Over the past decade, no scholar has written more perceptively about Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term than Susan Dunn. After publishing studies of the President's role in the 1938 campaign (Roosevelt's Purge (2010)) and the election of 1940 (1940 (2013)), Dunn has turned her attention to the start of Roosevelt's third term. In A Blueprint for War, she focusses on the hundred days (or so) between FDR's reelection in 1940 and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, a time when foreign policy consumed American politics. Approving of Roosevelt and his initiatives, Dunn vividly portrays a pivotal moment in the history of a transformative presidency.

Dunn posits two theses, one quite compelling and the other a little less so. Borrowing from scholars of the New Deal who discerned a First Hundred Days of reform in 1933, followed by Second Hundred Days in 1935, Dunn identifies a “Third Hundred Days” stretching from November 1940 to March 1941 (177). She rightly deems those months “one of the most fertile periods of [Roosevelt's] long presidency” (176). FDR tacitly approved his military brass's plans for an Atlantic-focussed, Beat-Germany-First strategy, should the United States enter World War II, and permitted discrete discussions with agents of the British Chiefs of Staff. “If we didn't have some talks with the British,” General George C. Marshall later observed, “we would start with no basis at all if war developed” (149). The President also began to mobilize American society via methods that persisted following the attack on Pearl Harbor: the country's capitalistic system remained intact, the government eschewed coercion as factories churned out war matériel, and labor leaders and the once vilified (by FDR) captains of industry gained key positions overseeing the economy. During the winter of 1940–41, Roosevelt marshaled the fighting morale of Americans, and quelled the appeals of isolationists (for whom Dunn exhibits no sympathy), through an “arsenal of ideas” – a splendid bit of wordplay by this author (73–100). The President's “Arsenal of Democracy” fireside chat, “Four Freedoms” message to Congress, and Second Inaugural Address together “established America's determination to lead the nations fighting the forces of tyranny” and laid the foundation for the liberal international order that American leaders would build after the war (100). In some of the most revealing passages of the book, Dunn pinpoints the origins of Roosevelt's famous rhetorical flourishes, attributing, for instance, the “arsenal of democracy” metaphor to a passing remark by visiting French business leader Jean Monnet (85). Of course, the United States would have been unable to supply military hardware to Germany's enemies without the Lend-Lease Act, whose passage Dunn reconstructs in clear, if familiar, detail. Nevertheless, the author detects the genesis of the Marshall Plan, and other postwar aid programs, in Lend-Lease.

Dunn also contends that the Third Hundred Days exceeded the two earlier hundred-day spans in both importance and accomplishment. “Far more than the nation's economic and social well-being was now at stake,” she asserts. “The lives of tens of millions of people around the world and the fate of free and democratic governments everywhere hung in the balance” (2). Although the point sounds sensible and is eminently defensible, one wonders whether it slights the enduring reforms of the New Deal – Social Security, after all, emerged from the Second Hundred Days – and engages in apples-versus-oranges comparisons of domestic and foreign policy. A few colloquialisms and hyperbole further distract from the author's fine narrative. Dunn four times refers to the Nazis as “gangsters” (11, 25, 93, 142), and she labels as “libel” the isolationist charge that Roosevelt sought to use Lend-Lease to make himself a dictator, when a slightly less loaded word might have been more appropriate (136).

These qualms represent minor matters. Dunn makes a strong case for a Third Hundred Days focussed on America's relations with the wider world. Her paradigm demonstrates anew how bursts of creative energy and substantive achievement defined FDR's presidency, while highlighting the successive crises faced by Roosevelt as the United States lurched from the Great Depression to non-belligerency to full participation in World War II. This book's solid research (chiefly in published sources) and original insights will please specialist readers, while its readability and modest length (182 pages of text) make it attractive for classroom use. A Blueprint for War deserves a wide audience.