xviii, 490 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

English

Originally published: New York : Random, 2003.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [381]-467) and index.

Annotation,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, Rooseveltand 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.

Annotation,"Franklin and Winston is the fullest portrait to date of the complex emotional connection between the two men who led the free world to victory in World War II. There has never been anything quite like this extraordinary friendship: a president and prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together-fishing, smoking, and drinking late into the night in places as far-flung as Casablanca and Tehran, talking to each other of politics, war, family, and illness. Meacham offers a masterful and intimate study of their alliance: what they thought of each other and how each tried to manage and influence the other. It is also the story of their marriages and their families, two fascinating clans caught up in the greatest global conflict in history."

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