A flawed colossus.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, by Conrad Black (Public Affairs, 1,280 pp., $39.95)

WHAT historians do is make generalizations. They study and take notes from the relevant documents and secondary literature. As they ingest the data, they digest them and reduce them to general propositions. When they sit down to write they select and report only that which makes cogent the story they are telling or the analysis they are offering. Two other kinds of folks who study the past go about their tasks differently. Antiquarians delight in learning details for their own sake and are likely to report them accurately and fully, if somewhat randomly. Authors of academic history characteristically record their research on note cards, arrange them in chronological order, and write by turning the cards over one by one. The results in either case are well-nigh unreadable.

Conrad Black's unconscionably long biography of Franklin Roosevelt shares almost none of the characteristics of genuine history and falls halfway between the work of antiquarians and academicians. Like them, he includes every detail, however irrelevant, though he is not always accurate and sometimes arranges his note cards out of sequence.

Consider some examples of irrelevance. Black devotes five paragraphs to Dean Acheson's reappointment to a minor State Department position and informs us that "Acheson was sworn in by Justice Brandeis in the presence of Frankfurter, Attorney General Biddle, and the congressional librarian, Archibald MacLeish, at Brandeis's home." Does one really need to know that in order to understand the life of Franklin Roosevelt? Again, when Winston Churchill comes to America for his first meeting with Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, we are told the names and positions of everyone in his entourage, though none is mentioned in the further account of the discussions. In the middle of a long narrative of the proceedings at the Yalta Conference, we are subjected to a paragraph telling us that at one point Stalin went to the men's room for two minutes, disconcerting his NKVD guards who did not know where he had gone. As for details out of sequence, we are told of Mussolini's rescue by Germans pages before we are told that Americans captured him.

A few of the extraneous details, to be sure, are entertaining. Roosevelt's strange relationship with Eleanor affords examples. When he first ran for governor of New York she told a reporter, "I am not excited about my husband's election. I don't care." In early 1933, when told of an apparent assassination attempt on Roosevelt, Eleanor nonchalantly noted, "These things will happen." At another point, interrupting a conversation about tax reform, she interjected ideas that Roosevelt and his guest regarded as absurd; Franklin said, "Oh Eleanor, shut up! You never understand these things anyway." Soon after Pearl Harbor she suggested that American planes "should be filled with hornets, wasps, and bees and emptied near enemy lines to torment German and Japanese soldiers." Those of us who already have a store of anti-Eleanor gossip need not endure a thousand pages to get more.

In addition to the burdensome detail, Black repeats himself. Steve Early is mentioned as Roosevelt's press secretary 15 or 20 times before Black finally decides that we know who he was. Mike Reilly is identified as Roosevelt's "security chief" every time he appears. At least half a dozen times we are informed that FDR and Churchill met in 1919, that Roosevelt had unpleasant memories of the encounter, and that Churchill did not remember it at all. On back-to-back pages we are told that Operation Gymnast was the code name for the invasion of North Africa. Frequently we are reminded that Margaret Suckley took care of Roosevelt's Scottie dog Fala. When Black describes naval artillery as 16-inch or 14-inch, he always throws in parenthetically that the inches refer to barrel diameter.

The book teems with errors, small and large. I shall restrain myself and cite but a few. FDR did not learn of the collapse of the Insull utility companies in April 1932, since the collapse came in May. General Electric was by no means "essentially an appliance manufacturer." Harry Hopkins did not pay "the minimum wage" to Civil Works Administration employees in 1934, for the minimum wage had not yet been enacted. Dred Scott was not a "fugitive slave." Supreme Court justices were not originally required "to ride around the district." The Articles of Confederation did not govern "the newly independent colonies ... from 1783 to 1788 while the Constitution of the United States was being prepared." Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861, not 1852. The G.I. Bill of Rights was not "entirely his [FDR's] original conception."

On occasion Black misinforms the reader but corrects the error with a later turn of his note cards, without noticing the original mistake. He tells us that Russia clobbered Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, but later he has Stalin trying to recover the territories it lost in that conflict. He misidentifies Treasury secretary William Woodin as a "diminutive banker"; later, he properly identifies Woodin as a (still diminutive) "head of American Car and Foundry."

In addition to errors of commission, Black makes errors of omission. He does not mention the 1938 New Economic Policy of antitrust enforcement under Thurman Arnold (a policy abruptly dropped when Roosevelt realized that the wicked trusts were necessary to the war effort). He fails to mention the pivotal Curtiss-Wright Export case, in which the Supreme Court held that executive agreements have the force of treaties, having previously ruled that treaties can supersede the Constitution. In his long account of Russia's war with the Nazis he omits Russia's "scorched earth" policy.

The worst thing about this book, however, is Black's judgment that Roosevelt was not only the greatest president ever but the greatest man in the world during the 20th century. Granted, Black reports unfavorable things about his hero: FDR comes across as devious, cruel, and a pathological liar (Black claims that as Roosevelt matured and had real accomplishments to brag about, he outgrew his penchant for embellishing, but as late as 1944 FDR claimed to have discovered Enrico Caruso in 1904--pure fiction). Yet Black stills paints FDR as The Hero.

Black bases his judgment on several propositions. The first great achievement, Black tells us, was leading the nation out of the Depression and thus averting a revolution. But in 1937, after four years of the New Deal, the economy was as bad as it had been in 1933; in reality, production for war was what ended the Depression. Roosevelt gave almost everyone, in private conferences and over the radio, the impression that he understood the causes of the Depression and knew the remedies; in reality he was an economic illiterate. He dismissed as partisan nonsense Herbert Hoover's accurate claim that the Depression was caused by international forces. John Maynard Keynes, who admired Roosevelt until he met him, was appalled to learn the depth of his ignorance of economics.

Another reason for Black's judgment is FDR's role in shaping the course of the war and postwar settlements. The author takes great pains to prove that FDR did not naively sell out eastern Europe to the Soviets at the Yalta Conference. Black concedes that in 1942 Roosevelt smugly wrote Churchill that "I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department," and that he was confident that Stalin would become democratic and capitalistic after the war. But, Black insists, Stalin had his troops in eastern Europe at war's end, and the Yalta agreements really made no difference. What Black fails to understand is that Churchill's plan to invade Germany through the Balkans, which Roosevelt regarded as foolish, would have cut the Russians off from Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Had Roosevelt listened to Churchill, there would have been no Iron Curtain.

Roosevelt blew it. So did Conrad Black.

Mr. McDonald is Distinguished University Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama.