Word: brinkley
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Despite this portrait of a city remarkably unprepared and unwilling to coordinate the war effort, Washington Goes to War is also a celebration of and a tribute to the men and women whose contributions to the war effort in Washington were invaluable. Chief among these, Brinkley implies, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 himself...
Throughout the book, Brinkley reveals with his typical biting wit, keen insight and damning criticism many of the not-so-heroic aspects of Washington during these years: a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and its petty infighting over exceedingly short supplies and space; a rigidly circumscribed, deeply impoverished and grossly ignored Black community; a non-existent municipal government that was in effect run by one of the nation's most outspoken racists, Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, chairman of the obscure Senate District Committee beginning in 1944; a financial elite far more intent on improving their social status by flattering their fellow...
Congress, Brinkley contends, was at this time an archaic, old-fashioned body more concerned with preserving its own privileges and patronage system than with effectively overseeing the war. While the wartime agencies and bureaus were loaded with economists, professors and specialists in even the most arcane fields, congressional committees had staffs comprised mainly of hacks appointed for reasons of patronage. Thus, Congress was "reduced to waiting for ideas and suggestions from the president and, while bewailing their ineffectuality, rubber stamping their approval...
...Brinkley shows FDR at his best, outmaneuvering the isolationists in Congress, stirring the American public to support the war, attacking his opponents in the press and in industry and luring the brilliant dollar-a-year men from business and academe to run the new wartime industries...
...Brinkley also pays tribute to the lesser-known heroes of the Allied effort, such as Amy Thorpe, a British intelligence agent who used her "bedroom skills" with officials of the Polish government not only to steal a highly sophisticated machine developed by the Germans but also to figure out how to use it. Considered the greatest and most spectacular espionage achievement of the war, her action enabled the British to read Hitler's most secret messages and orders to Nazi generals before even they had seen them...