Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780375505003)

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Meacham's new sources--including unpublished letters of FDR' s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in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.

Author: Jon Meacham
ISBN-10: 0375505008
ISBN-13: 9780375505003
Publisher: Random House
Language: English
Published: 10/14/2003
Pages: 512
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.84lbs
Size: 9.66h x 6.54w x 1.63d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2003 pg. 96
Publishers Weekly 08/04/2003 pg. 68
Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2003 pg. 1060
Library Journal 09/15/2003 pg. 69
Booklist 09/15/2003 pg. 198
Newsweek 10/20/2003 pg. 63
BookPage 11/01/2003 pg. 42
Vanity Fair 12/01/2003 pg. 114
Time 12/12/2003 pg. 128
New Yorker (The) 12/22/2003 pg. 157
New York Times 01/04/2004 pg. 16
New York Review of Books 03/11/2004 pg. 17
Library Journal 06/01/2003

About the Author
Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.