His Final Battle

From the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, an intimate and hugely insightful account of Roosevelt’s final months of life, when, despite a dire medical prognosis, he was determined to be re-elected, deal with Stalin, and bring the war to a successful conclusion.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is often ranked among the greatest of American presidents, but his legacy has never been considered like this: through the lens of his final sixteen months. This little-examined period encompasses the D-Day invasion, the Manhattan Project, the Yalta conference—and the discovery that he was suffering from severe hypertension and congestive heart failure.

With precision and compassion, Joseph Lelyveld examines the choices Roosevelt made in this period, illuminating his state of mind, his preoccupations, and his motives, both as a wartime leader and in his personal life. Confronting his own mortality, Roosevelt operated under the belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end—while simultaneously pressured by the demands of family, health, and volatile enemies. Lelyveld delivers an incisive portrait of this famously inscrutable man, full of contradictions but a consummate leader to the very last.