Awraith stares out from the dust jacket of the final volume of Nigel Hamilton's trilogy on Franklin Roosevelt at war. FDR is wrapped in his navy cape at Yalta in February 1945, where he met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to settle the postwar world just two months before his death. Roosevelt must have suspected what the future held, and his dead eyes tell the story.
Mr. Hamilton's “War and Peace” covers the momentous last year and a half of the president's life. It runs from the late-1943 Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin through the triumph of D-Day in June 1944, Yalta, and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed FDR at age 63 on April 12, 1945, as he sat posing for a portrait at his Warm Springs, Ga., retreat.
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