Harry Hopkins: FDR's Envoy to Churchill and Stalin

One of the most controversial figures of the New Deal Era, Harry Hopkins elicited few neutral responses from his contemporaries. Millions admired him and believed the New Deal agencies he headed had rescued them from despair, but many of President Roosevelt’s enemies passionately hated him and derisively called him the “world’s greatest spender” or FDR’s “left-wing Rasputin.”

Hopkins was a paradoxical man: a trained social worker who enjoyed the company of the “swells,” attending cocktail p...