Author Description

For Franklin D. Roosevelt, the spring of 1941 was a time of uncertainty and fear. Hitler's armies were poised to strike, but no one was sure where the next attack would come. The United States had begun its military build-up, but as yet the Army and Navy were ill-prepared for war with Germany and Japan. And though the American public was not ready to support an unprovoked declaration of war, Churchill and members of Roosevelt's administration were urging him to intervene before it was too late. In Threshold of War, the first comprehensive treatment of the American entry into World War II to appear in over thirty-five years, eminent historian Waldo Heinrichs places American policy in a global context, covering both the European and Asian diplomatic and military scene, with Roosevelt ("the only figure with all the threads in his hands") at the center. In a tale of ever-broadening conflict, this vivid narrative weaves back and forth from the battlefields in the Soviet Union, to the intense policy debates within Roosevelt's administration, to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, to the precarious and delicate negotiations with Japan. Of particular interest is Heinrichs' portrait of Roosevelt. Roosevelt has often been portrayed as vacillating, impulsive, and disorganized in his decision-making during this period. But here he emerges as a leader who acted with extreme caution and deliberation, who always kept his options open, and who, once Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in July, 1941, acted rapidly and with great determination, sending supplies to Stalin, placing an oil embargo on Japan, and ordering armed escorts of vital supplies to Europe. A masterful account of a key moment in American history, Threshold of War is both a distinguished work of scholarship and a moving narrative that captures the tension as Roosevelt, Churchill, Stimson, Hull, and numerous others struggled to shape American policy in the climactic nine months before Pearl Harbor.