NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’ s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in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.
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"When Roosevelt and Churchill first met early in their careers, they did not like each other. They came from completely different backgrounds. However, when they are thrown together again as the powerful leaders of the United States and Britain during the early days of World War II, a deep friendship develops. As Meacham points out, however, it is usually Churchill who is the suitor and Franklin who plays hard-to-get, partly because Churchill has to beg the U.S. for aid for so long before the U.S. finally joins the war effort. (For example, Churchill visited the U.S. numerous times, but Roosevelt never did make it to England.) At the apex of the war, Franklin and Winston are as close as two men in such positions can be, but later on, when Stalin becomes part of the picture, Roosevelt intentionally leaves Churchill out as he jockeys for greater status for the U.S. Still, their complicated and intense personal alliance had a huge effect on how the war played out. There were so many wonderful insights in this book that I found myself reading with a pen in hand, underlining and making notes as I read. I developed even more respect for these two courageous leaders (and their wives), and plan to read more about them."
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Judy (5 out of 5 stars)