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sources--including unpublished letters of FDR's great secret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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