Franklin D. Roosevelt and the creation of the United States intelligence community

The dissertation has two broad objectives. The first objective is to attempt to explain the causes and significance of the tremendous expansion of the United States's foreign intelligence establishment that took place from 1941 to 1943, most dramatically after the catastrophic intelligence failure of Pearl Harbor and the nation's entry into the Second World War. The dissertation's second objective is to attempt to give an account of the relationship between this expanding intelligence establishment and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's conduct of United States national security policy from 1939 to 1943, to try to obtain new insights into the president's thinking and goals regarding national security during this period through the application of the perspective of foreign intelligence. The dissertation's main overall argument is that despite enormous improvements made in the quality, quantity, and scope of United States foreign intelligence from 1941 to 1945, in particular from 1941 to 1943, the emerging intelligence community had little impact on the making of the country's national security policy during the wartime presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. The important changes that took place in United States intelligence at this time made a very considerable contribution to the success of ongoing military operations, and would become highly significant for the conduct of United States foreign policy and national security policy in the future. The changes did not, however, substantially influence policymaking at the highest levels of the Roosevelt administration from 1941 to 1945. The main reason for this was that President Roosevelt maintained until his death in April 1945, the working habits he had developed during the early days of his political career, which emphasized the importance of making personal contact with highly placed individuals, both as a means of doing political business and for collecting political intelligence. The president generally preferred to receive information in this informal way, rather than assessing the regular product of intelligence agencies. I thus conclude that many of President Roosevelt's national security policy decisions were made without taking full advantage of the range of intelligence sources available to him, often with unfortunate consequences for United States national security.