The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.
We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln.
Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war.
As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.
Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before.
I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.
My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.
Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack.
For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.
Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama has upheld FDR's vision of America as a nation that keeps its word - a nation still committed to uphold the 'four freedoms' that President Roosevelt set down in the great Atlantic Charter of August 1941.
Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!
President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.
For the serious biographer, history and the life story of a real individual are inseparably intertwined. Get the facts wrong, or distort them, and the life story gets distorted: becomes fiction.
Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels.
I'm not promising to write 'JFK 2' - but one day, I might!
My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.
In daring to re-tell the stories of the last twelve American presidents, both public and private, I knew I would incur some outrage with 'American Caesars.'
President Gerald Ford was no intellectual, but he had served with distinction in combat as a naval gunnery officer and then as Congressman for a quarter century.
To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.
