Word: roosevelts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Indifference to the big picture was a shortcoming of Morris' first volume too. Roosevelt was one of the most complicated figures in American history. What should we make of the unblushing imperialist who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Or the economic conservative who attempted to make the Republican Party a friend to the workingman? When this book ends, with Roosevelt turning over the White House to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, you can laugh and marvel at what Teddy has done, but Morris has made it hard to evaluate...
Saturnine Henry Adams, who never much cared for the sunny, tireless Teddy, concluded that Roosevelt "showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--the quality that medieval theology assigned to God--he was pure act." Morris seems to think so too. But even if he doesn't quite have Teddy's act together, you put down this middle volume looking forward...
...Margot Roosevelt...
...President Roosevelt and attorney general Francis Biddle, who would serve as the government's lead prosecuting attorney, suddenly had an opportunity to prove that we had made progress, that we had defeated the first Nazi threat on our soil. Hoover in particular wanted to maximize the public relations value of the arrests: He kept secret for a few years that it was two of the saboteurs, who, hoping to defect, had alerted the FBI to the plan, not prodigious agents...
...Office of Legal Counsel. One Sunday afternoon in June I was called and asked to report to the Justice Department, where for three months I worked as the youngest of 10 lawyers who tried the saboteurs. In the days after Hoover's announcement, I helped draft a proclamation for Roosevelt that created a military commission to try foreign spies and saboteurs, and denied them the right to judicial review and the right to trial in nonmilitary U.S. courts. They would, instead, be tried by a military tribunal of seven generals, none a trained lawyer, in a conference room...