Roosevelt's Secret War - FDR and World War II Espionage - Joseph E. Persico

I have been wanting to read this book for some time - I finally found a used copy last year and finally got a chance to read it - cover to cover - at our family camping trip two weeks ago.
It is an oustanding slice of FDR-iana, consisting of analysis by an experienced FDR scholar on FDR's activities on the espionage arena during World War II.  What Persico freely admits is that no one understood FDR completely, and any history of his actions  and analysis of them of necessity is going to be incomplete and speculative - but he doesn't let that stop him from going through every piece of information relating to FDR and espionage.  There are lots of great stories here, from the hare-brained "intelligence" and schemes that went on throughout the war to the great work that (sometimes) happened as well.  The book is sometimes a little opaque - there were paragraphs that I read and reread trying to figure out what the author meant - but overall it was a good book and illustrated just how far FDR went trying to get the nation prepared for and into the conflict that he saw coming.  What I did not know until I read this was the extent to which FDR violated civil liberties and the law itself in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, in part in conducting espionage against U.S. citizens or cooperating with Britain in keeping it in the fight.  Of course the sanctity of civil liberties was already somewhat suspect with J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI, but the book illustrates just how far FDR was going, and how serious he perceived the threat of German global domination.  In numerous instances, he seems to have taken the approach that he could ignore the law where he believed need required it, and he wouldn't pay a price politically for doing so.  Where he would pay a price, and couldn't afford it, he backed off, constantly evaluating just how far he could go in moving the country closer to getting into the war against Hitler.  It is a fascinating subject what would have happened had FDR not acted as he did, or if there had been a different president in 1940 or 1941.  FDR was a unique character, with unique political gifts at a time that gave him a full opportunity to use them.  This book is a good addition to the body of work on him.