When FDR took office in March 1933, thousands of banks had gone under, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, farmers were in open rebellion, and hungry people had descended on garbage dumps. After the Hundred Days, the federal government had assumed active responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens. Cohen offers a riveting group portrait of the five members of FDR's inner circle who accomplished this unprecedented transformation....

Fullilove demonstrates that America's global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century was enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his five extraordinary representatives from 1939-1941. Together these men and their president took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world.

"In the summer of 1941, Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt's trusted advisor, arrived in Moscow to assess whether the US should send aid to Russia as it had to Britain. And unofficially he was there to determine whether Josef Stalin -- the man who had starved four million Ukrainians to death in the early 1930s, another million in the purges of the late 1930s, and a further million in the labor camps of the Gulag -- was worth saving. Hopkins sensed...

"A Team of Rivals for World War II, here is the inside story of how FDR and the towering personalities around him waged war in the corridors of Washington D.C. to secure ultimate victory on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. Faced with the unprecedented challenges posed by a global war against entrenched and implacable totalitarian forces, Franklin Delano Roosevelt surrounded himself with a colorful group of strong-minded counselors, including...