In this biography Conrad Black makes a case for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the most important figure of the twentieth century, the nation's most accomplished leader since Abraham Lincoln, and one of America's greatest presidents. FDR transformed an isolated and isolationist country into the most formidable super-power the world has ever known. He was both the savior of American capitalism, in peril from its own excesses and the competing systems of Communism and Fascism, and the foremost reformer in the nation's history. And it was Roosevelt's bravery and remarkable leadership skills that brought America into the world's conflicts at mid-century as, in Winston Churchill's words, "the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old." It is Black's contention that the second half of the twentieth century was so much more successful than the first because Roosevelt permanently engaged America and Europe in the Far East.How could this man, whose political life nearly ended with an illness at age thirty-nine, have accomplished so much as a politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary? The sheer scope of FDR's life and achievements has deterred many historians and biographers from attempting a comprehensive biography. Additionally, FDR's remarkable personality was terribly difficult to decode - leading famously to comparisons with the similarly unmovable, and unknowable, Sphinx. Conrad Black has risen to the challenge. He tells us how this privileged seemingly facile young man became the vigorous young president and then the redoubtable older president. Roosevelt was underestimated as a young man and, as Black makes clear, continues, incredibly, to be underestimated, particularly by the propagators of the Yalta myth, according to which Roosevelt was swindled by Stalin. This book demonstrates that Roosevelt's dealings with Stalin were far more successful than the myth would have it. Read Less