The Epic Years.

• Author: Galbraith, John Kenneth
• Position: Review

A magisterial history of the century's defining decades

This is an enormous book, heavy to carry and light and very agreeable to read. David Kennedy, a professor of history at Stanford, is merciless as to fact and detail but very kind to the reader. It gave me, I do not exaggerate, a very pleasant free-time occupation for a full two weeks.

He begins with Herbert Hoover, for a Stanford professor a local icon, about whom he is at first admiring and then, as the Depression really folded in around, deeply devastating. Next, as expected, comes Roosevelt, by more or less accidental designation the New Deal and the detailed, sometimes brilliant, sometimes chaotic history, economic and political, of the following eight years. After that, the grave and looming threat from abroad. The struggle to help Britain, then Pearl Harbor and the insane declaration by Hitler, while his armies were at terrible winter risk in Russia, of war on the United States.

First comes the account of the war in the Pacific and then in the Mediterranean and in Northern Europe. As an economic political historian and then on the military and war itself, Kennedy holds firmly the attention of the reader, conveying a sense of both serious care and competence, all in good, unassuming English.

The worst thing that can happen to any historian is to have a reviewer who was there. That is, or could be, Kennedy's one misfortune here. I joined the New Deal in the summer of 1934. It was then a year old and I had frequent assignments in Washington thereafter. The first was with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, then Triple-A, to which Kennedy in an earlier work has given informed attention. As I've often told, being recently from Canada, I was not in those early days an American citizen. As to this I was not asked; I did have to affirm that I was a Democrat, which, of course, I did. Kennedy's account of the AAA accords closely with my own memory. Those with whom I was most associated were concerned with limiting production, cutting back or holding on to the crop and livestock surplus and thus raising prices. He has much more to say of the cruel problems of the small, land-poor families and the sharecroppers than I knew from my own experience. Had my association been with the small assemblage of Communists and fellow-travellers then in Triple-A (including Alger Hiss), my memory would be more complete, although it might have extended less pleasantly to later encounters with Richard...