Michael Fullilove, Rendezvous with Destiny: How Franklin D. Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World (New York: Penguin, 2013), 480 pp., $29.95.

THIS IS certainly an interesting and meticulously researched book, agreeably written and rigorous in its assertion of historical facts. The only reservation that arises is that the basic premise seems to confer too much importance on the five people who are its subjects, in their shared roles as special envoys for President Franklin D. Roosevelt between March 1940 and July 1941. This was a terribly complicated and intense period in international relations, in which the United States moved to confirm President Roosevelt’s prediction (in his speech accepting renomination in Philadelphia on June 27, 1936), that “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Roosevelt led it to that rendezvous with astonishing agility and both tactical and strategic brilliance. The contention of this book appears to be that the five men featured—Sumner Welles, William J. Donovan, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie and W. Averell Harriman—were indispensable to making it to the encounter with destiny and making the experience a national and international success.

Unfortunately, that case is not really made, and I don’t think it is accurate. The author generally grasps Roosevelt’s methods and recognizes him for the deft cynic that he was, almost always in the service of broadly good objectives. He also was ultimately, at the summit of his career, the indispensable man to the victory of democracy, though he shared that honor, at least in 1940 and 1941, with Winston Churchill. And on the last page of the book, Michael Fullilove writes, “For the most part, [Roosevelt] moved his envoys around the globe with great skill and élan.” His envoys “were instruments of his will.” But Fullilove also declares, “Sometimes, especially in his moments of irresolution, they shifted his thinking.” There is not a jot of evidence, here or anywhere, that any of these five ever shifted his thinking at all. It is undoubtedly true that Harry Hopkins was an informative observer of the determination of the British to persevere and of the high qualities of Churchill as a war leader, but these were not exactly revelations when Hopkins made his first visit to Britain in January 1941. Indeed, as the author records, Hopkins advised Churchill and his entourage, “The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him.” Roosevelt sent Hopkins with that message; he did not adopt that policy after listening to Hopkins tell him about the state of British morale and war capability and Churchill’s strong personality.

Even before Hopkins arrived in London, the United Kingdom had won the Battle of Britain, smashed the Italian navy, sunk the Bismarck and was threatening to sweep the Italians out of North Africa. Hopkins’s role was to buck up the British and assure them that help was coming, as Roosevelt had already conceived the lend-lease program and it was proceeding through Congress. Even Roosevelt, inscrutable though he was behind his apparently guileless bonhomie and overwhelming charm, liked company, and he sought it from women less opinionated and more deferential (and physically alluring) than Eleanor (Missy LeHand, Margaret Suckley, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd), and from his senior political loyalist and adviser, Louis McHenry Howe, until he died in 1936. Three years later, Roosevelt invited the unhealthy widower, Hopkins, who had been a remarkably capable welfare and workfare administrator for Roosevelt when he was governor of New York and in the New Deal, to take Howe’s place as a resident of the White House and confidential sounding board. The night before the Pearl Harbor attack, he reviewed with Hopkins the decrypted Japanese message, scheduled for delivery the following day, and said, “This means war.” There is no known instance where Hopkins did more than carry out missions for his chief, very important though those assignments sometimes were. As this book recounts, when Willkie, the industrialist and 1940 Republican presidential candidate, asked Roosevelt why he employed such a controversial man as Hopkins, FDR said that it was important to have someone around who wasn’t asking for anything and only wanted to serve, which Howe and Hopkins did. But when Hopkins remarried and moved out of the White House, he lost access to Roosevelt, and they were not close again. It was Roosevelt’s nature to use people and discard them, with a smile and a joke and a kind word, but absolutely ruthlessly. His mentor Al Smith, party chairman Jim Farley, fixer Thomas Corcoran, all of the original so-called brain trust, nearly all those who supposedly had any influence with him—all departed eventually as if through the trapdoor on a gallows.

BY MAKING his book effectively a snapshot of America starting in early 1940, Fullilove inadvertently incites the inference that Franklin D. Roosevelt entered this critical phase of the war with unformed ideas about the correlation of forces in the world. In fact, Roosevelt knew Western Europe well and spoke French and German fluently. He attended school in Germany, and from his first visit to a performance of the “Ring” cycle at Wagner’s Festspielhaus at Bayreuth with his mother in 1896 he considered Germany to be a nation of delusional warmongers. As soon as Hitler was installed as chancellor, while he was preparing for his own inauguration, he said to his entourage that it would be impossible to maintain peace with him on satisfactory terms. This view was bolstered in May 1933 when he met with Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, whom FDR considered “extremely arrogant.” The president listened to Hitler’s speeches with his staff in his office and translated them for the others. When Albert Einstein visited Roosevelt, they spoke in German.

Thus, Roosevelt saw the war coming as early as 1933 and came to his conclusions about Hitler even before Churchill did. It is inconceivable that after the outbreak of the war in Europe, Roosevelt intended to retire, though he was determined to try to make it look like he was a reluctant draftee to a third-term nomination, as he was breaking a tradition as old as the Republic. Based on the votes in Congress on peacetime conscription, increased defense spending, lend-lease aid and protection of arms shipments to Britain through 1941, it is clear that no one but Roosevelt would have thought in such terms and no one else could have brought congressional and public opinion with him. While unctuously claiming to be neutral, he gave the British and Canadians anything they wanted with an indefinite repayment, and he extended U.S. claims on territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles into the Atlantic and ordered the U.S. Navy to attack on detection any German ship. This was a novel definition of neutrality, and no one else—certainly not the well-disposed amateur Willkie—would have thought of, much less accomplished, such a thing. So artfully conceived and brilliantly executed a plan of genius was not the distillation of the findings of talented special envoys; they each had a part to play but had no idea what their leader thought or what his overall design was.

Roosevelt knew that if Germany were able to consolidate its hold on all that it had conquered by the summer of 1940—including most of France, Poland and Scandinavia, plus Benelux, Bohemia and Moravia—it would have a population as great as America’s and an economic strength almost as great. Within a generation, this greater Germany would dominate Europe and be a mortal threat to the position of the United States as the world’s most powerful country. FDR had warned the French not to allow the remilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany in 1936 and had warned Stalin in the last week of August 1939 not to sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler. He had admonished the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, against “this ‘We who are about to die, salute thee’ attitude,” and asked the British king and queen to visit the United States as an add-on to their trip to Canada in June 1939, partly to warm relations between the two countries and partly because he considered successive British prime ministers—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—to be hopelessly irresolute. This caused him to welcome the return of Churchill to government in 1939 and to enter into direct contact with him, even though his recollection of their one previous meeting, in 1919, was not a happy one.

From the time of his 1937 “quarantine” speech in Chicago, in which the president posited the idea of resisting the Axis powers through economic sanctions, Roosevelt tried to prod the British and French into being more resistant to German and Italian aggression. He laboriously explained when importuned by the leaders of those countries that it was hard for him to be as purposeful as they might wish when they, Hitler’s immediate neighbors, were so steeped in passivity and addicted to appeasement. For the next four years after the quarantine speech, he steadily ratcheted up American opinion, but after each oratorical escalation he deftly insisted that nothing had changed. Strangely, King George VI understood Roosevelt’s technique better than Churchill or many of Roosevelt’s own circle. He wrote Roosevelt on June 3, 1941: “I have been so struck by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.”

WHAT THIS history demonstrates is that the envoys chronicled by Fullilove were not pathfinders guiding their president and countrymen to destinations that only became discernible as a result of their research. They performed important tasks assigned them by the president, whom they served in furthering a plan of favorable engagement and retrieval of civilization that he had been silently preparing for years and started to execute with the quarantine speech. Obviously, details of it had to be adapted and timed to events that Roosevelt could not foresee or control.

FDR did not require the advice of Hopkins or Donovan or Willkie to reassure him that helping Britain stay in the war against Germany was a good idea. As for Willkie, Roosevelt liked him as a progressive Republican, unlike the other GOP leaders who had succeeded his distant cousin, Theodore, in leading that party. Herbert Hoover and Alf Landon were supporting the isolationists—as was Senator Robert Taft, son of the former president—and Roosevelt had fought a bruising juridical battle with the 1916 Republican presidential candidate, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had died—and were isolationists anyway. (Roosevelt had run for vice president along with James M. Cox against the Harding/Coolidge ticket in 1920.) He welcomed a Republican nominee whom he did not regard as a member of the political flat-earth society. Roosevelt had thought about trying to rationalize American politics by expelling the segregationist South from his party, as he had tried partially to do with some Southern Democrats in his attempted purge of 1938, and attract moderate Republicans in their place. Willkie might have played a role in that, but events of the war prevented him from pursuing such a course.

Likewise, there is no reason to believe William J. Donovan did more than confirm Roosevelt in his well-established opinion that Britain had to be assisted in every politically feasible way to remain in the war and serve as America’s first line of defense against the Nazi threat. Curiously, Fullilove does not mention Donovan’s most important service prior to the U.S. entry into World War II—namely, his trip to the Balkans in December 1940, in which he advised the government in Belgrade that the United States would assist Yugoslavia, and this was soon broadened to include lend-lease aid, if Belgrade did not cave to the Germans. This information, amplified by the efforts of the British intelligence service, helped produce the coup that overthrew the pro-German government in Belgrade in February 1941, which, along with Mussolini receiving a good thrashing from the Greeks, caused Hitler to delay the invasion of the Soviet Union by almost six weeks while the Wehrmacht subdued those countries, a decisive time in the first year of the Russo-German war.

Similarly, the book does not mention that Hopkins explained to Churchill the political equation in the United States at the beginning of 1941. There were, he said, four distinct blocs of public opinion in his country. About 10–15 percent of Americans were Communist or Nazi sympathizers, sheltering behind Charles Lindbergh; they professed to be neutral, but wanted a German victory. Some 15–20 percent, represented by the catastrophic former ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, wanted to help Britain but were pessimistic about that country’s chances and did not want to run any risk of war. Another 10–15 percent thought war was inevitable and victory for the democracies essential and achievable; they simply wanted to get on with it. This group included much of Roosevelt’s cabinet, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Finally, the remaining 50–60 percent wanted to give all possible aid short of war to Britain and Canada even if that risked being drawn into the war, though they preferred to stay out of the war, at least for a time. Roosevelt had the support of almost all of this last group, as well as all of those who favored war and a chunk of the Kennedy faction. This represented 70–75 percent of the total, a formidable achievement in such political crosscurrents. Hopkins left Churchill in no doubt that Roosevelt himself was in the war camp with Stimson and the others, but he knew from American history, including Wilson’s experience in World War I, that he had to lead a united people into war.

It is true that in his brief visit to Stalin in July 1941, after his second Churchill visit, Hopkins did bring back some impressions of Stalin and of Soviet staying power that were valuable to both Churchill and Roosevelt. Yet even here, Hopkins was reporting, not altering the president’s policy to assist Russia. His observations had nothing to do with Roosevelt’s determination, already formed as Fullilove acknowledges, to extend a great deal of assistance to Stalin. Still, Roosevelt and Churchill both thought it might be difficult for Stalin to hang on much more than the first year before making a separate peace on the lines of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but with borders well to the east of where this conflict began. But Hopkins was not so much increasing Roosevelt’s insight into European affairs as conveying for him the message that the British could count on American assistance. Hopkins was in London to reinforce the resolve and morale of the British, not to tell Roosevelt what he already knew. Hopkins concluded his first visit, in February 1941, with the famous and stirring adaptation from the Book of Ruth: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God, even unto the end.” Hopkins came with this mandate and successfully conveyed his message. Churchill wept. It had already been a lonely and brave struggle, and the prospect of the approaching might of the New World was a vision of inexpressible consolation. Hopkins was also useful in setting up the first meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in their present leadership capacities, in Newfoundland, but that was already in train when he returned for his second visit in June 1941.

Roosevelt considered Willkie, with some reason, to be a political innocent in Babylon, in domestic politics and even more so in foreign affairs, though he was grateful for his support in aiding the democracies. Willkie went on to tour the world and write a rather naive paean to world fellowship called One World, and was unduly entranced by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whom Roosevelt, though also taken by her charms, regarded with considerable suspicion. On his world tour, Willkie repeatedly shot from the hip, calling for a second front in Western Europe to alleviate pressure on Stalin, long before the Western Allies were in any position to launch such an attack as anything other than a sacrificial distraction to the German Wehrmacht. He also demanded the preemptive dissolution of the British and French empires. Churchill famously replied, “I have not become the king’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” And Charles de Gaulle responded in even more precise and dismissive acerbities. Willkie’s use to Roosevelt was to bring in Republican support and divide the opposition. When he was no longer of use to the wily president, Roosevelt discarded Willkie like so many others, though he issued a gracious statement when his former opponent died in 1944, aged only fifty-two. Willkie made a good impression on the British, as all Roosevelt’s emissaries did, but his principal accomplishment in London was physically delivering Roosevelt’s message to Churchill, including the famous quote from Longfellow:

Sail on, Oh ship of state!

Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.

Humanity, with all its fears,

With all its hopes for future years,

Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

Churchill read those lines over the radio in a world broadcast.

THE REAL importance of Willkie and Donovan was that they contributed to Roosevelt’s effort to present what amounted to a coalition government without the president himself yielding a scintilla of his own authority or flexibility of movement. The week before the 1940 Republican convention, he had brought into his government Stimson, a former cabinet member of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, along with Knox, the 1936 Republican candidate for vice president. Stimson took over the War Department, while Knox became secretary of the navy. Then, within three months of winning a third term, FDR sent his Republican opponent to Britain as his special envoy. In the meantime, New Hampshire’s Republican governor John G. Winant had been appointed ambassador to Britain, and Donovan, a former GOP candidate for New York governor, had been effectively established as head of intelligence. He had also engaged Hoover’s war secretary, General Patrick Hurley, as another special adviser. All of these men—except Hurley, who was a reactionary Bull Moose—carried out their assigned missions very competently, and all had great symbolic value.

Again, there is no reason to imagine that Roosevelt expected much, if anything, from Sumner Welles’s trip to Rome, Berlin, Paris and London in March 1940. The president didn’t feel he should be completely inactive, but the author’s supposition that he harbored ideas of delaying the anticipated German spring offensive is completely unsubstantiated. The descriptions of the details here are interesting, but nothing was unearthed that did other than reinforce Roosevelt’s concern that the democracies were not strong enough to defeat Germany. The British and French, both stronger at the start of World War I in 1914 than they were in 1940, could not defeat Germany without the intervention of the United States, even with Russia as an ally. And they certainly could not do so with the Russians as a neutral with friendly ties to Hitler under the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Roosevelt had always doubted that the appeasement policy would succeed, and he considered the men of Munich, Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, to be morally bankrupt and discredited, along with their coteries of appeasers, still thick in the ranks of both governments. Nothing happened during Sumner Welles’s trip to alter that perception. Roosevelt considered Welles his best career foreign-policy aide, and he liked this fellow alumnus of Groton School (Welles, Harriman, Dean Acheson and the able ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, also were graduates of that school), but Welles was an executant of Roosevelt’s orders and not more.

As for Harriman, he was, as the author volunteers, a highly motivated but rather pedestrian son of a very wealthy man. He hung around the fringes of the Roosevelt administration for two terms reviewing parades of New Deal workfare participants and had to prevail upon his sister and friends to champion him to Roosevelt, who did not even wish him to attend the Atlantic Conference with Churchill in July 1941. Although perfectly adequate, by all accounts, as lend-lease coordinator in Britain and an improvement over Laurence Steinhardt as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harriman was always a journeyman. He never achieved much in the Roosevelt administration, as Truman’s ambassador in London and commerce secretary, as one-term governor of New York, as Kennedy’s ambassador at large or as cochairman of Johnson’s Vietnam peace delegation. He may deserve some credit for the Limited Test Ban Treaty, but the Laotian neutrality agreement transformed that country into the infiltration super highway of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and he was not even able to negotiate the shape of the table at the Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

He was apparently a competent businessman and a diligent public servant who had an interesting career, but this effort to portray him as a “wise man” who played a seminal role in thirty years of successful American foreign policy is rubbish. There is no record that Roosevelt’s view of anything was altered by Harriman. The British lavished immense attention on him, as they did on any official American as part of Churchill’s desperate and perfervid campaign of ingratiation, waged with the conviction that U.S. entry into the war was the only imaginable deliverance for Britain. To this end, Churchill and his wife seemed not to notice the affair their daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill, had with Harriman (and subsequently with the leading American media figure in London, Edward R. Murrow, guru to such future stars of American television news as Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid); or their daughter Sarah Churchill’s affair with Ambassador Winant. (As I observed on these relationships in my biography of FDR, Churchill was “an indulgent parent and a full-service ally.”)

AS AN Australian, Fullilove works in some interesting and relevant Australian material, which gives a refreshingly detached perspective, but he seems a little uncertain of the exact nature of American politics in this period. He refers to Roosevelt’s famous address in Boston on October 30, 1940, as “infamous,” presumably because he said: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Always before he had added the qualifier, “except in case of attack.” But he paid no price for this, as he made the point that if the United States were attacked it ceased to be a foreign war. Fullilove seems to have bought the idea that this was an impetuous commitment. He seems not to realize just how complicated Roosevelt’s path to war was. At the Atlantic Conference, Churchill urged Roosevelt to impose an absolute embargo on the sale of oil to Japan, which was at that point dependent on the United States for 80 percent of its oil, including aviation fuel. Roosevelt said he would retain the right to approve individual applications for export, tanker load by tanker load, so as not to put Japan absolutely to the wall, forcing it to choose between a humiliating exit from China and Indochina or going to war to assure an oil supply (from the Dutch East Indies, subsequently Indonesia). When he returned to Washington, he discovered that Dean Acheson, the assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, had laid down a practice, in the absence of a presidential policy, of declining to permit any exportation of oil to Japan. So Churchill was agitating for what was in fact the status quo, so desperate was he to get the United States into the war, even via the back door in the Pacific.

Roosevelt verbally outlined to the Japanese emissaries a modus vivendi in which the embargo on oil, scrap metal and rice would be partially lifted, while the Japanese would send no more forces to China or Indochina and some Japanese exports to the United States, such as silk, would be resumed. In the end, Roosevelt did not repeat this proposal or put it in writing. The Japanese were interested, as their decrypted diplomatic messages confirmed, but with the Germans at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad Roosevelt concluded it might be necessary for the United States to enter the war now, to assure that Stalin remained in the war. If Stalin made a separate peace with Hitler, it would require many hundreds of divisions and scores of thousands of aircraft to invade Hitler’s Europe successfully. Although Acheson wasn’t an envoy, the author would have done well to work him into his narrative. He was fired by Roosevelt as assistant treasury secretary in 1934 for indiscretions of which he was, in fact, innocent. But the president brought Acheson back into government after he publicly wrote during the 1940 election campaign that FDR had the constitutional authority to lend fifty destroyers to Britain without congressional approval. Roosevelt did so and recalled Acheson to government in consequence. Acheson, of course, remained in government and served with great distinction under President Harry Truman as George C. Marshall’s deputy secretary of state and later as secretary of state.

Fullilove sets a toe in these waters with his question, attributed to the compiler of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, Warren Kimball: “Who was manipulating whom?” The answer, of course, was that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were all, to some degree, trying to manipulate each other. Churchill sought a resurrection of a power balance in Europe, reinforced by an alliance with America, in which Britain would play its centuries-old role as custodian of the fulcrum. Stalin sought the long-dreamed Russian advance into Western Europe. And Roosevelt sought the rout of the isolationists at home, the engagement of the United States in Europe and the Far East, and the gathering of most of the countries in those theaters into a gentle and cooperative subordinacy to the United States. America’s nature would be disguised by an international organization that the Western powers would dominate through their economic and military power and moral force, as well as through the votes of the quiescent Latin Americans and the commendably supportive British dominions.

None of these powerful men could win all he wanted, but Roosevelt was the big winner. Kimball only meant who, between Churchill and Roosevelt, was manipulating whom, and there the answer was neither. Both wanted America in the war and knew it had to happen for the war to end satisfactorily. The rest was tactics, well within Roosevelt’s purview. His judgment was accurate, his decisions correct, his execution brilliant. These five envoys were among the most prominent of his many helpers and well worth attention.

But it was these broader strategic questions that Roosevelt had to weigh. He retained Acheson’s complete embargo on oil exports to Japan; the Japanese responded by attacking the United States and other targets across the Pacific. By that time, Roosevelt already had advised Stalin that Japanese forces had moved south from the Siberian border, enabling Stalin to ship twenty divisions from the Far East across the Trans-Siberian railway as final reinforcements in the successful defense of his two largest cities. Of course, the Soviet Union remained in the war, though there were peace talks with the Germans in Stockholm in 1943. This is the same Roosevelt who stayed in the Soviet embassy at the Tehran Conference, rather than the British, although he assumed (correctly) that his rooms were bugged by the Soviets, because he needed to get Stalin’s support for the cross-channel landings in France, as opposed to Churchill’s hobbyhorse of moving up the Adriatic. Roosevelt was concerned that if the Western Allies did not invade northwestern Europe in 1944, either Stalin would make his peace with Hitler or he would advance so far into Europe that he would bag most of Germany and possibly be able to promote putsches by the powerful French and northern Italian Communist parties. Churchill and his advisers thought the cross-channel operation premature, and were convinced that Stalin supported that option only because he thought that the Germans would push the Allies into the sea, as they had at Dunkirk, Greece, Crete and Dieppe. Roosevelt thought that this might have been Stalin’s motive, but he had more confidence in the ability of the Allies to conduct a successful amphibious invasion and thought it the only way of winning the war strategically, by bringing most of Germany, as well as France, Italy and Japan, under Western occupation and back into the West as democratic allies, even though the Soviets were taking the vast majority of the casualties incurred in subduing Nazi Germany.

This global conflict, from beginning to end, was a war of intricate grand strategy on all sides. Hitler recognized, based on Roosevelt’s actions, that he was almost at war with the United States in mid-1941, and if he did not move to eliminate the Soviet Union he could find himself at war with the combined might of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. It was a huge gamble, but he had built his career on gambles. If Hitler had flattened Stalin before America entered the war, as bulked in Roosevelt’s reasoning when he resigned himself to a Japanese attack on America to bring it into the war before Stalin and Hitler signed a separate peace, it would have been a very daunting and almost-insuperable task to dislodge the Third Reich from control of Western and Central Europe. Historian A. J. P. Taylor was essentially correct when he credited Roosevelt’s strategic genius and said, “He made the United States the greatest power in the world at virtually no cost.” Of course it was a great cost—but it paled in comparison to what all the other great powers endured.

In pretending that its five featured envoys achieved more than they did and operated in a more spontaneous policy-making environment than they did, Fullilove’s book inadvertently gives an oversimplified notion of great-power grand strategy in World War II. In doing so, it shortchanges somewhat the president who sent them, respectfully treated though he is. It also pushes the basically unsound notion, largely advanced by Doris Kearns Goodwin, that these matters were more collegial than they were. This isn’t the place for a review of other books. But Roosevelt made all the decisions and was little influenced by advice; Eleanor was not a copresident, as Goodwin suggests in No Ordinary Time, any more than Lincoln’s men profiled in Team of Rivals had much influence on their president. But both were excellent books, and so is this an interesting and a good book. Anyone who keeps these limitations in mind will find Fullilove’s Rendezvous with Destiny a very rewarding read.

Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (Encounter Books, 2013). He is chairman emeritus of The National Interest.

Image: Flickr/Tim Evanson. CC BY-SA 2.0.