false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172187403m/147537.jpg 147537 8 The most complete portrait ever drawn of the complex emotional connection between two of history&#8217;s towering leaders<br><br>Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of &#8220;the Greatest Generation.&#8221; 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&#8212;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.<br><br>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&#8212;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&#8217;s affections&#8212;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&#8212;and Winston Churchill.<br> <br>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.<br><br>Meacham&#8217;s new sources&#8212;including unpublished letters of FDR&#8217;s great secret love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the papers of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and interviews with the few surviving people who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&#8217;s joint company&#8212;shed fresh light on the characters of both men as he engagingly chronicles the hours in which they decided the course of the struggle.<br> <br>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.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i> 1218479 book 2003 Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship total:368|5:83|4:176|3:98|2:10|1:1| 368 1434 580 71 5 0 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Apr 20 17:13:20 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 20 17:32:36 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Wed Nov 19 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Oct 30 18:25:35 -0700 2008 Wed Nov 19 12:33:10 -0800 2008 Franklin more so. C was so right in his misgivings of Stalin an...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Sep 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 04 13:44:33 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 05:29:56 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 30 11:53:44 -0700 2009 Mon Mar 30 11:58:20 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Feb 10 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 03 06:42:59 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 10 14:57:09 -0800 2009 Jon Meacham's Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship more than I did his American Lion: A Biography of President Andrew Jackson, though this may be due to either a better abridgment or my own sentiments on the subjects of this book, as I have more of a per...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Jun 15 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue May 27 07:44:45 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 17 14:04:29 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Nov 25 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Apr 06 10:58:10 -0700 2008 Tue Nov 25 10:05:45 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false true Wed Jul 20 00:00:00 -0700 2005 Mon Feb 11 23:52:45 -0800 2008 Tue Feb 12 00:00:01 -0800 2008 I don't usually read history books, or at least a lot of historical biographies, they usually strike me as being a little too aging-old-guy-wants-to-be-george-patton for me.

This one was light, but well drawn and easily digestible.

It doesn't get into much criticism of...more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2004 Wed Dec 05 11:36:17 -0800 2007 Wed Dec 05 11:37:22 -0800 2007 After their first meeting, in 1918, Roosevelt said that Churchill was "a stinker" Churchill didn't even remember Roosevelt. But by their next exchange, in 1939, Churchill was convinced that Britain's future depended on getting Roosevelt to like him. Meacham's engag...more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Jan 19 20:00:08 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 19 20:03:02 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 19:43:38 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 19:43:38 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Feb 22 18:09:19 -0800 2009 Sun Feb 22 18:11:27 -0800 2009 4 0 false false Sat Aug 09 13:33:45 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 09 13:37:51 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Jun 19 10:09:44 -0700 2009 Fri Jun 19 10:15:41 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Fri Oct 10 17:40:07 -0700 2008 Fri Oct 10 17:44:59 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 0 true false Mon Aug 24 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Aug 17 11:12:19 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 29 16:17:16 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Tue Aug 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Jul 26 06:20:44 -0700 2009 Thu Aug 13 14:00:25 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 02 07:41:23 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 02 07:43:22 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Sun Jan 11 11:04:10 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 11 11:04:45 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Sun Dec 07 18:40:25 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 07 18:48:36 -0800 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=147537