British historian David Reynolds explores President Franklin D. Roosevelt's rise to power against the backdrop of a turbulent personal life. As the global war reached its devastating climax, while Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded the wartime alliance, he was a man living on borrowed time. Roosevelt's health was collapsing, sapped by chronic heart disease and by two decades as a secret paraplegic.

Professor Reynolds focuses on how Roosevelt's formidable yet fragile wife, Eleanor, had supported him through his long battle with disability. But their marriage was now coming under increasing strain, for Roosevelt was living with a dark secret about an affair, exposed and ended 25 years earlier, but now resurrected in wartime by a president isolated in the loneliness of power.