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Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making. By Barbara Rearden Farnham. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 313p. $39.50.
In this account of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the growing threat of war in Europe, Barbara Farnham makes the case that FDR was constrained by a value conflict between international and domestic imperatives. The former dictated more active U.S. involvement in European security affairs, while the latter mandated keeping America out of any war. After a period of experimentation with a conciliatory approach between 1936 and 1938, FDR's response following the Munich crisis shifted to aiding the British and French democracies in their rearmament efforts. This choice satisfied fully neither the isolationist nor the interventionist sectors of American public and elite opinion. It was acceptable to both, however, and appeared at the time to Roosevelt as a feasible response to the Axis threat. The Munich crisis is important in this account, because it enhanced FDR's appreciation of the awful consequences of a victory by the dictators should war occur in Europe.
The author marshals exhaustive archival sources to support this description of the president's policy between 1936 and 1939. Equally impressive is her command of the literature in political psychology and decision making, which informs a theoretical solution to the puzzles presented by the historical evidence. They are: Why did Roosevelt's response appear to "drift" between 1936 and 1939? Why did FDR adopt a policy of aid to the democracies rather than select from the isolationist and interventionist alternatives? These puzzles raise the broader questions of why it took the president two years to appreciate the gravity of the threat posed by Germany in particular, and, once he fully appreciated...