Five books to understand why FDR was the greatest American president

Iwan Morgan is Professor of US Studies emeritus at the Institute of the Americas, University College London, UK. He is also a distinguished fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He was the recipient of the British Association of American Studies Honorary Fellowship in 2014, and winner of the Richard Neustadt Book Prize in 2010. He is the author of Reagan: American Icon (2016), named by The Times/Sunday Times as a Politics Book of the Year.

Morgan's new book is FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America.

[The Page 99 Test: FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America]

At Shepherd he tagged five of the best books to understand why FDR was the greatest American president, including:

American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America to Victory in World War II by Jonathan W. Jordan

This is an intimate account of the collaboration between the quartet who led America to victory in World War II: FDR, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, and Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet Admiral Ernest King. The four sometimes disagreed: the military men initially worried that FDR sought to shape war strategy for political purposes; the president overruled their preference for an Anglo-American invasion of Nazi-occupied France in 1943, something he considered premature. Far more often, the quartet set aside personal, political, and professional differences to pull the nation through its darkest days of the twentieth century. Superbly researched and written, this book offers illuminating commentary on how wars are won.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue