Flip-Flopper With the Final Say

This chapter examines Franklin Delano Roosevelt's postwar foreign policy intentions. President Roosevelt showed little interest in the work of official experts working on postwar issues, preferring to find analysis from outside official channels. As a result, planners sometimes worked in a vacuum, without a voice in wartime agreements and uncertain of their president's plans. Indeed, lack of communication between the president and bureaucratic planning groups led to divergence between the president's aims and policy drafts. However, Roosevelt supported the planner's work to provide him with a diverse set of options, and in so doing he allowed for the development of a policy-creating network during the war.