f reedom of a ction 199American people and their capacity to endure the terrible price of civil
war. He explained his policies directly and with striking respect for the
intelligence of the citizenry. In sharp contrast, Roosevelt often feared
public opinion; he shied away from eff orts to persuade and opted for
dissembling rather than candor, especially in election years. His failure
to move Americans toward interventionism represented a singular
shortcoming of his prewar leadership. Toward the end of the war, he
refrained from speaking plainly about the parts of the nascent postwar
order that did not fi t the vision he had touted. He denied the implica-
tions of Soviet control over Poland even after his 1944 reelection. Simi-
larly, because he needed Chiang Kai-shek to be something he wasn’t,
Roosevelt chose to remain silent about the weaknesses of the genera-
lissimo and his Nationalist regime. Into the void stepped that regime’s
American enablers, conservatives who would later deny Chiang’s
obvious limitations and seek scapegoats among American diplomats for
the “loss” of China to the communists.
Th e curious aspect of the president’s reluctance to share his own
realism with the American people is that his administration demon-
strated, in the case of the United Nations, a striking capacity to shape
public attitudes on international aff airs. Nonetheless, by declining to
address the limits of American power, he purchased short-term accep-
tance of the Yalta agreements and other end-of-war accommodations at
the price of future popular disillusionment. Although the public would
not retreat into an isolationist shell again, international engagement
would be driven by unreasoning fear of the Red Menace, an attitude no
more conducive to the sober consideration of foreign aff airs than the
cynicism that had followed Wilson’s war.
Roosevelt’s capacity to shape outcomes over the 1938–1945 period
followed an arc. Before the United States entered the war, the president
maneuvered, at times desperately, to retain his freedom of action so he
might decide whether, where, and when the country would become a
belligerent. He juggled multiple goals—to defeat Hitler without
actually fi ghting him, to force the Japanese to withdraw from China
without provoking them to launch a wider war in Asia and the Pacifi c,
to help Great Britain without arousing isolationist ire, to deter enemies
with American might without building the kind of military needed to
fi ght a global war. By late 1941, events left him waiting for an expected