If Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan were allowed to rampage unchecked across Europe and Asia, America would eventually be in danger. began hammering relentlessly on one theme. His efforts to escape Wilson's fate began even before the U.S. When writing speeches, he often glanced at Wilson's portrait, which he'd had installed in the Cabinet Room. The Senate rejected the league, America returned to political isolation, and Wilson died a broken man. to again sacrifice its sons for a world that would not live by its principles. So when Wilson returned home trumpeting the newly created League of Nations, Americans asked why they should join an organization that might require the U.S. But at the Paris Peace Conference following the war, it became clear that the victorious European powers had no interest in birthing such a world. When Wilson led Americans into World War I, he told them they were abandoning their historical isolation in order to create a world in which the strong no longer menaced the weak. This was the conundrum that had destroyed his old boss Woodrow Wilson, whom Roosevelt had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. F.D.R.'s task was to persuade his people to put their money and blood on the line, even though, despite their best efforts, the world would remain a nasty place. could neither escape the world nor fully redeem it. Yet both paths, he believed, led nowhere. His basic problem as Nazism stalked Europe was that some Americans wanted to isolate themselves from the world while others wanted to remake it in America's image. find his way through a political labyrinth that was navigable by neither intellect nor principle alone. spoke up immediately: "You go straight ahead." Their driver, who lived in the area and had driven the route many times, could not remember which way to turn. Once, as Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were being driven through the New Mexico desert along a barren and featureless landscape that they had traversed only once before, they came to a fork in the road. Mencken called him "too feeble and wishy-washy a fellow to make a really effective fight." Yet this preppy, dilettantish mama's boy had something that his critics didn't appreciate: instinct. In 1931, during Roosevelt's first presidential campaign, the columnist Walter Lippmann warned that "he just doesn't happen to have a very good mind." The satirist H.L. It's a question that puzzled F.D.R.'s contemporaries as well. Roosevelt? He helped save the world from the greatest barbarism it has ever known and laid the foundation for the greatest run of peace and prosperity in history and yet by most accounts had neither intellectual heft nor a stiff spine. (Think Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.) Conservatives generally prize backbone. When it comes to foreign policy, liberals generally like leaders with brains. Stalin, above right, also agreed to join the U.N. At Yalta in 1945, the Big Three formalized plans for occupation zones in Germany.
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