Franklin And Winston Part 1

FRANKLIN AND WINSTON.

JON MEACHAM.

TO KEITH.

The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.

-WINSTON CHURCHILL.

FRANKLIN.

AND.

WINSTON.

"My thoughts are always with you all"

Aboard the USS Quincy at Malta, February 2, 1945.

INTRODUCTION.

A Fortunate Friends.h.i.+p.

THE LIGHT WAS fading. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, February 4, 1945, in the Crimean coastal town of Yalta, the three most powerful men in the world-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin-were sitting in the Grand Ballroom of the Livadia Palace, a former summerhouse of the Russian czars. The Allies in the war against Adolf Hitler's Germany were three months and four days away from conquering the Third Reich; Imperial j.a.pan would surrender three months after that. There were huge questions to be decided about the war's final act and its aftermath, yet Churchill's circle was horrified by the paralyzed Roosevelt's condition. "He is very thin & his face is drawn & deeply lined & he looks weary all the time and as if he might be in bad pain," British Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal wrote to Pamela Churchill, then Churchill's daughter-in-law. "Also, his brain is obviously not what it was. Altogether he looks as if Truman might be in for a job of work, but of course it may be nothing serious though none of us liked the look of it much." It was quite serious: The American president was secretly suffering from congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. The prospect of losing Roosevelt troubled Churchill, who had spent five years in a turbulent but intimate alliance with the president. "Our friends.h.i.+p," Churchill told Roosevelt in the early months of 1945, "is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders."

Roosevelt veered between engagement and exhaustion. "He's really absolutely sweet-very easy to make conversation to-amusing & generally in great form," Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the American diplomat Averell Harriman, told Pamela in a letter from Yalta. But Roosevelt could not escape the shadows. Writing to Pamela about Roosevelt, Churchill, and "Uncle Joe" Stalin, Portal said: "I am sure that FDR is completely unable to think hard about anything. He is tremendously perceptive of an atmosphere, and the most wonderful politician, but on these occasions where he meets W & U.J. he is absolutely pathetic. It is such a pity, but I suppose everyone fails in one way or another."

Churchill, however, had spent so much time and invested so much of himself in maintaining a connection with the president that he could not quite contemplate life after Roosevelt. Cabling Roosevelt from London as Germany tottered after Yalta, Churchill was nostalgic. "I remember the part our personal relations have played in the advance of the world cause now nearing its first military goal," he wrote, adding that he and his wife, Clementine, were looking forward to seeing the president and Eleanor Roosevelt in England soon. "My thoughts," Churchill said, "are always with you all."

But there was nothing he could do. Roosevelt was dying. One of the great friends.h.i.+ps in history was coming to an end.

TO MEET ROOSEVELT the president, "with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence," Churchill once said, was like "opening a bottle of champagne." Theirs was an extraordinary comrades.h.i.+p, "forged," as Churchill put it to Eleanor Roosevelt the day the president died, "in the fire of war." Between September 11, 1939, and April 11, 1945 (the eve of Roosevelt's death), the two carried on a correspondence that produced nearly two thousand letters. From the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in August 1941 to the USS Quincy off Alexandria, Egypt, in February 1945, they spent a hundred and thirteen days together. By war's end Roosevelt and Churchill would celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's in each other's company, visit Hyde Park and Shangri-la (the retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains that President Eisenhower rechristened Camp David) together, and once slip away from the press of business to spend a brief holiday in Marrakech, where Roosevelt was carried to the top of a tower to see the rays of the setting sun reflect off the snowcapped Atlas Mountains. An accomplished artist, Churchill painted the view for Roosevelt-the only picture Churchill produced during the war. The spring that Roosevelt died he was planning a state visit to Britain.

Reflecting on her father and Roosevelt, Mary Soames, Winston and Clementine Churchill's youngest and last surviving child, captured the complexities of the relations.h.i.+p by quoting a French proverb: "In love, there is always one who kisses, and one who offers the cheek." Churchill was the suitor, Roosevelt the elusive quarry. Their friends.h.i.+p mirrored their private characters. With Roosevelt, Churchill was sentimental and shrewd. With Churchill, Roosevelt was cheerful and calculating. Churchill was warmer and more anxious for rea.s.surances about Roosevelt's affection for him; Roosevelt cooler and more confident, alternately charming and distant.

WHY REVISIT the story now? There are hundreds and hundreds of books about each man, and more than a few about the two of them together. Predictably, Churchill put the problem best. Told of a new effort to write about his life and work more than half a century ago, he remarked: "There's nothing much in that field left unploughed." But Roosevelt and Churchill's joint leaders.h.i.+p in the middle of the twentieth century-a time of threats from ideologues as technology tied countries and peoples together more tightly-has a particular resonance in the early years of the twenty-first. Given the world in which they lived-a global era of attacks on civilian populations, warfare, tenuous alliances, and the mechanization of genocide-Roosevelt and Churchill merit close attention, for their world is like our world, and together they managed to bring order out of chaos.

This book is not a history of World War II, nor is it a study of the Anglo-American "special relations.h.i.+p." It is, instead, a portrait of what I believe to be the most fascinating friends.h.i.+p of modern times-a portrait that is necessarily impressionistic, since feelings are fleeting. There are libraries of excellent sources for readers seeking to find their way through the military and diplomatic forests of the war, a conflict that killed more than fifty-five million people and reordered the world. My aim was to focus tightly on the two men and tell the personal tale of what they meant to each other-and, in the end, to all of us.

IT WAS NOT a foregone conclusion that Britain and America would fight what became known as World War II. At the highest levels of the British government in May 1940, there was talk of exploring a settlement with Hitler, who was in the midst of conquering a large part of Europe. Some people in London were willing to consider further appeas.e.m.e.nt-but Churchill said no. And so, on July 16, 1940, after the fall of France, Hitler directed his generals to plan for the invasion of England. Read closely, however, the fuhrer's order was equivocal; perhaps peace was yet possible. "Since England, despite her militarily hopeless situation, still shows no signs of willingness to come to terms," Hitler said, "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary to carry it out." Three days later, in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler announced: "I can see no reason why this war must go on." It would not have been a sunny peace, if peace could come, but a Hitlerite one, probably sanctioning Berlin's hold over the Continent and delaying, not reversing, the ultimate spread of n.a.z.ism. In London, Churchill refused to even think it over. William s.h.i.+rer, the CBS Radio correspondent, was in Berlin when Britain's reply was broadcast. A German official he talked to "seemed dazed," s.h.i.+rer recalled. "Can you understand those British fools?" the German said. "To turn down peace now? They're crazy!" In these same months, stretching to the last weeks of 1941, Americans were not eager to fight a war overseas-but Roosevelt slowly nudged his nation toward engagement with the world.

Both men undertook these enormously complicated tasks of statesmans.h.i.+p with a vision of the other in his mind. From the beginning Churchill thought victory required Roosevelt; after an initial period of uncertainty and skepticism, Roosevelt decided that Churchill was vital to the complete defeat of Hitler. From afar, and then face-to-face, they chose to believe in each other, fighting political elements in their own countries and battles beyond their borders to ensure democracy's chances against totalitarianism and terror.

Roosevelt and Churchill helped shape the way we live now. Four of the turning points of World War II-the American decision to support Britain in its struggle against Germany in the months before Pearl Harbor; the victory over the Germans in the North African desert in 1942, which kept the Middle East out of Hitler's hands; the development and control of the atomic bomb; and the timing of the liberation of Europe-were largely products of their personal collaboration. Their partners.h.i.+p illuminates the human dimension of high politics and suggests that the unlikeliest of people-those who are underestimated or discounted by the conventional wisdom of their own era-can emerge as formidable leaders.

It is easy to be too cynical or too sentimental about the Roosevelt-Churchill friends.h.i.+p. Some historians have argued that the image of Roosevelt and Churchill as friends at work in wartime is in many ways a convenient fiction, largely created by Churchill in his memoirs in an attempt to build an enduring Anglo-American alliance. Another president and another prime minister, the clinical case continues, would have probably produced the same results in World War II. I think the Roosevelt-Churchill story, however, proves that it does matter who is in power at critical points and that politicians, for all their calculations, deceptions, disagreements, and disputes, are not immune to emotion and affection as they lead nations through tumultuous times.

"A MAN IN high public office is neither husband nor father nor friend in the commonly accepted sense of the words," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, somewhat chillingly. By the time they met during World War II, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could really separate their political lives from their private ones. The demands of office and ambition determined the shape of their emotional spheres. Their relations.h.i.+p was like many friends.h.i.+ps among the powerful, ones in which public figures conduct statecraft within a framework of professed regard and warmth.

There is almost always a practical element in a politician's connection to other people, particularly to other politicians. "It would, however, be wrong to a.s.sume that Churchill's friends.h.i.+ps were political, even though their inspiration might be so," wrote John Colville, a Churchill private secretary known as "Jock" who was close to the prime minister and his family. "My father's friends.h.i.+p and love were spontaneous and unmotivated," said Mary Soames. "He was not complicated in his approach to people. He was trusting and very genuine. He could be wily if he had to, but it did not come naturally."

Wiliness came more easily to Roosevelt. "He was the coldest man I ever met," Harry Truman said of him. "He didn't give a d.a.m.n personally for me or you or anyone else in the world as far as I could see. But he was a great President. He brought this country into the twentieth century." Roosevelt's true affections and feelings were hard to gauge. "Mrs. R. used to say we all served him," recalled Trude Lash, a friend of Eleanor's who was often in the White House in the war years, "and she was right."

Roosevelt and Churchill became friends under the force of circ.u.mstance. From the invasion of Poland in 1939 to the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Churchill begged for help from Roosevelt, who had to be convinced Britain was worth American trust and treasure. America's entry into the war in December 1941 threw them together in what became a spirited friends.h.i.+p that lasted until November 1943, when America's growing power moved Churchill away from the center of Roosevelt's thinking. The Roosevelt-Churchill connection was more nuanced in the last years of the war. In 1944 and 1945 they were like an old married couple who knew each other's vulnerabilities and foibles, yet each considered the other a permanent part of life.

During the war, Churchill would flatter, appear to defer (calling himself the "President's lieutenant" or saying, "It's up to the Boss"), but fight to give as little ground as possible. Roosevelt would be genial yet try to have his own way. Still, the two thought of each other as friends. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most honest women who ever lived. "You must remember Mrs. R. was brutally candid, especially with friends," recalled Trude Lash. Though they were cordial to each other, the liberal Eleanor thought Churchill too conservative. Yet here is Eleanor's postwar testimony: "I shall never cease to be grateful to Churchill for his leaders.h.i.+p during the war. The real affection which he had for my husband and which was reciprocated, he has apparently never lost. The war would have been harder to win without it, and the two men might not have gone through it so well if they had not had that personal pleasure in meeting and confidence in each other's integrity and ability."

At Christmastime 1941, Churchill, fresh from his bath, was in his guest room at the White House, pacing about naked-"completely starkers," recalled Patrick Kinna, a Churchill a.s.sistant who was taking dictation from the dripping prime minister. There was a tap at the door, and Churchill said, "Come in." Roosevelt then appeared and, seeing the nude Churchill, apologized and began to retreat. Stopping him, Churchill said, "You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide from you." Roosevelt loved it. "Chuckling like a small boy, he told me about it later," said presidential secretary Grace Tully. "You know, Grace," Roosevelt said, "I just happened to think of it now. He's pink and white all over." After the 1941 holidays, Roosevelt told Churchill: "It is fun to be in the same decade with you."

There was a genuine warmth between them. "The friends.h.i.+p and affection between my husband and Mr. Churchill grew with every visit," Eleanor recalled, "and was something quite apart from the official intercourse." In a handwritten letter to Roosevelt in the summer of 1943, Clementine told him: "I hope you know how much your friends.h.i.+p means to Winston personally, quite apart from its world aspect & importance." Robert E. Sherwood, the playwright who served as a White House speechwriter and wrote the landmark biography of Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, said Roosevelt and Churchill "established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant-and also a degree of frankness in intercourse which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it."

Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay on friends.h.i.+p, C. S. Lewis noted that Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? "Or at least," Lewis wrote, " 'Do you care about the same truth?' " Though they had their differences-Churchill wanted the British empire to survive and thrive; Roosevelt largely favored self-determination for colonial peoples around the world-they cared pa.s.sionately about the same overarching truth: breaking the Axis. They also shared the conviction that they were destined to play these roles. A friends.h.i.+p like Roosevelt and Churchill's is rightly understood as a fond relations.h.i.+p in which two people have an interest not just in each other (though they do) but also, as Emerson saw, in a shared external truth or mission. Victory was the common goal, and only Roosevelt and Churchill knew the uncertainties that came with ultimate power. Theirs was, for a moment, the most exclusive of clubs. During World War II, remarked Isaiah Berlin, the essayist and a British official in wartime Was.h.i.+ngton, "each appeared to the other in a romantic light high above the battles of allies or subordinates: their meetings and correspondence were occasions to which they both consciously rose: they were royal cousins and felt pride in the relations.h.i.+p, tempered by a sharp and sometimes amused, but never ironical, perception of the other's peculiar qualities."

ROOSEVELT WAS the better politician, Churchill the warmer human being. When Hitler dominated the Continent, staring across the En-glish Channel, Winston Churchill stood alone and stared back. Some respectable people in Britain would have cut a deal and let Hitler rule much of Europe. Defending liberty when others wavered, Churchill held out long enough to give Roosevelt time to prepare a reluctant America for the fight and then for global leaders.h.i.+p. Together they preserved the democratic experiment.

They were men before they were monuments. "To do justice to a great man, discriminating criticism is always necessary," Churchill once wrote. "Gush, however quenching, is always insipid." Their personal faults-Roosevelt's duplicity, Churchill's self-absorption-were at times political virtues. What could make Roosevelt a trying husband and a frustrating friend made him a great president: Sometimes politicians have to pursue different courses at the same time and deceive those closest to them about what they are doing. What could make Churchill a tiring guest and an exasperating friend made him a great prime minister: Sometimes politicians have to talk endlessly, with boundless enthusiasm and no room for argument, in order to point the way to higher ground and convince people to make the journey. While n.a.z.ism and j.a.panese imperialism were on the march, the West was led by human beings p.r.o.ne, like anyone else, to shortcoming, jealousy, and sickness-and yet capable of historic insight and courage. The Roosevelt-Churchill connection was, Eleanor Roosevelt said, a "fortunate friends.h.i.+p." The world was indeed lucky that Roosevelt and Churchill rallied the forces of light when darkness fell.

PART.

I.

IN G.o.d'S GOOD TIME.

Beginnings to Late Fall 1941.

"Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt"

FDR on a fis.h.i.+ng excursion in Britain during his mission to Europe in 1918 "He's pig-headed in his own way"

Churchill, circa 1918, the year he and Roosevelt first met.

CHAPTER 1.

TWO LIONS ROARING AT.

THE SAME TIME.

A Disappointing Early Encounter-Their Lives Down the Years-The Coming of World War II.

IN THE OPENING hours of a mission to wartime Europe in July 1918, Franklin Roosevelt, then thirty-six and working for the Navy Department, looked over a typewritten "Memorandum For a.s.sistant Secretary" to discover what was in store for him in London. Reading the schedule's description of his evening engagement for Monday, July 29, Roosevelt learned that he was "to dine at a function given for the Allied Ministers Prosecuting the War." Hosted by F. E. Smith, a government minister and good friend of Winston Churchill's, the banquet was held in the hall of Gray's Inn in London. It was a clear evening-the wind was calm-and Roosevelt and Churchill, the forty-three-year-old former first lord of the Admiralty who was then minister of munitions, mingled among the guests below a portrait of Elizabeth I.

What were Roosevelt and Churchill like on this summer night? Frances Perkins knew them both in these early years. A progressive reformer, the first female member of a president's cabinet-Roosevelt would name her secretary of labor after he was elected in 1932-Perkins saw their strengths and their weaknesses. She first encountered Roosevelt in 1910 at a tea dance in Manhattan's Gramercy Park. Perkins was a graduate student at Columbia, already immersed in the world of social causes and settlement houses; Roosevelt was running for the state senate from Dutchess County. "There was nothing particularly interesting about the tall, thin young man with the high collar and pince-nez," Perkins recalled. They spoke briefly of Roosevelt's cousin Theodore, the former president of the United States, but Perkins did not give this Roosevelt "a second thought" until she ran across him again in Albany a few years later. She watched him work the Capitol-"tall and slender, very active and alert, moving around the floor, going in and out of committee rooms, rarely talking with the members, who more or less avoided him, not particularly charming (that came later), artificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit-so natural that he was unaware of it-of throwing his head up. This, combined with his pince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people." Later, the toss of the head would signal confidence and cheer. In the young Roosevelt it seemed, Perkins said, "slightly supercilious." She once heard a fellow politician say: "Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt."

Perkins had also spent time with Churchill when she visited preWorld War I England. He was, she recalled, "a very interesting, alert, and vigorous individual who was an intellectual clearly." Churchill, she would tell President Roosevelt years later, "is this kind of a fellow: You want to be careful. He runs ahead of himself, or at least he used to." He was stubborn, Perkins said, "so sure of himself that he would insist upon doing the thing that he thought was a good thing to do. He was a little bit vain. He thought people were old fuddy-duds if they didn't agree with him." Her bottom line?

"He's pig-headed in his own way," Perkins said. "He's often right and brilliant, but . . ." But. She left the sentence unfinished.

THE GRAY'S INN dinner was a glittering occasion, with high British officials going out of their way to pay homage to Roosevelt as the representative of their American ally. Hailing Roosevelt as "the member of a glorious family," Smith, who later became the earl of Birkenhead, said, "No one will welcome Mr. Roosevelt on his visit to England with a warmer hand and heart than we do." Then Roosevelt-to his "horror," he said-was unexpectedly asked to say a few words. He stumbled a bit as he began. Uncertainly, trying to find the right note, Roosevelt said he had been "given to understand that I should not be called upon to speak" and in his nervousness, looking around at the faces of his hosts, began to talk about the importance of the personal in politics and war. Citing the need for an "intimate personal relations.h.i.+p" among allied nations, Roosevelt said: "It is quite impossible . . . to sit at home 3000 miles or more away and to obtain that close man-to-man, shoulder-to-shoulder touch, which today characterizes the work of the Allies in conducting the War." Warming to his point, Roosevelt concluded: "We are with you-about ninety-nine and nine-tenths of 110,000,000 of our people are with you-in the declaration that we are going to see this thing through with you."

In later years, Churchill would not recall meeting the American visitor. Roosevelt certainly recalled meeting Churchill, however, and long remembered Churchill's brusqueness. "I always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1917 or 1918," Roosevelt said to Joseph P. Kennedy, the American amba.s.sador to Britain, in a conversation in 1939. "At a dinner I attended he acted like a stinker." Roosevelt and Churchill would not be in contact again for another twenty-one years. When they were, Churchill, not Roosevelt, would be the one sounding the trumpet about the indispensability of an "intimate personal relations.h.i.+p." The man who would bring them together: Adolf Hitler, a corporal who won the Iron Cross, First Cla.s.s, six days after Roosevelt and Churchill dined at Gray's Inn.

THEY HAD BEEN born eight years and an ocean apart-Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfords.h.i.+re; Franklin Delano Roosevelt on January 30, 1882, at Hyde Park in Dutchess County, New York. They loved tobacco, strong drink, history, the sea, battles.h.i.+ps, hymns, pageantry, patriotic poetry, high office, and hearing themselves talk. "Being with them was like sitting between two lions roaring at the same time," said Mary Soames. With Roosevelt in his naval cape and Churchill in his service uniforms, they understood the stagecraft of statesmans.h.i.+p. "There was a good deal of the actor in each," said Mike Reilly, Roosevelt's Secret Service chief, "and we Secret Service men who had to arrange their exits and their entrances found we were working for a pair of master showmen who were determined that no scenes would be stolen by the other."

They were the sons of rich American mothers. Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874; Sara Delano became the second wife of James Roosevelt in 1880. Roosevelt, the cousin of a president, came from the Hudson Valley, Groton School, Harvard College, and Columbia Law School; Churchill, the grandson of a duke, from Blenheim, Harrow, and Sandhurst. In a sign of how small the elite Anglo-American world in which they moved was, one of the wives of Winston's cousin the duke of Marlborough was romanced by Winthrop Rutherfurd, the husband of Franklin's illicit love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. As boys, Roosevelt and Churchill were obsessive collectors: stamps, birds, books, and naval prints for Roosevelt, toy soldiers and b.u.t.terflies for Churchill. Cousin Theodore's legend fired young Roosevelt's political imagination; Lord Randolph's career fascinated his son. As children and young men, they read the same books: Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, the naval writings of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, G. A. Henty's boys' books about the glories of empire, Kipling's poems and fiction, and Macaulay's history and essays. They loved Shakespeare, the Sermon on the Mount, and movies-even bad ones.

Politics was a shared pa.s.sion. "My husband always had a joy in the game of politics," Eleanor said. "It was always to him an interesting game, like chess-something in which you pitted your wits against somebody else's." Until he became president, Roosevelt was a state senator, a.s.sistant secretary of the navy, the 1920 Democratic nominee for vice president, and governor of New York-and his four White House victories are unmatched in American history. Churchill was the quintessential parliamentarian. "Westminster is his ambience-his aura, as a spiritualist would say," wrote Colin Coote, managing editor of the Daily Telegraph. From his first election to the House of Commons in October 1900 to his summons by King George VI to become prime minister in May 1940, Churchill would serve as parliamentary undersecretary for the Colonies, president of the Board of Trade, home secretary, first lord of the Admiralty, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, minister of munitions, secretary of state for war and air, secretary of state for the Colonies, and chancellor of the Exchequer. He was always looking ahead. At the Munitions Ministry in September 1917, Churchill said: "There are only two ways left now of winning the war, and they both begin with A. One is aeroplanes and the other is America."

Their minds raced and roamed. Roosevelt loved what he called "bold, persistent experimentation" in politics and government and liked to lecture Middle Eastern leaders-from the shah of Iran to Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia-on how they might grow trees and crops in the desert. In 1918, Felix Frankfurter was visiting Cliveden, Nancy Astor's country house in England, and listened as she attacked Churchill, who was not there, at length. At last A. J. Balfour, a former prime minister, told her: "Nancy, all you say about Winston may be true, but Winston has ideas, and to a statesman with ideas much shall be forgiven."

Ceremony fascinated them. At the height of World War II, when they were in Was.h.i.+ngton, Roosevelt and Churchill took time to confer about the music that would be played at a White House concert. With Roosevelt's approval, Churchill proposed "some . . . early American airs and suggests that the list include some of Stephen Foster's-Old Kentucky Home, and others-popular Civil War airs, and winding up with the Battle Hymn of the Republic." Roosevelt's intimates belonged to an exclusive Cuff Links Club, whose founding members had been part of Roosevelt's failed vice presidential campaign; Churchill's inner circle dined together in the Pinafore Room of the Savoy as members of the Other Club, established by Churchill and F. E. Smith in 1911. Roosevelt and Churchill were fascinated by the drama of war. Roosevelt "really had military genius, and there's where he and Churchill came closest together," said the columnist Walter Lippmann. "What they loved was the war room-the maps, deployment, deciding on where to land."

In their hearts, though, they were men of peace. To them war was a necessary evil. "I have seen war," Roosevelt once said, his remarks based on his memories of the 1918 trip to Europe. "I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their ga.s.sed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line-the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war." After the bloodshed of the western front, Churchill took the same view. "War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid," Churchill wrote in 1930. "Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of bleary-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill."

Roosevelt and Churchill were courageous and cool under fire. In February 1933, in Miami, an a.s.sa.s.sin armed with a revolver fired five shots at Roosevelt, missing the president-elect but killing the mayor of Chicago, who was talking with FDR. Roosevelt never flinched. That evening, the president-elect appeared unshaken and went to bed after drinking a gla.s.s of whiskey. Facing a ferocious storm on an Atlantic cruise in 1935-a sailor on board thought the tempest looked "as if all the devils of h.e.l.l were breaking loose"-Roosevelt was unruffled. "He was interested but not in the least alarmed," said Admiral Wilson Brown, a Roosevelt naval aide.

At Omdurman, Churchill rode in a fabled cavalry charge, brandis.h.i.+ng a Mauser pistol; went to the front as a battalion commander in the trenches in World War I; refused to leave London during the Blitz; preferred rooftops to bomb shelters during air raids; and had to be forbidden by George VI to strike the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. En route to Was.h.i.+ngton aboard the Queen Mary for a meeting with Roosevelt in 1943, Churchill waved away reports of German submarines, saying that he had had a machine gun mounted in his lifeboat. "I won't be captured," he said. "The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy."

THEY WERE DEEPLY driven. Seated next to Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, at dinner when he was thirty-three, Churchill said, "We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm." On his first American lecture tour in 1900, Churchill was introduced to a Boston audience by an American novelist named Winston Churchill (no relation). "Why don't you run for the Presidency of the United States?" the British Churchill asked the American Churchill. "Then I will become Prime Minister of England, and we can amaze everybody." Careening from hot spot to hot spot in the empire at the turn of the century, Churchill was aware of the impression his stark ambition made on others. Some of his critics, he wrote in a memoir, "proceeded to be actually abusive, and the expressions 'Medal-hunter' and 'Self-advertiser' were used from time to time in some high and some low military circles in a manner which would, I am sure, surprise and pain the readers of these notes."

Roosevelt was stoked by ambition, too. By the end of his college years at Harvard, Roosevelt seems to have grasped what it would take to get what he wanted in life: a relentless drive. In an editorial addressed to the incoming freshman cla.s.s at Harvard in 1903, Roosevelt, then president of the Crimson, wrote: "It is not so much brilliance as effort that is appreciated here-determination to accomplish something."

The young Roosevelt was openly ambitious and privately anxious, and the war between these impulses came to the surface when he slept. "Sometimes he'd have nightmares and then he'd generally do very strange things," recalled Eleanor. "He was a collector of books and so one night I woke up to see him standing at the foot of the bed reaching for something. I said, 'What on earth are you doing?' and he said, 'I can't reach that book, and if I don't get it now I may miss getting it!' " Subst.i.tute any of life's great consolations for the book-love, office, fame-and we have a glimpse of the turmoil Roosevelt kept hidden from public view.

In their youth and early adult years, Churchill and Roosevelt could be unpopular with their contemporaries. As a young member of Parliament, Churchill was often isolated. "His parents' friends found him an interesting phenomenon; men of his own age thought him brash, offensive and arrogant," said Jock Colville. Roosevelt was blackballed from Porcellian, his father's and his cousin Ted's Harvard club. "He was the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance, but not the dinner," recalled Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice Longworth, "a good little mother's boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who was never at the really gay parties." Roosevelt did worry about his place in this world, and in his storytelling he tended to exaggerate, as if his own formidable accomplishments were not enough, as if the boy who had been the center of his parents' universe at Hyde Park could not bear to be out of the spotlight or to come up short at anything.

Their families' histories were always part of their consciousnesses. One December 8, Grace Tully recalled, "the Boss in dating a doc.u.ment looked up and remarked: 'This is the anniversary of my father's birth.' " On January 24, 1945-a Wednesday late in the war-Churchill, preparing for Yalta, remarked to Colville that the day marked the fiftieth anniversary of his father's death. Later, in the 1950s, "I went to his bedroom to talk to him about some business matter while he was shaving," Colville wrote. " 'Today,' he said to me, 'is the twenty-fourth of January. It is the day my father died. It is the day that I shall die too.' And on the twenty-fourth of January 1965, he did."

As leaders they had a gift for bolstering those around them. "His capacity to inspire and encourage those who had to do tough, confused, and practically impossible jobs was beyond dispute," Frances Perkins recalled of Roosevelt. "I, and everyone else, came away from an interview with the President feeling better. It was not that he had solved my problem or given me a clear direction which I could follow blindly, but that he had made me more cheerful, stronger, more determined to do what, while I talked with him, I had clearly seen was my job and not his. It wasn't so much what he said as the spirit he conveyed." Lord Bridges, secretary to the British cabinet from 1938 to 1946, remembered Churchill's habit of calling for late-night sessions-a practice that was "not popular," Bridges recalled. "A proposition would be advanced," Bridges said. "Churchill would repeat it once or twice rather slowly, looking above him rather like a man throwing a ball into the air and catching it. Then another train of thought would occur to him. Was this really the right proposition, or should it be differently stated? He would then try it in a different form: and by degrees arguments would start: different lines of thought would emerge: and crucial points would be forced into the open." The hour would be late, the conversation tiring, but the work would get done-and Churchill's pa.s.sion and confidence could be infectious. "I can see now," Bridges recalled long after World War II, "that, like a few other really great men, Churchill had the power, not only to inspire those who worked for him, but to pa.s.s on to them while they worked for him, something of his own stamina, something of his own matchless qualities of courage and endurance."

They were moving targets politically. Churchill changed parties from Conservative to Liberal and back again, and the vicissitudes of his views did not surprise those closest to him. "It was not as a crusader or a missionary that he had entered politics, but rather as a fish takes to the water or a bird to the air, because it was his natural element," recalled Violet Bonham Carter. "He had not thought it necessary to evolve or a.s.sume a conscious or coherent political philosophy. Though born and cradled in the purple of the Tory fold he was not of it. His ardent and adventurous mind, forever on the move, could not have been contained within its static bounds."

Roosevelt did not come to high office with a fixed philosophy, either. "All the members of the Brains Trust and their a.s.sociates will testify, I think, to the flexibility of the Roosevelt mind even when the presidency approached," said Rexford Tugwell, a Roosevelt adviser. "He was a progressive vessel yet to be filled with content."

CHURCHILL WAS MOSTLY exterior, Roosevelt more elusive. When World War II was going badly, Churchill "would sometimes listen to the news and tears would roll down his face," said Kathleen Harriman. Roosevelt, however, kept a pleasant mask on virtually all the time. The mature Roosevelt appears to have been seen with tears in his eyes just once, in private, shortly after his mother died in 1941. In Roosevelt's mind, one controlled emotions; you did not allow them to control you.

The origins of their distinctive styles may partly lie in their earliest days. Young Churchill was given little that he wanted, young Roosevelt rather too much. Churchill grew into a man who openly ran an endless race to win approval and affection; Roosevelt became an emotionally distant figure with a tendency to secrecy and camouflage.

Churchill adored his parents, but they paid him little attention. "It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood," Churchill once wrote. "The stern compression of circ.u.mstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished."

Young Churchill had plenty of such emotional hards.h.i.+ps to work with. "I did once ask a very old cousin who had known Jennie whether Lord and Lady Randolph were really such awful parents," recalled Mary Soames. "Mind you, this cousin was a woman of very high standards." The cousin thought for a moment, then began: "I think that even by the standards of their generation . . ." The cousin was quiet and then went on: "That they were pretty awful." Churchill had to fill the void and chose his nanny, Mrs. Everest ("Woom"). "My nurse was my confidante," Churchill later wrote. "Mrs. Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles."

When Lord Randolph did take note of his son, he found Churchill wanting. "I have told you often & you never would believe me," Lord Randolph wrote his own mother, "that he has little [claim] to cleverness, to knowledge or any capacity for settled work. He has great talent for show off exaggeration & make believe." Quoting this letter in his official biography of his father, Churchill's son, Randolph, put it in context, writing that "Lord Randolph had less than eighteen months to live. His performances alike in private and public were already causing deep concern to his friends and family. He was in the grip of the progressive mental paralysis from which he was to die." That was true-Lord Randolph suffered from "general paralysis" related to syphilis-but he had also put his finger on one of Winston Churchill's chief characteristics: He did enjoy escaping to a world of "make believe."

Young Churchill, after all, had to do something to fill his time and thoughts. "I loved her dearly-but at a distance," Churchill said of his mother. Jennie moved in the glamorous and often promiscuous circles around Edward VII, both during his years as Prince of Wales and his decade as king. Even the worst parents, Mary said, "managed to put in an annual appearance at Eton or Harrow, but Lord and Lady Randolph did not. There is a wonderful story about Papa, which a bright, perceptive boy always remembered. Mrs. Everest came to see Papa, and though she was hardly a stand-in for Lady Randolph, my father was so proud of her that he paraded her up and down the High Street at Harrow as though she were. The boy who recorded it thought it a very great tribute to my father's character."

Though Lady Randolph ultimately warmed to Churchill, the depth of the son's professed devotion to both his parents was at odds with his actual experience with them. "He put her on a pedestal and he did not want her to ever step down from it," said Mary. "I do think Jennie, on the whole, comes out much better than Lord Randolph. He was very cold and unforgiving." But Churchill revered him. "In fact to me he seemed to have the key to everything worth having," Churchill recalled. How to reconcile the gap between reality and the son's memory? Churchill's son, Randolph, offered this explanation, citing George Bernard Shaw on his own mother: "Her almost complete neglect of me had the advantage that I could idolize her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid disillusioning contacts with her. It was a privilege to be taken for a walk or a visit with her, or an excursion." The roots of Churchill's fertile imagination may lie in the nursery and at school, where he was forced to dream things that could not be.

CHURCHILL TRIED TO get close to Lord Randolph. "But if ever I began to show the slightest idea of comrades.h.i.+p, he was immediately offended," Churchill recalled, "and when once I suggested that I might help his private secretary to write some of his letters, he froze me into stone."

In 1893 Churchill had, on his third try, won admission to Sandhurst. His father wrote Churchill a cruel letter. "Now it is a good thing to put this business vy plainly before you," Lord Randolph said. "Do not think I am going to take the trouble of writing to you long letters after every folly & failure you commit & undergo. . . . I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel one of the hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence." Churchill was crushed.

Still, he did not give up. Rather than d.a.m.ning his father, Churchill reconfigured the relations.h.i.+p in his mind and became the most loyal of sons. As a young man he had, in his own words, devised "a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe." One night at dinner in 1947, his daughter Sarah asked him: "If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?" "Oh, my father, of course," Churchill said.

In Churchill's imagination, though, nothing-including winning World War II-would ever be quite good enough to please his distant father. In November 1947, Churchill was making a copy of a damaged portrait of his father in his studio at Chartwell, his retreat in the Kent countryside, when he fancied that the late Lord Randolph appeared to him. In the episode, which Churchill wrote about in a "Private Article" ent.i.tled The Dream, Lord Randolph does not realize his son has risen to the pinnacle. At one point he lectures Churchill, whom he takes to be an amateurish painter who writes for the newspapers, on parliamentary democracy.

"Give me a fair arrangement of the const.i.tuencies, a wide franchise, and free elections-say what you like, and one part of Britain will correct and balance the other," Lord Randolph says.

"Yes, you brought me up to that," Churchill replies.

"I never brought you up to anything," Lord Randolph interjects. "I was not going to talk politics with a boy like you ever. Bottom of the school! Never pa.s.sed any examinations, except in the Cavalry! Wrote me stilted letters. . . ." Lord Randolph was in character: demanding and unforgiving. Yet Churchill loved him, and Churchill's capacity to move forward past almost any emotional setback-in this case his father's refusal to recognize his gifts-would be an a.s.set in his friends.h.i.+p with Roosevelt, who could be cold and casually cruel and yet remain an object of Churchill's affection. From his father Churchill was accustomed to such relations.h.i.+ps.

"WINSTON WAS OFTEN RIGHT," said F. E. Smith, "but when he was wrong, well, my G.o.d."

Churchill loved action, spectacle, and the idea that he was playing a part in the sweep of history. "Not any part that came along," said his friend and parliamentary ally Leo Amery, "but the particular part of leaders.h.i.+p in some secular crisis; to reincarnate his great ancestor, or Chatham, or the younger Pitt; to stand out in history as the champion of English freedom against another Philip of Spain, or Louis XIV, or Napoleon." Distant centuries were as real to Churchill as the present. In 1930, at the age of fifty-six, Churchill wrote, "I pa.s.sed out of Sandhurst into the world. It opened like Aladdin's Cave. From the beginning of 1895 down to the present time of writing I have never had time to turn round. I could count almost on my fingers the days when I have had nothing to do. An endless moving picture in which one was an actor. On the whole Great Fun!" In 1945, Churchill was at dinner when a woman at the table asked: "Now that it is all over, what was your worst moment in the war-the fall of France, the threat of invasion, the Blitz?" After a minute he answered: "Frankly, my dear, I enjoyed every moment of it." Like Roosevelt, he found joy in governing and in the work of his days.

During the war, when problems seemed countless and insurmountable, Churchill told Lord Beaverbrook, a press baron, politician, and longtime friend: "You must not forget in the face of petty vexations the vast scale of events & the brightly-lighted stage of history upon which we stand." Churchill relished movement. Charles Eade, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch, was with him one evening in early 1940 and "was amazed at the speed with which this man of 65 walked along pa.s.sages and up steep staircases." Churchill never lost the urge for action. One morning during his second premiers.h.i.+p in the 1950s, he called for Anthony Montague Browne, his private secretary. "Has anything happened?" Churchill asked. "No," replied Montague Browne. "Then let's make something happen," Churchill said with mischief in his eyes.

Churchill lived large. When he visited the White House or Hyde Park, Eleanor recalled, "we had to have, in his room, all the drinkables he might wish, at any particular time." There would be Scotch, soda, ice, French-not American-champagne, and brandy. These were, Eleanor noted dryly, the "little comforts" of Churchill's life. With Winston Churchill, what you saw was usually what you got-a big, boisterous, occasionally overbearing bundle of energy.

ROOSEVELT WAS MORE subtle and fortified. The only child of James, who was fifty-three when Roosevelt was born, and Sara, who was twenty-seven (and who followed her son to Harvard and published a book ent.i.tled My Boy Franklin the year he became the thirty-second president of the United States), Roosevelt was inundated with the attention Churchill longed for. Yet for all of Sara's adoration, she recalled, James "often told me I nagged the boy." To cope, Roosevelt handled his mother-and, later, most other people, including Churchill-with tactics and indirection.

When Roosevelt overtly rebelled against the prevailing order at Hyde Park-which was not often; over time he would build up nuanced psychological defenses-he did so in small but telling ways. When he was a little boy, he decided to play a practical joke on his nurse by tying a string at the top of a short flight of stairs, Eleanor recalled, "hoping his nurse would not see it. She did not see it, and she and the supper tray fell down that short flight of stairs." Roosevelt liked being in control, and he liked to win. "Mummie," the young Franklin once said after being scolded for being bossy with other children, "if I didn't give the orders, nothing would happen!"

From his first moments Roosevelt was accustomed to being heeded-even, in his own mind, by animals. He spotted a winter wren near the river at Hyde Park he wanted for his collection and came into the house to retrieve his gun. "And do you think that wren is going to oblige you by staying there?" Sara asked. "Oh, yes, he'll wait," Franklin replied-and according to Sara, the bird did.

Sara once grew frustrated when her son did not look up from his stamp collection while she was reading him a story. "Franklin, I don't think there is any point reading to you anymore. You don't hear me anyway," Sara said. Young Roosevelt quoted back the last paragraph she had just read. "Why, Mom, I would be ashamed of myself if I couldn't do at least two things at once," he said with a charming smile. In White House receiving lines as president, Roosevelt would keep up a whispered running commentary to whichever aide on whose arm he leaned. "He made amusing comments under his breath about the costumes or appearance of some of the unending throng," said Admiral Brown, "until Mrs. Roosevelt, who shared our struggles to keep a straight face, hushed him."