 Well, Michael Fully Love, thanks for taking some time to talk about this new book, your new book, Rendezvous with Destiny. I'm really interested in the subtext of this book, which is about the isolationism in America in the period we're talking about in the lead-up to the Second World War. In modern foreign policy debates, we're so used to thinking about America as central to almost every problem that's tackled in the world. There's barely anything you can discuss in the foreign policy realm without America being a huge part of it, and yet it was such a different world then. Explain to us the sort of the milieu in America at the time, a public perception about America's role in the world. Well, you're right that it's hard to imagine an isolationist America, especially at the end of 15 years of very intense American involvement in the Middle East and around the world. But of course, isolationism has very deep strains in American history. It flows, in part, from American geography, the fact that the country is protected by great moats to the east and the west, and by unthreatening neighbours to the north and the south. It's history, it's revolutionary history, a feeling especially in the 30s that the country had been tricked into the war and they were determined not to get into it. So in the late 1930s, the Congress had basically fenced the country off from the rest of the world with a series of neutrality acts that prevented Americans from having much involvement with countries at war. And indeed when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, even though Nazi Germany was obviously a threat to American interests, only one in 40 Americans were in favour of an American declaration of war against Germany. So this is what Roosevelt had to deal with. He had to deal with congressional opposition and great public anxiety about getting involved in the war. And the book really tells the story of how he took America on this journey from this nervous isolationist power to a great power deeply engaged and indeed involved as a competent in the Second World War. And of course, it's from the Second World War that America emerges as the global superpower that we know it has. Right, so that gets to the next question I wanted to ask, which is the subtitle and the book here, it talks about how Roosevelt and five extraordinary men took America into the war and into the world. Talk some more about that, into the world. Well I wanted to make a big claim with the book and that was part of it. But I think that what Roosevelt did in these two years was he defeated isolationism as a domestic political force through a deluge of speeches, broadcasts, policy decisions, missions by these envoys. He dramatised what was happening in Europe to the American people. He made them understand that their interests were deeply implicated in the war that was going on, the wars that were going on really in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. And by December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and the days after that, really the coalition has been established that will defeat the dictators, the coalition of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. And as the war went on, the United States became a more and more important member of that coalition and it emerged from the war as one of two superpowers, but really as the more important superpower. I don't think America's ever really looked back and so I guess the reason I put into the world, into the subtitle was that often when we think about America's post-war role we give the credit to Harry Truman and some of the characters around him who were present at the creation, as it were, Dean Atchison and George Kennan and others like that, but I want to make admittedly a bold claim that actually it was Roosevelt and his representatives several years earlier who enabled all that work that Truman and his cohorts did. It was Roosevelt and his envoys who took America into the world. Now the other thing that's I think notable about your book is that it's a book about people. Now that sounds almost trite to put it that way but there are historians who would actually place the role of impersonal forces, economic and military forces above the role of individuals. You strike very much the pose of that it's individuals, it's people who move history. I think it's both. I think people make history but in a context that is presented to them. But I'm certainly, I go against the vogue in history I think which is to point more to the vast impersonal forces. I think scholars in general tend to underestimate the role of individuals in making history and I think sometimes politicians overestimate the role of individuals. Politicians underestimate the role of the vast forces but I think a lot of scholars underestimate the role. So it's partly, I wrote it this way for two reasons, partly because it's a belief I have that and I try to describe how individual decisions and things that these individuals did actually changed history and changed America's course. But it's also because that's more fun. I mean I wanted to write the kind of history I like to read and myself I find it more interesting to read about big personalities and their lives and how they collided with each other and how they interacted with these bigger forces. That's the kind of history I like to read and that's what I wanted to write. Yeah, last question. This is a book about envoys, about presidential envoys and this is a long tradition in American foreign policy and diplomacy going back to as you say in the book Colonel House who had a pivotal role in Wilson's diplomacy in the second world, the first world war excuse me, Roosevelt had five of them and it's continued as a tradition in American diplomacy. Is it still a viable tradition? It's it's become less important I think with the growth of technology and so on that means that the president can be making many of these decisions himself or herself in the future perhaps. We saw that Obama tried envoys early in his first term he appointed Senator George Mitchell on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and Richard Holbrook on AFPAC and it didn't work and I think it partly it didn't work because unlike Roosevelt, Obama likes to control foreign policy from the White House. Roosevelt was ready happy to have other people freelancing within the within a sort of a policy context that he gave them. Obama likes to control things so it depends in part on the proclivities of the president but I'd also say you will never again I don't think because of changes in technology see a band of envoys like this. I mean most of these guys are traveling by themselves into war zones through very through you know Germany war plane infested skies and and through very dangerous seas and they are you know they for for most Americans and even for Roosevelt the personalities that they're meeting with are completely mysterious he hadn't met Stalin or Hitler he hadn't had met Churchill for many decades. Nowadays I think there's much more familiarity I think presidents have much better intelligence so so we'll never again get this have this sort of period where I think envoys play such a crucial role to these historical decisions. Well thanks Michael I think you've explained actually conveyed really well the sense of adventure that's in the book too so thanks very much. Thank you Sam.