Ebook: Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance

The revealing story of Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and a political alliance that changed history, from a New York Times–bestselling author.

When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, he gained the support of Joseph Kennedy, a little-known businessman with Wall Street connections. Instrumental in Roosevelt’s victory, their partnership began a longstanding alliance between two of America’s most ambitious power brokers.

Kennedy worked closely with FDR as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later as ambassador to Great Britain. But at the outbreak of World War II, sensing a threat to his family and fortune, Kennedy lobbied against American intervention—putting him in direct conflict with Roosevelt’s intentions. Though he retreated from the spotlight to focus on the political careers of his sons, Kennedy’s relationship with Roosevelt would eventually come full circle in 1960, when Franklin Roosevelt Jr. campaigned for John F. Kennedy’s presidential win.

With unprecedented access to Kennedy’s private diaries as well as firsthand interviews with Roosevelt’s family and White House aides, New York Times–bestselling author Michael Beschloss—called “the nation’s leading presidential historian” by Newsweek—presents an insightful study in contrasts. Roosevelt, the scion of a political dynasty, had a genius for the machinery of government; Kennedy, who built his own fortune, was a political outsider determined to build a dynasty of his own.

From the author of The Conquerors and Presidential Courage, this is a “fascinating account of the complex, ambiguous relationship of two shrewd, ruthless, power-hungry men” (The New York Times Book Review).

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...