franklin and winston a portrait of a friendship jon meacham

has written account of the most remarkable friendship of the modern age.-Dust jacket

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. Confronting tyranny and terror, Roosevelt and Churchill built a victorious alliance amid cataclysmic events and occasionally conflicting interests. A man of secrets, FDR liked to keep people off balance, including his wife, Eleanor, his White House aides and Winston Churchill. 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. Theirs was a kind of love story, with an emotional Churchill courting an elusive Roosevelt. 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. Sons of the elite, students of history, politicians of the first rank, they savored power. Born in the nineteenth century and molders of the twentieth and twenty-first, Roosevelt and Churchill had much in common. 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. 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. relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II.

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.

Franklin and winston a portrait of a friendship jon meacham