Franklin
and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic
Friendship
by Jon Meacham
Book
Description
The most complete portrait ever drawn of the
complex emotional connection between two of
history’s towering leaders
Franklin
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest
leaders of “the Greatest Generation.”
In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores
the fascinating relationship between the two
men who piloted the free world to victory in
World War II. It was a crucial friendship, and
a unique one—a president and a prime minister
spending enormous amounts of time together (113
days during the war) and exchanging nearly two
thousand messages. Amid cocktails, cigarettes,
and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places
as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca,
and Teheran, talking to each other of war, politics,
the burden of command, their health, their wives,
and their children.
Born
in the nineteenth century and molders of the
twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill
had much in common. Sons of the elite, students
of history, politicians of the first rank, they
savored power. In their own time both men were
underestimated, dismissed as arrogant, and faced
skeptics and haters in their own nations—yet
both magnificently rose to the central challenges
of the twentieth century. Theirs was a kind
of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting
an elusive Roosevelt. The British prime minister,
who rallied his nation in its darkest hour,
standing alone against Adolf Hitler, was always
somewhat insecure about his place in FDR’s
affections—which was the way Roosevelt
wanted it. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep
people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor,
his White House aides—and Winston Churchill.
Confronting
tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill
built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic
events and occasionally conflicting interests.
Franklin and Winston is also the story of their
marriages and their families, two clans caught
up in the most sweeping global conflict in history.
Meacham’s
new sources—including unpublished letters
of FDR’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer
Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman,
and interviews with the few surviving people
who were in FDR and Churchill’s joint
company—shed fresh light on the characters
of both men as he engagingly chronicles the
hours in which they decided the course of the
struggle.
Hitler
brought them together; later in the war, they
drifted apart, but even in the autumn of their
alliance, the pull of affection was always there.
Charting the personal drama behind the discussions
of strategy and statecraft, Meacham has written
the definitive account of the most remarkable
friendship of the modern age.
About
the Author
Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek.
Born in Chattanooga in 1969, he is a graduate
of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
The editor of Voices
in Our Blood : America's Best on the Civil Rights
Movement, Meacham lives in New York
City with his wife and son. |
Editorial
Reviews
 |
From
Publishers Weekly
Meacham,
managing editor of Newsweek (editor, Voices
in Our Blood : America's Best on the Civil
Rights Movement), delivers
an eloquent, well-researched account of
one of the 20th century's most vital friendships:
that between FDR and Winston Churchill.
Both men were privileged sons of wealth,
and both had forebears (in Churchill's
case, Leonard Jerome) prominent in New
York society during the 19th century.
Both enjoyed cocktails and a smoke. And
both were committed to the Anglo-American
alliance. Indeed, Roosevelt and Churchill
each believed firmly that the "English-speaking
peoples" represented the civilized
world's first, best hope to counter and
conquer the barbarism of the Axis. Meacham
uses previously untapped archives and
has interviewed surviving Roosevelt and
Churchill staffers present at the great
men's meetings in Washington, Hyde Park,
Casablanca and Tehran. Thus he has considerable
new ground to break, new anecdotes to
offer and prescient observations to make.
Throughout, Meacham highlights Roosevelt's
and Churchill's shared backgrounds as
sons of the ruling elite, their genuine,
gregarious friendship, and their common
worldview during staggeringly troubled
times. To meet with Roosevelt, Churchill
recalled years later, "with all his
buoyant sparkle, his iridescence,"
was like "opening a bottle of champagne"-a
bottle from which the tippling Churchill
desperately needed a good long pull through
1940 and '41, as the Nazis savaged Europe
and tortured British civilians with air
attacks. One comes away from this account
convinced of the "Great Personality"
theory of history and gratified that Roosevelt
and Churchill possessed the character
that they did and came to power at a time
when no other partnership would do.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information,
Inc.
From
Booklist
If the personal element in the Roosevelt-Churchill
relationship influenced the course of
World War II, this author demurs from
saying so. The war in Meacham's hands
is scaffolding for an edifice of detail
about the two leaders' meetings. So Meacham
coaxes gossip and trivia from the source
material meticulously recorded by each
man's voluble and history-conscious entourages.
While the way Churchill would barge into
Roosevelt's bedroom, or Roosevelt would
mix drinks for Churchill, may not seem
significant today, to immediate observers
this social badinage marked the trajectory
of their chiefs' dealings. Churchill was
usually transparent, and FDR indirect,
traits of the men's leadership that provide
coherence to Meacham's immense indulgence
in the physical accommodations, the gustatory
spreads, and the verbal give-and-take
of their friendship. WWII as experienced
in personal relationships was the point
of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary
Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1994);
Meacham's work is cut from the same cloth.
Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association.
All rights reserved
The
Washington Post Book World, 10/26/03
"With its keen, nuanced analysis
and sympathetic insight, Meacham's book
makes for intense and compelling reading.
His achievement is memorable"
Back
Cover
“This is at once an important, insightful,
and highly entertaining portrait of two
men at the peak of their powers who, through
their genius, common will, and uncommon
friendship, saved the world. Jon Meacham’s
Franklin and Winston takes its place in
the front ranks of all that has been written
about these two great men.“
—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest
Generation
“Franklin
and Winston is a sensitive, perceptive,
and absorbing portrait of the friendship
that saved the democratic world in the
greatest war in history.”
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., author
of The Age of Roosevelt
“Jon
Meacham has done groundbreaking work by
focusing on the World War II alliance
between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill as a friendship. Using important
new sources, he has brought us a shrewd,
original, sensitive, and fascinating look
at the many-layered relationship between
these two towering human beings, as well
as their friends, families, aides, and
allies. The book reveals the emotional
undercurrents that linked FDR and Churchill—and
sometimes estranged them—and teases
out which of the ties between them were
heartfelt and which were based on raw
mutual political need. Meacham triumphantly
shows how lucky we are that Roosevelt
and Churchill were in power together during
some of the most threatening moments of
the twentieth century.”
—Michael Beschloss, author of The
Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the
Destruction of Hitler’s Germany,
1941–1945
“The
relationship between FDR and Churchill
was the most important political friendship
of the twentieth century, not only determining
the outcome of World War II but also setting
a pattern that has endured ever since.
Jon Meacham brings it to vivid life, shedding
new insights into its strange and poignant
complexity, and why its legacy has helped
shape the modern world.”
—Richard Holbrooke, author of To
End a War
“Jon
Meacham enlivens the two men, their families,
and their personal relations and relationships,
providing a human context for the world-shaping
leaders of the Anglo-American alliance
during the Second World War.”
—Warren F. Kimball, author of Forged
in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the
Second World War |
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