Praise

Time and again, Roosevelt’s foresight and leadership saved the world. Craig Nelson recounts this most essential of all American stories with epic sweep and telling detail. In our time of great strife and fear, his powerful book inspires hope that, like America under FDR, we, too, can build a better future.

—Marc Wortman, author of 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War

Craig Nelson’s lucid prose invites his readers into the opaque workings of FDR’s mind. Across a wide-ranging account of Roosevelt’s sublime and at times manipulative grasp of every aspect of American involvement in World War II—from politics and diplomacy to strategy and operations to social and economic issues—V is for Victory is a revelation of a master leader on the world stage.

— Thomas Alexander Hughes, Professor of History and Dean of Academics, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, and author of Admiral Bill Halsey and Overlord

Craig Nelson has written a brilliantly researched and compellingly written story of the American home front at war. The book inspires as it instructs.

— Laurence Leamer, author of Capote’s Women

Here it is – the story behind the story – the compelling chronicle of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership to build the fabled arsenal of democracy brick by brick, bolt by bolt. In Craig Nelson’s highly compelling account, readers will meet Roosevelt’s team of politicians, industrialists, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats who pulled America from the depths of the Great Depression, fought a multi-front world war against fascism and emerged from victory as a world leader. V is for Victory is an engrossing contribution to World War II history.

— James M. Fenelon, author of Angels Against the Sun and Four Hours of Fury.

In this study of FDR’s brilliance before and during World War II, Nelson proves he is the master of mixing startling political concepts (FDR began preparing America for victory in World War II in the mid-1930s) with captivating close-up vignettes (“Ambassador of Good Will” Harpo Marx smuggling papers out of Moscow in his socks; Ernest Hemingway— drunk and clutching a hand grenade— searching the North Atlantic for Nazi submarines).

Each page of this book crackles with an historian’s insight, a scientist’s research, a writer’s confidence, and a storyteller’s charm.

— Jim DeFilippi, author of The Mules of Monte Cassino and Forty Steps to Old Sparky

Gifted storyteller Craig Nelson weaves together the fascinating backgrounds of the men and women – some famous, most lesser known – who built the machine that defeated Germany and Japan. These heroes (along with a few villains) creatively met the challenges laid down by a president who “took his stand against the advice of some of this country’s best minds” and whose “foresight saved us all.”

— Bill Whiteside, author of  The Barbarians Sat Back and Laughed