Only four people served at the top echelon of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration from spring 1933 until he died in April 1945: Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, and Henry Wallace. Prior to that, none would have been considered for high office, yet each became a world figure, essential contributors to Roosevelt's plans to transform the nation. As Derek Leebaer recounts here, these outsiders built the great institutions being raised against the Depression, implemented the New Deal, and were pivotal to winning World War II.