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Meacham's new sources--including unpublished letters of FDR's great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.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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