Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who had never fired a shot in anger and yet became the greatest soldier in the most devastating war in history, was dead. He had crossed over at the fag end of an existential struggle that would be won in part because of his ability to persuade other men to die for a transcendent cause. Churchill, who would sob like a child at the president’s passing, subsequently wrote that “he altered decisively and permanently the social axis, the moral axis, of mankind by involving the New World inexorably and irrevocably in the fortunes of the Old. His life must therefore be
...more
