Kennedy opens on Armistice Day 1918 with four men: Hitler brooding in Pomerania, Churchill at a London window waiting for Big Ben to strike eleven, Stalin ordering night executions from a barge on the Volga at Tsaritsyn, Roosevelt woken in Washington by car horns and regretting that he had spent the war behind a desk. Each had been formed by that war, each would come to rule a country, and each of those countries would be torn apart by what the fighting left unsettled and by its resumption.

The device sets the book's span: the unfinished business of 1918, the American 1920s, the crash, the Depression and the New Deal, and the second war. Kennedy looks hard at the economy beneath the decade's prosperous reputation -- industrial unemployment above ten percent during the Coolidge years, war debt eating a third of the federal budget, workers whom the Lynds found living with no prospect of advancement.