His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt
A Book Talk with Joseph Lelyveld
Monday, September 12, 2016
6:00 p.m.
Roosevelt House
Book signing to follow
Roosevelt House is pleased to welcome Joseph Lelyveld and to celebrate the publication of His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt. Lelyveld is the former executive editor of The New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White. He will discuss Roosevelt’s final months, showing how FDR juggled the strategic, political, and personal choices that he faced as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax.
As World War II entered its final phase, FDR received a dire medical diagnosis, raising urgent questions about the ability of the longest-serving president to stand for a fourth term at a time when he had little choice. Neither his family nor top figures in his administration were informed of his diagnosis, let alone the public or his closest ally, Winston Churchill. FDR announced only on the eve of his party’s convention that he would be a candidate for a fourth term. A political grand master still, he manipulated the selection of a new running mate, with an eye to a possible succession, displaying some of his old vigor and wit in a winning campaign.
Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, calls His Final Battle “required reading for anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century’s most consequential – and most mysterious – president.”
We hope you will join us at Roosevelt House for this important discussion.
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College
47-49 East 65th Street (between Park and Madison Avenues)
New York City
"By far the most enigmatic leading figure" of World War II. That's how the British military historian John Keegan described Franklin D. Roosevelt, who frequently left his contemporaries guessing, never more so than at the end of his life. Here, in a hugely insightful account, prizewinning author and journalist Joseph Lelyveld untangles the narrative threads of Roosevelt's final months, showing how he juggled the strategic, political, and personal choices he faced as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax.
The story has been told piecemeal but never like in His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, with a close focus on Roosevelt himself and his hopes for a stable international order after the war, and how these led him into a prolonged courtship of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, involving secret, arduous journeys to Tehran and the Crimea.
This event is currently sold out.
