num_pages: 387
description: A New York Times 2016 Notable BookBy far the most enigmatic leading figure of World War II. Thats 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 a prizewinning author and journalist untangles the narrative threads of Roosevelts 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 this 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. In between as the war entered its final phase came the thunderbolt of 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. With D-Day looming Roosevelt took a month off on a plantation in the south where he was examined daily by a navy cardiologist then waited two more months before finally announcing on the eve of his partys convention that hed be a candidate. 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.With precision and compassion Joseph Lelyveld examines the choices Roosevelt faced shining new light on his state of mind preoccupations and motives both as leader of the wartime alliance and in his personal life. Confronting his own mortality Roosevelt operated in the belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end telling himself he could always resign if he found he couldnt carry on.Lelyveld delivers an incisive portrait of this deliberately inscrutable man a consummate leader to the very last. 
language: English
title: His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt
publisher: Vintage