Like much else about the 1960s, the mantra that “all politics is personal” was rather naïve compared to earlier, more pointed formulations. According to Harold D. Lasswell, who authored Psychopathology and Politics (1930) during the first wave of Freudian debunking, all politics is the displacement of private motives unto public issues, rationalized in terms of the greater good. Herman Melville—a first-hand student of the rise of “Jacksonian democracy”—put it succinctly in Moby Dick: “all mortal greatness is but disease.” Not surprisingly, it was soon after the making and unmaking of Richard Nixon, that James D. Barber’s The Presidential Character (1977) launched a new wave of psychoanalyzing presidents. The problem with many of these studies is that they may be strong on psychology, but are weak on politics—specifically, the nexus between “presidential character” and public policy decisions. Another problem: historians have proved as prone to projecting their own agendas as politicians. It is true that liberal historians, disillusioned with LBJ, have not been reluctant to dissect his character, and that—given that they really had no other choice—they relatively soon fessed up about JFK’s peccadillos. However, the iconic FDR and—to a lesser degree, Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman—have long received kid gloves treatment. Belatedly, this deficiency is being corrected. First, in Truman’s case, William E. Leuchtenburg used the pages of American Heritage in 1991 to reveal Truman’s now notorious admission to his future wife, Bess, in a 1911 letter: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust[,] a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negros [ sic ] ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.” In the case of Jews, Truman’s overruling the State Department in recognizing Israel during the 1948 presidential election campaign should be viewed against the more positive backdrop of the 1920s when he partnered with Jewish haberdasher, Eddie Jacobson, who became a lifelong friend) his love of the Old Testament always tempered his occasional anti-Semitic remarks. (See Allis and Ronald Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel [2009].) Regarding African Americans, Truman’s private expressions of prejudice—including his racial slur in the 1950s against Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.—continued throughout his life. Yet as Leuchtenburg argued convincingly in his article entitled “The Conversion of Harry Truman,” none of this prevented Truman from becoming the most important champion of African Americans since Lincoln by issuing a 1948 executive order mandating the integration of military, among other measures. The “personal” may have become “political” for Truman in 1946 when he privately as well as publicly expressed revulsion at the lynching of black veterans returning from the war. Yet politics may also have played a role as reflected in a memo by Truman’s young aide Clark Clifford arguing that advocacy of civil rights for African Americans (as well as Zionism) could help pave the way to victory in 1948. In the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, we finally have a book—Rafael Medoff’s FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith (2013)—that establishes a devastating nexus between Roosevelt long history of private anti-Semitism and his failure to do much to save European Jews during World War II. FDR grew up among deeply anti-Semitic family and friends—as did Eleanor, who outgrew her prejudices as he apparently did not. In 1923, as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, he voted to institute a Jewish quota on admissions. In 1938, he blamed Polish anti-Semitism on the Jews. In 1937, he accused the Ochs-Sulzberger family—the New York Times had editorialized against the “court packing” plan) of a “dirty Jewish trick” under the tax law involving their ownership of the Times. In 1940, he dismissed horror stories about Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler as “sob stuff.” In 1943, he told Allied officials in liberated North Africa that Jews in the professions should be “definitely limited.” Medoff singles out FDR’s near-obsession with “thinning the Jews.” Roosvelt boasted that, in the 1920s—when he had complained about the need to redistribute immigrants “crowding into the cities” and supported total exclusion of Japanese and other Asians under the new immigration law—he personally had acted at both Hyde Park and near Warm Springs to introduce a handful—but only a handful—of Jewish families. As late as May, 1943, he argued in talks with Prime Minister Churchill that “the best way to settle the Jewish question” was “to spread the Jews all over the world.” His dispersal fantasy did not include admitting more Jewish refugees to the U.S. or admitting more than a token number to Britain’s Palestine Mandate, so as not to offend the Arabs. Supporting “thinning out” of the Jewish immigrant population was one thing before World War I when there were Jewish immigrant aid organizations that favored. It was quite something else in 1943, especially when FDR’s convoluted thinking translated into leaving Jews to their fate in Europe. After reading Medoff’s book, it is hard not to struck by the ironic overlap between Roosevelt’s preference and what mythical President Charles A. Lindbergh actually does in Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, where the American government pressures Jewish young men in Eastern big cities to disperse to the Midwest in order to be “Americanized.” As students of the Holocaust know, FDR relented somewhat in 1944. But as Medoff amply shows, by then it was too late to do take the modest actions that would likely have saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. One can defend FDR on politics grounds by pointing to the constraining effect of widespread anti-Semitism. Public opinion polls showed 36 percent of the American public harboring strong anti-Semitic views in 1938 (during the period when the New Deal was viciously criticized for opening government jobs to American Jews), and 58 percent in 1945. Even so, it is hard to escape the conclusion that: with Truman, a president led for civil rights despite personal prejudices; with FDR a president failed to lead because of personal prejudices.