Their very exclusive wartime club

It was a cold winter day in Washington, D.C., and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was visiting the White House. After taking a bath, he started pacing around the guest bedroom in the buff, frantically dictating a note. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Churchill instructed. The door opened and it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his face telegraphing embarrassment. There in front of him was a naked Churchill. “You see, Mr. President,” the British leader intoned, “I have nothing to hide from you.”

Colorful anecdotes like this populate virtually every page of “Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship,” Jon Meacham’s beautifully written and superbly researched dual biography. For the most part it’s an anecdotal World War II saga, and Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek, ably takes us behind the scenes for fresh looks at such historic diplomatic turning points as Placentia Bay, Cairo, Tehran and Yalta, to name just a few. Though the basic story line of “Franklin and Winston” is familiar, this is not recycled history. Meacham, in fact, conducted original interviews with the few living staffers who saw both leaders in action and unearthed fascinating revelations from the papers of Churchill’s wartime daughter-in-law and later grande dame of the Democratic Leadership Council, Pamela Churchill Harriman. He also draws sprightly vignettes of the 113 days Roosevelt and Churchill spent together swapping strategies over cocktails and cigars. At the core of “Franklin and Winston,” however, are the nearly 2,000 letters the pair exchanged between September 1939 and FDR’s death in April 1945. In many ways what Meacham does is flesh out the backdrop against which these incessant exchanges occurred.

Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt adhered to any strict ideology, just as neither hewed too closely to his own party’s line. This is particularly true of Churchill, who strayed from Tory to Liberal and back again as his thinking evolved. In fact, both twin colossi of 20th century democracy evinced nothing so much as the smarts to keep on learning, thus avoiding becoming hidebound either by ideology or political expediency. Perhaps that’s why both men rose so high in their publics’ esteem, ranking alongside such laudable shades-of-gray precursors as Benjamin Disraeli and Abraham Lincoln. As Meacham makes clear, foolish consistencies never hobbled these restless minds. Both Churchill and FDR were always opportunistic works in progress.

“They also shared the conviction that they were destined to play these roles,” Meacham writes. “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 Washington, ‘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 relationship, tempered by a sharp and sometimes amused, but never ironical, perception of the other’s peculiar qualities.’ ”

To construct this relationship, both leaders had to sweep aside some preconceived notions. “The British,” Meacham explains, “tended to think of Americans as upstarts obsessed with making money and susceptible to retreating from the world when it suited them; Americans, swaggering but insecure, disliked colonialism and feared the more sophisticated mother country might take advantage of them. ‘I’m willing to help them all I can but I don’t want them to play me for a sucker,’ Roosevelt once told Joseph Kennedy.”

Yet FDR also proved willing to play the supplicant, as he did in a Sept. 11, 1939, letter to Churchill, newly installed as first lord of the Admiralty, regarding the roiling European situation after Hitler invaded Poland. “Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors but the essential is not very different,” he wrote. “What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.” It seems telling that the president of the United States addressed his concerns to Britain’s newest Cabinet member rather than to, say, Neville Chamberlain himself. But Roosevelt was one shrewd geopolitician -- just like the demi-American who would soon become his Allied counterpart.

Churchill tried to take advantage of his personal relationship with the U.S. president as soon as he became prime minister in May 1940. Shortly after assuming the office, he cabled Roosevelt a weighty wish list for taking on the Nazis, including unspecified quantities of raw American steel, 50-odd “older destroyers” and several hundred late-model U.S. aircraft. “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can,” he noted, “but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.” Churchill would be so disappointed -- in the short term -- that in his memoirs he would describe the consequences of the U.S.’ initial reluctance to meet all his war-materiel demands as “How the British people held the fort ALONE till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.”

During the 1940 U.S. presidential race between Roosevelt and his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie, “Churchill observed the contest with ‘profound anxiety,’ ” Meacham reports. “ ‘No newcomer into power could possess or soon acquire the knowledge and experience of Franklin Roosevelt. None could equal his commanding gifts.’ Those words were written after the war [in “Their Finest Hour”], when Churchill was using his memoirs to cement the Anglo-American alliance during the cold war, but it was true that he had more than a year invested in Roosevelt, and the destroyer deal suggested Roosevelt’s heart was in the right place.”

Churchill expressed his relief at the election’s outcome in a cable to FDR the day after he won his third term in the White House. As he does throughout “Franklin and Winston,” Meacham shows better sense than to paraphrase his erudite protagonists. Instead, he quotes Churchill’s congratulations: “Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor.” Meacham notes that Roosevelt’s failure to reply to this artfully crafted missive “bothered Churchill for years.”

Undeterred, when FDR’s trusted aide Harry Hopkins arrived in London for consultations in January 1941, Churchill simply ratcheted up the encomiums: “I have always taken the view that the fortunes of mankind in its tremendous journey are principally decided for good or ill -- but mainly for good, for the path is upward -- by its greatest men and its greatest episodes. I therefore hail it as a most fortunate occurrence that at this awe-striking climax in world affairs there should stand at the head of the American Republic a famous statesman ... in whose heart there burns the fire of resistance to aggression and oppression, and whose sympathies and nature make him the sincere and undoubted champion of justice and of freedom, and of the victims of wrongdoing wherever they may dwell.” And even if Roosevelt wasn’t all that, Churchill’s grandiloquence practically demanded that the U.S. president live up to his billing. Hopkins reported back that “Churchill is the gov’t in every sense of the word,” not to mention the only Briton the United States need heed. Churchill knew it, too. As he would write to FDR early in 1945: “Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders.”

What made each of these men great, and the sum of their parts greater still, Meacham shows again and again, was their daring and their enthusiasm in acting on it. As Churchill’s youngest (and only surviving) child, Mary Soames, remarked to the author: “Being with them was like sitting between two lions roaring at the same time.”

In the end, Roosevelt indeed did not get played for a sucker. Instead, he skillfully coached the United States to its place not just as a partner in but as the leader of the free world. What Churchill evinced, if reluctantly, was the maturity to accept his nation’s evolutionary decline in power; yes, he ached to preserve his Albion’s empire, but he was just too shrewd to dismiss the tides of history -- and fortunately for Britain he knew how to navigate the ship of state to its best advantage. “As he was retiring as prime minister in 1955,” Meacham writes, “his advice to his colleagues was twofold. ‘Man is spirit,’ he said -- and ‘Never be separated from the Americans.’ ”

Churchill espoused that view despite Roosevelt’s considerable snubs, which ranged from his petty criticisms of the British leader before news reporters to major insults such as belittling Churchill in front of Soviet strongman Josef Stalin to underline America’s toughness approaching the postwar recarving of the Western world. Meacham’s descriptions of the Allies’ tripartite Yalta conference comprise some of his book’s most compelling segments. The endnotes are even more impressive, as evidenced by the one to “Franklin and Winston’s” very first line, which reads: “The light was fading. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, February 4, 1945, in the Crimean coastal town of Yalta.... “ The corresponding note reveals that “[t]he sun set in Yalta by 4:56 p.m. that day. (U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department, ‘Sun and Moon Data for One Day’ for February 4, 1945, Yalta, Crimea.)” It’s hard to take issue with anything in a work referenced that well, a scrupulousness greatly to Jon Meacham’s credit.

The opposite, alas, also holds true -- wherein lies the main flaw in Conrad Black’s massive new biography, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom.” Weighing in at an unwieldy 1,280 pages, Black’s book tries hard but suffers from logorrhea in the guise of scholarship, composed as it is of overwritten paraphrases from a very few secondary sources, most of them earlier hoary biographies of our 32nd president. The result is a groaningly comprehensive account of virtually everything FDR ever did, from his globally spectacular accomplishments to what appear to be the least significant minutiae of any man’s life.

It is a shame that the most notable aspect of Black’s workmanlike book is its coincident publication with its controversial author’s apparently empire-ending travails. In the same week his book came out, the world’s business journals were trumpeting the news of the Canadian-born press baron’s resignation as chief executive of newspaper conglomerate Hollinger International, amid various charges of financial misfeasance. Among the corporate expenditures called into question for their diversion to Black’s personal use stands his Hollinger board’s acquisition of a passel of FDR’s papers for $8 million to $12 million.

The sorrier part lies in how little Black’s book seems to have benefited from the outlay. Unlike “Franklin and Winston,” Black’s volume boasts no discernible new primary research or other fresh material on the man or his times. Its only surprise may be how admiringly such a well-known pro-business figure confesses to regarding FDR overall. Black approves, for example, of Roosevelt’s neutral stance in the Spanish Civil War, even if that neutrality helped usher into power the brutal Francisco Franco. Similarly, Black lauds the New Deal as proof of his subject’s “political legerdemain,” exemplified by FDR’s tendency to lie outright whenever doing so served his strategic purposes. Yet Black also convincingly argues the worth of FDR’s various New Deal programs as evidenced by their measurable achievements: Such “policies greatly alleviated the condition of most of the needy,” he writes, “and permanently reformed the economic system without greatly disrupting it.”

Although Black repeatedly touts the brilliance of FDR’s political calculations and instincts, a certain irony arises in that the general effect of his book is to damn Roosevelt with faint praise for his worst facets. He rightly exalts Roosevelt’s gradual move away from isolationism and toward full-blown international activism when needed, but his peculiar assessments on more specific topics, such as his suggestion that Stalin’s designs on Eastern Europe were “obvious” as of the end of December 1944 rather than years earlier -- an unlikely notion that French leader Charles de Gaulle may have promoted but was way too smart to believe -- suggest an occasional uninformed authorial bias. Such glitches might have been cleaned up via more thorough fact-checking, but Black’s editors appear to have lost interest about two-thirds of the way through this hefty tome, then given up completely well before the end. As a result, the book’s concluding chapters read more like raw notes than cogent history. All in all, Black’s book seems more interesting for what it says about its author than about its subject. Black paints himself as a modern-day Lord Beaverbrook and ends up -- like the original, Max Aitken, and other of history’s assiduous arrivistes -- coming across a little too desperate for approval to be taken very seriously. Anybody interested in learning about the inner FDR is instead advised to read biographies by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Geoffrey Ward, Frank Friedel or James McGregor Burns. *