Drawn from the Hofstra University series of Presidential conferences, this volume collects a diverse set of essays that explore the life and times of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Treated in depth are Roosevelt's political beginnings and his life as a politician, the tumultuous World War II years, the New Deal and its legacy, and the political emergence of Eleanor Roosevelt in an era that saw few women in public life. these papers provide a good sense of the complexity of the man, his policies, and some of the people who were personally and politically close to him. . . . It is of value to...

President Jimmy Carter, like all his predecessors since World War II, experienced the blurring of lines between foreign and domestic politics while, paradoxically, the contrasts between those lines became more pronounced. In nearly every arena of domestic and foreign policy, he had to deal with the intrusion of the politics of both spheres.

The major concerns of the Carter foreign policy experience and, consequently, of the papers included in the volume were staffing the foreign policy apparatus, shifting human rights to the forefront of basic policy considerations, attempting to create...

Jimmy Carter was an unexpected president. The first Southerner since the Civil War to gain the office, he had pursued the presidency at the grass roots as an outsider. A president who sought to run a government as good as the American people, Carter soon found himself embroiled in system overload as he worked for a domestic agenda to increase park lands, made the federal judiciary accessible to more women and minorities, to better manage the civil service, to devise a rational long-range policy of energy consumption and conservation, and to keep the deficit under control. Deadlock with...