Roosevelt and Stalin is an interesting but bad book.1Susan Butler argues that the Cold War and the terror of its nuclear arms race might well have been avoided had Franklin D. Roosevelt’s suave and sage benignity not abruptly given way to his crude successor Harry S. Truman and the saturnine influence of Winston Churchill. Butler portrays Churchill as an incorrigible Victorian imperialist, a profoundly dishonest and treacherous ally, a venomous racist, and almost a mass murderer, morally on no higher a plane than Stalin. In order to rewrite history so radically, Ms. Butler engages in the wholesale splicing of historic documents, the willful misrepresentation of the views of several prominent statesmen, recurrent recourse to unsubstantiated surmise and mind-reading, and histrionic magnification of trivial events, while passing off, as necessary (i.e., quite often), grievous Stalinist misconduct as cultural differences and understandable reaction to Western chicanery. Ms. Butler’s thesis begins unexceptionably from the position that Roosevelt recognized that Stalin ran a dictatorship as severe and morally reprehensible as Hitler’s, and rightly castigated him for attacking Finland in 1939, having warned him that if he made a pact with Hitler, the Nazi leader would knock France out of the war and then attack the Soviet Union. So far, so good, and she gives Roosevelt credit for extending Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. She does exaggerate the boldness of Roosevelt’s exchange of ambassadors with Stalin in 1933