cover image The Hopkins Touch: 
Harry Hopkins and the Forging 
of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler

The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler

David Roll. Oxford Univ, $34.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-19-989195-5

Roll makes the case in this lively book that Harry Hopkins was “arguably the most powerful presidential aide in the history of the American republic.” Even if not, Hopkins surely acted as Franklin Roosevelt’s alter ego, intimate, and sounding board for all of WWII. An emollient presence admired by both Churchill and Stalin, this frail and sickly man brought a natural prudence and impeccably balanced judgment to the advice he offered FDR and the duties he performed for him. Unjustifiably feared by those who didn’t really know him as a kind of Rasputin to the president, as Roll makes clear, Hopkins was instead implementer of others’ decisions as much as the source of ideas and advice. The author can’t seem to make up his mind whether he’s writing a biography, often overdetailed, of Hopkins during the war years—when he actually lived much of the time in the White House—or trying to illuminate, using interviews and freshly opened documents, the sources of WWII policy making. But there’s no doubt that Roll, in his debut book, has added to WWII history by illuminating Hopkins’s “indispensable behind-the-scenes role.” 32 b&w illus. Agent: Kirsten Neuhaus, Kirsten Neuhaus Literary Agency. (Jan.)