June 24, 2015

Finest Hour 120, Autumn 2003

Page 36

By JON MEACHAM

With Churchill, what you saw was usually what you got.
With Roosevelt what you saw was rarely what you got.

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, by Jon Meacham. Random House, 512 pp., illus., $29-95. Member price $22.

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For me, a child born in the American South in 1969, “Winston Churchill” began as a byline. My grandfather, a Tennessee judge, liked to read and re-read his way through Churchill, from The Second World War to The Story of the Malakand Field Force. I can still picture those volumes on his desk, and I remember the first time I read My Early Life, loving the images of martial splendor and the crack of gunfire.

All of this resonated, I think, because I spent my own first years on a Civil War battlefield—Missionary Ridge, overlooking Chattanooga. Great battles and heroes were the things many boys of my age and place dreamed about. Later, the story of Churchill’s defiance between May 1940 and Pearl Harbor took on a particular meaning when I discovered that my grandfather, impressed and inspired by the PM’s courage, had joined the navy in mid-1941, serving until the end in 1945.

Growing up around tales of the war, I became accustomed to hearing the phrase “Roosevelt and Churchill” as though it were one word, one idea: Roosevelt and Churchill. Truth be told, though, I did not think very much about them as human beings. They were epic figures, men to be grateful to, but at a distance. It seemed somehow more appropriate to revere them than to try to understand them.

Then one day in the autumn of 1998, I happened upon Churchill’s tribute to Roosevelt (page opposite) after FDR’s death. At Newsweek I had spent enough time around leading figures to see, in a way I could not have before, that even the greatest and most powerful are human before they become monuments.

Reading Churchill’s eulogywords I later learned were hurriedly composed over lunch after a memorial service at St. Paul’s—I was struck anew by the sheer scope of their relationship: nearly 2000 messages, some 120 days in one another’s company. (My own check of Churchill’s count turned up a slightly smaller figure—110 days—but the point remains.) So much time together, so many words exchanged: surely, I thought, there was a personal bond there, and just as surely it must have been more complicated (and more interesting) than Churchill’s romantic rendering in his speech to the House of Commons. But how complicated? And how interesting?

So began my excursion into the most fascinating friendship of modern times. Good and great books had been written on the subject, but nothing I could find had fully taken up the personal dimension of the alliance in our own time. Was there new light to shed, a fresh angle of vision?

At first, of course, I didn’t know. For nearly two years, at night and on weekends, increasingly intrigued by the elusive Roosevelt and the boisterous Churchill, I read everything I could find: Churchill’s war memoirs (using, in fact, my grandfather’s editions); the big biographies; key memoirs from both sides of the Atlantic; Warren Kimball’s books and his edition of their correspondence; Lady Soames’s biography of her mother and her collection of her parents’ letters, and Winston Churchill’s 1996 biography of his father. Still I was unsure whether I could add to the story. I needed to talk to anyone still living who had spent time in their joint company.

This led to the most pleasurable moments in the writing of the book, whether it was drinking tea with Harry Hopkins’ son Robert, looking at the scroll the Churchills had sent FDR’s closest aide when Stephen, Harry’s son, died in combat in the Marshall Islands; or listening, rapt, as Winston Churchill kindly read his grandfather’s eerie short story The Dream aloud to me in his study in London.

In these researches Lady Soames was central. I describe her in my book as a loving but not uncritical student of her parents’ lives and times, and if there has ever been a more loyal yet historically evenhanded child of the great in our time, I do not know of one. She kindly received me one afternoon in London and it was in her house, sitting next to a fireplace beneath a painting of her father’s, that the theme of the book crystallized. “When I think of Papa and the President,” she said, “I think of the French proverb, ‘In love there is always one who kisses and one who turns the cheek.'” She paused, and added: “And Papa was always kissing, and the President was always turning the cheek.”

That was it, I thought. Theirs was a kind of love story, a relationship of seduction, mutual pleasure, jealousies small and large, and, at long last, at Teheran in the autumn of 1943, a kind of betrayal when FDR sided with Stalin, mercilessly teasing Churchill and freezing him out. The real story of the friendship was not as unnuanced as Churchill’s memoirs, composed at a time when he wanted to polish the Anglo-American alliance, would have it; nor was it as clinical and cold as many professional historians have suggested. It was, like so many human relationships, a mixture of affection and artifice, kindness and calculation, played out with a direct influence on the deadliest war in history.

I realized that this was as good as a story got: intensely interesting on a human level, unfolding on the grandest of historical stages. It was, in short, the kind of tale Churchill would have loved to write, pacing up and down at Chartwell—and that Roosevelt would have loved to tell over drinks upstairs at the White House.

As the months went by I found more and more untapped sources to add detail and dimension to what could have been very familiar ground. Interviews with Kathleen Harriman Mortimer, Patrick Kinna, Trude Lash, and George Elsey produced fresh anecdotes. Winston Churchill generously granted me access to his mother’s World War II papers, which shed new light on how the Prime Minister’s inner circle viewed Roosevelt during the war years.

Perhaps the most interesting letter in the Pamela Harriman collection was from Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who wrote Pamela from Yalta that FDR looked so poorly, “Truman might be in for a job of work”—the first example I have found of a highlevel British official explicitly mentioning the possibility of Harry Truman’s ascension to the presidency.

Probably the richest find came on the Roosevelt side of things. Late in the research for the book, I was reconstructing a secret visit FDR’s great love Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd made to the President s grave at Hyde Park when a hitherto unpublished letter of Lucy’s to Roosevelt turned up in the files at the Roosevelt library at Hyde Park. At least the first and possibly more of its pages are missing, but eight remain, and they form a coherent whole. It is a chatty, intimate, reassuring letter, probably written in 1941, and it suggests a much closer degree of engagement and contact between the two than has generally been assumed. In another letter of Lucy’s I am publishing for the first time, written to FDR’s cousin Daisy Suckley after Roosevelt died, Lucy recalls that evening Roosevelt and Churchill first met (29 July 1918), at a dinner for the war ministers at Gray’s Inn in London—a sign that the meeting presumably meant so much to Roosevelt that he talked of it enough to impress the memory on his friend Mrs. Rutherfurd.

Writing the book was a joy. I would sometimes joke that I relished the second-hand smoke from FDR’s Camels and Churchill’s Havanas. Much to my wife’s amused (I think) chagrin, I took our six-month-old son to Hyde Park one rainy Monday to stand in the little study near the porch where Roosevelt and Churchill had first agreed to share the atomic bomb, and we soggily walked the road the two men had driven from the house to the President’s private railway siding as they talked of war and peace.

I thought long and hard about the emotional inclinations and tools each of them brought to the relationship. My conclusion is that Churchill, because of his complex connection to his parents, particularly to his father, was accustomed to absorbing disappointments in personal affairs, re-imagining them in a more congenial light, and moving on. My guess is that this capacity to think of things as he would like them to be, rather than as they really were, was an invaluable gift when it came to handling Roosevelt.

FDR was a man of infinite emotional complexity and duplicity, able to operate on several levels simultaneously in both his personal and political life. He had, I think, learned this skill at home, trying to have his own way in the face of a somewhat overly attentive mother. With Churchill, what you saw was usually what you got; with Roosevelt what you saw was rarely what you got. Churchill was the suitor, Roosevelt the quarry. Churchill said it himself: “No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”

A great treat was discovering how lovely and generous the circle of Churchill and Roosevelt scholars truly is. Sir Martin Gilbert read parts of my manuscript, talking me through several issues on a snowy night in Manhattan; Warren Kimball, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Michael Beschloss, David Reynolds, Geoffrey Ward, and Alex Danchev all gave selflessly of their time and insights. William Vanden Heuvel of the Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt Institute and Richard Langworth of The Churchill Centre were both cheerful and helpful. I am grateful to them all.

At dinner in the Connaught in London one winter evening, I had the pleasure of discussing Churchill’s views of Roosevelt with Sir Anthony Montague Browne, the Prime Minister’s last private secretary. It was over a particularly good bottle of claret, Sir Anthony’s discerning choice, as we talked about the connection between history and the crises of our own day, that he reminded me of a line near the end of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a line I had first read in my grandfather’s house years before. “The future is unknowable,” Churchill had written, “but the past should give us hope.”

I made that wise sentence the epigraph of Franklin and Winston. Why? It was more than the claret. When the past is a place where men like Roosevelt and Churchill did their best amid what George Eliot once called the “dim lights and tangled circumstance” of an imperfect world, then we all should indeed take comfort from what—and who—has come before. My own small hope is that I have managed to achieve what I set out to do: to paint a portrait of their friendship, to explain origins of their greatness and to chart the complexities of the passions which drove two flawed but ultimately marvelous men to fight a war and build a new global order— together.

Mr. Meacham is managing editor of Newsweek. On the eve of publication he wrote about his new book exclusively for Finest Hour.