Once war came, Roosevelt’s slim interest in the “Jewish Question” became slimmer still. Consumed by events on both the European and Pacific fronts, he appeared to wish the question away. According to Breitman and Lichtman, Roosevelt met only once with Jewish leaders during the war “to discuss what we call the Holocaust.” When he was pressed on the matter, his reply was always the same: the best way to save the Jews of Europe was to defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible, and that was exactly what he intended to do.

How, then, does this new portrait of Roosevelt differ from the damning one drawn by the revisionists? The answer rests on how one measures the president’s gestures and accomplishments against the pressures he faced to do even less. In 1938, for example, Roosevelt recalled his ambassador to Germany to protest Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom. It was little more than a symbolic act, but he was the only head of state to do so. Over protests from his notoriously anti-Semitic State Department, moreover, Roosevelt encouraged efforts to settle European Jews in Latin America — about 40,000 of them made it there from 1938 to 1941 — and pressed the British to keep Palestine open to Jewish refugees. Most important, perhaps, was his approval of the War Refugee Board in 1943, which, while often ignored and always underfunded, worked with heroes like Raoul Wallenberg throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to save untold thousands of Jews.

As to the most contentious revisionist claim — that Roosevelt could have blunted Hitler’s killing machine by ordering the rail lines to Auschwitz destroyed — Breit­man and Lichtman provide a measured response. There is little doubt, they write, that Allied planes were capable of reaching this destination by mid-1944. Industrial complexes in the area were already being bombed. The problem was that the War Department viewed the project as a diversion from more important military targets. Opposition was such that the matter never appears to have reached the president’s desk. How successful the precision bombing of Auschwitz would have been, given the mixed results elsewhere, is a matter of debate. What is undeniable, however, is that close to 250,000 Jews were murdered in the months between the capture of this death camp and the German surrender in May 1945. When it came to the Final Solution, the Nazis were demonically resourceful. They found ways to kill Jews to the very end.

In their conclusion, the authors rightly note the squeamishness of America’s modern presidents in dealing with genocide. Woodrow Wilson, a true idealist, virtually ignored Turkey’s slaughter of a million or more Armenians, while Jimmy Carter, a human rights crusader, did nothing to prevent Pol Pot from exterminating 20 percent of Cambodia’s population. The Clinton administration took several years to respond militarily to the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims in Bosnia, which required only air power, not soldiers on the ground, and it never confronted the mass killings in Rwanda. More recently, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama employed little more than words to condemn the atrocities in Darfur. Historically speaking, Roosevelt comes off rather well.

Indeed, an even stronger case might be made for him than the one put forth in this eminently sensible book. Roosevelt masterfully prepared a skeptical nation for a war against global tyranny. Always viewing Hitler as his primary enemy, despite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he supplied the Soviet Union with much of the matériel it needed to defeat the Nazis on the Eastern front, an extremely controversial move. The American landing in North Africa in 1942, bolstering British troops there, may well have saved that region’s Jews from extermination. And the final defeat of Germany, costing hundreds of thousands of American lives, ended the Holocaust for good.

Early in 1945, following the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin, the president traveled to the Middle East, saying he’d most likely never “get over here again.” Roose­velt had always considered himself a master of persuasion, but his key meeting with the Saudi king Ibn Saud did not go well. Noting that Europe’s surviving Jews had suffered “indescribable horrors,” he assured the king that allowing them into Palestine would improve the land for Arabs as well as Jews. Ibn Saud was unmoved. Cooperation with Zionists was impossible, he replied; that door was closed. Returning to America, the exhausted president actually apologized to Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent Jewish leader, for failing “your cause.” Roose­velt died the following month at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. — sadly aware, one suspects, of the unceasing bloodshed between Jews and Arabs that lay ahead.