The Three Roosevelts

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn

Atlantic Books £25, pp544

The contrast always surprises. Britain, which has so much history, neglects and forgets it. A dead, not a living, thing. America, which has so little history, constantly reveres and reworks it as an illumination of present greatness. The best transatlantic historians - like MacGregor Burns and Dunn - are never content to turn the page and move on. They are always seeking new connections, new perspectives. Here, as what you might call a trilogy, are the lives of Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt put together in search of a magisterial whole.

Forget lesser dynasties such as the Kennedys. Were these three - scions of privilege who heard the call of political duty - the true makers of the American century? A stretching question with a slightly banal conclusion. Their 'genius lay in their recognising the needs of the people early on, sensing their political mood, and then - above all - ACTING.' Hail 'History as the Great Moralist, judging leaders according to the values they govern by... The Roosevelts met that test.' Well, even George W couldn't disagree.

Two further irritations. One is the (American) need to mythologise in the quest for 'greatness'. The other is a chronological structure which, inevitably, fades out Teddy before cousin Franklin (let alone his cousin Eleanor) have really started. The Roosevelts were carved from the same upper crust of society. They broke away from the dilettante class, America's aristocracy, and got their hands dirty. But common roots don't add up to a common theme on the power of 'transformational leadership'. The thesis, frequently invoked, rather gets in the way.

What is much more fascinating - by design, because the old struggles for health or pension reform, the old fights against the plutocrats of capitalism are always given a modern relevance - is the way this history forces you to confront the politics that you have around you now. When I read about Teddy Roosevelt - no tittering at the back there, please! - I kept thinking of Shaun Woodward. When I read about FDR, I kept thinking of Tony Blair.

Yet consider: was there ever a greater 'turncoat' than Theodore Roosevelt, who went into politics without any settled beliefs 'to get for myself a privilege to which I was entitled in common with other people' but who, gathering reforming zeal, became successively a dynamic Republican President, the splitter and wrecker of that party, then finally a candidate for its nomination once again?

Was there ever a more unlikely giant than the young FDR, amiable, indolently vapid, a failed lawyer prattling about 'niggers and darkies' and wondering whether to become a Democrat or a Republican? Was there ever, for that matter, a more unlikely champion of the Jewish state and human rights than the Eleanor Roosevelt who had groaned, in her youth, about the teeth-gritting boredom of attending yet 'another Jew party'? Consistency is the fodder of fools. Change is the hallmark of humanity.

Consider, too, the FDR of the New Deal. 'He was more of a broker of ideas, than a creator of them, more a processor than an originator. Rather than organising his goals and ideas into some priority order... he played by ear and boasted of it. He was following no set course, left, right or centre.' Franklin Roosevelt was the 'supreme pragmatist', tacking this way and that, doing dirtyish deals, constantly watching his back, chafing as a pernickety bureaucracy failed to turn schemes into reality swiftly enough.

War clouds on the horizon? He would promise to keep out of it to ditch Wendell Wilkie then slide, with relief, into inevitable conflict. Some said he even welcomed Pearl Harbor. Yet the steel and the achievement were there at the end. He had given hope where there had been none. He had saved countless lives from despair. His monuments, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, were symbols of what an empowered, determined state could deliver. Steering or stumbling, he had done what was right in the end - 'a very simple Christian', as Eleanor called him.

There isn't necessarily any great hymn to progress here. The universal health insurance that Teddy fought for 90 years ago is still a dream. The barons of big business he made his enemies are back on the White House lawn peddling oil and military hardware. The class hatred directed against FDR when he challenged his own upbringing remains in the lips curled against Bill Clinton. The moral internationalism which the widowed Eleanor made her own has turned into the shrugging insularity of Bush. The word 'liberal' itself is a term of malign repute.

So many things are not different, they are much the same. So many of the battles are history repeating itself. No transformation. But can you, for a while, make a difference? Franklin Roosevelt, handed the necessity of leadership, did that. Eleanor (though her influence is overblown) carried a torch for the world to see. Teddy - though the greatest of the lot - was the one who fought the single-handed good fight most valiantly. Would any of them have survived the current Daily Mail tests of consistency or fidelity? Probably not. But they changed proudly as they found the imperatives for change.

It's an absorbing, instructive story told with ambition, imagination and impeccable scholarship. And, for the supposedly bridgehead Britain of the twenty-first century, this is not a faraway time of which we need to know little: it has its own special relationships to illuminate.