Five best books on statesmanship

Philip Terzian, author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century, named a five best list of books on statesmanship for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

For the Survival of Democracy
by Alonzo L. Hamby

No single president is more important to American foreign policy in our time than Franklin D. Roosevelt, and there is no better account of FDR's stout defense of democracy against the twin dangers of Nazism and Soviet Communism than Alonzo L. Hamby's great work. His thesis concerns the extent to which the Depression blighted the modern world by scuttling post-World War I prosperity, weakening democratic capitalism in Europe and America at its moment of greatest peril, and rendering a second military cataclysm inevitable. FDR had to contend with the Depression while awakening his countrymen to Hitler's menace and stiffening the spines of European democrats. The consensus on the New Deal remains unsettled; but Roosevelt's global leadership in the late 1930s and throughout World War II made America the superpower it remains.

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see: Five best books about statesmen.

--Marshal Zeringue