design or choice.
It is not, however, a path defined by sheer happenstance. One unexpected result of the book, for me, is a greater appreciation of the civic duty each of us shares. We must vote. We must speak. We must get involved. While I often feel that my own voice is lost in the sea of shouting that is political discourse today, Kearns gave me a greater appreciation of how history really works. It’s not my voice that matters. But it is my voice, in a chorus with others, which can change history. And for that awakening I am truly grateful.
The great strength of democracy is that government leaders ultimately hold no power without the support of the people. But which is the chicken and which is the egg? While Roosevelt consciously waited for the support of the American citizenry before escalating the US commitment to war, it is also clear that he was very deliberately shaping that support toward his own agenda. While that deceptive use of government power may be justified by the fact that his was the just agenda, what if it wasn’t?
World War II was the medium for vast social, economic, and migratory change in America. Some of it, particularly relating to the treatment of people of color and gender norms didn’t go far enough and there is much work to be done yet today.
Some of it went too far. Before the war America was built on a foundation of small business. The war launched the rise of the large corporate institution and the military-industrial complex. It’s a particularly important development because of the power of the state to shape opinion and policy. He/she who controls the political process, which is clearly in the hands of the people and the institutions who control our wealth today, controls, to a large extent, public opinion. It’s not, in other words, a fair fight between opposing ideologies. The money, in this case, has the upper hand.
There is little question that the dog-eat-dog, me-centric way of life we know today would have been unrecognizable, and greatly disappointing, to the Roosevelts. They spoke openly about a post-war America in which the right to make a decent living, access to health care, and the integration of the rights of labor and management, would be firmly established. It is a we-centric perspective that is foreign to the individualistic ideology of our current political leadership.
It’s a long book. But it’s not repetitive. And while it felt like an accomplishment when I turned the last page, it was a feeling of great satisfaction. This is my first book by Kearns but she is truly one of the great historians and the great writers of our era.
In the end, it is a period of American history that we should all study. Not just because it was an important era in history but because it has so much to teach us, both good and bad, about the America we live in today and where we should go from here.
That said, assorted winds were blowing at her back. First is the undeniably fascinating focal point of the president and first lady, the likes of which this country has not seen before or since. Far from being merely the prototypical New Dealer, Goodwin reveals FDR as the penultimate political tactician. He was a consummate master of reading the public's readiness to embrace social and political change, including the launching of New Deal programs intended to put Depression era America back to work, the transition to a war time production footing, and incremental steps toward racial equality and integration, including such nearly impenetrable bastions as the United States Navy where for decades, blacks were overwhelmingly more likely to serve as mess workers than sailors. FDR's soul mate, the irrepressible agent of social welfare, Eleanor Roosevelt, is revealed as a once the damaged product of a troubled childhood and a lifetime juggernaut, a virtually tireless advocate for the poor, women, minorities and anyone else who was otherwise disenfranchised.
Perhaps above all else, including a riveting account of how the U.S. finally came to put its full might behind the war effort, "No Ordinary Time" paints an incredible complex and subtle relationship between FDR and the first lady. This was a love affair perhaps unlike any in history, mostly for the better, but at times for the worse. At their best, they were tireless advocates for the nation's and each others' needs, causes and passions. At their worst, they were a couple who largely lived apart, both physically and spiritually. Their extra-marital relationships were probably unique, not merely because they happened over a period of decades, but in their idiosyncratic nature. FDR had the equivalent of at least two full blown extramarital relationships, while Eleanor was the subject of a romantically obsessed female reporter and the fount of an obsession of her own making with a man young enough to have been her son. One is led to believe that FDR and Eleanor's combined levels of extraordinary energy and sociopolitical passion were directly fueled by their relationships with other men and women across most of their adult lives.
This book is so richly detailed and nuanced that one could ignore (at their great loss) all the psychological intrigue and simply focus on the most distressing and fascinating war in history. The description of how the U.S. transitioned from an isolationist nation wishing to avoid involvement in another world war at all costs to the driver of the Allied effort is intriguing. If for no other reason, one can devour this book for its revelations over how we turned a consumer nation good at making cars, trucks, washing and sewing machines to a crushingly effective manufacturer of warplanes, tanks, ships, guns and ammunition.
Read this book for the psychological, political, or economic content. You can not possibly miss out on a fantastic learning experience and yes, this truly was the Greatest Generation.
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Goodwin demonstrates just how entwined were the endeavours of the soldiers at the battlefront and the domestic workers at home, how much the eventual Allied victory relied on the immense manufacturing capability of the American economy. The Allies didn't win World War II through superior soldiering or strategy; the Axis powers were simply swamped by the overwhelming might of the American military-industrial complex. And all of these efforts, of industry and business and economics and labour, were all guided and shaped by the hand of Franklin Roosevelt, with Eleanor at his side serving as his eyes and ears where the crippled Roosevelt could not go, forging a independent role for herself and revolutionising the role of First Lady.
It must surely be one of the great what-ifs of history - what if Franklin Roosevelt had not been at the helm during World War II? Would another President have supported the Allies the way he did? Would another President have come up with lend-lease? Would another President have forged quite the same relationship with Churchill or Stalin? Would another President have had a wife quite as remarkable as Eleanor Roosevelt, to serve as his social conscience and moral arbiter? It is of course impossible to say, but reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's remarkable book, one can only be thankful that such an extraordinary couple as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were in the White House at this most crucial of times.
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