The controversy over the pre-war foreign policy leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt continues forty years after the fact, an interesting reflection of doubts over the course of more recent foreign policy decisions. Was Roosevelt the plotter painted by revisionists such as Tansill and Beard, who willingly forced events to bring the US into the war? Or was he the sagacious national leader who saw valid US interests at stake in the conflict and moved along a recognized path as quickly as domestic opinion would allow? These have been the two main poles around which arguments and interpretations have centred. A third interpretation is possible, one which denies many of the basic arguments of both schools. President Roosevelt's policy, for all of the linearity later imposed on it, was actually a series of fits and starts whose interconnection the President himself denied at the time. These policy decisions can be grouped into three broad consecutive periods. Each of these periods was dominated by a thematic unifying search for a type of policy, or a very broad and general outcome which, while not always apparent at the time, particularly to subordinates, shaped most of Roosevelt's preferences and decisions. In each period Roosevelt knew, at least vaguely and usually within broad general outlines, what he wanted and what he hoped to avoid. Unfortunately, he regularly failed to define this for those subordinates responsible for executing this policy, leaving them to arrive at their own conclusions upon which to base and