Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt

Marks contends that FDR's foreign policy throughout his successive administrations was distinguished by duplicity, indecisiveness and mendacity; that the false hopes he aroused in Japanese leaders during the '30s and early '40s received due recompense at Pearl Harbor; that the Good Neighbor Policy was largely a waste of money; that by the time he died, Roosevelt had acquired ""the largest overseas credibility gap of any president on record.'' Not only does Marks accuse Roosevelt of aristocratic disdain for foreigners of nearly every stripe, he scoffs at the Olympian wartime partnership between FDR and Churchill, arguing that beneath the genial surface lurked ``a hard substratum of spitefulness.'' Readers will find this churlish revisionist view provocative but few will agree with the overall implication that Roosevelt's foreign policy was a disgrace. Marks is the author of Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. (April)