Franklin and Winston - Jon Meacham

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Meacham's new sources-including unpublished letters of FDR' s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman,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.