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sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’ s great secret love, Lucy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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