When it started becoming fashionable to compare the current economic malaise to the Great Depression, decades of scholarship flew out the window overnight. In place of the policy nuances that have been debated over the years by historians and economists, we were offered a simple-minded, three-act morality play in which Herbert Hoover embraces unchecked laissez faire, producing and aggravating an economic crisis, until Franklin Roosevelt rides to the rescue.

According to this dubious story line, Hoover fought obstinately, against all evidence and prevailing wisdom, to block jobs programs, fiscal stimuli, agricultural supports, and other necessary government interventions at a time of profound business uncertainty, falling wages, and skyrocketing unemployment. Roosevelt, a pragmatic man beholden to no ideology, fixed America through common-sense policies that led us out of the Depression and into the halcyon days of prosperity, equality, and economic security. Things were good in the late 1940s and the ’50s, thanks in large part to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Into this rose-colored intellectual milieu strides Adam Cohen of the New York Times editorial board. Cohen’s new history of the first 100 days of Roosevelt’s administration, serendipitously released just in time for the inauguration of Barack Obama, puts some flesh on the skeleton of this fable, chronicling FDR’s early presidency through the eyes, words, and deeds of five of his closest advisers...