The tempestuous relationship between a towering American president and the founder of an American political dynasty--and its impact on history. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, he won support from the little-known, Boston-born financier and ex-Hollywood mogul Joseph Kennedy. The politician and the businessman formed a partnership that helped to bring Roosevelt to the White House, where he fought the Great Depression and institutionalized the New Deal. But the mutual admiration born of Roosevelt and Kennedy's shared victories, including the latter's stint as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he worked to clean up Wall Street, was severely tested as Nazism rolled across Europe. Eager to protect the lives of his four sons and to see that his family would retain the wealth and social status he had fought so hard to achieve, Kennedy desperately wanted America to stay out of World War II. As Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain, he enthusiastically supported the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler. By 1940, his isolationism forced an angry showdown with his boss at the Roosevelt mansion at Hyde Park. "I never want to see that son of a bitch again as long as I live," the president told his wife, Eleanor. After America entered World War II, Kennedy retreated from the spotlight and turned to the political ambitions of his sons. By 1960, when Franklin Roosevelt Jr. campaigned for John F. Kennedy to win the presidency, the complex relationship between their two families had come full circle. To tell this story, bestselling author Michael Beschloss has drawn on crucial sources that had never been seen by other historians, such as Joseph Kennedy's private diaries and his unpublished diplomatic memoir. Beschloss also interviewed a number of Roosevelt's White House aides, as well as three of the president's sons. Kennedy and Roosevelt was Beschloss's first book, and has been hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "fascinating" account of "the complex, ambiguous relationship of two shrewd, ruthless, power-hungry men."
