Before Pearl Harbor, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, America teetered between the desire for isolation and the threat of world war.
May 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt-recently reelected to a second term as president-sat in the Oval Office and contemplated two possibilities: the rule of fascism overseas, and a third term.
With Hitler's reach extending into Austria, and with the atrocities of World War I still fresh in the American memory, Roosevelt faced the question that would prove one of the most defining in American history: whether to once again go to war in Europe.
In The Sphinx, Nicholas Wapshott recounts how an ambitious and resilient Roosevelt-nicknamed "the Sphinx" for his cunning, cryptic rapport with the press-devised and doggedly pursued a strategy to sway the American people to abandon isolationism and take up the mantle of the world's most powerful nation.
Chief among Roosevelt's antagonists was his friend Joseph P....