Reviews for Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage

The average rating for Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-13 00:00:00 Edward Joseph Cross If Joseph Persico ever wrote a book that was less than stellar, I haven't found it yet. Other authors have alluded to what Persico details here, that Roosevelt was a very compartmentalized president who held his cards close to his chest. For a time, he had three different espionage services that were unaware of the others' existence. Eventually, they all came to resent and submarine each other, as bureaucracies are wont to do. There were as many failures as successes, perhaps even more. But the successes were crucial to the allied victory. We would have won eventually, but code breaking and espionage saved countless allied lives along the way and shortened the war significantly. While Persico clearly admired Roosevelt, it's a very even-handed account. We learn, for example, that he knew all along that Japanese Americans posed no threat to the west coast or anywhere else on American soil, but he had thousands of them interned anyhow because of a paranoid public that demanded it. No surprise here, but we also see what a weasel J. Edgar Hoover was. When a Croatian spy in the service of the British came to America he checked in with Hoover, who interviewed him. The spy told him specifically that he was ordered to get information about Pearl Harbor, but Hoover was more interested in the fact that the Germans were using microdots to transport information. In his report to FDR, Hoover never mentioned Pearl Harbor but was proud that he discovered the Nazi used of microdots, even though he didn't discover it, the spy told him without any prompting. Similar episodes of Hoover's arrogance getting in the way of cases abound here. I highly recommend this to any history buff, presidential buff, and espionage buff.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-21 00:00:00 Carrie Bruder Whether you find them tedious or fascinating the details of this book (relating to scene setups or filling out tangential characters) provide a fully-realized picture of the subject. Ancient historians would kill for this kind of material, and it makes me appreciate the book all the more. However there is a strong whiff of the apologist here, especially regarding the decision to drop the atomic bomb. This hint of an agenda made me always wonder whether some inconvenient fact was being displaced by one of these fascinating details. Overall, though, the book is very informative and paints a clear picture of how the CIA's prototype emerged from the fog of FDR's administrative chaos.