Using a vast array of official documents secured at the highest levels of the US Government, official US Senate historian and history professor Charles Tansill delves deep into the origins of American involvement in the Second World War, and comes to a startling conclusion: that, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration actively sought to participate in that conflict.

To that end, Professor Tansill shows, US diplomacy in the 1930s was focussed exclusively on forcing first the Japanese Empire into "firing the first shot," and in Europe, helping Britain to generate a "war fever" through solemn undertakings of support (such as those made to Poland) which, the author shows, the US Administration was well aware had no hope whatsoever of being fulfilled.

Thus, the author shows, that the Roosevelt Administration sought to provoke Japan into an attack on American territory, knowing that such an even would inevitably involve Japan's Axis allies, and in this way, America would enter the war through the "back door".