100 books like Our Mutual Friend

Few Americans remember the Marshall Plan that helped make western Europe the economic powerhouse it is today. Fewer still remember the man behind the Marshall Plan, who led the U.S. military during World War II, and later became Secretary of State. Pogue’s four-volume biography isn’t your usual military biography with a long recitation of battles, dates, and minutiae about guns and ships. It’s about how an obscure career officer who never went to West Point became the confidant of two presidents and the mentor of a future one, Dwight Eisenhower (who later betrayed him during the Trump-like McCarthy era). When political integrity is in short supply, Pogue reminds us of a time when a politically astute general kept his.

This book provides an excellent discussion of the various policy debates and conflicts that occurred within the New Deal, involving monetary policy, the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as well as many other programs. 

Key to this was the shift away from “planning” and towards the greater use of fiscal policy and anti-trust that occurred after 1935 as the result of Supreme Court decisions. 

Institutionalists played a major role in all parts of the New Deal, but policies were often rather experimental. 

As various ideas were tried and discarded (for both economic and legal reasons), policy eventually arrived at an Americanized version of Keynesianism.     

For those who want to think big and envisage large systemic change. Gaddis is one of the great military historians and he writes with fluency and adventure. In this book, which is a joy to read, he examines leadership, vision, and decision-making from the perspective of a number of great leaders in history and how they faced crucial turning points.

Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor's third-born, must have read his older brother's book and thought, "That’s not all!"

Always sensitive to his surroundings, Elliott knew things were not right between his parents. He felt the turbulence of Eleanor's "Griselda" moods, recounting an incident that drove her to fire all of their servants after mounting distrust. Where older brother James would write of catching fish with their father on a boat trip, Elliott divulged the sting of witnessing Missy LeHand on his father's lap during that same trip. Elliott also mentioned household staff members including Frances and Millie, who come to the forefront in my own novel.

This is a fascinating account of FDR’s confrontation with the Supreme Court after it struck down many New Deal measures as unconstitutional expansions of federal authority. In response, he proposed a court-packing bill enabling him to appoint additional justices supportive of his policies, but this got nowhere in Congress because it threatened the constitutional separation of the powers. Nevertheless, Roosevelt still emerged victorious from the imbroglio. Wary of political backlash if it continuously opposed a popular president, the Supreme Court changed course to accept the New Deal once FDR abandoned efforts to pack it. This outcome preserved the judicial branch as a separate arm of the US government while upholding the ideal of a living Constitution whose interpretation changed with the times to make America’s democracy workable. 

James, the eldest Roosevelt son, gives readers a firsthand glimpse into growing up Roosevelt.

His heartwarming anecdotes add color to a world that seems black and white. One of the most endearing stories he shared came from the night Franklin won the presidency and humbly asked his son to pray for him. These memories provide an intimate glimpse of the man who was FDR.

The book gives great insight into the role of organized efforts at persuasion in establishing and reinforcing much of what we think we know about mobilization for the war.

Business wanted credit for the success of war production, even though most of it was achieved in government owned, government operated (GOGO) or government owned, contractor operated (GOCO) plants. The public sector played a much larger role in planning, directing, and controlling the mobilization effort than business wished the American public to acknowledge.

Largely forgotten today, Ray Clapper was perhaps the most highly respected American newspaper columnist and radio personality of the 1930s and 1940s. Especially adept at sketching the domestic political scene, Clapper restores the nation's wartime leaders to life for modern readers in this collection of excerpts from his columns. President Franklin Roosevelt was "always supremely self-confident, sometimes angry, eager to exchange gossip, quick to make a humorous dig at the expense of some opponent or critic, and especially of a stuffed shirt." By contrast, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, who ran against Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1944, was "too slippery with words to inspire any confidence." Clapper reserved his harshest judgment for the wartime Congress, which he deemed "a collection of 2-cent politicians who could serve well enough in simpler days," but whose "ignorance and provincialism" rendered them "incapable of meeting the needs of modern government."

This remarkable volume offers a selection from the millions of letters that ordinary men and women sent FDR in response to his radio Fireside Chats. Roosevelt used these talks to explain his policies to the American people, many of whom wrote him in return (for the cost of a 3-cent postage stamp) to communicate their thoughts about his presidency and the state of the nation during the depression and war years. Their letters reveal the multiple images that Americans had of FDR: friend, neighbor, trusted leader, protector—or, far less often, violator of the Constitution, enemy of sound economics, warmonger. They provide a timely reminder for our own times of the presidency’s capacity for civic education and the importance of dialogue between leaders and citizens.

The author’s perspective on human rights and the process would not be something I would endorse, but it is, nonetheless, to date, the best book on the details of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it wound its way through the United Nations.