From Kirkus Reviews
From Kimball (History/Rutgers Univ.), who edited the collected correspondence of FDR and Winston Churchill, another look at the fateful partnership that helped win the Second World War. FDR and Churchill first met in London in 1918, when the American was a visiting assistant secretary of the navy and Churchill a famous member of Britain's war cabinet. It was not, apparently, an auspicious meeting: Churchill offended Roosevelt years later by telling him he did not remember the encounter. Also, Churchill's attempts to cultivate political contact with Roosevelt when he was governor of New York and later president were unsuccessful, until WW II intervened. However, once the correspondence between the two finally began (even while Churchill was still a member of Neville Chamberlain's cabinet), the tone was set for the ``special relationship'' that ultimately resulted in the Atlantic Alliance. In sketching the personalities of the two partners, Kimball draws parallels and contrasts: Both were flamboyant speakers and masters of dramatic language, both generated intense personal loyalty, both were idealists with a pragmatic bent. Churchill was a master of detail who micromanaged, while Roosevelt left most of the details to subordinates. Kimball records the years of America's pro-British neutrality, in which the US supported Britain through lend-lease aid and assistance of an increasingly military nature, and the intensification of the relationship between the two leaders as the US and the Soviet Union entered the war. The Churchill-Roosevelt friendship set the tone for the sometimes tense, sometimes warm Anglo-American relationship, which Kimball follows through its high points and its lows (like the Yalta Conference, in which Roosevelt joined forces with Stalin in opposing some of Churchill's ideas). Ultimately, Kimball points out, the relationship played a crucial role in creating the ``Holy Alliance'' against fascism that ended the war and created the postwar world. An absorbing examination of one of modern history's most dynamic friendships and its military consequences. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Mr. Kimball's is the latest word on the alliance; it may be the conclusive one. -- The New York Times Book Review, Kenneth Harris
From the Publisher
World War II created the union between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, molding it from start to finish, while the partnership itself shaped many of the most significant moments of the war and the peace that followed. Their connection was truly forged in war. Roosevelt and Churchill continue to fascinate both the World War II generation and those who have grown up in the world formed by that struggle. Here is an inside look at their relationship and the politics, strategy, and diplomacy of the British-American alliance. Warren F. Kimball's lively analysis of these larger-than-life figures shows how they were at the same time realists and idealists, consistent and inconsistent, calculating and impulsive. The result is an unforgettable narrative.
Warren F. Kimball, Robert Treat Professor of History at Rutgers University, has written numerous books, including The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman. Kimball edited the acclaimed three-volume collection Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence. He lives in Somerset, New Jersey.
From the Back Cover
"Warren Kimball catches it all in this magnificent new analysis of Roosevelt and Churchill. It is a marvelous guide through the maze of World War II diplomacy, politics and strategy. Recommended without reservation or hesitation." -- Stephen E. Ambrose "Warren Kimball has studied the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship more carefully than anyone else; and his splendid new book gives a compelling account, as penetrating as it is lively, of the partnership that saved the world." -- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
About the Author
Warren F. Kimball, Robert Treat Professor of History at Rutgers University, has written numerous books, including The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman. Kimball edited the acclaimed three-volume collection Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence. He lives in Somerset, New Jersey.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Never were there two less likely-looking warriors. Winston Spencer Churchill was, to be candid, short and fat; "very pink and cuddly," commented one journalist's wife upon her first close encounter. His round red cheeks invariably prompted the description "cherubic," though nothing could be further from the truth. He waddled rather than walked and lectured rather than listened, talking endlessly about everything, the opposite of the virile, strong, silent leader that fiction idealized and John Wayne and Hollywood popularized. Much of his working time was spent lying abed, and when he did get up, it was often to prance around in soft slippers and pink bathrobe or his "siren suit" (designed to be pulled on easily in the event of an air raid), getups that brought derision from more than a few diarists. "A marvellous garment [Churchill's dressing gown], rather like Joseph's many-coloured robe," General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, acidly commented, going on to describe a typical evening's work with the prime minister. "Finally at 2:15 A.M. he suggested we should proceed to the hall to have some sandwiches, and I hoped this might at least mean bed. But, no! We went on till ten to three before he made a move for bed. He had the gramophone turned on, and in the many-coloured dressing gown, with a sandwich in one hand and watercress in the other, he trotted round and round the hall, giving occasional little skips to the tune of the gramophone.
On each lap near the fireplace he stopped to release some priceless quotation or thought. For instance he quoted a saying that a man's life is similar to a walk down a long passage with closed windows on either side. As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness at the end of the passage."1
That image of English eccentricity must be balanced against the description of Churchill from a soldier in the ranks during a formal inspection: "He's a pugnacious looking b[astard]."2 But as Adolf Hitler found out, it was more than just looks. A search committee working in 1939, or even 1940, to hire a wartime leader would have carefully examined Winston Churchill's resume. After all, he had attended the British military academy at Sandhurst, had been first lord of the admiralty during the Great War of 1914-18, and had called stridently for Britain to rearm as Germany became more belligerent in the 1930s.
But those assets were more than offset by performance. Whatever Churchill's fascination with things military, his academic performance at Sandhurst was undistinguished, and his military service uneventful and brief. His mother, the former Jennie Jerome and an American debutante from Baltimore when she married Randolph Churchill, once cautioned her son not to come home from India on leave early in his short army career. Though her real motive was to save money-always in short supply for a woman with champagne tastes-she hit on a truth when she warned young Winston: "They will say & with some reason that you can't stick to anything. You have only been out six months...."3
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Footnotes:
1. "Pink and cuddly," is from Robbins, "Reporting Churchill," 10, Bryant, Turn of the Tide, 263.
2. General V. Freyberg: recollection (September 3, 1940), in Gilbert, ed., The Churchill War Papers, II, 781 See p. 707 for John Colville's description of Churchill, during an air raid, "wearing his flowery dressing-gown and a tin hat."
3. Quoted in Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 69.
