The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler

Description

The Hopkins Touch offers the first portrait in over two decades of the most powerful man in Roosevelt s administration.

In this impressive biography, David Roll shows how Harry Hopkins, an Iowa-born social worker who had been an integral part of the New Deal s implementation, became the linchpin in FDR s--and America s--relationships with Churchill and Stalin, and spoke with an authority second only to the president s. Hopkins could take the political risks his boss could not, and proved crucial to maintaining personal relations among the Big Three. Beloved by some--such as Churchill, who believed that Hopkins "always went to the root of the matter"--and trusted by most--including the paranoid Stalin--there were nevertheless those who resented the influence of "the White House Rasputin."

Based on newly available sources, The Hopkins Touch is an absorbing, substantial work that offers a fresh perspective on the World War II era and the Allied leaders, through the life of the man who kept them on point until the war was won.

Bonus Photographs of Harry Hopkins

At the Tehran conference outside the Soviet embassy, December 1943, left to right: General George Marshall shaking hands with British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Archibald Clark Kerr, Hopkins, V. N. Pavlov (Stalin’s interpreter), Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov (with mustache).(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

Hopkins at the 1940 Democratic national convention in Chicago with daughter Diana, age seven. From left to right behind them: John Hertz, founder of the Hertz car rental empire, thoroughbred race horse owner and a close friend of Hopkins; David, Hopkins’ twenty-eight-year-old son; and Edwin Daley.(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

Under the fourteen-foot guns of the British battleship Prince of Wales in August 1941, Churchill, Hopkins and British officers discuss the forthcoming meetings with President Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland in what became known as the Atlantic Conference.(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

 

Hopkins conferring with Roosevelt in the Oval Study, June 1942.(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

After visiting American troops in Rabat, Morocco, Hopkins, General Mark Clark (second from left), Roosevelt and General George Patton (right) discuss the North Africa campaign during a lunch in the field.(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

Roosevelt celebrating his sixty-first birthday in the roomy cabin of his Boeing Clipper with Admiral Leahy (left), Hopkins and Captain Howard Cone, the Clipper commander (right). They were on the final leg of their return from the Casablanca conference.(Photo by Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)