Buy the Book

Q & A with Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston

Q: What's new in your book?

A: This is the first full-scale biography of the emotional connection between Roosevelt and Churchill. Other books have dealt with strategy and diplomacy, but "Franklin and Winston" is a new perspective on a story that not many contemporary readers know about. And the book is full of new nuggets. The most interesting, perhaps, is a hitherto unpublished letter from Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, FDR's great love, to the President on the eve of World War II. The letter reveals that the two were in intimate contact with each other in the years when previous accounts have generally held that they were only in occasional touch. She refers to Roosevelt as "poor darling," and indicates that they have also been speaking together on the telephone. This is significant because FDR had promised his wife Eleanor that he would end any contact with Lucy after their love affair was discovered in 1918. A master of juggling complex emotions, Roosevelt liked to keep secrets, and he treated Churchill much the same way he treated Eleanor: as someone to be controlled on Roosevelt's terms.

I was also able to draw on other new collections of papers that shed fresh light on the friendship, from Pamela Harriman's World War II letters to wartime diaries of Churchill intimates.

Q: Were Roosevelt and Churchill really friends?

A: I think so, yes. They loved hymns, history, the sea, tobacco, strong drink—and power. And like all friends, they were alternately ready to kill for or murder the other.

Of course, it was unquestionably a political friendship; they were not childhood chums. Hitler brought them together, and Stalin drove them apart. But I think most friendships, even among ordinary people, are rather like that: they are created by certain circumstances-a school, a neighborhood, a team, a journey, a foxhole—and some survive down the years and some do not.

Statesmen can be cold and calculating and falsely cheerful, but they cannot turn off their emotions and affections any more than the rest of us can. Roosevelt and Churchill has so much in common and spent so much time together—113 days during the war—that they could not help but grow close.

Q: How close were they?

A: The theme of my book crystallized one day in London when Mary Soames, the Churchills' youngest and last surviving child, said that when she thought about her father and the President, she was reminded of the old French proverb "In love, there is always one who kisses and one who turns the cheek." Churchill was needier, and was always kissing Roosevelt, seeking concrete help for his nation and personal reassurances about his place in FDR's affections, and FDR was cooler, more distant, something of a coy mistress.

Their story is a kind of love story. There was an early period of skepticism and courting from the invasion of Poland to Pearl Harbor; once America was in the war, Churchill and FDR spent two years in a grand pageant of personal intimacy and diplomacy. Then, beginning in the autumn of 1943, at Teheran, Stalin drove a wedge between them. The story of what happened at Teheran is riveting-games of teasing, sarcasm, and chilliness directed against Churchill, who at one point literally stormed from the dinner table. It's just amazing that such a thing could happen at the highest levels during the greatest war in history. But the personal matters to everyone, and Churchill was a very emotional man. And Roosevelt could be a very chilly one.

But there is no doubt their friendship helped win the war. Here's just one example: The victory at El Alamein, the crucial turning point in the early part of the conflict, was made possible in part because Roosevelt and Churchill were together at the White House in the summer of 1942 when news came of a British defeat in North Africa. Seeing Churchill's anguish, FDR asked, "What can we do to help?" and soon essential arms were on their way—which might not have happened if the two men had not enjoyed each other's company so much.

Q: Why is this story relevant now?

A: Because fundamentally it's the story of allies waging war against a common foe in an age of terrorism and threats to freedom at the same time strong elements in their own countries were pulling the other way. Roosevelt and Churchill were men before they were monuments, and they repay close attention as we all try to make our own way through a complex time. If you want to understand the war on terror, you have to understand its leaders—and I don't think you can understand modern leadership without studying Roosevelt and Churchill.

Q: You were born four years after Churchill died. What got you interested in this subject?

A: Both my grandfathers fought in World War II, one in the Pacific and one in Europe, so the war has always been part of my consciousness. They both spoke reverently of FDR and Churchill, and my paternal grandfather, seeing what was coming and admiring the British resistance to Hitler, joined the Navy several months before Pearl Harbor.
And as a reader, I've always been fascinated by both Roosevelt and Churchill—by FDR's fight against polio, by his secret affair, his ability to manage complex forces, and his sheer will to lead us through the two defining crises of the world into which I was born: the Depression, which changed Americans' relationship with government, and World War II, which rescued freedom at its darkest hour. And Churchill-alcohol-dependent, slow-to-bloom, erratic-somehow, by the grace of God, was the perfect man for the most important moment of the twentieth century.

But it wasn't until about five years ago, when, because of my job at Newsweek, I had spent some time around the major leaders of our own era did I realize that Presidents and Prime Ministers who seem frozen in black-and-white, flawless and distant, are really complicated, flesh-and-blood mortals who managed to do great things despite their own shortcomings as human beings. I figured that, on close inspection, Roosevelt and Churchill might be the same way. And they were.

Q: What are the lessons of their alliance for us today?

A: That no matter how difficult the problems between like-minded nations are, it is essential for us to stick together against tyranny, whether it's a rogue nation or a terrorist group. One of the last sentences FDR ever wrote was this: "We must cultivate the science of human relationships." Roosevelt and Churchill saw that the world was becoming smaller and that what happened in distant places affected the lives and liberties of their own people. By explaining that new world clearly, by standing up to dictators when it would have been politically easier to cut deals and avoid hard choices, and by forging a friendship that helped save our way of life, the two men, amid cocktails, cigarettes, and endless hours of talk, from a tower in Marrakech to a stream at what would later be known as Camp David, delivered us from evil.