‘America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War’
By H. W. Brands
Doubleday, 464 pages

H. W. Brands has written a historical thriller — hard to do when we all know the outcome of the story. He succeeds because for much of his book he is a silent witness, allowing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh to play out their very different conceptions of America and its place in the world.

Lindbergh thought Roosevelt was a liar. The president proclaimed peace but prepared for war even as an isolationist majority rejected involvement in foreign wars after the debacle of President Wilson’s mission to save the world for democracy.

Lindbergh presumed the country was on his side, relying on the natural protective barriers of two oceans. Why should America join the British and French in opposing Hitler’s Germany? To Lindbergh, in the late 1930s, an impending World War II was about the balance of power in Europe. Sooner or later, Britain and France would have to accommodate Germany’s rising strength.

So if Americans inclined toward Lindbergh’s America First, isolationist movement, how was it that Roosevelt was able to edge the country closer to an alliance with the declining empires of Britain and France, and later with the perfidious Soviet Union? Lindbergh cited a pro-war press, British propaganda, and the Jewish influence — although, to begin with, he kept his antisemitism a matter mainly for his private correspondence.

Instead of analyzing or taking issue with Lindbergh, Mr. Brands tracks the wily Roosevelt, especially in press conferences and speeches, where he denied an impending involvement in war, even as he kept intensifying remarks about the Nazi plans for world domination and did what he could to supply the allied arsenal. 

What Roosevelt thought of Lindbergh, Mr. Brands does not say, because Roosevelt never directly criticized Lindbergh, a national hero after his solo flight across the Atlantic and then the victim of a national tragedy when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered.

Through surrogates, Roosevelt undermined Lindbergh’s radio broadcasts, in which he maintained America could never deliver millions of men across the Atlantic to defeat Hitler, and that doing so was not necessary; a military buildup of defensive weapons was sufficient.

Lindbergh might have been more formidable against Roosevelt if he had not prided himself on not being a politician. When advised not to state everything that he thought was true — such as his claims about the harmful influence of Jews, he refused to listen — even to President Hoover who counseled that in politics one did not have to say something just because it was true. In short, there was a time for everything, even when it came to speaking one’s truth.

The cagy Roosevelt may well have realized that sooner or later Lindbergh would defeat himself, which Lindbergh did in a speech at Des Moines, Iowa shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. There Lindbergh bluntly voiced publicly what he had been saying in private letters about the Jewish campaign to commit America to war.

Nearing the climax of Mr. Brands’s book, we get what he had wisely withheld: the full blown criticism of Lindbergh for decrying Jewish influence while virtually ignoring Hitler’s atrocities. This moment is a long time coming, but that seems by design: only with that fateful speech did the horrendous implications of Lindbergh’s pent up antisemitism become clear to a national audience. 

Even Lindbergh’s America First collaborators shied away from association with him. The offer of his services to the American government after Pearl Harbor was ignored. What assignment could have been given to such a compromised public figure?

In an epilogue, Mr. Brands susses out the implications of his narrative, presenting a picture of Lindbergh as the product of 19th-century America, as a man who did not understand modern life — although he correctly predicted that as soon as America committed itself to saving democracy on the European continent, the country would not return to thinking of itself exclusively as America first, which really meant, Mr. Brands argues, American alone. 

The war was about defeating Hitler and the Japanese to be sure, but it was also, finally, about a realization that America had to maintain a leadership role in the world. That was Roosevelt’s project, even though he was never willing to admit it in so many words.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History”