June 25, 2015

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 42

By DAVID FREEMAN

Franklin and Winston, by John Meacham. Random House, 412 pp., $29.95, Member price $22.

Ton Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, admits up front that he ventures here into well-trod territory. He honestly cites in the endnotes several of the many books about the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, with many references to Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography. He makes the case for book by asserting that the theme resonates with current relevance; that he writes for general readers, not scholars; that this was the most important friendship in modern times; and that “it does matter who is in power at critical points” (xvii). Those whose shelves already groan under the weight of books about Churchill, Roosevelt and their partnership may find little new; those new to the field will find a good overview, though the work does contain some errors and dubious suppositions, many of them occurring quite early.

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Only eleven pages into the story the myth of Lord Randolph Churchill’s syphilitic death is passed off in an aside as gospel. (Be cheered: Geoffrey Best’s excellent recent study of Churchill did cite Dr. John Mather’s report in FH 93, which destroyed this canard.) Meacham also makes frequent references to Churchill’s drinking, with the innuendo that it was problematic; and there is a short psychoanalysis of Churchill’s short story The Dream which is stretched to conclude that the son’s relationship with his father prepared him for dealing with Roosevelt. One might suppose his relationship with such as Asquith, Baldwin and Lloyd George also prepared him.

Meacham clearly aims his book at those already favorably disposed toward Churchill and Roosevelt, possessed of the idea that these were two great leaders symbolizing all that was best in their countries. Consequently, much of the hyperbole generated by both men goes unchallenged. That the author’s aim nonetheless succeeds is suggested by the reaction of Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a Churchill Centre Trustee, who described this as “…a noble, warm and wonderful book [which] gives you a Churchill who is absolutely human, a guy trying to save his country, who comes to love the guy he needs to save it. It’s a story of unbalanced but effective friendship between two great figures. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about public affairs.”

Meacham does note Warren Kimball’s hypothesis that the essential element of the relationship was that between America and Britain, but dismisses Kimball’s conclusion that the particular personalities involved ultimately did not matter. Meacham never really grapples with the fact that Churchill’s rhetoric, his cables to Roosevelt, and his postwar spin on the relationship in his memoirs were all composed with Churchill in the position of supplicant. But he rightly commends the fact that Churchill never left any record of his candid opinion of FDR who, by contrast, made more than one acidic remark about Churchill. Indeed, Churchill’s stature is enhanced by his refusal to let Roosevelt’s attempts to thaw Stalin at WSC’s expense come between them or the alliance.

Of course, given his position, Churchill would have used all of his powers to woo the President of the United States, regardless of who filled that office. Kimball, the scholar who edited the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, understood this and said so. Meacham, a journalist writing about two captivating personalities, thinks less of this fact. A Chamberlain-Willkie duo might have formulated broadly similar policies, as Kimball insinuated, but it would never have generated so much copy.

Meacham quotes early what proved to be FDR’s mantra concerning Churchill and Britain through the whole war: “I’m willing to help them all I can, but I don’t want them to play me for a sucker,” the President told Joseph Kennedy, his Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. This attitude can be seen in President Roosevelt’s cables to Churchill, which were usually cooler and more formal than those he received, a fact picked up when Finest Hour first reviewed Kimball’s magnum opus.

Meacham does appreciate that the relationship was indeed special in the sense that the representatives of the two nations were among history’s most exceptional personalities, possessed of great charm, fluency and wit. Regardless of what the two privately thought of one another, there is no cause to question their sincerity when Churchill compared Roosevelt to opening a bottle of Champagne, and Roosevelt’s exclamation to Churchill when FDR turned sixty: “It’s fun being in the same decade with you.”

If Meacham is light on the basic nature of the relationship, he is nevertheless quite right in observing that the two statesmen were bonded by a shared vision in the value of representative democracy, the rule of law, and the threat posed to these institutions by Hitler. Nor is Meacham abused of any false notion of Churchill and Roosevelt selling out to or being suckered by Stalin at Yalta. Wisely he includes Averell Harriman’s observation that the English-speaking leaders made “an honest attempt to build an orderly relationship with the Russians” with a certain amount of give and take. The fact that Churchill and Roosevelt together “tried and failed left the main responsibility for the Cold War with Stalin, where it belongs” (319).

Like its subjects, therefore, Meacham’s book may be flawed in some details and perhaps even in some large conceptions, but its virtues outweigh its faults. Beautifully written, it gathers virtually all the accounts of the relationship by people present at the time. In the essentials it grasps the truth and relates the facts with warmth and sensitivity.