Secret Affairs, Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles

IRWIN F. GELLMAN, Secret Affairs,. Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (London and Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xvii, 499 pp. $24.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8018-5083-5).

It has long been recognized that FDR was his "own secretary of state" and that he managed American foreign policy personally and with varying degrees of success. Nonetheless, scholars continue to be attracted to the study of the personalities of the Roosevelt administration who were significant in its conduct of foreign affairs. In Secret Affairs, Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles, Irwin F. Gellman provides not only a valuable contribution to our study of FDR and two of his principal foreign policy assistants in the formulation and conduct of foreign policy, but he also has uncovered new information which sheds light on the inner workings of the White House and the State Department during the war years. Gellman's previous books include Roosevelt and Battista: Good Neighbor Diplomacy in Cuba, 1933-1945 and Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933-1945.

The initial chapters of Secret Affairs introduce the three major figures of the study: Franklin Roosevelt,...