Arthur Johnson Memorial Library

Meacham, Jon

Franklin and Winston : an intimate portrait of an epic friendship / Jon Meacham - New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004, c2003. - xviii, 490 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.

Originally published: New York : Random, 2003.

Introduction : A fortunate friendship -- Part 1. In God's good time : beginnings to late Fall 1941. Two lions roaring at the same time -- Those bloody Yankees -- Jesus Christ! What a man!-- Lunching alone broke the ice -- Part 2. Getting on famously : winter 1941 to late summer 1943. A couple of emperors -- I think of you often -- You may kiss my hand -- I know he means to meet Stalin -- Part 3. The chill of Autumn : fall 1943 to the end. I had to do something desperate -- The hour was now striking -- Life is not very easy -- I saw WSC to say goodbye -- You know how this will hit me -- Epilogue: Them's my sentiments exactly -- Appendix: Their days and nights: a summary of the Roosevelt-Churchill meetings, 1941-1945.

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 Meacham's new sources -- including unpublished letters of FDR's great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who were in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

94854

0812972821 (pbk.) 9780812972825 (pbk.)


Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1882-1945 --Military leadership.
Churchill, Winston, 1874-1965 --Military leadership.


World War--Diplomatic history.--1939-1945


United States--Foreign relations--Great Britain.
Great Britain--Foreign relations--United States.

940.530922 Mea 15