The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace.

The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace. By David B. Woolner. (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. xiv, 335. $32.00.)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first hundred days in office are the stuff of legend. The vigorous action he took in early 1933 to fight the Great Depression set a standard of excellence by which all future chief executives would be judged. By contrast, his final days on the job have received far less fanfare, this despite the fact that FDR faced challenges every bit as grave.

David B. Woolner sets out to change the narrative in The Last 100 Days. The author's chief innovation is to pair new information about FDR's declining physical condition with traditional diplomatic accounts of the Yalta summit to provide fresh perspective on the high-level talks that led to the creation of the United Nations Organization, whose founding conference opened just days after Roosevelt's death on 12 April 1945. The personal becomes deeply political as a result.

The demands of twelve years in office had taken a heavy toll on Roosevelt, who, though just sixty-three years of age, suffered from ailments such as hypertension and congestive heart failure, in addition to the polio that had stricken him earlier in life. Although FDR tried to hide it, the perilous state of his health was painfully evident to almost everyone who saw him up close. "He had the pallor, the deep gray color, of a man who had been long ill," said Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, shocked, like many, by the president's appearance (23).

FDR was a dying man. He nevertheless summoned the strength to make the 14,000-mile roundtrip to Yalta to meet Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. The voyage exhausted the president, arguably hastening his decline. Even so, Roosevelt went fully determined to iron out any differences among the Big Three that could stand in the way of the permanent peacekeeping structure that he sought to create, writes Woolner, who suggests that FDR sacrificed himself for the greater good.

Critics who argue that FDR, too ill (or naive) to resist Stalin at Yalta, sentenced Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe to decades of Soviet dictatorship might object to Woolner's fawning portrait of the president and his actions. But it is difficult to come away from The Last 100 Days unimpressed by the courage Roosevelt displayed in his efforts to forge a lasting peace. Highlighting the enormity of what he accomplished seems particularly important now that the international order Roosevelt helped build appears to be in some danger of collapsing. As Americans return to an isolationist stance akin to that once faced by FDR, Woolner encourages readers to find inspiration in the internationalist example Roosevelt set: "We should remember FDR's vision, faith, and idealism--his conviction that the world's problems are America's problems--and ask ourselves if, in the face of the challenges confronting us today, we will exhibit the same courage to live up to our international responsibilities" (300). Woolner's timely work, which should remain the standard account of FDR's final days for the foreseeable future, deserves wide readership.

M. Todd Bennett

East Carolina University