Richard Moe

Excellent unit history of one of the most celebrated regiments in the Army of the Potomac. We are blessed that it included a large number of very literate soldiers who left many letters and diaries. The book successfully weaves the war narrative with their accounts of not only battles but camp life. By the end, we come to know many of them as friends and are heartbroken when one of the most closely detailed men dies during their immortal sacrificial charge at Gettysburg. These books are essential to gain as close as possible a view of what the Civil War was truly like for those who fought it.… (more)

There is a misspelled word in the last paragraph of page 65 and a missing word on the last line on page 66.
Interesting minutia: "Drole de guerre" is French for "Phony War." The Germans called it "Sitzkreig."
Starting on page 110, the author gives the historical background for the two-term presidency. Its more than just Washington choosing not to run for a third term.
Footnote 26 on page 118: It would have been nice if the author mentioned where this story was published and how it got to the media. The book lauds Roosevelt unabashedly; I would like to think the author didn't not include this because it went against his thesis.
Page 121: The author says the allied troops at Gallipoli were "systematically annihilated." Surely that is an exaggeration.
Page 131: I wish more was written about New Dealer criticism of Roosevelt for using the private sector for military industrialization. The Democrats similarly criticized President Trump in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Page 132: The mysterious three-day halt of the German advance toward Dunkirk; apparently it was not that mysterious, at least according to Wikipedia.
Page 168: Gerald Ford later called 1940 GOP national committeeman Frank McKay, a "crook." It would have been nice to know why.
I would love to know more about Russian-born theosophist Nicholas Roerich whose correspondence with Henry Wallace nearly torpedoed the latter's chances for the vice presidency.… (more)

Though ostensibly an account of the presidential election of 1940, Richard Moe's book is essentially the history of a decision — specifically, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision to go against nearly a century and a half of American political tradition and run for a third term. It was an incredibly critical choice, one with momentous significance for Roosevelt's historical legacy, American political history, and indeed even the history of the world itself, for it determined that it would be he rather than a successor who would lead the United States to war in December 1941 and to the cusp of victory less than four years later.

Roosevelt's decision was also an incredibly controversial one, though, as it flew in the face of decades of presidential custom. One of the strengths of Moe's book is his summary of the two-term tradition itself, in which he argues that it was really not until well into the 19th century that serving only eight years as president became a standard expectation of presidential office holders. Yet even before Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933 that custom was fraying at the edges, as Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and even (unacknowledged by Moe) Wilson all had sought to extend their terms, Franklin Roosevelt himself seemed accepting of it until the outbreak of the war in Europe, when the worsening geopolitical situation led him to reconsider. Part of the issue for Roosevelt was his low assessment of his potential successors from the party's ranks, namely John Nance Garner and James Farley, The lack of a clear heir led Roosevelt to conclude that he needed to run for another term, a decision that then had to be managed into a staged "draft" at the Democrats convention in an effort to counter animosity to defying the longstanding tradition.

Moe's book offers an interesting look at how Roosevelt made his momentous choice within the context of politics and world war. Yet there is little that is original in Moe's account, as he relies mainly on the mass of secondary works about Roosevelt and his contemporaries in order to construct his narrative. His dependency on them invariably channels him towards a standard narrative that makes the same points as many of the previous authors (such as the ultimately unverifiable view that, but for the issue of war, Roosevelt's Republican opponent Wendell Willkie would have won in 1940), with little fresh consideration of the subject. In this respect, Moe's book is a useful examination of an event fully justifying its inclusion in a series about the "pivotal moments in American history," but one that ultimately has little that is new to say about its subject.… (more)