The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 3: The Lowering Clouds, 1939-1941

Ickes, Harold L.

Edité par Simon and Schuster, 1954

A propos de cet article

THE SECRET DIARY OF HAROLD L. ICKES, VOL. 3: THE LOWERING CLOUDS, 1939-1941, Harold L. Ickes, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, 1st edition, stated 1st printing, 1954. 8-page "Readers Guide to the People in The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 3" laid in. BOOK CONDITION: very good. The text block is in near fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. No bookplate or signature of a prior owner. Not a library book or remainder. The blue and brown boards are in very good condition (lightly bumped spine, slightly bowed back board). The dust jacket is in good condition (light crinkling along top and bottom edges, age-toned interior). 8 ½ x 6, 695 pages, 31 ounces XX [From the inner flaps] DURING the two years following the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, Harold L. Ickes poured into the black looseleaf folders of his secret diary the inside story of one of the great quiet changes which make true history. This was the shift of the United States and the American people from a position of neutrality bordering on isolationism to one of deep and committed involvement with the foreign world. Harold Ickes was the right man to keep this record. On the night after Pearl Harbor, as he tells the story here, he was approached in the White House by Senator Hiram Johnson, the man who had originally proposed Ickes for a Cabinet job. He was a bitter-end isolationist; the two men had not seen each other for two years. But this was, at last, the bitter end, and Ickes could tell the President later that Johnson would vote the next day for our declaration of war. During those two years while the storm was gathering over the world, the Secretary of the Interior watched the political weather in Washington and outside it with the same candid, uncharitable, honest eyes he had developed in the early years of the New Deal. Here are the Cabinet meetings, White House conferences, newspaper feuds, poker games, and cocktail parties which helped to shape, in the long run, the destiny of our times, and they are described here with both the malice and the passion which made Harold Ickes the man he was. The cast of characters is more important than in the earlier volumes of the diary; by President Roosevelt's third term Ickes had acquired both more power and more self-confidence than he earlier had. Now he is tangling with men better known than he was, and the stakes have risen correspondingly. His diary entries over these years show the same truculence and the same integrity, and a growing sense of the tragic and fateful meaning of what lay behind all the shoving and pushing and jockeying for power which make up politics in a democracy. Here is an entirely unrewritten story of the frantic struggle in high places to get the vice-presidential nomination in 1940. It is followed by a day-by-day record of the Democratic national convention in Chicago in that year and by an account of the Willkie campaign, both of which are as readable as they are unorthodox. Here are a little more than two years of our immediate past told by a master diarist whose Washington, as the New Yorker has pointed out, "like Dickens' London, Balzac's Paris, and Faulkner's Jefferson, is a community in which one can settle down and lead a life of one's own.?

N° de réf. du vendeur 003242

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 3: The Lowering Clouds, 1939-1941
• Éditeur: Simon and Schuster
• Date de parution: 1954
• Langue: anglais
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: 1st Edition
• Impression: 1st Printing
• État de l'article: Very Good
• État de la jaquette: Good
• Poids: 31 onces
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • United States
  • History