The World That FDR Built: Vision and Reality

Mortimer here reviews Roosevelt's impact on the postwar world order and presents commentaries by political leaders, government officials, economists, industrialists, historians and political essayists from the U.S., Europe and the Third World. American participants include Paul Nitze, Jack Kemp, Pat Schroeder, George Will. Former French leader Couve de Murville is probably the best-known of the non-Americans. The author groups their remarks into three categories: earliest individual awareness of the Roosevelt legacy, ``most formative experience'' in relation to it and views on its present status and possible future. These overbroad themes are often obscured as the interviewees delve into matters not clearly pertinent, such as the international effect of the John Kennedy assassination, the ``oil shocks'' of the 1970s, the Vietnam War, the rise of terrorism. The interviews, along with Mortimer's interpolations, add up to a sprawling discussion of world history from 1943 on that is only intermittently interesting. Mortimer is a London Times journalist. (Feb.)