Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
by By Meacham, Jon
Category: History , Modern , 20th Century

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe 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 Meacham’s new sources—including unpublished letters of FDR’ s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman,  and interviews with the few surviving people who were in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.