THE RIGHT BOOKS

Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have embraced the idea of a non-ideological kind of American exceptionalism, pled against “entangling alliances”; Theodore Roosevelt, a century later, demanded that the United States comport itself unequivocally as the rising hegemonic empire it had grown to be. Both views, while clearly debatable, were nevertheless based on reasoned readings of realities accurately apprehended by men who were not reticent about drawing strongly defined conclusions and insisting upon them. Woodrow Wilson, for all the naïve falsity of his own foreign-policy ideas, was perhaps the last of the breed to hold the Presidency; after him, the falsity and naïveté persisted, deprived of the strength of mind and will behind them. In Wind over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga. 30602; $29.95), Frederick W. Marks III demonstrates how Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy developed from Wilsonian doctrine the muddled, vacillating, contradictory, and self-defeating formula that we now recognize as the quintessence of modern liberal-democratic foreign policy, even as it is waged by so-called conservative governments.

Franklin Roosevelt was, all his life, bluntly scornful of the Western European countries embroiled in what he saw as their petty, jealous, and reactionary power-plays; it was America’s mission, as he understood it, to instill a sense of highminded disinterestedness and responsibility in these decadent Old World societies. By contrast, the burden of Marks’s book is that it was Washington—not Paris or London or Tokyo or Berlin—that, between 1933 and 1945, evinced strong symptoms of decadence, if one understands that word to connote, at bottom, a falling-away from a sense of reality once strongly perceived, but that the moral imagination has lost the courage to contemplate. The result is that, in Marks’s words, while “it may be fairly said . . . that no other American Administration before 1933 had as many opportunities as the New Deal to avert the coming of war, to settle wars in progress, or to shape the future of peace,” nevertheless, “not one of FDR’s offers of mediation ever succeeded, and most were flatly refused.”

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have embraced the idea of a non-ideological kind of American exceptionalism, pled against “entangling alliances”; Theodore Roosevelt, a century later, demanded that the United States comport itself unequivocally as the rising hegemonic empire it had grown to be. Both views, while clearly debatable, were nevertheless based on reasoned readings of realities accurately apprehended by men who were not reticent about drawing strongly defined conclusions and insisting upon them. Woodrow Wilson, for all the naïve falsity of his own foreign-policy ideas, was perhaps the last of the breed to hold the Presidency; after him, the falsity and naïveté persisted, deprived of the strength of mind and will behind them. In Wind over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt (University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga. 30602; $29.95), Frederick W. Marks III demonstrates how Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy developed from Wilsonian doctrine the muddled, vacillating, contradictory, and self-defeating formula that we now recognize as the quintessence of modern liberal-democratic foreign policy, even as it is waged by so-called conservative governments.

Franklin Roosevelt was, all his life, bluntly scornful of the Western European countries embroiled in what he saw as their petty, jealous, and reactionary power-plays; it was America’s mission, as he understood it, to instill a sense of highminded disinterestedness and responsibility in these decadent Old World societies. By contrast, the burden of Marks’s book is that it was Washington—not Paris or London or Tokyo or Berlin—that, between 1933 and 1945, evinced strong symptoms of decadence, if one understands that word to connote, at bottom, a falling-away from a sense of reality once strongly perceived, but that the moral imagination has lost the courage to contemplate. The result is that, in Marks’s words, while “it may be fairly said . . . that no other American Administration before 1933 had as many opportunities as the New Deal to avert the coming of war, to settle wars in progress, or to shape the future of peace,” nevertheless, “not one of FDR’s offers of mediation ever succeeded, and most were flatly refused.”