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Those Angry Days

Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
Jan 30, 2014
Lynn Olson does it again: breathing life into history through vividly-portrayed characters at a crucial point in world events. Unlike her masterful "Citizens of London: How Britain Was Rescued in Its Darkest, Finest Hour," which focused on Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant, or even her "Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped save England," it's not simply the struggle over isolationism vs intervention in Europe between Lindberg and Roosevelt, as the subtitle suggests. An array of characters on both sides of this crucial debate are profiled, including Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian and Ambassador to the US, and a colourful group of upper-crust USAmericans working out of an exclusive club in NY in support of the Brit fight against tyrrany. Wendell Willkie, who ran against FDR, and lost, yet whose sense of right exceeded his partiality to his party, to the chagrin of most isolationist Republicans. If I have misgivings, it's the scant mention of Joe Kennedy's role in isolationist circles, given that he was the Ambassador to the UK and a Nazi sympathizer; US writers still have trouble writing openly about the family they wish was their royalty, it seems. Also, I quibble with her nil mention of Charlie Chaplin, who opposed all the going tides to express his loathing of Hitler, in "The Great Dictator." No mean achievement that, to put his money and career at risk and sail very much into prevailing winds. Otherwise, she makes interesting various ins-and-outs of internal, past US politicking--a subject that few could ever find gripping. Recommended nearly as much as her other superb books on this crucial era we can still call of "our" times.