A Review of Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston
“The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we now have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.”
— Winston Churchill in his final address to the House of Commons at the age of eighty, March 1955
“Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them from one another. Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships — the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unfinished Jefferson Day address on which he was at work on the porch at Warm Springs, Georgia, the afternoon before his death
Jon Meacham’s excellent and well-documented history Franklin and Winston is precisely what its subtitle declares it to be — An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. His source notes are excellent, his bibliography brief but good, and his critical judgment nearly flawless (I found only a single anecdote to be utterly dubious and weakly supported). Meacham enlivens his telling of the familiar story with previously undiscovered documents and the gleanings of a number of solid interviews with surviving witnesses of the relationship between the two giants of Western Democracy.
All those who treasure freedom and peace owe the greatest of debts to these two uniquely gifted leaders. As Meacham writes near the conclusion of his absorbing work:
“Like most friends, Churchill and Roosevelt were sometimes affectionate, sometimes cross, alternately ready to die for or murder the other. But each helped make what the other did possible. Churchill’s unflinching countenance in the chaos of 1940 gave the British strength to endure in the face of the seemingly unendurable. The conviction that someday, somehow, Roosevelt would come to his side was the engine of Churchill’s heroic resistance.
“Roosevelt’s reluctance to fully enter the war before December 1941 was not about opposing totalitarianism — which he did — but about leading an unready and divided nation into combat. Perhaps the only thing worse than America’s aloofness from September 1, 1939, to December 11, 1941, would have been a president who pushed an ill-equipped country into political and military battles that, if lost — and they may well have been — might have sent the United States back behind its own walls for good. But for the American president’s caution in those early years, we could be living in the grim shadow of an isolationist Age of Lindbergh, not in the light of the Age of Roosevelt.
“Roosevelt saw that what happened far from our shores — in Europe, in distant Asia, in caves and camps — mattered. The world was connected, one nation and one people to another, and he understood that we could not — cannot — escape history, no matter how much we might like to. ‘Wishful thinking,’ Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘is one of our besetting sins.'”
If you’ve recently imbibed the poisonous brew of Nicholson Baker’s pathetic Human Smoke or Patrick Buchanan’s absurd Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Franklin and Winston is one of numerous antidotes I would heartily prescribe.
Haysville Community Library 