Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: “Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead? … All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and
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