Franklin and Winston

August 4, 2003
Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek
(editor, Voices in Our Blood), delivers an eloquent, well-researched account of one of the 20th century's most vital friendships: that between FDR and Winston Churchill. Both men were privileged sons of wealth, and both had forebears (in Churchill's case, Leonard Jerome) prominent in New York society during the 19th century. Both enjoyed cocktails and a smoke. And both were committed to the Anglo-American alliance. Indeed, Roosevelt and Churchill each believed firmly that the "English-speaking peoples" represented the civilized world's first, best hope to counter and conquer the barbarism of the Axis. Meacham uses previously untapped archives and has interviewed surviving Roosevelt and Churchill staffers present at the great men's meetings in Washington, Hyde Park, Casablanca and Tehran. Thus he has considerable new ground to break, new anecdotes to offer and prescient observations to make. Throughout, Meacham highlights Roosevelt's and Churchill's shared backgrounds as sons of the ruling elite, their genuine, gregarious friendship, and their common worldview during staggeringly troubled times. To meet with Roosevelt, Churchill recalled years later, "with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence," was like "opening a bottle of champagne"—a bottle from which the tippling Churchill desperately needed a good long pull through 1940 and '41, as the Nazis savaged Europe and tortured British civilians with air attacks. One comes away from this account convinced of the "Great Personality" theory of history and gratified that Roosevelt and Churchill possessed the character that they did and came to power at a time when no other partnership would do.

June 1, 2003
The managing editor of Newsweek describes a complex relationship. With the first serial to Newsweek, of course.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2003
If the personal element in the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship influenced the course of World War II, this author demurs from saying so. The war in Meacham's hands is scaffolding for an edifice of detail about the two leaders' meetings. So Meacham coaxes gossip and trivia from the source material meticulously recorded by each man's voluble and history-conscious entourages. While the way Churchill would barge into Roosevelt's bedroom, or Roosevelt would mix drinks for Churchill, may not seem significant today, to immediate observers this social badinage marked the trajectory of their chiefs' dealings. Churchill was usually transparent, and FDR indirect, traits of the men's leadership that provide coherence to Meacham's immense indulgence in the physical accommodations, the gustatory spreads, and the verbal give-and-take of their friendship. WWII as experienced in personal relationships was the point of Doris Kearns Goodwin's "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt" (1994); Meacham's work is cut from the same cloth. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)