Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill's Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency.

• Author: Peters, Charles

In the last half-century or so, American presidents have displayed a proclivity for foreign policy misadventures, often carried out in secret and without consulting Congress. Robert Shogan, one of our shrewdest political reporters, has an intriguing explanation of this phenomenon. It all began, he says, with Franklin Roosevelt's deal with England in 1940 in which the United States acquired sites for military bases from Newfoundland to Trinidad in exchange for 50 destroyers. The deal was made public at the beginning of September 1940, but had been negotiated largely in secrecy, and was not submitted to Congress.

Shogan tells a fascinating story of the three months of negotiation that produced the agreement. Unfortunately, his analysis is less compelling. Because he is a great reporter, Shogan has the integrity not to omit the facts that don't fit his case, but he too often either mininimizes or misinterprets them.

1940 is a year everyone should know and know well. It was a crucial moment in the history of the modem world. And the drama was at its height during the period of June through September.

This was the situation in the middle of June: Hitler had completed his conquest of France, having already overrun Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. He was planning to invade Britain in September. Britain was short of all kinds of armaments, but, of its many needs, destroyers ranked among the most desperate. So Churchill asked Roosevelt for 50 of the World War I-era destroyers this country had mothballed. The need was clearly immediate.

Yet Roosevelt could not say yes right away. There was a law called the Walsh Amendment that appeared to preclude a transfer of American warships to another country. Even more daunting was the fact that the American public had been largely isolationist in sentiment for more than twenty years. The great national hero, Charles Lindbergh, was an active leader of the America First camp, aided and abetted by such prominent senators as Burton Wheeler, Hiram Johnson, Gerald Nye, and Arthur Vandenburg. The Chicago Tribune, the leading editorial voice of the isolationists, said, "The sale of the American ships to a nation at war would be an action of war." Herbert Hoover, the only living ex-president, opposed the transfer. And perhaps most maddeningly, Roosevelt faced the same problem that Churchill had been forced to confront when France, in its death throes, had asked for his precious Spitfire fighters. Would he be sacrificing to a lost cause weapons that would soon be needed in his own country's defense? Hitler seemed unstoppable. Britain, especially since it had been stripped of...