Franklin and Winston : A Portrait of a Friendship

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of ‘the Greatest Generation’. In Franklin and Winston, Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in the Second World War. It was a crucial and unique friendship: a president and a prime minister spending enormous amounts of time together and exchanging nearly two thousand messages. Amid cocktails and cigars, they met, often secretly, in places as far-flung as Washington, Hyde Park and Casablanca, talking to each other of war, the burden of command, their health, their wives, and their children. Meacham’s new sources, including unpublished letters of Roosevelt’s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few survivors who were in Roosevelt’s 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. Meacham has written the definitive account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.