PROGRAM

Roosevelt House is pleased to welcome Joseph Lelyveld and to celebrate the publication of His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt.  Lelyveld is the former executive editor of The New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White. He will discuss Roosevelt’s final months, showing how FDR juggled the strategic, political, and personal choices he faced as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax.

As the war entered its final phase, FDR received a dire medical diagnosis, raising urgent questions about the ability of the longest-serving president to stand for a fourth term at a time when he had little choice. Neither his family nor top figures in his administration were informed of his diagnosis, let alone the public or his closest ally, Winston Churchill. FDR announced only on the eve of his party’s convention that he’d be a candidate. A political grand master still, he manipulated the selection of a new running mate, with an eye to a possible succession, displaying some of his old vigor and wit in a winning campaign.

Geoffrey C. Ward, author of The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, has praised His Final Battle as “required reading for anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century’s most consequential – and most mysterious – president.”

We hope you will join us at Roosevelt House for this important discussion.