April 15, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 43

By ROBERT DISQUE & NEWSWEEK

Franklin and Winston, by Jon Meacham, 512 pp., illus., published at $29.95, member price $22. Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, edited by his grandson Winston S. Churchill, 592 pp., illus., published at $27.95, member price $22. Order from Churchill Stores, c/o The Churchill Centre.

I loved the book. While many of the episodes (not all) are familiar to Churchillians, Meacham’s description of the interaction between the two men is fascinating: one cool, crafty and devious; the other emotional, loving, thoughtless of others (Churchill, keeping his people up all night but napping during the day while his staff worked.) Although they were so different personally, they loved each other and were as one with the objective: win the war. Thank God for them both.

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I was born in 1926 and remember listening to my parents at the dinner table discussing Chamberlain and Munich. They were both interventionists, even though my father’s father was born in Germany, and two of his brothers were in the German-American Bund. There were times when they would argue, and I was terrified that it would come to blows. I joined the Navy at 17, serving aboard a destroyer. —Robert Disque