The Three Roosevelts: the leaders who transformed America James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn Atlantic Books, 678pp, £25 ISBN 1903809088

On 17 March 1904, St Patrick's Day, the president of the United States marched in the traditional parade up Fifth Avenue at the head of the Rough Riders, the volunteers he had led to war in Cuba six years earlier. It was the unforgettable Theodore Roosevelt, whose gruff machismo and penchant for slaughtering the biggest game he could find sat oddly with his learning and his languages. He wrote almost as many books as he slaughtered bears. Strangely, Teddy Roosevelt was the model for every child's nursery bear. He combined fearsome energy with insatiable ambition, and progressive politics with aggressive nationalism. He once said: "I should welcome any war, for I think this country needs one."

Leaving his Rough Riders that day, he travelled uptown to East 76th Street, to a gathering of his social near-equals, Astors, Vanderbilts and the like, who were classed as parvenus alongside the descendant of Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, who emigrated from Holland in 1641. (Only near-equals: the Roosevelts liked the Vanderbilts, but did not accept their invitations for fear of having to invite them back.)

The event was the wedding of two of his fellow Roosevelts: Eleanor, of his own, Oyster Bay branch of the family, was marrying her kissing cousin, young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the branch established as the squires of Hyde Park, up the Hudson Valley from New York City.

James MacGregor Burns, an eminent student of the American presidency, and Susan Dunn have had the interesting idea of threading the history of the United States over the first half of the 20th century through the fabric of these three Roosevelt lives.

Each of these American aristocrats was in his or her way a radical. And each played an important role not only in progressive politics at home, but also in extending American influence in the world. TR was the first president since Lincoln to see the potential for power inherent in the role of the president, who, unlike members of Congress, was elected by all the people. He saw that the growth in America's population and its industrial and agricultural wealth since the civil war meant that it was time for his country to take its place as the first among equals in the Great Powers. His broking of a peace settlement between Japan and Russia made the world acknowledge that the US was now in the front rank of the powers.

A playboy toughened by the experience of building a career after being paralysed by poliomyelitis, FDR played the part - to paraphrase his own expression - first of "Dr New Deal", then of "Dr Win-the-War". At his death, in the spring of 1945, he left the United States at a pinnacle of power and international reputation, - its economic power revived, a world war just won, an atomic bomb still undropped.

Eleanor Roosevelt's claim to be considered alongside these two titans of American and world politics is not obvious at first. Yet, for better and for worse, she was one of the shapers of the brand of liberalism - Americans for Democratic Action liberalism, you might call it, after the organisation that she helped to found - which remained the dominant public philosophy of the US from her husband's death to the defeat of Lyndon Johnson, a loyal disciple of FDR, in 1968.

After FDR died, Eleanor devoted herself to what can fairly be called "good works". If there was real growth in her personality and her sympathies, which extended even to black Americans, she also remained, in many ways, an upper-class New Yorker, complete with residual anti-Semitism, closer to the world of Edith Wharton than to that of Betty Friedan.

MacGregor and Burns have spun these three lives into a readable, popular account of the American century. They are not hagiographers. Due attention is paid to TR's racism and FDR's (mild but, for ER, painful) philandering; they ignore only the considerable indications that ER had lesbian relationships.

What is not tackled is the curious ambivalence in the politics of these upper-class populists, all denounced as traitors of a class whose position they actually preserved. If today, the United States is in effect the last empire, but in denial of the idea that it possesses anything like an empire at all; if it is a democracy ruled by two rival conservative parties, one tracing its modern descent to one Roosevelt, and the second to the other two Roosevelts - that is in part the political legacy of these three confident, but ultimately confused, aristocratic rebels.

Godfrey Hodgson is a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University

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