Franklin Roosevelt was one of two men, the arcs of whose respective lives trace out the distance between what we might call the brightest glories and the darkest evils of the twentieth century.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 8, 2008.
Historian David Kennedy discusses themes and personalities from his 1999 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of the New Deal, which he presents as a profound turning point in American history.
