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Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
 
 
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Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship [Hardcover]

Jon Meacham (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)

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From Publishers Weekly

Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek (editor, Voices in Our Blood), delivers an eloquent, well-researched account of one of the 20th century's most vital friendships: that between FDR and Winston Churchill. Both men were privileged sons of wealth, and both had forebears (in Churchill's case, Leonard Jerome) prominent in New York society during the 19th century. Both enjoyed cocktails and a smoke. And both were committed to the Anglo-American alliance. Indeed, Roosevelt and Churchill each believed firmly that the "English-speaking peoples" represented the civilized world's first, best hope to counter and conquer the barbarism of the Axis. Meacham uses previously untapped archives and has interviewed surviving Roosevelt and Churchill staffers present at the great men's meetings in Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca and Tehran. Thus he has considerable new ground to break, new anecdotes to offer and prescient observations to make. Throughout, Meacham highlights Roosevelt's and Churchill's shared backgrounds as sons of the ruling elite, their genuine, gregarious friendship, and their common worldview during staggeringly troubled times. To meet with Roosevelt, Churchill recalled years later, "with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence," was like "opening a bottle of champagne"-a bottle from which the tippling Churchill desperately needed a good long pull through 1940 and '41, as the Nazis savaged Europe and tortured British civilians with air attacks. One comes away from this account convinced of the "Great Personality" theory of history and gratified that Roosevelt and Churchill possessed the character that they did and came to power at a time when no other partnership would do.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

If the personal element in the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship influenced the course of World War II, this author demurs from saying so. The war in Meacham's hands is scaffolding for an edifice of detail about the two leaders' meetings. So Meacham coaxes gossip and trivia from the source material meticulously recorded by each man's voluble and history-conscious entourages. While the way Churchill would barge into Roosevelt's bedroom, or Roosevelt would mix drinks for Churchill, may not seem significant today, to immediate observers this social badinage marked the trajectory of their chiefs' dealings. Churchill was usually transparent, and FDR indirect, traits of the men's leadership that provide coherence to Meacham's immense indulgence in the physical accommodations, the gustatory spreads, and the verbal give-and-take of their friendship. WWII as experienced in personal relationships was the point of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1994); Meacham's work is cut from the same cloth. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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23 Reviews
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4.4 out of 5 stars (23 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The friendship that made our world possible, Jun 7 2004
By 
I. Tysoe "Inna Tysoe" (Earth) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Hardcover)
This is the story of a human and a political friendship. A seemingly unlikely friendship between a Tory Prime Minister and a Progressive President. A friendship between an extroverted, warm human being and an introverted, many layered and often secretive man. A friendship between two men who lived in a time not so very different from our own, when certainties were few, enemies seemed to spring up like mushrooms, and the whole world in danger.

Their friendship did much to save that world. It was a friendship that made D-Day possible; and it was in part thanks to that friendship that Winston and Franklin made a joint decision to avenge, not save the victims of the Holocaust. Their decisions saved and cost millions of lives. They were two friends, doing their best in a world plunged into darkness. And they brought it out again-together.

Winston Churchill led Britain when that island stood alone against Hitler for one year; Franklin Roosevelt patiently prodded an isolationist nation into accepting the responsibility that comes with power. And in the end, they made a "world that is for many a better one than existed before" (283).

Thanks to their efforts, when "an American President and a British prime minister [today] walk through the woods of Camp David, or confer on a transatlantic telephone, they are working in the style and in the shadow of Roosevelt and Churchill. [They are reaffirming] the Anglo-American alliance [that] has been the bedrock of global order for decades" (366).

A bedrock Winston and Franklin created in those fraught years of a world war.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Well-done reference that paints a very close friendship, April 16 2004
By 
David Traill (Stuart, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Hardcover)
Although the two men who would most impact the eventual course of the Second World War greatly disliked each other at first (they met decades before either one was a national leader), Jon Meacham is able to interestingly draw a reader into the warming of their friendships and then the critical heat of battle they enjoyed together.

Using a wide variety of sources, Meacham's book charts the course of their upbringing on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and the adventurous travels they embarked upon that led to their early encounters. Both were similar in their interests in government and politics, and were very ambitious. Yet, the two men grew toward each other with the passage of time, and by the Second World War, were able to respect the other's personality and intelligence greatly. Whether it was in their late-night drinking sessions as they dreamed up ideas and hatched plots, or aboard their ships off Newfoundland, or to their secret conferences in Casablanca or Teheran or elsewhere, it was the closeness of these two men that formed the glue that bound the Anglo-American alliance against the Axis.

This book warmly portrays both men through the author's access to letters, diaries, and people who knew them, and admirably makes both men stand out as if alive. When confronted with the most challenging decisions and situations a leader could ever face, these were two of the greatest the world has ever known, and Meacham has done a brilliant job desribing not only the situations and potential repercussions, but also the two men, their countries and their friendship we still hold dear to this day.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great telling of great history., Feb 14 2004
By 
Rheumor (New Orelans) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (Hardcover)
The book is a beautiful blend of a dual biography and of world history in the first half of the last century. Naturally, the protagonists are Roosevelt & Churchill, and the backdrop is World War II.
The author leads up to the outbreak of the conflict with just the right amount of background on both men, as well as with a bit of the politics of the era. Interestingly, (and actually a point that was lost on the President but not on the Prime Minister), they had briefly met as underlings during the Great War. No fast friendship was to be theirs however.
Politics and circumstance drew them together twenty years hence, and while they initially approached one another with caution and with great reserve, they were to become not only allies but truly brothers-in-arms. Their meetings were warm and their friendship made the alliance more efficient than any other of its day.
This is not to say there weren't differences; there were indeed many important ones and they not infrequently led to serious strains on their friendship. Among such issues detailed nicely in this book were Churchill's hard-line dedication to the British Empire (and all the strategic & political implications of keeping the Empire intact) and Roosevelt's reflexive, inner Politician, a personality that could be cold, hurtful and quite disingenuous.
In the end, it certainly seems that Churchill was not only the more forthright of the two, but also the more prescient. He perceived Stalin's intentions and the coming Cold War perhaps before anyone else. His warnings however made little impression on Roosevelt or on anyone else in a position to make a difference. Unlike his ally, however, Churchill would survive long enough to see the Cold War he had predicted become our reality, to see the Russians turned back from Cuba, and to receive an honorary American citizenship from President Kennedy. Knowing Churchill just a bit leaves one with the feeling that this last honor was one he most sincerely cherished.
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