The academic combatants who are engaged in the seemingly endless battles over Franklin D. Roosevelt's performance as the Holocaust raged, will not be pleased with Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman's work. Neither the legion of detractors, who have depicted a perfidious president ignoring urgent pleas to save Jews, nor the cavalry that has arrived to restore Roosevelt's reputation will be comfortable with the calmness of these historians’ presentation as they wrestle with the complexities of American and world foreign policies during the Hitler years. By contrast, all other students of the administration's activity before and during World War II, who see FDR as neither an antagonist nor as an advocate for those doomed by Nazi policies, will appreciate this work's search for a historiographical middle ground. Such readers will commend this book for largely staying clear of judgmental statements about what might have been achieved, while looking closely at the central dilemmas of refugees and rescue. While Breitman and Lichtman mostly side with those who assert that the White House could have done more, the importance of the work lies in its explanations of what constrained FDR.

In so doing, the authors are sure to aver that FDR, who brought more Jews to the federal government than any prior chief executive, was personally not an anti-Semite—though many people near him in the State Department most certainly were. Rather, they perceive the president as at his core a politician, and a very cautious one at that, who persistently tested congressional and public waters before endorsing, more than initiating, moves that assisted the Jews of Europe. As they see FDR, “internal security, foreign policy and military concerns” (3, 64) were always at the forefront of his mind. When he engaged Jewish issues, he did so tentatively, opting typically for behind-the-scenes maneuvers. Adding a psychological dimension to their analysis, they assess FDR as “emotionally stingy when it came to the plight of the Jews” (210).

For Breitman and Lichtman, only in the last year of his fourth term in office, with the founding of the War Refugee Board—which took the Jewish question out of the unsympathetic hands of the State Department—did he finally move rescue towards the front of his many wartime agendas. And he did so even as he struggled to keep the often-contentious Allies focused on the defeat of the enemy.

This estimation of FDR's performance will disturb his stalwart defenders even if Breitman and Licthman are quick to state that in their view “he did more for the Jews than any other world figure even if his efforts seem deficient in retrospect” (2). But then again, those historians who are antagonistic to Roosevelt will be outraged when they read of the authors’ early favorable comparison of FDR to Lincoln, whom they hallow as another wartime president who “fac[ed] the political need to hold the union together, while wrestling with the humanitarian imperative to abolish slavery” (3).

Typically, in their effort to illuminate carefully and unemotionally what they call “the contemporary reality of FDR” (2), Breitman and Lichtman have their own harsh words for those who have ascribed “mythical traits” at the expense of “important real ones” in their critical characterizations of FDR's performance (136). Most notable for them is the “Hollywood” take on the fate of the 937 German Jewish passengers on the St. Louis, who traveled in what has been called the “Voyage of the Damned.” Their version of the story debunks the allegation in some quarters that the United States Coast Guard was ordered to prevent any passengers from reaching that country's shores. They point out that if these refugees had gained admission, given the laws and climate of the times, they would have done so at the expense of different groups of Jews who were awaiting their turn to enter America. What the dramatists miss, they assert, was the cold “political calculus” that any administration attempt to run around the immigration laws would have done immeasurable damage to the big picture of FDR's efforts to amend the Neutrality Laws despite his powerful and influential isolationist opponents in Congress.

For Breitman and Lichtman it is significant that in other instances the administration intervened with Cuban officials, which led to the admission of 5,000–6,000 Jewish refugees to the island. Most importantly, though we know of the ultimate tragic fate of many of those who ended up in the western European countries that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis—two-thirds of them would be murdered in death camps—in 1939 the travelers themselves did not see themselves as doomed or damned. As Breitman and Lichtman put it, “In June 1939, the Holocaust had not yet begun. The St. Louis passengers, Jewish aid workers, and American officials all believed that the refugees had escaped Nazi persecution” (139).

FDR and the Jews will not end the debates over the performance of the American government during the Shoah. Nor for that matter will it close discussion over the responses of American Jewry's leadership during these desperate times, which is a collateral theme of this book. Predictably, these authors are not out in search of heroes and villains as they focus on the constraints, misperceptions, and rivalries that undermined Jewish communal efforts to save their people. Withal, FDR haters will certainly continue to dig up statements by the president during his long public career that they hope will undermine his reputation. And in their angriest poses, these critics will relate what they see as perfidy during World War II to postwar and even contemporary American administration attitudes towards Jews and the Jewish state. Meanwhile, historian friends of FDR will emphasize what they assert was his record of concern for Jews and the courageous battles that he waged against nefarious enemies within the United States while saving the world from totalitarianism. What is certain is the enduring truth of the statement that Breitman and Licthman make at the outset of this important work. There, they argue that the tragedy of the destruction of European Jewry goes far beyond the performance of one man in the White House. In the end, while the rescue of the Jews, even when possible, was for the president subordinate to winning the war, the murder of six million Jews, for the Third Reich, was at all times essential to its purposes, even rising above its goal of winning the war against the Allies.