“I've got a leave of absence from death,” joked Harry Hopkins in his last presidential mission to Russia in June 1945 (392). Some six months later the man whom Winston Churchill dubbed “Lord Root of the Matter” died at the relatively young age of fifty-five from cirrhosis of the liver. As David Roll demonstrates in his illuminating new biography, this Iowa-born son of an itinerant harness maker, despite his lack of any previous diplomatic experience, became the indispensable intermediary who forged and sustained the British–American–Soviet coalition that won victory in World War II. Like the protagonist in the long-running Broadway play The Man Who Came to Dinner, Hopkins accepted President Franklin D. Roosevelt's invitation to spend a night at the White House in May 1940 and wound up staying for three and a half years. As FDR's closest companion, court jester, cutter of red tape, irreverent truth-teller, and personal envoy, he excelled as the President's de facto national security adviser. According to Roll, Hopkins's success derived from “his sense of timing, his remarkable instinct for knowing when to press forward on a matter of substance, when to tell a joke, and when simply to listen. He had the right touch” (4).

In addition to attending virtually all the wartime summit meetings, Hopkins scored his most notable accomplishments in solo missions to London and Moscow in 1941. His enthusiastic assessments of both Churchill and Stalin as strong personalities whose fighting forces would repulse Hitler's aggressions reinforced Roosevelt's decision to send vital lend–lease assistance to both countries in the months before Pearl Harbor. Hopkins's instant and genuine friendship with Churchill eventually grew to legendary proportions. Even the prickly Stalin, “built like a football coach's dream of a tackle,” came to respect Hopkins as the one American who always spoke po dushe, or “from the soul” (126, 409). That Hopkins carried out these proxy missions at great risk to his already fragile health only increased his effectiveness. Churchill's daughter-in-law Pamela put it succinctly: FDR had “sent the right man to the right place at the right time” (98).

In one important new revelation, Roll credits Hopkins's vaunted “fixer” skills for settling the contentious debate between British and US officials over the first Allied strategic offensive after Pearl Harbor. Notwithstanding FDR's promise in May 1942 to Stalin that “we expect the formation of a second front in Europe this year” (Roll's emphasis), Hopkins played the pivotal role in determining that the Anglo-American invasion of November 1942 took place in French North Africa rather than France (197). Roll offers persuasive evidence that Hopkins quietly leaked to the British in a key London meeting that FDR, having vetoed any “Pacific First” option, had decided that American soldiers must fight Germans somewhere in 1942, so that the British refusal to carry out potentially suicidal landings in Brittany (Operation Sledgehammer) meant that an invasion of French North Africa (Operation Torch) was the only viable alternative. Did Hopkins and FDR, as Roll suggests, deliberately undercut their military advisers for reasons of morale and domestic politics, knowing that the invasion of North Africa would likely delay any cross-Channel operation until 1944 and eventually sour relations with the Soviet Union? Such judgment seems too severe, if only because the Torch landings came a few days after the mid-term elections of 1942 and Roosevelt, ever the optimist, always hoped for an early invasion of France even as he approved subsequent landings in Sicily and Italy. Because the British were fully mobilized in 1942–43 and the Americans were not, any combined operation had to depend largely on British troops, shipping, and casualties. The Soviets would simply have to wait for the second front.

Roll's impressive biography benefits greatly from newly available sources, including Hopkins family papers deposited at Georgetown University, as well as interviews with Diana Hopkins Halstead, who as a child lived with her father in the White House during those tumultuous years. Candid shots of Hopkins and Roosevelt at Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta, taken by US Army photographer Robert Hopkins, also grace the volume. Roll even uses FBI transcripts of telephone conversations with Hopkins's third wife, Louise, as he effectively debunks revisionist claims that Hopkins passed atomic secrets to the Soviets. In short, The Hopkins Touch is a worthy successor to Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning Roosevelt and Hopkins, published in 1947.