The Sphinx
Nicholas WapshottBefore Pearl Harbor, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, America teetered between the desire for isolation and the threat of world war.
May 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt—recently reelected to a second term as president—sat in the Oval Office and contemplated two possibilities: the rule of fascism overseas, and a third term.
With Hitler's reach extending into Austria, and with the atrocities of World War I still fresh in the American memory, Roosevelt faced the question that would prove one of the most defining in American history: whether to once again go to war in Europe.
In The Sphinx, Nicholas Wapshott recounts how an ambitious and resilient Roosevelt—nicknamed "the Sphinx" for his cunning, cryptic rapport with the press—devised and doggedly pursued a strategy to sway the American people to abandon isolationism and take up the mantle of the world's most powerful nation.
Chief among Roosevelt's antagonists was his friend Joseph P....